If you are unfamiliar with McFadden, you should know his core argument is effectively that the electromagnetic field generated by neurons is consciousness.
The more I read about neurons the more I discover new (to me) ways that they communicate. I read recently an article that says neurons emit photons and that possibly the photons could transmit information to other neurons. We have the well-known electrochemical communication. Then there is the possibilities that neurons also used electromagnetic fields to communicate with each other. If nature finds something useful, it will tend to use it, so I wouldn’t be surprised that neurons would use electromagnetic fields. Likely any or all of these methods could be related to consciousness, but it isn’t as clear whether one or a combination is more greatly involved.
Imaginative Rats
Rats are more imaginative than you might believe. Through some clever experimental methods researchers have found that rats navigate toward a goal only in brain activity. In other words, they are imagining themselves taking a path to a location different from where they are at to get a reward.
There are a lot of articles on the internet about this. Here is an explanation from one:
To explore whether rats can do the same, and unpick a possible mechanism, researchers employed a brain-machine interface in which electrodes were surgically implanted into the rats’ brains. The rats were then placed on a treadmill ball within a 360-degree immersive virtual reality (VR) arena, and presented with an on-screen goal to run towards.
As the rats moved, and the treadmill ball turned, the animal’s apparent location within the VR environment updated on screen – as if the rat was running through a real environment. When the rats reached the goal, they received a treat and the goal was moved within the VR environment. The process was then repeated.
During this initial phase, the team recorded the activity within the animals’ hippocampus. They then used a computer system to translate this neural activity to specific locations within the VR environment.
In the next step, the researchers decoupled the treadmill from the VR system. This meant the rats could not reach the goal by running on the treadmill. Instead, they could only use their brain activity to navigate through the VR environment.
By analysing the activity in rats’ hippocampus in real time during the task, the team were able to update the screen every 100 milliseconds with the animals’ current location in the VR environment, based on what was happening in their brain.
The results reveal the rats could indeed navigate to the goal using just their brain activity.
Perhaps this isn’t surprising. If one of the main roles of the brain is prediction, then the ability to imagine alternative outcomes and different ways to accomplish a task might be an inevitable consequence.This would extend to imagining steps involved in a task such as navigating to a reward.
Other research has show navigation in rats, perhaps most mammals, may be accomplished in grid cells in the hippocampus.
Mammals are able to navigate to hidden goal locations by direct routes that may traverse previously unvisited terrain. Empirical evidence suggests that this “vector navigation” relies on an internal representation of space provided by the hippocampal formation. The periodic spatial firing patterns of grid cells in the hippocampal formation offer a compact combinatorial code for location within large-scale space.
This is evidence that, in some brain functions, the geometric arrangement of neurons may be critical to conscious content. We might speculate that, if each neuron had its own unique electromagnetic signature, the geometric arrangement of multiple neurons might create an unique combined “picture” composed of the individual signature of each neuron.
Bats Too
Bats have grid cells too and may use the same grid cells for spatial and social navigation.
In short, the bats’ navigation system appeared to do double duty as a social map. The mammals weren’t just moving around their home — they were also using the exact same brain cells to track who was on the premises.
In that sense, Forli said, the hippocampus may be like a powerful graphics card in a computer, which can have many uses, from rendering graphics for video games to performing machine learning computations. The hippocampus may be great at particular kinds of computations and may have the ability to be modified or programmed by evolution.
I’m not especially fond of the “computation” metaphor in the quote, because it becomes associated with digital computation in the mind of many. Whatever form of “computation” is occurring hardly seems like digital computation, especially if the geometric arrangement of computing elements is part of the “computation.”
The article is about special neurons called place cells, which fire whenever an animal is in a certain location and grid cells, which are like a dead-reckoning system, telling the animal its location independent of external cues.
Apparently these type of neurons and patterns are widespread in mammalian brains, including those of humans. The firing patterns for grid cells seems to have a hexagonal geometric pattern.
The hexagonal pattern of grid cell activity is repeated all over nature, from honeycombs to the benzene ring to a tightly packed crate of oranges. It’s a highly efficient arrangement; bees use hexagons in their combs to minimize their use of wax. In the grid-cell system, the hexagon isn’t a physical object. Rather, it’s the organization of space that encodes information most efficiently. “It’s the most efficient way to compress data,” said Marianne Hafting Fyhn, a neuroscientist at the University of Oslo in Norway and a former student of the Mosers. Researchers aren’t sure why grid cells use hexagons, but the hexagonal organizing principle has attracted attention from computational biologists, who are trying to figure out how the grid is generated.
Apparently it is not simply physical space and location that is maintained with grid cells. The grid contains abstract properties such as the social map mentioned about bats earlier.
The article concludes:
Many researchers believe that memory and space are even more intricately linked. In a popular trick for remembering speeches, dating back to ancient Greece, the orator calls to mind a familiar path through a city and attaches a segment of the speech to each location along the path. This mnemonic may unwittingly exploit the fact that the hippocampus encodes both location information and autobiographical memories. “It just happens that space is a good way of organizing experiences,” Wilson said.
1- Representations are unreal because they do not occupy a place in spacetime.
2- Algorithms are manipulations of representations.
3- Consciousness is real because it has a location in spacetime.
4- Algorithms cannot be conscious.
Elaboration
Okay, somebody will want to say representations are real. After all we can see the pipe in the Magritte painting. But even if the representation is real, it is not real in the same way as the actual object that it represents.
A representation only has meaning because it is a pointer to something else that is real. That is why representations are totally portable. A representation could be rendered in innumerable substrates – pencil drawing, painting, computer monitor, photograph. Each of the representations would occupy a place in spacetime, but what each represented would not be instantiated in that place. A drawing in charcoal of the pipe from the painting would only have charcoal on paper at its place in spacetime. The original pipe would either be in Magritte’s atelier or in the original painting if it were a pipe imagined by the artist. We can have thousands of pointers to or representations of the original pipe, but only one original pipe.
Algorithms are manipulations of representations. A simulation of rain is not wet. What is real are the events occurring while the simulation is running – basically fluctuations in electricity on chips and circuits in current technology.
Consciousness is located in the brain. It exists in spacetime. Only a dualist or idealist would dispute this.
Manipulations of representations cannot be conscious.
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 