[FRIAM] Free Will in the Atlantic

[Roger Critchlow]

Last week's Science reports on studies which induced mice to act as if they
were hallucinating a sound.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33

The ability to detect external stimuli rapidly and accurately by building
> internal sensory representations is a central computation of the brain that
> is critical to guide behavior. Such expectations (or priors) may be
> acquired throughout the lifetime of an individual and are important to
> influence perception, particularly when incoming sensory signals are
> ambiguous (*1* <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-1>).
> But this process is not exempt from failure. Hallucinations (perceptual
> experiences without external stimuli) seen in conditions such as
> schizophrenia are thought to result from giving too much weight to priors,
> creating an imbalance at the expense of actual sensory evidence (*2*
> <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-2>, *3*
> <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-3>). Sustained
> high-dopamine tone in the striatum has been proposed to contribute to this
> imbalance (*4* <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-4>);
> however, it has remained unclear how the dopaminergic perturbation leads to
> the generation of hallucinations. On page 51 of this issue, Schmack *et
> al.* (*5* <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/33#ref-5>)
> uncover the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie dopamine-dependent
> auditory hallucinatory states, with therapeutic implications.


https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6537/eabf4740?ijkey=dc959050f9aca2a9b59af202ba146edea5fc22c7&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha

INTRODUCTION

> Psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia impose enormous human, social,
> and economic burdens. The prognosis of psychotic disorders has not
> substantially improved over the past decades because our understanding of
> the underlying neurobiology has remained stagnant. Indeed, the subjective
> nature of hallucinations, a defining symptom of psychosis, presents an
> enduring challenge for their rigorous study in humans and translation to
> preclinical animal models. Here, we developed a cross-species computational
> psychiatry approach to directly relate human and rodent behavior and used
> this approach to study the neural basis of hallucination-like perception in
> mice.


 -- rec --

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 4:07 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> Marcus -
>
> I think the least plausible of these is the think-yourself-happy
> approach.   If it always worked, that would be Free Will.  Mind over matter.
>
> This is quite familiar to my own operational logic.   I tend toward
> trick-yourself-happy with things like "I can always procrastinate later" to
> break a procrastination rut for example.  I'm experimenting (without any
> controls or even a plan) on my (struggling) 26 year old nephew by offering
> him a series of "trick-yourself-out-of-unhappy-or-inaction" tricks that I
> have gathered (by bouncing through a life).  So far, his resistance (my
> Sister's family's classic I-cant-because) has held firm, but I trust some
> of the seeds of my cult-deprogramming are getting through even if they
> haven't sprouted yet.   I follow what I take to be a stylization of Glen's
> (likely?) prescription which is to change my habits and my internal state
> will follow (with some exponential moving average?).  A friend used to call
> this "acting as if".
>
> I don’t see machines all the way down and panconsciousness at odds.   Open
> source software.
>
> I suppose the question begged by ORCH-AR (Penrose-Hameroff) and Poised
> Realm (Kauffman)  or Neuronal Superposition (Pearce hisself) and others is
> whether "all the way down is qualitatively different for sufficiently large
> values of 'down' ? " at which point something magical/mystical/mythical
> happens and "viola!" Consciousness!
>
> And you are probably much better able to explain why a "quantum machine"
> is qualitatively different (or not) than a classical machine?
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
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