Digital Seeds from a Virutal Core

If the real history is the register of the human actions, the art history is the register of his imagination, fears, and desires.

John Smythies
Space, Time and Consciousness

The relationship between a consciousness and its brain has traditionally been the
subject of two competing theories. The older is dualism. This holds that a human
being does not just consist of a physical body with its brain but possesses some-
thing extra, ontologically independent of the body. The other is monism that
holds that a person consists only of a physical body with its brain and that con-
sciousness is in some as yet undetermined way a product of the brain and of the
brain only.

Consciousness has contents — namely sensations, images and thoughts — which we can observe by introspection, as is done during psychophysical experiments.

Bertrand Russell (1948) puts this clearly:
The objects of perception which I take to be ‘external’ to me, such as coloured sur-
faces that I see, are only ‘external’ in my private space . . . When on a common-sense
basis, people talk of the gulf between mind and matter, what they really have in
mind is the gulf between a tactual percept, and a ‘thought’ — e.g. a memory, a plea-
sure, or a volition. But this, as we have seen, is a division within the mental world;
the percept is as mental as the ‘thought’.
Descartes’ mistake was, until recently, greatly obscured by the confusion reign-
ing over how perception works. I will therefore turn to the topic of perception.

This controversy has recently been
resolved by the results of a large number of experiments in psychophysics. These
demonstrate beyond any doubt that, in vision, we do not perceive the world as it
actually is, but as the brain computes it most probably to be (see Smythies and
Ramachandran, 1998; Kovács et al., 1996; Yarrow et al., 2001; and see further
Vernon, 1962; Gregory, 1981;

However, sensation
involves more than epistemology. In associative agnosia the patient has normal
vision but cannot recognize what he/she sees. In other words sensations maintain
their ontology but have lost their epistemology. In ‘blind sight’ the reverse
occurs. The patient can obtain valid information about objects that he/she cannot
see. Thus I suggest it is legitimate to discuss the ontological status of phenome-
nal space and its content independently of their epistemological content.

In a
similar way it is legitimate to discuss the pictures on our TV screens as they are in
themselves (ontology) without reference to what events in the TV studio they
may be portraying (epistemology).

If the chair is seen ‘before me’, the ‘me’ of this phrase means my
body as an experience, of course, not my organism as an object in the physical world.

Searle (1992) is one of the very few philosophers to grasp this essential point:
‘The brain creates a body image, and pains, like all bodily sensations, are parts of
the body image. The pain-in-the-foot is literally in the physical space of the brain.’

My last quotation in this section is from another neurologist — Jason Brown
(1991). ‘Space itself is an object: volumetric, egocentric, and part of the mind of
the observer . . . Mind is positioned in a space of its own making . . . We wonder
about the limits of the universe but never ask what is beyond the space of a dream.’

Lord Brain (1955) says much the same ‘. . . it is essential to recognise the distinction
between the space of perception and the space of physics, and between phenomenal objects and physical objects’.

It has been suggested by several people (Broad, 1923; Price, 1953; Kuhlenbeck,
1958; Smythies, 1994a) that the solution to this problem may be that phenomenal
space and physical space are simply different spaces, different parallel universes,
whose contents are causally related. Here ‘different spaces’ does not mean that
one is real and one is abstract, but that both are real but are topologically external
to each other. A real space can be defined as that in which some thing moves
about. In which case, the physical body moves in physical space, and the body
image (as well as dream images, etc.) move in phenomenal space. The causal
relations postulated here are of the simplest Humean type, i.e. whenever a certain
event A occurs in a brain a correlated event B occurs in the relevant part of a sensory field or other subdivision of a consciousness.

Kuhlenbeck (1958) says that ‘. . . physical events and mental events occur in different space-time systems which have no dimensions in common’.

That is what it means to say that physical space and phenomenal spaces
are different spaces.

However, more modern accounts take into consideration the possibility
that these extra space-time systems are invisible, not because they are exceed-
ingly small, but because they form a parallel universe or universes. Naturally we
can only see physical objects that can reflect light rays. Objects in parallel uni-
verses would be outside the range of the light rays in our universe. (Note, how-
ever, we experience our own sensations directly without the mediation of light
rays. Light rays are among the causal ancestors of our visual sensations.)

However, if the theory of consciousness presented in this paper is correct, then
all the contents of consciousness — including our visual sensations — lie in a
space, or brane, of their own outside the physical universe. Normal perception, in
this theory, is mediated by the causal chain
object–photon–retina–brain–(cross to a new brane)–visual field.
Hallucinations involve only the last part of this causal chain
brain–(cross to a new brane)–visual field.

‘Consciousness may be in the
brane not in the brain.’

Louis de Broglie (1959):
Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time
which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality
the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them
. . . the aggregate of past, present and future phenomena are in some sense given a
priori.
Stannard (1987):
Physics itself recognizes no special moment called ‘now’ — the moment that acts as
the focus of ‘becoming’ and divides the ‘past’ from the ‘future’. In four-dimensional
space-time nothing changes, there is no flow of time, everything simply is . . . It is
only in consciousness that we come across the particular time known as ‘now’ . . . It
is only in the context of mental time that it makes sense to say that all of physical
space-time is. One might even go so far as to say that it is unfortunate that such dis-
similar entities as physical time and mental time should carry the same name!
This position is supported by Lord Brain (1963):
Moreover when we describe what happens in the nervous system when we are con-
cerned with the movement of electrical impulses in space (i.e. along neurons), and
though we use physical time to describe these movements, we can never abstract
from such an account time as we experience it psychologically.

Eddington (1920): ‘Events do not happen: they are just there, and we come
across them . . . [as] . . . the observer on his voyage of exploration.’

Weyl (1922): ‘The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the
gaze of my consciousness crawling upward along the life-line [world line]
of my body does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image.’

Broad also points out that this formulation requires two ‘times’. Time 1 has
become amalgamated with space into space-time. But a real time — t 2 — is still
required in which the ‘observer’s field of observation’ moves through space-time.
At what velocity? Eddington (1920) suggested this must be the velocity of light.
Time 2 may correspond with Stannard’s ‘mental’ time.

As Alexander (1975) put it ‘. . . the present being a moment of
physical Time fixed by relation to an observing mind’. Thus the observer in a
block universe with a shifting ‘now’ of time must be some entity in addition to
the physical body.

The answer is that we do not experience
these postulated causal relations that connect the contents of the brain located in
physical space-time and of the consciousness module located in phenomenal
space-time. What we experience are the end results of these causal relations —
namely our own sensations, images and thoughts.

Keith Sutherland
Why Do We Want to Open
the Black Box?

Ask any non-specialist (not to mention a hard rump of old fashioned cognitive
scientists) about the mind and chances are you will hear some version of the old
yarn ‘mind is to brain as computer software is to hardware’. Although this myth
has its origins in the science-envy that led psychology to make its Faustian pact
with the artificial intelligence industry, neuroscientists have not been entirely free
of culpability.

Greenfield pours scorn on this by outlining more recent evidence on
the modulatory role of neurotransmitters, along with a discussion of Rodolfo
Llinás’s extraordinary discovery that dendrites from the cerebellum, usually
viewed as humble one-way conduits, are themselves involved in a kind of learn-
ing process. Even without considering some of the more exotic theories about
microtubules and the cytoskeleton, neurons are exquisitely complex and it is a
serious error to represent them as simple digital switches. Also brains are inte-
grated into bodies and are subject to all manner of hormonal and visceral influ-
ences. ‘To model the brain in its entirety, one needs to model a body too’ (p. 105).

Bodies are also situated in a social and cultural milieu. Although pharmacolo-
gists normally restrict themselves to studying how, say, amphetamine increases
arousal by boosting the effect of dopamine in the brain, Greefield reports research
that shows that the same drug, the same arousal, can produce markedly different
emotions, depending on the social context. Experimental subjects who were
expecting to be given amphetamine enjoyed its effects but subjects who were
(untruthfully) told that they had been given a placebo simply felt anxious.

reenfield points out that
vision is a highly active system, replete with top-down feedback loops and even
goes so far as to endorse Llinás’s radical view that there is no essential differ-
ence between waking and sleeping. In both cases the brain actively constructs
the world — waking is just dreaming with the eyes open and without sensory
constraints.

eeing as no-one has the faintest idea how human memory works, the tempta-
tion has been to borrow words like ‘store’, ‘retrieve’ and ‘memory trace’ from the
computer science literature. But there is no proven parallel between human and
computer memory. Computer memory is localised whereas, as Wilder Penfield
famously discovered, there is no reliable correlation between the cortical area
stimulated and the specific memory evoked.

Does the elaborate processing required to
extract results from the raw scanning data not cast serious doubts on the validity
of the findings? (Uttal, 2001).

Greenfield proffers her own dynamic theory as a candidate, according to which
transient assemblies of tens of millions of brain cells — distributed across many
different brain areas — compete with each other to generate moments of con-
sciousness.4 According to Greenfield, consciousness is not a ‘magic switch’,
rather a dimmer switch, a continuum. There is no sudden transition (in phylogeny
or ontogeny) to sentience, only a question of degree.

She uses evidence from the incremental ablation of consciousness under anaes-
thetics to support her theory, speculating that deeper levels of anaesthesia are
associated with smaller neuronal assemblies. To Greenfield, ‘increased’ con-
sciousness means larger, more complex neuronal assemblies, in which sensory
input, emotion, rationality, and the richness of past experience all combine. This
leads her to conclude that dreaming and ‘being trapped in the present moment’ are
lower forms. However, some of our most vivid experiences occur during dreams
and countless systems of esoteric philosophy value the ‘experience of the present
moment’ or the ‘pure’ (contentless) conscious event as the most highly developed
form of conscious experience. But perhaps there is no conflict here as such phi-
losophies often equate the onset of (human, linguistic) consciousness with the
Fall and seek to offer the path back to the Garden of Eden.

Greenfield cites Benjamin Libet’s discovery — a pinprick to the hand only
takes 20 milliseconds to reach the brain, but a further half second to generate con-
scious experience — as evidence for the time needed to recruit a large enough
neuronal assembly.

Thus our so-called free will is just an
epiphenomenon of deterministic brain processes. ‘If consciousness and free will
are mere illusions, where does this leave personal responsibility and accountabil-
ity?’ (p. 184).

Robert Clowes, Steve Torrance
& Ron Chrisley
Machine Consciousness

Embodiment and Imagination

Kiverstein’s complex and subtle
argument aims to demonstrate that the DSM account can show how an
artificial agent that exercises the appropriate sensorimotor knowledge
has a subjective point of view, and hence a consciousness of itself as the
owner of experiences. Such an approach implies that the fine-grained
character of motor control has a key significance for consciousness

Discussions over MC impact on many other
mainstream issues concerning consciousness: how consciousness is to

be defined or characterized; what different kinds of consciousness
there are (core, phenomenal, access, functional, …); how these differ-
ent types relate to one another, and so on.

So, in decades to come, devel-
oping work on machine consciousness may come strongly to affect
how consciousness is seen, by both lay people and experts alike.