Digital Seeds from a Virutal Core

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.