This is contrary to the standard cog-sci "modular" or "binary" feed-forward information processing model. Of course, that model has also been challenged by studies of synesthesia, neural plasticity and generally holistic models. Eventually cognitive science is going to move well beyond the "More Neural Than Thou" philosophy, toward more realistic and intriguing models of cognition. It'll have no choice.

From the Cornell press release -

"For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols — like a digital computer," said Spivey. "More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties — like a biological organism."

"Like a biological organism?" Lordy! Next thing you know scientists are going to start suggesting that humans and other critters actually ARE 'biological organisms'!!!

Of course, I still have reservations about "emergent properties" in their present fuzzily-defined form, but this is progress. I do agree that mental processes are nonlinear and self-organized. I just don't agree that they 'emerge' like magic from a causally inadequate substrate. The "More Neural Than Thou" reductionists haven't reduced far enough to identify the actual causal substrate, so of course they want to view 'emergence' of mind as magic.

If, as Hameroff-Penrose suggests, the causal substrate is quantum-dynamic on the seriously sub-cellular level of NCCs, cognitive science will have to accept global properties that don't magically 'emerge', but are there all the way down - it's called "Coherence," the technical term for quantum entanglement (non-locality). This has implications for the whole of biology, not just higher organs like brains. Because the PCCs (same structures as in neurons but ubiquitous) go all the way down.

Turtles can be fun!

The tricky part of research into mind is that the researcher cannot eliminate the subjective testimony of the subject related to what is going on in his/her head. A materialist would assert that self-consciousness and its attributes are emergent properties - basically illusion - and that self-referential "feels" and "thoughts" are to be ignored in favor of objectively observable physical processes.

This is the infamous "Zombie Debate." Philosopher David Chalmers has collected a lot of the best papers in the ongoing debate, and I think you may enjoy reading a few of them. The submission of Christof Koch and Francis Crick, On the Zombie Within is quite fun, as is The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies by Daniel Dennett.

Materialists tend to ascribe mind/consciousness to neural structures, dendrites and synapses and their biophysical/biochemical processes. Cognitive scientists have tended to rely on neatly circumscribed "brain regions" responsible for this sensation or that memory [etc.], working with their experience of what goes wrong with the machinery after injury or certain disease states. This has long ignored documented neuroplasticity, and cannot explain things so common as stroke or encephalitis victims using whole other regions of brain to re-learn what was lost.

In the past decade or so there has also been quite a bit of research in cog-sci into the phenomenon of synesthesia - the "blending" of sensation in some people so that they hear colors or see sounds, etc. One of the leading synesthesia researchers is Richard Cytowic, who has written several books [including "The Man Who Tasted Shapes, and a keynote article for Psyche Journal. Cytowic now postulates that virtually all humans are born synesthetic, and that segregation of brain regions for specific sensory processing is learned in the first couple of years of life.

Perhaps some of the material at these links will prove helpful to you in understanding the state of the quest. It is all very interesting to me, and I suspect it will be a crucial factor in any scientifically acceptable theoretic of teleological design.

Say I build a robot, like Data in the Star Trek NG series. This robot is in essense an amazingly advanced turing machine at heart - ones and zeros processed through AND and OR gates, etc. Yet this robot is so sophisticated, that anyone not already knowing it was a robot would mistake it for a human being. It responds in all the ways a human would to ANY stimulus.

Now, this seems to me preciesly what materialists believe human beings actually are. So there would be no real difference in kind between a robot and a person. Indeed they would have a strong case, since there is no empirical evidence to an outside observer showing any difference between the two. They look and act identical, so surely we should presume they are.

This would be all right and proper, except that we are not outside observers. We each are people with something different than the robot - namely "consciousness." Or that might be a bit of a strech to claim - perhaps it would be better to say that I at least am. For everyone else it the world I can't say, because I cannot get inside their souls and see that there is indeed a "self" experiencing the life that their biological machines live. Other people are indistinguishable from the robot to me.

So my question is, how can one really do a scientific study of consciousness, in that our only way of knowing about it is in our OWN case? There seems to be no way whatsoever of distinguishing a conscious organism from a highly sophisticated machine, yet in the one case I have the inside scoop on, there is all the distinction in the world. This seems to me to be beyond the scope of our ability to study scientifically.

Help me out, scientists! Where am I going wrong?

…if there are more than 3+1 dimensions in reality, we can't rule out the existence of intelligent life in any or all of them, or circumscribe the capabilities of such conscious existence according to the provisional [ignoring anomalies] 'rules' here in 3+1. Really.

Abstract

Dynamical activities within living eukaryotic cells are organized by microtubules, main structural components of the cytoskeleton and cylindrical polymers of the protein tubulin. Evidence and theoretical models suggest that states of tubulin may play the role of "bits" in classical microtubule computational automata. The advent of quantum information devices, key roles played by quantum processes in protein dynamics, and coherent ordering in the cell cytoplasm further suggest that microtubules may function as quantum computational divides, and that mesoscopic and macroscopic quantum states are characteristic of living systems. In this paper new results from molecular dynamics simulation based on recently obtained atomic structure of tubulin are presented which provide support for classical and quantum modes of microtubule information processing.

The entire paper is in HTML at this link, and I will provide links to some other recently formulated tests of Orch-OR biological predictions. This is a theoretic that is being actively investigated and refined, at least in the biological end. The mathematical end is a little more problematic, as it steps out beyond the currently-testible, and like all mathematically based physical theoretics at this point in time, is awaiting the development of technology that would allow tests that could demonstrate the nature of the operative extremal of collapse. Penrose hypothesizes that the extremal is a graviton. We are not likely to encounter gravitons in our accelerators any time soon.

On the biological end, things are heating up rapidly. Just last month ten researchers from various nations published an overview of tests that can be conducted to test the model, and some are currently engaging tests - Towards Experimental Tests of Quantum Effects in Cytoskeletal Proteins [and in Greek, if it's not Greek to you...

When I was working with Matti Pitkanen on an attempt to quantify an anomalous issue under his TGD model of consciousness, I was introduced to a whole "new math" that this subject probably deserves - much as gravity deserved calculus back when Leibniz and Newton were arguing the details. Needless to say, I wasn't very "up" on the technicalities, so tried to frame what I was being exposed to in terms my ancient QM training would allow.

It turned out to be slightly easier than grokking multiverses, but not by much. Matti's only got 8 dimensions to work with, which I think is probably better than 11, 22 or infinite [FWIW]. Penrose is still working in a 4-D manifold, which is a good place to start, though he does give some lip service per Nigel Cook in his latest tome to Matti's p-adic primes as a mathematical framework the world's just not ready for yet.

I had stubbornly insisted on equating Matti's multi-stage vector alignment for the extremal of consciousness as akin to the vector of a magnetic monopole. It was the only theoretically existent particle I knew of that would take more than one phase transition to align to 'reality', so my mind kept focusing on its hedgehog extremal vector. Recently Matti has indeed integrated magnetic field dynamics into his 20+-year project, and it's starting to almost make sense! Check his blog for incoming details.

JohnJoe McFadden had a pretty good EM field ubertheory for consciousness that would be deducible from both Penrose's dynamic and Matti's. Since neuronal biophysics does operate on electrical circuitry, and biophotons must of course generate an EM field that extends not only throughout the brain itself, but also extending exterior like an 'aura' around the biophysical body.

True, the world isn't ready for multi-sheeted 8-dimensional spacetimes, hierarchial 'selves' or even magnetic monopoles. Penrose, at the late end of a long and storied career, can risk censure because nobody would dare censure him. He's plowing the road, and some of Matti's students may just plant some seeds. For the subject of life and biological evolution, it's the PCCs and NCCs that count. And these are well on the way to quantification.

Please visit some of these provided links, as they are terribly interesting and I think will upset neodarwinism with a TKO in the final round. Life is not just absurd, it's also way too complex for simplistic formulae to pretend to address. In order for life to get from single-celled archaea and new-symbiant eukaryotes all the way to intelligent life (if we represent such) in a mere 550 million years, something seriously directed has been going on. This can be called "Intelligent Design," or it could be just the details of teleological design.

Because science proper isn't chartered to rule supernatural intervention in or out, shouldn't we just follow the evidence?