CONSCIOUSNESS

110 2. Neuroscience
takes place in a living cell, and implies transfer of information to the Biochronos field, eventually
changing the organism’s morphology, metabolism or both, thereby in a teleological way
increasing the long term stability of the organism?s core quantum field. In one of the possible
universes, the physical constants allowed carbon based life to form, and an extraordinary
recursive quantum solution created the first cell, LUCA, and hereby the first observer. The
first observation caused the primordial quantum wave to collapse, creating a one-dimensional
singularity in the time dimension, extending from Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago to the
LUCA singularity 3.7 billion years ago. Since then, the Earth-centered Hubble volume has
moved forward in time, driven by the quantum Zeno effect from continuous observations by
the cells in the Biosphere. This anthropic model explains the initial low cosmic entropy, the
flat cosmic geometry, and the alignment of the cosmic microwave background with the solar
system. The model does not require inflation or Higgs particles, and when correcting observed
cosmic red-shift for the growth in the time dimension, both black matter and black energy can
be shown to be illusionary. P8
2.11 Pharmacology
138 Effects of the Psychedelic 3,4-Methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) in
Humans Matthew Baggott, Jeremy R. Coyle, Jennifer D. Siegrist, Keith Flower, Gantt P.
Galloway, Lynn C. Robertson, John Mendelson (Cal Pac Research Inst
& UC Berkeley, San Francisco, CA)
3,4-Methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) is a psychoactive phenethylamine that is related
to MDMA (‘Ecstasy’). Research increasingly supports the idea that this latter drug has
emotional effects, including feelings of closeness to others and sociability, that are not shared
by most hallucinogens. However, because MDA has not been studied in humans in over 30
years, it is not clear in what ways it is similar to MDMA and in what ways it is similar to
hallucinogens like LSD. To better characterize MDA, we conducted a double-blind placebocontrolled
study administering MDA to 12 healthy volunteers. We compared effects to those
from our studies of MDMA. MDA altered attention to emotional stimuli, consistent with
decreased threat vigilance, a hypothesized mechanism of MDMA effects. Changes also included
significant increases in closed-eye visuals (CEVs). Magnitude of CEVs after MDA
was associated with lower performance on measures of contour integration and object recognition,
supporting a hypothesized link between hallucinations and impairments in sensory or
perceptual processing. Overall, MDA produced changes that were similar those of MDMA as
well as effects expected from LSD-like hallucinogens. C7
2.12 Neural synchrony and binding
139 How are Synchrony and Suppression Related to Conscious Experience?
Eric Larock (Philosophy, Oakland University, Rochester, MI)
Over the past few decades research in neuroscience has exploded in the area of visual
consciousness. Neuroscientists have begun to unravel considerably more details about some
of the functions and possible causes that underlie visual consciousness. What is fascinating
about our current knowledge of the brain’s visual system is that consciousness of an object’s
properties involves the activity of neurons distributed throughout the visual cortex. Specialized
subassemblies of neurons have been identified in different areas of the visual cortex that
respond to specific properties of objects, such as shape, color, motion, and location. From a
biological point of view, the evolution of these specialized neuronal areas has enabled the
brain to represent the particular properties of an object more economically. But the advantages
of functional specialization have led to apparent gaps in our attempts to provide a thoroughgoing
neural story of the unity of consciousness: thus far, there is no known central processing
mechanism, or convergence site in the brain, where perceptual information about an object’s
properties could coalesce to form a unified object of consciousness (see Crick & Koch, 1990;
Singer, 1996, 1999, 2007). What binds the distributed representations of an object’s properties
into a unified object of consciousness? The recognition of this vision-related binding problem
has motivated temporal theories of binding in neuroscience, most notably the neuronal