Introduction
The location of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) has been the subject of research and philosophical speculation for many decades. The starting assumption for much of this research is that consciousness is a product of brain activity. While there are many good reasons to believe this assumption is correct, the location of NCC in the brain has remained a mystery. A recent competition organized by the Templeton Foundation pitted two widely held theories about NCC against each other and performed research designed to demonstrate the validity of the theories. The theories made claims about how consciousness works and each predicted observations that the research would uncover to prove its theory correct. The global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT) says that consciousness integrates information in a workspace in areas of the brain involved with cognition. The integrated information theory (IIT) says consciousness is a product of a neural network that integrates information. The end results were disappointing with no clear winner, although each side claimed partial victories and had reasons for why their theory was not thoroughly vindicated.
Different speculations on the location of NCC have placed consciousness in various locations scattered all over the brain. Descartes and some mystical traditions believed the pineal gland located in the middle of the brain to be the seat of the soul. Crick and Koch at one time suggested the claustrum as a candidate for a master conductor that might play a major role in consciousness. Mark Solms has proposed the brainstem as a source of consciousness. Most contemporary theories can be divided between theories favoring the front part of the brain where higher order mental activities seem to take place and whole brain theories that include sensory processing centers as part of the information grid where consciousness resides. The lack of definitive results for any of these theories has led some philosophers to propose that consciousness does not reside in the brain. Some have proposed higher dimensions are involved. Others have proposed consciousness as a component of all matter to solve the mystery. Others still have invoked quantum mechanics or other exotic physical phenomena as the source of consciousness.
The lack of evidence for a location or definitive process in the brain for consciousness is a puzzle for neuroscientists. Common to most scientific theories is that our consciousness is an integrated, unified phenomenon. On this basis, the logic follows that consciousness must have a place or at least a mechanism that integrates it; that is, it must have a place in the brain where everything comes together. A notable exception to this is the multiple drafts model of consciousness proposed by Daniel Dennett which explicitly says consciousness has no one place. Unfortunately, Dennett’s model as proposed has no actual role for consciousness nor any proposal for why it exists or how it works.
Maybe consciousness despite all appearances and beliefs is not as integrated or whole as it appears. Instead of a location or process, consciousness could, in fact, be distributed across nodes in dozens of locations in the brain at any point in time.
Is Consciousness Integrated?
The “binding problem” and “combination problem” are closely related issues in theories of mind. They address the problem of how all contents of consciousness – memories, thoughts, perceived objects, emotions – become bound into a single experience. If the integration of consciousness is more illusory than real, there would be no binding problem. While the combination problem has been used in recent years as an objection to panpsychism, it is still much the same problem that begins from an erroneous assumption that consciousness is unified. The answer to both problems is that consciousness is not a single experience but many experiences that happen around the same time. Let us examine reasons why consciousness may appear unified even though it is not.
1- Consciousness seems whole and integrated in large part because we seem to view the world from a perspective.
This perspective, pejoratively called the Cartesian Theatre, arises in part as conscious experiences in parts of the brain involved with reasoning and sense of self. In other words, there are specific conscious experiences at specific locations in the brain that account for the feeling. Some of the areas that have been identified include the medial prefrontal cortex, the medial posterior parietal cortex, the posterior and anterior cingulate cortex, and media ventral medial prefrontal cortex. If this sense of perspective arises from specific parts of the brain, rather than proving consciousness is integrated, it could be evidence for fragmented consciousness with the nuanced sense of self manifesting by conscious experience at multiple locations.
2- The brain routes information from one conscious node to another quickly enough that we do not perceive a lag time; hence, everything appears to be happening together.
Since the experiments of Benjamin Libet in the 1970’s, we have understood there are delays in the brain. Libet discovered evidence of brain activity associated with a conscious decision occurred several hundred milliseconds before there seemed to be conscious awareness of the decision. While there is still debate about the free will issues raised by Libet’s experiments, there is no doubt that delays happen in the brain. Even though neural signals are propagated quickly, they are not instantaneous. In addition, once signals are transmitted from one part of the part to another, additional delays can occur before the electrical activity has built to the point that a conscious experience is registered.
3- Since the content of consciousness frequently contains information from the surrounding environment, many events in consciousness could appear to be happening synchronously because it is happening synchronously in the environment.
Much of conscious experience involves the external world. Events in the external world occur in a natural order with events following each other causally. These events we perceive through our senses which are monitoring the world while we are awake. If we see a book fall from a shelf, we will perceive it striking the floor at about the same time we hear it striking the floor because these events are occurring nearly synchronously with each other. No integration in the brain is required in this case for there to be a feeling that the two experiences of seeing and hearing are integrated because they would be caused by an external stimuli.
4- Information from the senses may reach consciousness fully formed and integrated to itself.
Information from the senses, especially vision, could reach consciousness mostly integrated. The reason we see an orderly and structured world about us is because unconscious processes from the senses to the visual cortex have already assimilated the information and provided an order to our visual perception of the world. By the time, the information emerges as consciousness it is already fully formed and unified. Simply because one sense appears unified does not require that all consciousness be unified.
5- Large scale neural oscillations occurring throughout the brain serve as a kind of timing mechanism much like a conductor keeps the members of an orchestra playing together.
Following the discovery of the default mode network, interest among researchers has increased in studying resting state brain oscillations. Slow self-initiated oscillations characterize both the sleeping and awake brain. In the awake brain, they appear to provide master coordination functions operating on timescales of seconds to hours. They can also generate brain activity that leads to conscious experience. Since the generation of these conscious experiences is partially under the influence of controlling oscillations, they would also be, and appear to be, integrated. A memory of a pleasant experience the day before might lead to a reimagining of the same experience. The reimagining of the memory seems to flow from the original experience in an integrated fashion, but they are casually linked by the underlying resting state oscillations.
6- The brain integrates information, but it does not require consciousness itself to be similarly integrated.
Consciousness may play a role in information flow in the brain through its interactions with unconscious processes without needing itself to be integrated. Consciousness bubbles up from unconscious processes and integrates with other neuron clusters through unconscious processes. No instance of consciousness would have more than a portion of an organism’s total consciousness.
Fragmented Consciousness
The human brain contains over 80 billion neurons with possibly more than a trillion connections between more than a thousand different types of neurons. Neurons on average have an estimated thousand connections to other neurons. The brain’s neural network is a complex biological network with a distinctive type of organization called small-world because it allows connections with few hops between any two neurons while minimizing overhead. Small-world networks are characterized by nodes with many connections to nearby, local nodes and many fewer connections with distant, remote nodes.
This type of network minimizes wiring while still allowing any node to reach any other node with a small number of hops. It segregates tightly integrated processing locally while providing loose integration across clusters of nodes. The resulting network supports both efficient information segregation and integration while using low energy and reduced wiring. Since connections are believed to be crucial to how the brain handles information, it follows from the small-world network organization that information is widely distributed across the brain, but its processing is concentrated in local clusters of neurons. The smaller number of connections between tightly connected local clusters and remote clusters means that the amount of information transmitted between them is relatively small compared to the amount of information processed locally within the cluster.
This suggests the brain performs intensive information processing in small clusters of neurons but only has a form of loose integration across them. A rough analogy might be to a large but decentralized organization of small local committees of people with minimal top-down controls such as a disorganized political party or service organization. Local committees meet and discuss intensively local conditions, but only high-level information and decisions get communicated between the different local groups. People exchange information across groups to a degree. Occasionally a committee will unify around a particular message and issue a communique to the other groups. A national organization might also have its own different internal groups and organizational units and might serve to set general objectives for the local groups but, for the most part, the local groups operate semi-autonomously.
Applying this analogy to an idealized model of the brain, we would find hundreds of clusters of neurons that could potentially manifest consciousness, but that only a relatively small percentage of these clusters would be active in doing so it around the same time. Clusters might range in size from as few as a few hundred neurons to perhaps a million. Each cluster or node could function unconsciously as well. Other clusters still might never be potentially capable of consciousness by virtue of their composition and/or the nature of the function performed. Multiple causal chains from both conscious and unconscious clusters could cause consciousness to arise at a point in the brain.
Figure 1 Fragmented Consciousness – Red clusters are conscious; green ones are unconscious. The lines show connectivity between clusters. The red lines show a hypothetical causal pathway between conscious clusters using hops through unconscious clusters.
Each cluster of neurons is acting on its own behalf but is receiving information from other clusters. Underlying the conscious parts of the brain is a vast network of unconscious neural clusters and processes. This is a complex peer to peer network between clusters of neurons where each cluster reacts to information from other clusters or sensory neurons.
In this model, there is little or no essential difference between phenomenal consciousness and what has been termed access consciousness even though both forms of experience seem quite different. Phenomenal consciousness is associated with somewhat raw sensory data. Access consciousness has been associated with high level functions like reasoning and decision making. The key difference between the two in this model is the nature of their inputs. Sensory data comes into the brain from sensory neurons that are interacting with stimuli in the environment. Phenomenal consciousness reflects its sensory input. Access consciousness, on the other hand, is receiving its input not only from parts of the brain involved in sensory information processing, but other centers involving memory and internal feelings. Access consciousness reflects its input, but is several hops removed from sensory data. In the case of both phenomenal and access consciousness, neural clusters are reacting to their individual input which is coming from other neurons.
The human brain has dozens, maybe hundreds, of units performing discrete functions. Each functional unit engages in non-conscious processing. Some, perhaps a large number, of these units may be consciousness capable; however, at any point in time, only a subset of these units will be generating consciousness. The critical processing that produces the contents of consciousness has well-known locations in the brain. These locations have been identified when damage or abnormalities have resulted in a loss of function or anomalous function or through direct electrical or electromagnetic stimulation of an area. The visual cortex in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex processes visual information. The auditory cortex in the temporal lobe processes sound. The cortical homunculus discovered by Wilder Penfield is a distorted sensory map of the human body. The frontal cortex is tied to reasoning and higher-level cognition. Damage to almost any part of the brain usually creates a deficit of capability with a diminishment of overall consciousness. The implication of this is that consciousness may be tied to functional areas. Fine nuances even to logical thought might have associated components in types of consciousness.
The most parsimonious hypothesis for the location of consciousness is that it appears in the location where the critical processing occurs. This would mean that it is scattered throughout the brain, not at a single location, and that whatever integration of information occurring in the brain arises largely from unconscious processing. The brain does integrate information, but consciousness is not directly involved.
Implications
Modern neuroscience and philosophy have been derailed in investigating the physical correlates of consciousness because they have labored under the mistaken assumption that consciousness is unified and must be found in a limited number of places in the brain. If consciousness is found all over the brain, then investigations need to focus on smaller clusters of neurons and find commonalities across the clusters that are associated with consciousness.
The fragmented consciousness hypothesis is that consciousness can arise in a relatively small number of neurons, perhaps as few as several hundred, and the totality of consciousness of organism is simply the complete set of its discrete conscious experiences (ce1, ce2, …).
C = {ce1, ce2, ce3, ce4 …}
A key question would be why a cluster would become conscious if it was able to process unconsciously.
One possible explanation is that the information the neuron cluster has received is in some way anomalous or out of bounds of previous information. Perhaps when information falls outside the expected range it needs to be prioritized. Consciousness may be what happens whenever one part of the brain finds something interesting enough that it alerts other parts of the brain about it. Whether other parts of the brain care about the information depends upon their own unique processing and the inputs they receive from other clusters. So, one possible explanation is that a cluster becomes conscious when it needs to provide a more detailed and/or higher priority message to other neuron clusters. In this scenario, there may be routine, low band-width messages routing between cluster all the time, but once consciousness enters the picture, the messages are high priority and high bandwidth.
A second reason may be tied to memory and learning. Since learning has been associated with consciousness and learning at the neural level involves modifying connectivity, it would be logical that consciousness is doing something critical associated with wiring and adaptation at the neural level. If consciousness is tied to learning, then we would expect it to be happening at precisely at the point where the modifications to connectivity need to occur – that is, spread across the brain at the cluster level. This would imply that anything conscious is capable of being remembered; however, whether it is remembered and for how long would depend on possibly the strength of the signal either generated in the cluster itself or in the strength of the signals coming from the inputs to the cluster.
How this works at the physical level in the neurons and clusters is still an open question. Certainly, the recent discovery of vortex-like patterns of neural firings, which seem to have an affinity for arising at boundaries between functional areas, might suggest that the neurons are engaging in something like a feedback process with themselves, possibly through the neurons’ own self-generated electromagnetic field. When the feedback becomes sufficiently strong, consciousness arises, and information is written into the neurons and/or possibly the surrounding infrastructure. Perhaps all neurons have an ability to react to an electromagnetic field and our experiences of consciousness are our own neurons feeling that reaction.
This view of consciousness as fragmented has only recently drawn my attention. I must say I have labored under the impression that somehow in some way consciousness must be unified. This view is quite humbling in that it makes some of most prized mental capabilities, reasoning and decision making, nothing more than another form of consciousness in a different part of the brain on par with seeing and hearing. It also may mean there are hundreds or thousands of other forms of consciousness across species and across individuals in our species. Some of these other forms may be potentially accessible by us.
Broad Speculations 
Thanks to SelfAwarePatterns for pointing out the multiple drafts theory of Dennett and especially a paper by S. Zeki which has many ideas similar to what I’ve written here. I had most of this written before I saw the paper so I decided to publish this as is. Of course, I know that nobody ever really has an original idea. There are almost always antecedents. But S. Zeki’s paper was prior to my ideas in time but mine were derived independently. I may post something on the paper itself later.
https://selfawarepatterns.com/
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Thanks James.
The big question I always have with any of these consciousness concepts is, what makes what we’re talking about conscious? And of course the answer always involves a philosophical conception of what consciousness is.
I do think the idea that we’re not nearly as unified as we feel we are is an important insight. Like much in this area, it’s also a powerfully counterintuitive one. For me, the key point is we’re never directly conscious of what we’re not conscious of. (That sounds so obvious it might seem like a trick, but it isn’t.)
For example, we’re not conscious of being in a deep dreamless sleep. We only infer it from the break in continuity and (hopefully) change in wellbeing we feel from it. Nor are we conscious of the hole in our retina, because it’s a hole in perception, not in a window we’re looking through.
It makes sense that if we’re fragmented, we’re not conscious of the gaps, or of the fragments not participating in the current fragment coalition, a coalition that is constantly shifting and morphing. Are the other fragments conscious? Depends on what we mean by “conscious.”
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There are philosophical questions but, as the science develops and the physical processes understood, those will fade into the background. I see consciousness as small bubbles on a sea of unconscious processes. The brain itself forms an analogue to the world but it is mostly unconscious. We are given glimpses of the world model when parts of it pop into consciousness.
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Another excellent essay Jim. Not that I necessarily agree with your assessment, but I think what stands out for me is how current vocabulary obfuscates the subject matter which makes a confusing topic even more muddled. The word consciousness is one of those words. Consciousness may be closely related with mind but at a fundamental level they are not synonymous terms. That difference needs to be succinctly established by clear, concise and defensible definitions.
Another example: it would add clarity to a subject if we dropped the word conscious and used words like aware and awareness, being awake or wakefulness instead. Likewise it would add clarity if we used the word unaware for being unconscious. So the next obvious question becomes: What is it that is aware or awake and what is it that is unaware or a sleep?
As a system, is it the brain that is awake or asleep, or is it a system we refer to as mind that is awake or asleep? However, as long as the prevailing dogma is that mind is what the brain does and that mind does not exist as a unified system that emerges from the brain then all bets are off.
One more distinction:
As a term, consciousness is not as elusive as everyone wants to make it. Its origin is Latin and consciousness means: together (con), to know (scious), us (ness). “Together to know us”: it’s all about the shared experience; in other words, consciousness is: what it is like to be homo sapiens. And what it is like is not an obfuscated meaning since we all know what it’s like. IMHO, the definition of consciousness should be confined to this narrow definition period.
There has to be a clear and succinct distinction made between the two closely related words of consciousness and mind in order to avoid obfuscation. These two words may be closely related however, they are not synonymous. Consciousness is the experience or, what it is like to be homo sapiens whereas, homo sapiens are essentially the locus of a unified SELF centered in a physical architecture. And that architecture is a mind interacting with that physical reality at every aspect during wakefulness.
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I didn’t think you would agree with my assessment. Actually, if you had asked me six months ago, I might not have agreed with it either.
You might really like the paper by Zeke. It explicitly refers to Kant. He creates a hierarchy of consciousness.
Click to access zeki.pdf
Let me quote:
Micro- and macro-consciousnesses, with their individual temporal hierarchies, lead to the final, unified consciousness, that of myself as the perceiving person. This and this alone qualifies as the unified consciousness, and this alone can be described in the singular. Kant
probably saw, hesitatingly, the relation between the microconsciousness (his ‘empirical consciousness’) and the unified consciousness.
I agree 100% there is a perception of a unified self and that perception is as accurate as blue is a the color of the sky. In other words, it is based on something real – the organism itself including it relationship to the world, its internal states, and is memories. I’m not comfortable with hierarchy part of it. I’m leaning more to the idea that the relationships isn’t so much a hierarchy as a peer-to-peer relationship. The unified self (not SELF) is another useful (functional?) microconsciousness, but as I said it sits multiple hops from the sense processors so it works off different inputs.
I’m not going to quibble over terminology and I don’t see making a big distinction between consciousness and mind, “Mind” makes me think more of an object whereas “consciousness” makes me think of a process.
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(“Mind” makes me think more of an object whereas “consciousness” makes me think of a process.)
“Process”, isn’t that just another way of saying that we are nothing more than a calculating machine? Personally, I don’t see it any more than I see idealism as a tenable alternative.
Everything without exception in our universe is a quantum effect. Without the underlying architecture of the quantum realm there would be no classical world. The classical realm is not an independently distinct system that functions on its own merits. The classical realm if forever intrinsically liked to its underlying form, and its very existence is dependent upon that reality.
The existence of a quantum mind is the inverse of that fundamental substrate. Why should it be a mystery that something as elusive as a “thought” would “not” be quantum. Due to the measurement problem, we will never be able to measure a thought. That fact of the matter should at least be a “clue” as to what we are dealing with.
If one eschews the ridiculous so-called wave function of quantum mechanics then we have a viable explanation for our experience that’s tenable. But if one rejects the notion that mind is a quantum “system” that emerges from a highly complex classical “system” and that those two systems are intrinsically linked, then we’re stuck in this circular rationale that’s simply untenable. It doesn’t work and there is no schema that can make it work.
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I still don’t rule out quantum effects. The question is what exactly happening in ce1, ce2, etc. that makes each experience conscious.
The problem I’ve had with quantum brain explanations has been the idea that the entire mind phenomenon is some sort of one giant quantum entanglement or something like that. What I thinking about is at the microscopic, molecular, and atomic level, not a big quantum mind including everything available to consciousness. That’s why the FCT makes sense because it seems obvious that extraordinary physics isn’t happening over the entire brain or we would already know about it now.
However, when we are the point where ce happens, there could be a lot of potential things happen. There could be something like quantum computation in the cytoskeletons. There also could be a new form of matter built from the mass interactions of ions. There could be something happening with the magnetite in the brain. There could be something happening with the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-brain-20161102/
There are a lot of possibilities. We already know that biology encodes information. DNA, RNA, and the entire epigenetic program.
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I did read the essay by Zeke. I appreciated his insights concerning Kant’s point of view.
Personally, I don’t see the mind as some giant quantum entanglement either. But I do see it as a highly organized, unique, separate system that is intrinsically linked to the classical brain where information, once it is constructed by the mind is shared with the brain for functional purposes.
As a system, the mind can hold all possible outcomes in a superposition until an intellectual measurement is made. Once an intellectual measurement is made, those infinite possibilities, real or imagined coalesce or collapse into a single discrete outcome which is subsequently filed in the classical brain through its neural networks, or new neural networks which constantly form when new information is developed.
The classical brain may be a magnificent processor of information however, that information has to be formed or built before it can be processed. Information does not exist independent of mind. In order for information to exist there has to be a system of some kind to be informed, and I think mind is that system.
There is no question that neurons and neural networks are the highway of that information transfer between different parts of the brain, but the brain as a system is not the mechanism that constructs the information to be processed.
Mind, body and brain are the three components that work together as a unified whole. Asserting that its body and brain is a huge ontological mistake……
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I have probably written a lot over the years that contradicts my current view but thoughts change and evolve.
I think there is a “highly organized, unique, system” but it is the brain itself. And it is only an information processor in the loose sense of the term because there is no “system of some kind to be informed”.
The brain works as a physical analogue of the world centered about the body. Consciousness plays a role in this but it is much smaller than any of us are likely to believe. What you are calling mind I think is likely is an aggregate of a fragments of consciousness in the frontal context. The fragments think they are controlling everything when, in fact, their role is much more limited. Everything in consciousness – including reasoning and decision making – are perception-like but the perceiver is an illusion.
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One has to be flexible if progress is to be made….. Like you, my own position has shifted over the years. Here’s an article you might find interesting.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/brain-consciousness-quantum-entanglement/
As another aside, I think you know that I’m not promoting a cartesian theatre scenario or any sense of dualism. When we wake up or during wakefulness, another system comes on line and that system is indeed a function of the brain however, that system is autonomous and sovereign once it is animated.
It is this evidence of sovereignty or what we call subjectivity that is the strongest proof for a quantum hypothesis. All classical systems in the known universe are objective or veridical both in nature and function including the classical brain however, there is an aspect of the brain that is not objective. It is subjective and it is sovereign. It defies logic to assert that a single system, be it classical, quantum or otherwise can be both objective and subjective at the same time.
It is this novelty and uniqueness of sovereignty which is the strongest proof that mind is not simply what the brain does, but mind as an emergent system of the brain, a feature which makes that quantum leap if you will to the next level of a physical experience and that experience is consciousness. Why should we be surprised by this thing we call emergence?
I’m on board with Penrose on this one when he asserted that the purpose of the physical universe is conscious experience. Doubling down on the idea that a single system we call the brain is an “exception” to everything else we know about the known universe is an argument to absurdity. One might as well ingest some psilocybin, have a nice trip and join the idealism club. As absurd as idealism it, it makes more sense than the other form of absurdity that neuroscience is selling.. 😳
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If you look at my number one reason why consciousness might appear unified even though it is not, you will see that much of the exceptionalism you are claiming for mind could simply be the perception generated by some clusters of neurons in the frontal cortex. However, as I also said in a comment, that perception is as accurate as blue is the color of the sky. It is a perception based on something real – the organism itself including it relationship to the world, its internal states, and is memories. So, there would be utility for such a perception, besides providing work for philosophers :). Nevertheless, it is simply a single (or a few) ce, not a entire system and it does not have total control over the mind or the body.
I appreciate your point of view but there is some hubris in making this the purpose of the physical universe. I don’t mean your hubris or Penrose’s but human hubris to believe its own sense of self has a universal purpose.. If a hierarchy has any meaning in this context, it is probably this isn’t even anywhere near the higher forms of consciousness. After all, it is limited and subjective after all.
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BTW, the paper is interesting but doesn’t really prove much about consciousness.
What is being correlated is the autonomic nervous system, which itself is unconscious, and the brain. But the autonomic nervous system is integrated in the brainstem. The brainstem in turn is tied to consciousness. As Solms has pointed out, damage to small parts of the brainstem can lead to irreversible coma. The brain controls the heart. Anxiety and stress can raise the pulse. The brain, the heart, the gut, and the body are a unified whole so the fact they were acting in sync isn’t remarkable. Northoff points to research showing how the brain aligns itself with heart and the center of the body.
On the issue of whether there are quantum processes in the brain, I wouldn’t be at all surprised that we will find them. They might even explain something useful about consciousness but what that would be is another matter. I can’t see necessarily how even the existence of quantum phenomena in the brain leads to the assertions about mind or the purpose of the universe.
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BTW, this is interesting. It references the paper that formed the basis for the article you linked.
Click to access Control_flow_in_active_inference_systems_Part_II_Tensor_networks_as_general_models_of_control_flow.pdf
“Scale-free biology requires a smooth transition from quantum-like to classical-like behavior. Typical representations of metabolic, signal-transduction, and gene-regulatory pathways are entirely classical, even though many of their steps involve electron-transfer or other mechanisms that are acknowledged to require a quantum-theoretic description [60], [61]. As noted earlier, free-energy budget considerations suggest that both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells employ quantum coherence as a computational resource”
And this:
“We have proved that control flow in such systems can always be represented by
a tensor network, provided illustrative examples, and shown how the general formalism of topological quantum neural networks can be used to implement a general model of control
flow. These results provide a general formalism with which to characterize context dependence in active inference systems at any scale, from that of macromolecular pathways to that of multi-organism communities. T
Now I’m definitely on board with the idea that non-classical computing and networking is arising from the brain’s network. As a matter of fact, I think it might actually be almost required if consciousness were fragmented.
Parallels also with communities of slim molds networking and seeming to take on intelligent properties.
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Would you be opposed to referring to the “mind” as an intellectual system that the brain regulates the same way it regulates all of the other systems in our body like the nervous system, respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive, etc., etc?
The brain regulates this “intellectual system” by switching it on and off for sleep and wakefulness. It’s function is intellectual or mental and as a “system” it is the locus of our own conscious experience. It is epiphenomenal in the sense that is has no jurisdiction over any of the involuntary systems the brain regulates however, it does have jurisdiction over motion both physically and mentally with the ability to take action in our world.
Mind has to be delineated as a separate system because our current schema for the explanation of mind and consciousness is irrefutably bogged down in an intellectual quagmire.
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The only problem I have with this “system” is that I think it is more than consciousness and includes unconscious processes too. It is likely even mostly unconscious. Consciousness is the scattered bubbles that pop out of it like soap bubbles in a stirred bowl of detergent mixed with water.
Take this example. I’m driving to work on a familiar route. I’m listening to the radio, thinking about a meeting at work, occasionally spotting something of interest on the route, but most of the actual driving is unconscious. However, if I were not awake, none of this would be happening so the “system” is up and running. And it will bring to my conscious attention any danger or unusual event that appears that I need to consider. But it will also not bring to my conscious attention a lot that I do not need to consider. Both aspects are at work.
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Like you said, both aspects are at work when the “system” is up and running. And it makes sense that those scattered bubbles of awareness cycling in and out of consciousness would be a feature of that “system” as well.
This idea sort of hit me when I realized that we have no qualms with all of the other “systems” in our biology that the brain regulates. And in the context of systems, it didn’t make any sense that we should have a problem with another system which is for all practical purposes an intellectual and/or mental system that the brain regulates as well.
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If you allow unconscious processing into the picture, then I definitely could see both pieces as a system. It would actually be similar to what Freud termed the psyche which is sometimes depicted as an iceberg with the unconscious below the water line and consciousness above.
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I’ve been reading the back and forth between you and Mike on his blog. I don’t know is you realize it or not, but as long as one is arguing from the assumption that “mind is what the brain does”, positing EM fields or even quantum effects does not resolve the issues that are built into that original predicate concept.
The only to defeat this zero-sum game of circular reasoning is to posit another predicate concept. And that predicate concept is that there is a separate and distinct system that the brain regulates, and that system for all practical purposes is an intellectual or mental system.
This hypothesis is capable of resolving all of the paradoxes and inherent contradictions built into the “mind is what the brain does theory”. It is, the only way forward, the only way……… 👍
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The only paradox is that the problem you think exists is caused by your brain.
I’m not trying to be sarcastic here.
What clouds the issues of consciousness is the complicating factor that our brain can not only have direct sensual perceptions of the world, but also can generate and manipulate abstract representations and symbols. We have little problem believing our perceptions can be wrong, we somehow think, that the abstract representations are more correct when, in fact, they can be just as wrong.
I think much of our thinking and conceptualizing about consciousness arises from thinking consciousness is somehow symbolic and abstract; hence, the algorithmic approach to consciousness. But the concept of mind is little different.
My argument is that it is concrete, not abstract. I’ve struggled to find the right word
model – gets confused with mathematical models ; concrete models like scale models don’t work well either because we don’t have something that looks a tree in our brain when we see tree
interface – works well if we are dealing with the external world, not so much inner world; couldn’t be applied to any part of a model that is unconscious; I think the model is largely unconscious with parts popping into consciousness as interfaces
analog/analogue – something real, concrete that is comparable to the world; example, a THC analog wouldn’t be THC but would be similar or with similar effects; gets confused with the digital/analog discussion
proxy – a concrete representative; something that behaves like the world and can interact with it on our behalf
If I had any knowledge of Greek, I could probably coin a new word.
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My model doesn’t have a problem that needs to be fixed, the “mind is what the brain does” hypothesis has the problem and there is no way to fix it.
The entire argument is a vintage example of a priori analysis at its best, because all of the contents of the subject concept are build into or contained in the predicate concept. A priori arguments are circular and depend entirely upon the predicate concept being correct or tenable. The “mind is what the brain does” is untenable and doesn’t work; and there is no schema that can make it work.
What I’m arguing for is that if one posits another system that is regulated by the brain, a system that has direct feedback mechanisms built into it just like the nervous or circulatory system for example, then I can resolve the circular arguments that are intrinsic and build into the predicate concept that “mind is what the brain does”.
Positing that mind is an intellectual and/or mental system is tenable and it is a model that can account for the huge gaps that are contained within the alternate theory. The simple fact that it works speaks volumes, and the efficacy of its attributes should be a clue.
“… concrete models like scale models don’t work well either because we don’t have something that looks a tree in our brain when we see tree.”
I beg to differ on this point because; “if” the concrete models are scale models reconstructed in the quantum realm, then a reconstruction of a tree or any other object will fit very nicely inside your brain with a universe of space to spare…….
IMHO, this rendition makes a-lot of senses because it works. And this isn’t the THC speaking; although in this case, it might help.
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“if one posits another system that is regulated by the brain”
Okay. How does it work exactly? What is the material nature of the other system? If it isn’t material, how does it interact with the brain?
“I beg to differ on this point because; “if” the concrete models are scale models reconstructed in the quantum realm, then a reconstruction of a tree or any other object will fit very nicely inside your brain with a universe of space to spare…….”
Similar to higher dimensional theory or maybe even equivalent to it. The quantum realm could have an infinite number of dimensions. Possible. There is just no research that suggests anything like that. Have you read this?
https://www.nature.com/articles/440611a
My problem with the term “model” was the misunderstanding scale models might cause for some people, not to the point you are making. But sure I would agree if there are multiple dimensions or a quantum realm, there’s plenty of room for a tree or a universe.
The biggest issue I had with the research on brain heart entanglement is it found a correlation between two unconscious activities regulated by the same brainstem and consciousness only enters the picture because the correlation vanishes when a subject fell asleep. A lot of things change in the brain when you go to sleep so it isn’t surprising that a connection between part of the brain and the heart would change too.
Here’s another comment on the paper. I think the authors of the original paper replied to the comment too.
Comment on: ‘Experimental indications of non-classical brain function’ 2022
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2399-6528/acc4a8/meta
Abstract
A recent paper in this journal presents magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data on humans which are asserted to ‘suggest that we may have witnessed entanglement mediated by consciousness-related brain functions. Those brain functions must then operate non-classically, which would mean that consciousness is non-classical.’ Unfortunately, the article provides no evidence to justify this claim. In fact, the paper only provides evidence for what we already knew: the brain (and any other living tissue) is complex, multicompartmental, and imprecisely characterized by MRI.
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Considering that this intellectual/mental system may be quantum, decoherence will always be a feature of that system which could cause problems.
Taking into consideration that there is no known or justifiable reason why we need to sleep, it might be related to decoherence. Sleep deprivation causes serious problems for our mental capacities which might be systemic of decoherence. Likewise, hallucinations, schizophrenia and other mental disorders might actually be a symptom of decoherence as well.
I find all of this intriguing. Not sure what my batting average is so far, but I’ll keep swinging as long as there’s a ball coming my way……
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Sleep is generally thought to be related to memory housekeeping. If neurons or clusters go through the day recording memories, there needs to be something to erase what is not useful or worth keeping long term. It might be difficult to do that in real time because you can’t know the usefulness of something until time passes.
I think there also may be physiological functions involved in sleep. The brain is flushed with liquids during sleep.
I doubt anything coheres for very long in the brain but I think it could happen for nanoseconds at a time.
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