Lifeboat Foundation

The progress of science in the last 400 years is mind-blowing. Who would have thought we’d be able to trace the history of our universe to its origins 14 billion years ago? Science has increased the length and the quality of our lives, and the technology that is commonplace in the modern world would have seemed like magic to our ancestors.

For all of these reasons and more, science is rightly celebrated and revered. However, a healthy pro-science attitude is not the same thing as “scientism”, which is the view that the scientific method is the only way to establish truth. As the problem of consciousness is revealing, there may be a limit to what we can learn through science alone.

Perhaps the most worked out form of scientism was the early 20th century movement knows as logical positivism. The logical positivists signed up to the “verification principle”, according to which a sentence whose truth can’t be tested through observation and experiments was either logically trivial or meaningless gibberish. With this weapon, they hoped to dismiss all metaphysical questions as not merely false but nonsense.

There is a theory dubbed “quantum consciousness,” which stipulates that brain functions and consciousness are derived from quantum effects like the collapse of the quantum wavefunction.

This is a strange part of quantum physics, where particles go from a state of simultaneous properties to a more “normal” state where they have one defined characteristic. It has notably been popularized by the concept of Schrödinger’s cat.

Consciousness creep.

Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it.

Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness.

The pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s disease is becoming an increasingly competitive and contentious quest with recent years witnessing several important controversies.

In July 2022, Science magazine reported that a key 2006 research paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature, which identified a subtype of brain protein called beta-amyloid as the cause of Alzheimer’s, may have been based on fabricated data.

One year earlier, in June 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration had approved aducanumab, an antibody-targeting beta-amyloid, as a treatment for Alzheimer’s, even though the data supporting its use were incomplete and contradictory.

An ischemic stroke is a type of stroke that occurs when a blood clot in an artery, also known as thrombus, or the progressive narrowing of arteries, blocks the blood and oxygen flowing to the brain. This process can cause both temporary and permanent brain damage, for instance, leading to partial paralysis, cognitive impairments and other debilitating impairments.

Statistics suggest that older age increases the risk of experiencing ischemic strokes. While neuroscience studies have shed light on many of the physiological processes underpinning strokes, the immune responses following these events and promoting recovery remain poorly understood.

Researchers at the Institut Blood and Brain @ Caen-Normandie (BB@C), University of Edinburgh and other institutes in Europe carried out a study exploring how central nervous system (CNS)-associated macrophages (CAMs), immune cells residing at the CNS interfaces, contribute to post-stroke immune responses.

It’s an unprecedented look into prehistoric anatomy.

Researchers at washington university in st.

The roadmap to promote neural repair after spinal cord injury remains elusive. Here, longitudinal single-cell sequencing in adult zebrafish identifies intersecting modes of neuronal plasticity and neurogenesis during innate neural repair.

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Personal identity seems so strong. We have the same sense of ourselves throughout our lives, even though everything about our physical bodies and brains is changing constantly. What then causes the continuity of personal identity? Where does transhumanism fit in? Some say personal identity is an illusion, but that seems like cheating. Others credit a nonphysical soul. That seems as though it’s cheating too.

Continue reading “Natasha Vita-More — What Makes Personal Identity Continue?” »

The hippocampus geometrically represents both physical location and abstract variables on a neural manifold in mice performing a decision-making task in virtual reality.