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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

Specifically from paper: The live/dead mice (and container) were all held at 37C, which google tells me is a normal mouse body temp. And, the observed light does not match the spectrum of black body radiation expected for the temps at which images were taken or subjects were held.

Also strange: The effect changed w/ injury or anesthetic treatment according to the abstract.

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Specific electrochemical processes have their own characteristic photon emissions. Since there are some processes that occur distinctively in living organisms (e.g. to do with metabolism), it was previously thought that these would have characteristic photon emissions, but as far as I know these are the first observations of this kind of thing.

The effect changing with injury or anaesthetic I guess reflects the fact that there are different electrochemical processes occurring in these cases that have detectable differences in the photon emissions

I seem to recall the mechanism for anesthetics being something like temporarily depolarizing the mitochondrial walls to shut down ATP synthesis, so that might point towards where the effect is originating.

That would be lethal. Instead, they affect cell membranes of nerve cells.

Ah, thank you, I was misremembering. That sounds more feasible.

If we had good enough sensors could we use this for screening or diagnostics?

“Aura scanners” has an appropriately cyberpunk feel.

From the abstract the answer basically seems to be yes, and that's how they're pitching it.

They note increased emissions due to injury, which would be consistent with repair activities increasing the general intensity of chemistry happening to facilitate repair at wound sites.

Research is finding MicroTubules in the brain likely are the LINK (quantum entanglement) to where Consciousness "lives" (is located). Note that the Microtubules link STOPs while under Anesthesia.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=microtubules+co...

Your idiosyncratic use of capital letters only adds to my skepticism.

First video when I hit that YouTube link was Joe Rogan.

Skeptic meter caught fire before I could get a reading.

This is such a weird way to navigate life.

Joe Rogan has interviewed plenty of people, different people that have very little in common, just because some of them have controversial views that make you nervous that doesn't mean all the information is useless.

We are constantly bombarded by links to information. It is reasonable to make snap judgments about the quality of the information based on who is providing it. If I’m looking for accurate, factual information on a topic that is clearly prone to magical thinking, a provider whose reputation is to listen to anyone, including people who very much engage in magical thinking, is actually a very bad source. Because they will not filter on anything beyond “is this neat to listen to.”

You are correct. However, Joe Rogan should not be the first stop for assessing the scientific plausibility of a new idea. If that is where someone is sending you, that can- and should- be a red flag.

I don't think it's the controversy of his guests so much as many of their unqualified ramblings that get treated as expertise. It's really obnoxious that it all gets put into political controversy when it's just often facially stupid BS.

And you're enough of an expert on all subjects to judge?

Or are you rather shielding from whatever makes you think?

The odd defensiveness of it wherever any criticism is labeled as some sort of philosophy against thinking.

>And you're enough of an expert on all subjects to judge?

Never claimed to be

This is like Gell-Man Amnesia, but for the YouTube age. If I can recognize a source is unreliable for my area of expertise, it's more strange to expect that I would trust it in other areas just because I don't have the expertise in that area to directly evaluate all of the claims

And to add to that he's interviewed just as many absolutely mainstream scientists whose ideas are not considered controversial

Nothing weird or new about it: Suppose the foremost source for Dr. Example's claims happens to be the one time they interviewed on Coast To Coast AM [0]. That tells you something about the media-landscape they seek—or have been stuck inside.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_to_Coast_AM

On the other hand, there's no shortage of information out there, so it's not particularly weird to filter out the sources you already have found to be unreliable rather than spend the time to try to listen to everything else they have to say

I havent even RTFA to be fair but I like how often Bayesian heuristics like this turn out to be... Useful... If even not provably "true".

Yeah he types weird and linked some generic YouTube search result that pops Joe Rogan up for some people, but there's some pretty interesting research along these lines that's becoming harder to dismiss as just Roger Penrose stepping way outta his field (I don't see people personally attacking Hameroff or Tuszynski for their roles in this research which always struck me as telling). I think it's more trying to zero in on how consciousness works from the perspective of trying to figure out how xenon administration in anesthesiology works to induce its effects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXElfzVgg6M

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157106452...

Why does consciousness have to live somewhere? I currently prefer to think of it as an emergent phenomenon that arises (somehow, we have no clue) from the complex and distributed computations in the brain. Many different systems contribute, and saying that a single level of abstraction is where it lives seems meaningless. Kind of like saying that your video game “lives” in a transistor. It’s not wrong, but it’s not useful.

We don't seem to be able to find it inside the physical brain, and not for a lack of trying. Just throwing emergent behaviour out there changes nothing, just like it doesn't for AI.

There are observed differences in brain function between conscious and unconscious patients. What's wrong with that as an initial characterization of "consciousness in the brain"? The investigation of these "neural correlates of consciousness" is quite a rich research field in its own right

Obviously, but that doesn't tell us shit where consciousness comes from.

why not?

What would "finding it" mean, whether inside the brain or out? It's quite easy to perturb consciousness by messing with the pieces of the brain, via pharmacology, injury, electrical stimulation, etc. I'm not sure why we need to assign responsibility to a single specific component like microtubules. That seems like saying the axle is responsible for a car moving. Sure, not wrong, but not right or explanatory either.

Yeah we don't even have a strict definition of consciousness.

It sounds like it's time for The Talk [0].

The whole thing is good, but the final punchline in the last three panels are particularly relevant.

[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

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