Can sensory apparatuses unlock the secrets of the Deep Future at Starlab?

[christaltman]

Starlab
... a place where 100 years means nothing

Starlab NV/SA was a privately funded, Blue Sky research institute in Brussels, Belgium. At the time of its closing on June 12, 2001, it employed over 100 scientists from more than 30 nationalities, many of them leaders in their respective fields. The range of research areas was very broad: intelligent clothing, stemcell research, emotics, transarchitecture, robotics, theoretical physics (e.g., the possibilities of time-travel), quantum consciousness, quantum computation, art, artificial brain building, new media, biophysics, materials science, protein folding and nano-electronics, to mention a few. Research was grouped within the acronym BANG - Bits, Atoms, Neurons, Genes; this combination was recently adopted at MIT.

Starlab's cross-disciplinary nature was an innovative and noteworthy effort to foster creativity among scientific researchers, and it will certainly be remembered as an original, if ambitious, dream to create a utopian scientific environment. Though Starlab's Brussels facility was closed, the http://www.starlab-bcn.com/ facility remains in operation.

Physicist Chris Duif maintains a Starlab archive at SpaceTime.

Welcome to the Deep Future

 

[selfAdjoint]

I hope someone will fund that photon echo experiment. I can't think of anything with a higher ratio of important knowledge gained to cost. Either way it turns out it will have major impact on the way we see the brain.

 

[sol]

Photon Echo

Dickt,

Do you have a link in mind, when you say this about photon echo in previous post?

Sol

 

[christaltman]

Reference

12 September 2003

Hi Sol,

Certainly, I can provide a link :

http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/hameroff/New/Photon%20echo/Echo.htm
Pierre St. Hilaire, Dick Bierman, Stuart Hameroff

Abstract: Our approach to the problem of consciousness implicates quantum coherent states in the brain. Conventional wisdom in science holds that significant quantum phenomena are impossible at brain temperature due to thermal decoherence. However theory suggests that the brain has evolved methods to avoid decoherence, and in fact uses thermal energy to pump the coherence. Experimental observation of such quantum states has not yet been possible. Recently physicists Pierre St. Hillaire and Dick Bierman at Starlab devised an experimental system to utilize "photon echo", a technique from quantum optics, to look for evidence of quantum coherent superposition in the human retina in awake volunteers. In photon echo a short laser pulse is sent to the system being studied followed by another pulse from the same source. If quantum coherence is occurring in the system a delayed photon "echo" is detected. Because the laser pulses required are of a very low power there is no risk of injury to the retina. Indeed subjects should perceive only a faint flash of light. Lasers are used commonly in ophthalmology; safety of the technique will be assured in the experiments proposed, and possible spinoff effects of retinal holography evaluated.


Kind regards,

Chris



Welcome to the Deep Future

 

[sol]

Sensory Apparatus

Hello Chris,

I am just going to put something our here for consideration.

The Weber Bar, and its use for detection of gravitational waves, and the effect of no eyesight, in monkey's, and how they compensate, in their sensory data acquicition.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/humphrey.html

I don't have any thing solid, yet I am intrigued by how we can be conscious:) How can there be order in something that is so tangible as chaos in very hot regions, yet the temperature in the brain could have perceived very complex patterns(there has to be a scale in energy determination that speaks to the same thing regardless of the weak and strong forces)?

Sol