The death-throes of the Irish “green “ party

I was a member of the Irish Green party from 1983-3, when I let my membership lapse, and 1997-2003. I was a member of national council, the policy body, 1998-2003 and science and tech head 1997-2003. I resigned at that point because of an incident where a TD for the greens  turned out to be  an oil millionaire, money inherited from his Yank granda.

What was particularly worrying was the lack of reflection about the party and its direction. A dystopia ensued; points of principle were to be used as bargaining chips. Shell, Tara etc are well-known and are arguably politics as usual, if of a craven, immoral and short-sighted-variety; what is not so well-known is the numerous incidents of criminal activity by the 2007-2011 "greens" in government.

The “greens “ began to use issues on which they had privileged info (see below) in a way that was downright evil. They had inside info on bribing of students by DCU management , with one of the students coming to parliament to give evidence to Paul Gogarty who brought tenure up as an adjournment debate; the latter then did nothing in government , and got 20k a year extra for being education chair in parliament. The state lost many millions from the litigation that ensued; G's famous outburst was the day after this defeat. The current leader, Eamon Ryan, who just lost a bid for redemption in the EU, is a worse case

First of all, two points;

1. Ryan's defeat is probably the end of the Irish greens. My sense is that they bet the house on his winning.
2. There is no trouble creating another “green” party; fis nua did so in a short time. The problem is attracting people from a wide range of backgrounds, like the 1997-2002 Greens had, from cultural nationalists to (retired) physical force republicans like the late Frank Gallagher, to fundamentalist greens who were very emotional in the period 2006-2007 about the destruction of their party. (Soubresauts aka Joe Thornton comes to mind. )

We are going to rebuild Ireland; we have no choice, bar emigration. We need to get culture and tech back and the Greens refused to act in any way other than to support Fianna Fail in their “policies” on these aspects (essentially, steal all the IP and destroy the competition)

What is interesting for me in particular about Ryan is his refusal to act on several aspects of Irish culture on which he had privileged information. One such piece of info was given to him personally at his own behest in his ministerial office in 2007. It showed that the chair of IMRO had been involved in copyright theft and illegal licensing of Irish music abroad.

One phone call and Ryan could have resurrected the now moribund music industry. A delicious karmic irony, one that younger readers of this site might attend to, is that he probably would have won the EU seat had he done so. The person who handed him the documents is very well connected in Dublin (certainly worth over 504 votes) and should not have had to go to US federal court to sort this out;

http://dockets.justia.com/docket/california/candce/4:2009cv03580/228656

I will leave it at that for now unless we get yet another defense of the indefensible; there is much, much more about these scum and their time in government that can be said.

PS I probably should have included this context;

1. While in opposition in late 2003, Ryan contacted the musician above to say that his friend Eleanor Blah..., lawyer for Ireland's national state-funded broadcaster (RTE), urgently need help as IMRO were trying to extort them

2. Both the musician above and Donal Lunny agreed to give evidence; IMRO backed down

3. Ryan was also aware of the Irish music scam, a system that impoverished Irish musicians and destroyed that industry

4. In 2007, HE WAS THE MINISTER RESPONSIBLE FOR REGULATING IMRO AND RTE

5. Everything suggests he did indeed make a phone call - and please note his still sumptuous lifestyle on one full income.......

6. apart from the numerous official perks they got while in government simply for selling out everything we ,Greens believed in, there is good reason the believe they got bonuses for being good little whores with
 NAMA etc

7. I would not be at all surprised to find that 100k was lodged in a Cayman islands account and wasted in this failed Euro run

A“visitor” for Dublin City “University”?

The unwillingness of successive Irish governments to send a “visitor” to Dublin City “University”-  as required by the 1997 universities act when there is suspicion of illegal activity, confirmed and documented at length is this case - is extraordinary. I argue here that the reason may have to do with the planned privatization of the place, with big pay-offs all around. The inertia in the Irish state bureaucracy is such that we recently saw a Minister for Justice take his own government down 10 points in te opinion polls by failing to tackle very common garden police corruption before being forced to resign . This may be happening again; in any case, the blog post has also been sent to the relevant ministers

This is my analysis of the  DC “U”. situation, an  analysis that but for the irresponsibility/criminality of various administrations since 1989 would have been performed by a formal university visitor. It will eventually probably form the backbone of yet another costly report.

First of all, there never was any serious attempt to create a recognizable university in the old Albert college site, now DC “U”. In the mid 1970's, an attempt to merge Kevin St and DIT techs into a new NIHE was stopped and the creation of a new college at the old Albert college site was initiated, after a crisis in which Danny O'Hare was otherwise going to find himself without a job. He was thus open to persuasion, and the evidence suggest that he succumbed.

NIHED was moderately successful; sufficient at least to follow the rash of Brit polytechs under Thatcher into university status. The accreditation was cankered, but the calculation was correct that with thousands of graduands every year, no government would take action. That started the criminality; illegal contracts in 1995; an  illegal disciplinary procedure 2001-2010 followed by another such; egregious behavior as the MO.

O'Hare's response, after the mysterious gift from Chuck Feeney's consortium in 1995, a  consortium recently in action in the shafting of Stanford in NY, was to appeal on American TV for the end of tenure. The hem of the dress had indeed been lifted; Danny O'Hare was most recently seen at the Hoover institute at Stanford “Writing” a book about how privatization helps universities. We can take it that the book will duly appear if and when  privatization occurs at DC “U”.

The DCU formula is still in place. What was interesting was how the scion of a Nazi slave labor cement factory chose to interpret the disciplinary procedures to be brought  in by statute;

1.summary dismissal for anyone appointed after 1995, as he made clear at Ireland's supreme court;
2.for the rest., a truly Kafkaesque situation wherein to be accused of outrageous (even if  untrue) violations of contract immediately put them under the new  disciplinary procedure and rescinded their previous rights. Otherwise, they were ruled as frustrating their contract and as having resigned
3.all intellectual property generated was to be assigned 100% to DC “U”. If that needed to be enforced, simply fire the academic, kick her off campus, and use state resources to fight every claim.



In fact, the evidence suggests that the plan was always to privatize the institution; we middle class idiots were brought in to set things up in the 1980's and given a teaching load that prevented us doing much research. Then (after 1995 with the tenure-free contracts) we were to be replaced by a new class of superdrone with better research records than us retards who had been teaching about three times the classes of our rivals.

The fact these new people replaced us in the departments we had set up was a bonus; but even they were pawns. The ultimate goal was a “university” with summary dismissal, no academic freedom/tenure, and the students whored out to corporations. All the shots were to be called through a single “chief officer” who, already well-paid, was doing very nicely from various campus spin-offs.

None of the above could have been implemented without collusion from successive governments, the “union” SIPTU, and greedy corporations. My conclusion is that  DC “U” is a basket case and should be forced into a more reliable accreditation, with a massive overhaul ensuing, or merged with the national universities

Further letter to the Irish Prime minister

A Thaoisigh, a chara

I read the Guerin report with interest, noting the same sequence as here; repeated complaints to the proper authorities by whistle blowers being stonewalled, followed by incessant letters to the Taoiseach finally bringing results. However, it is appropriate for me to say that I do not ask you, nor have I ever asked any government official, to bring influence to bear in my unfair dismissal case. That is still being appealed.

I would, however, ask you to consider whether it is a good precedent that DCU was allowed have an illegal disciplinary statute on its books for a decade. This is particularly the case given the documented illegal employment contracts issued by DCU post 1995, and its compromised accreditation. Minister Quinn has been given documentation of all of this. It is also worth noting that, post accreditation, O'Hare made no attempt to appoint qualified people to key positions; the “secretary” (chief admin) of DCU came from the local tech, and did not have even a H.Dip; the head of HR was a lowly admin assistant. I ask you to consider, in view of the many billions and the credibility invested in DCU, whether this was in the interests of Ireland.

Nevertheless, it all pales into insignificance in the context of this question, if a state body like DCU could use an illegal statute to force citizens to come to meetings (as it did, sacking them when they refuse to “arrange' those meetings), what is the status of any law or other compulsion issuing from the Irish state? In short, is the claim of Rialtas na hEireann on the Irish people no more valid than that of the Real IRA and its political wing?

There is a growing perception among the Irish people that successive governments are part of the same system and do not have the interests of the Irish people at heart, instead serving a neoliberal elite. While I leave this question open, after publishing two books (2012-2013) exploring it, I do wonder at the rampant criminality you have allowed at DCU. In particular, the practises at DCU made a mockery of industrial relations itself, let alone social partnership.

Let me explain, though this is not my job, and the state should have appointed a visitor to DCU (as the 1997 act demands) and suspended governing authority there long ago.. There are of course illegal contracts at DCU; there was no valid accreditation; there was an illegal disciplinary procedure in place 2001-2011 which was replaced by another illegal disciplinary procedure in 2011, inaccessible to the public who paid for it on the website, and guaranteed to ensure more litigation. The goal was always direct control of a state institution through an executive allowed to act outside the law, and without reference to the government. In pursuit of this end, summary dismissal was introduced. None of this has been resolved; that is your job.

What I do have a right to do is seek a remedy for the numerous illegal actions visited on my partner Melanie O'Reilly and myself with state connivance. Please do not claim statute of limitations for the illegal dealings of such as CBM “Ltd,” DCU, Record services “Ltd” – our complaints were made in time and then delayed in the Irish state bureaucracy.

In her case, that remedy should be a sizable cash sum as the Irish authorities failed her and she had to take a case in 2 foreign countries, both of which cases we paid for from our tiny resources. Of course, we won; however collecting the money is another matter, and the Irish state should help her and other musicians do this. It should also compensate her and them for the refusal to act against dissolved companies, despite many complaints in writing, and the aborted prosecution.

Let us note that Melanie and myself have brought huge credit to Ireland in many countries through our work and could bring much more with state help or even neutrality as distinct from the opposition we have felt. I most recently ran this conference ( http://foundationsofmind.org/)and follow-up workshop (including fri 9 mar 2014) at UC Berkeley, the premier public university in the world. As I mentioned many times, we can resurrect my language engineering degree to fill 1,000 job vacancies in Ireland at tiny state cost.

Melanie is world-famous as a Celtic jazz diva; you, the Taoiseach have her latest CD and are in a position to know what she could do for the image of Ireland abroad. Happily, aer lingus will have her “Jazz on the Bay” program on transatlantic flights from June 1.

My own case is rather different, as I was a civil servant. I ask only for a remedy for the many flagrantly illegal activities of DCU and other state authorities and will proceed to the circuit court for the unfair dismissal case if we get a court date; otherwise I will go to the ECHR. I note they state;

““ARTICLE 13

Right to an effective remedy

Everyone whose rights and freedoms as set forth in this Convention are violated shall have an effective remedy before a national authority notwithstanding that the violation has been committed by persons acting in an official capacity”

In the first place, I prepared a High court summons, only to hear from the Tanaiste's office (042039TAN) that this conflicted with the unfair dismissal case. As it turns out, that was incorrect; yet partly as a result my unfair dismissal case case was held up for 12 years to date.

Secondly, in 2005, I wrote a letter to then minister for labor Killeen showing that DCU's Smeaton, Pratt, Walsh and Conry had committed fraud at the LRC. This is apart from their illegal disciplinary procedure, thrown out at great expense at the supreme court. I got an acknowledgment; no action. This is apart from my own complaint to Whitehall Gardai at the end of 2001 (Det McCarrick I think) which never got acted on even after a dail question in 2002.

Thirdly, I never got any of my personal possessions back from DCU despite representations both from me and SIPTU. It included valuable software suites written outside DCU that they had guaranteed in 2002 to return as my “personal effects”. They never did so, and members of their staff used them to get personal advantage in my absence.

I shall therefore instruct my lawyer to prepare a case for the ECHR, in the absence of a circuit court date, noting;

“3. Freedom to exercise the right of application

13.

The right to apply to the Court is absolute and admits of no hindrance. “

and

“14.

The domestic authorities must refrain from putting any form of pressure on applicants to withdraw or modify their complaints. “

In particular, I note “The majority of Convention violations that the Court finds today are excessive delays, in violation of the "reasonable time" requirement, in civil and criminal proceedings before national courts “. My DCU case has now taken 12 years and has yet to see a real court. Melanie was not allowed criminal proceedings against those who destroyed her career.

It is also worth pointing out that one of the allegations against me by DCU was due to my whistle blowing on the failure rate in the 1999 computing degree intake at DCU. 305 started in first year in 1999; only 91 made it though their exams in summer 2001. When I pointed out in public that over 50% of the class had failed (it was actually more like 70% ) I was told this clashed with the HEA figures. At the EAT, Prondzynski admitted that he had faked the HEA figures. He also admitted that the charges against me of hiding consultancies were without foundation as I had met him, by his own account, in Jan 2001 and revealed all my activities, leaving him a CD and video.

As for the final, vexatious allegation – that of not being on campus – the computing year 4 class rep gave sworn evidence at the EAT in 2009 that I was there. Not only that; my students won the prize for best project that year with a software idea of mine, suggesting perhaps that maybe my work pattern is to be emulated. That is particularly the case as we had an NDA with Stanford, also lodged with the president of DCU. Incidentally, the same computing year 4 class rep was bullied egregiously by then had of computing, Joe Morris; Prondzynski giot the complaint and refused to act.

Of course, there is money for Arthur cox law firm in continuing to appeal. So what the state is countenancing is a public service in which the mere fact of being accused of something, even using a procedure that is illegal, guarantees summary dismissal with neither right of reply to allegations that turned out to be both false and absurd nor return of personal effects. A Czech called Kafka wrote a book about that; as it happens, the Irish are less compliant than Joesph K was

Is mise, le meas

Dr. Ó Nualláin

PS Good luck explaining the necessity of paying water charges to the citizenry while a state university gets away with breaking the law for 25 years

Offer to resolve all issues with DCU at NO cost to the taxpayer

 Offer to resolve all issues with DCU at NO cost to the taxpayer

(I sent this to the Taoiseach and the relevant 3 ministers of the government on May 4 2014 as part of an ongoing correspondence with all of them)

It is in everyone's interest – not least Minister Quinn's – that the whole imbroglio involving DCU and me be resolved expeditiously. It is also clear that neither DCU nor the dept of education has any  intention of ever allowing the case go back to court, 12 years after it started. Of course, I was denied the right to go to the High court as well.

I am therefore proposing a way out that costs the state nothing. It has been done without legal consultation; I am of course an innocent abroad in this field. I insist only that my “personal effects” as DCU called them, including working versions of my SONAS and BLOOM systems, be returned to me.  I am ccing this to my lawyer, Niall Clerkin, who will probably be appalled by my rash behaviour.

Nevertheless, as long as DCU will publish certain true statements and leave them on their homepage for 1 year, I will waive even the derisory 45k awarded by the EAT.

The statements are;

1.There is no legal contract between Dr O Nuallain and DCU;  Dr O Nuallain signed a contract only with the NIHE Dublin in 1987. Consequently, his settlement with us has no bearing on the academic tenure issue in Ireland;
2.He has since worked longer at Stanford, Berkeley and the NRC Canada than he ever did at NIHE;
3.The accreditation of DCU as a university  in 1989 came about after a report from a visiting group chaired by Mr Michael Gleeson. By 1987, it was known that Gleeson had accepted a job at the institution to become known as DCU, which he duly took in 1989. The Oireachtas only considered his report in 1989;
4.In 1995, DCU issued a “comprehensive agreement “ with SIPTU including  a set of new contracts. These new contracts excised academic freedom, the right to work at home, and tenure from academics' contracts. However, the signatures on this “comprehensive agreement “  were copied from the earlier one in 1985 and the document is a fraud. In fact, one of the “signers”, Pat Cullen of HR at DCU, had by 1995  already been in Australia for 4 years. Moreover, far from being a “comprehensive agreement “ , SIPTU were never even informed, let alone consulted
5.In 2001, DCU passed an illegal disciplinary procedure again with no SIPTU consultation, despite being required to do so by the 1997 act
6.This illegal disciplinary procedure was kept on our books for 10 years, and used on citizens several times;
7.It has since been replaced by one with the same flaw that  Justice Clarke pointed out in the High court that  will ensure more lucrative pay days for Arthur Cox
8.We stopped giving our staff statements of their research accounts in the late 1990's but their complaints to the Gardai have gone without being acted on, despite Dail questions
9.We have also not allowed grievance procedures to proceed to completion, despite their being specified on the contracts

I respectfully submit that the DCU experiment has failed, and the state may learn from this as it attempts to enthrone DIT as the Northside university. Of course, I feel free to publish all this on my website, and make it known to the public in court as it is all true. I will allow Minister Quinn to consider in particular the status of the thousands of contracts issued at DCU since 1995

Is mise, le meas
Dr O Nuallain

Workshop May 9 2pm Beach Room 3105 Tolman UC Berkeley

Workshop May 9 2pm Beach Room 3105 Tolman UC Berkeley

Neural dynamics at the microscopic level Seán O Nualláin UOI

Complementing Walter Freeman's exploration of neural dynamics at the mesoscopic level, his mentor Karl Pribram has long championed an approach at the level of individual neurons. With a new burgeoning interest in this level now apparent, this talk outlines for the first time how Pribram's schema plays out computationally. His work with David Bohm on quantum mechanics and the holographic nature of reality will be referenced.

3-30 pm Break

3-45 pm Carlos Montemayor SFSU

Dogmatic and skeptical arguments about the nature of consciousness

There are various ways to classify the extant views on the nature of consciousness. I analyze a classification that is based on the implications of different views with respect to subjectivity and time, and show that it has the advantage of highlighting different aspects of the hard problem. I focus on three aspects: a) the problem of agency and free will, which is crucial for the von Neumann interpretation of QM, b) the problem of the unity of consciousness, which is important to understand the nature of qualia, and c) the problem of the psychological now. This approach suggests that the impasse produced by the hard problem is based on either dogmatic or skeptical assumptions about these three aspects of consciousness, which may impede thinking more creatively about the nature of consciousness. A possible way of avoiding these assumptions is to further analyze these three aspects of conscious awareness.

Neurodynamics and consciousness workshop 2-30 pm May 2 2014 Beach room 3rd floor Tolman Hall UC Berkeley

Neurodynamics and consciousness workshop

2-30 pm May 2 2014 Beach room 3^rd floor Tolman Hall UC Berkeley

This workshop will have 2 parts; Walter Freeman will speak about the large and medium-scale (macro and mesoscopic) issues related to neural dynamics; Sean O Nuallain will speak about the microscale, individual neurons.

Introduction to Walter’s work

Over the past half-century, the Freeman laboratory has accumulated a
large volume of data and a correspondingly extensive interpretive
framework centered around an alternative perspective on  brain
function, that of dynamical systems. The contents of consciousness, by
contrast, are seen as an inevitably sparse sample of events in the
perception-action cycle. The paper proceeds to an attempt to elucidate
the contents of this sparse  sample.

 Freeman (2005a ) established  that local dynamics in rabbit and human
neocortex are scale-free, and that every skilled action involves all
cortex and basal ganglia in varying degree. Self-similarity from the
microscopic to the macroscopic levels of the cortex allows the cortex
to change state very quickly. Freeman (2002)  introduces the notion of
a wave packet, amplitude modulation of which constitutes the
expression of knowledge, which is stored in synaptic modifications and
expressed by phase  transitions.  Freeman (op.cit., 517) also makes
the radical contention that we do not need independent access to the
external world for communication to occur; it is sufficient that the
internal meanings in speaker and hearer  come transiently into
harmony.

The felt experience of consciousness is constrained by the fact that
the cortex operates discontinuously, with “shutter” states
interspersed with the generation of wave packets (Freeman 2007).
Moreover, while eschewing the technical apparatus of decoherence,
recent work has adopted quantum field theory (Freeman et al, 2006c) to
explain the phenomenon of anomalous dispersion in the brain. Just as
the vibration induced by a blow will reach the other side of a solid
object at a different time to the sound thereof, wave packets show
properties of transmission independent of neural impulse itself. In
fact, the brain behaves in ways not dissimilar to a boson.

Freeman (2005b) introduces several other  leitmotiven.  Globally
coherent brain activity may be an objective correlate of consciousness
through preafference. Preafference, in turn, enters once the more
veridical notion of circular causality is substituted for the
stimulus-response act.Briefly, once an action is lined up, the brain
prepares the system for the sensory consequences of this action in the
preafference process. The consequences for consciousness qua process
are enormous.

Essentially, Hume was right; there is no conscious will, but there
does exist a conscious “won't”. Agency as a concept needs to be
correspondingly attenuated; when the intending of an act presents
itself to consciousness, it is experienced as a cause; consciousness
of the consequences thereof are experienced as effects.

 What is  asserted, then,  is that conscious states comprise a sparse
sample of the wave packets that embody motor commands, corollary
discharges, and pre-perceptions that we conceive as unconscious. Wave
packets embodying motor commands are the substratum for mathematical
and other abstract thought. Furthermore, focal consciousness samples
at far too slow a rate to give veridical access to  the contents of
our cortices, and nature has gifted us various mechanisms to get
around this.

Specifics of this paper


Walter states three precepts;

1.        The only evidence for consciousness other than introspective is the
existence of group behavious and goal-directed such, particularly when
both attributes are combined in hunting;
2.        Thus, it is speculated consciousness emerges around the Cambrian,
perhaps 500 million years ago;
3.        Neuropil, generically considered, is the organ for consciousness

He summaries his viewpoint thus;
“Consciousness is a biological process that is sustained by
coordination of activity in many parts of the brain of a subject who
is engaged in an action of searching for information that it needs to
cope with its environment………My hypothesis is that the summary action
is expressed in a global field of synchronized oscillation, which will
shape the next action. My conjecture is that we experience this wave
packet as consciousness”


References


Freeman WJ [2000] Neurodynamics: An Exploration of Mesoscopic Brain
Dynamics, London UK: Springer
Freeman, W. (2002) “How and why brains create meaning from sensory
information” International journal of bifurcation and chaos, Vol 14,
No 2 (2004), 515-530
Freeman WJ [2005a] A field-theoretic approach to understanding scale-free
neocortical dynamics
        Biological Cybernetics 2005, 92/6: 350-359
Freeman WJ [2005b] William James on Consciousness, revisited. Chaos and
Complexity letters, 1 (1) : 17-43
Freeman WJ [2006a ] Origin, structure, and role of background EEG
activity. Part 4. Neural frame simulation. Clin. Neurophysiol. 117:
572-589.
Freeman WJ [2006b ] Scale-free neocortical dynamics. Encyc Comp Neurosci,
Izhikevich E [ed.].
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Scale-free_neocortical_dynamics
Freeman WJ [2007] Proposed cortical ‘shutter’ in cinematographic
perception. Ch. In: Neurodynamics of Cognition and Consciousness. Kozma R
and Perlovsky L [eds.]. New York: Soringer.
Freeman WJ, Vitiello G [2006c] Nonlinear brain dynamics as macroscopic
manifestation of underlying many-body field dynamics. Physics of Life
Reviews 3: 93-118.

Foundations of Mind Workshop series, UC Berkeley

Foundations of Mind Workshop series, UC Berkeley

The Foundations of Mind (FOM) project believes that it is possible that, far from showing incremental (let alone as is claimed, exponential) progress, modern neuroscience is a failed paradigm insofar as it focuses on the attempt to explain mentation in neural terms. Moreover, the reduction of cognitive science to neuroscience has worsened matters. Finally, even correcting these trends may leave a sphere of human action beyond the explanatory scope of science. On Mar 6-7 we ran a successful conference (see FoundationsofMind.org) which has begotten an active community of researchers who are now running a fortnightly seminar series, Fridays Beach room Tolman Hall UC Berkeley.

Wrt the first point, we do not have a single example of a sentence or other meaningful symbol being understood by an attested neural process and seem, if anything, to be going ever further from such a goal as the models get ever more primitive after the towering work of the 1980's in neural nets. Secondly, the assumption that mind can be described as a set of faculties, each with an anatomically distinct location, was regarded as risible phrenology until its 1990's comeback as fmri. Thirdly, fmri is a scalar formalism, famously prone to fraud, at a time when it is increasingly clear that the brain not only uses vectors, but that non-linearity is deep in its working ethos.

The reduction of cognitive science to neuroscience has combined with a mania for “Big data” to elide the contribution of linguists. The result has been machine translation systems that are dangerous in their inaccuracy and steadfast in their refusal to allow syntax, semantics and pragmatics to constrain the search space. Even if they did, it is unlikely that the hope for machines to “understand” language is anything but a negatively eschatological aspiration.

That brings us to our final point; in the classical Von Neumann interpretation of quantum mechanics, decision and observation is in the classical realm, outside the purview of the system. Can it be the case that modern neuroscience has been incorrect in failing to give this proper weight? Is it possible that, even after we as responsible scientists get our formalisms right, there will remain limitations in our simulation of behavior by machines?

All seminars are free and open to the public.

Workshop in Beach Room, 3^rd floor Tolman hall, UC Berkeley April 18 2014 2pm

2-10 pm Introductory remarks Seán O Nualláin

2-15pm Henry Stapp on “Quantum Mechanics and neuroscience ”

3-15 pm Stan Klein “Connecting visual qualia to their neural correlates”

How does simulation of a single neuron in ones visual system produce the richness of subjective color perception? This is the topic of connecting qualia to neural activity. The capability for achieving that connection has only become available in the past six months, because of a new instrument developed at UC Berkeley. But before getting to the recent experiments some context is appropriate in the context of this 20th anniversary of the Tucson "Toward a Science of Consciousness" (TSC) meetings. Who can forget Chalmer's presentation of the "Hard Problem" at TSCII in 1996. The 764 page book of papers from that meeting is a treasure and is unequaled in capturing the state of the field at that point. The challenge of connecting the hard problem of qualia to the neural correlates of the brain is still with us and I'll argue that advances in technology may enable substantial progress.  My article in the Vision and Consciousness section of the TSCII book was titled "Double Judgment Psychophysics for Research on Consciousness: Applications to Blindsight" (cornea.berkeley.edu/pubs/120.pdf). My present title could have been the same as the old title but replacing "Double" to "Triple", and "Blindsight" to "color" as I now discuss.
A new instrument that enables single neuron brain stimulation has been developed by Austin Roorda of UC Berkeley. The new technology that combines adaptive optics and super precise image stabilization enables one to do careful psychophysics on individual cones and ganglion cells. Retinal ganglion cells (RGC) are special since they are the bottleneck for vision, carrying information to the brain along the optic nerve. Roorda's lab is next to mine and we have been developing new approaches for single and double RGC stimulation.  One of the big surprises is that activation of single retinal neurons can produce a wide variety of color percepts. It had previously been thought that single RGC stimulation would produce limited color percepts (red, green, yellow, blue) based on the opponent color mechanisms found in RGCs and the brain's lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). But a much greater diversity of colors were found. In our experiments for every single RGC stimulation we make a triple judgment on the perceived hue, saturation and intensity of the stimulus. Several competing hypotheses regarding the mechanisms that produce the surprisingly diverse color percepts are now being tested and will be discussed. The new instrument opens up a great variety of experiments linking neural activity to perception. 

4pm Gautam Agarwal, et al.

“The emergence of information in mesoscopic measures of brain activity”

4-45 pm

Seán O Nualláin of the universityofireland.com

The great neuroscientist Karl Pribram and equally great physicist David Bohm collaborated a generation ago with, among others, Jiddah Krishnamrti to produce a completely new worldview. It provided a narrative, based on cutting-edge science on how the evolutionary process allowed nature to express itself as the “implicate” becoming “explicate” and presenting itself to consciousness manifest in us. This beautiful paradigm eventually failed to overcome resistance centering on the neurophysiological plausibility and lack of detail.

In 1999, after having met Seán O Nualláin at a conference on Gurdjieff organized by Seán’s close friend Jacob Needleman, Karl Pribram spent a week at the O Nualláin lab in Dublin. There, for the first time, a detailed computational implementation of the Pribram / Bohm work was done. Far from being merely a beautiful theoretical framework, it was found that the view of dendrodendritic connections between neurons as the critical computational operation in the brain explained many heretofore intractable problems about sense perception. Moreover, it was consistent with Stapp's work on quantum neural activity qua harmonic oscillators.

May 2 2-30 pm Walter Freeman on neural dynamics at the mesoscopic and macroscopic levels

4-30 pm The microscopic level Seán O Nualláin

“Resonate and fire; how non-spiking neurons process sensory data”

While it is universally accepted that several types of cells in the
retina, including rods, do not spike, little investigation has been
done to ask how sense-data can be processed without neural firing.
Moreover, the fact that timing of afferent impulses to a neuron shapes
its firing has not received enough attention. This talk argues that
firing is actually a limit case of a more general mode of neural
functioning in which subthreshold oscillations have a critical causal
role. A harmonic oscillator model of the neuron is sketched, beginning
from a compartmental Hodgkin-Huxley model, and it is shown how the
emergent principles operate equally for tactile, auditory, and visual
input.

The talk ends with speculation on the role of attention and consciousness.

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