Two and a half theories of Consciousness, an essay review of Gerald M. Edelman's book, "The Remembered Present" and Richard Pico's book, "Consciousness in Four Dimensions."
The setting sun, a mind's eye view
When we see a setting sun, a massive chain of physical events takes place along the optical nerve to the thalamocortical system of the brain. Each step involves trillions of electrochemical reactions by as many as one hundred billion neurons.
The sheer enormity of the activity taking place in a three-pound gelatinous substance called the brain, gives a whole new meaning to the notion that: "if there is enough quantity, there is no need to worry about quality."
However, somewhere along this path, an inexplicable qualitative change is occurring. One that turns these billions of transduced electrochemical pulses into a unitary scene that appears as an image of that setting sun fixed at the center of our mind's eye.
There is little doubt that what we are "seeing" is something neuromechanical. And, it is equally difficult to deny that the immanent mental picture appearing on that TV screen we call our mind's eye is the result of massive and complex neuromechanical processing whose output is of a qualitatively different character than the trillions of physical interactions moving on a millisecond time scale across our nervous system.
The quantity of activity alone hints strongly that consciousness must be the result of massive biomechanical processing, or why else would there be so much electrical activity?
If this is so, then the problem for the scientist is accepting that there is no description possible that can replace the actual experience of conceiving of these billions of processing steps and trillions of neuronal connections that turn them into the subjective experience of seeing that rich qualitative picture of the setting sun as a visual image.
The closest we can hope to get to the actual experience is describing the mechanisms that produce such experiences.
To appreciate such descriptions, the reader should bear in mind, not only that massive quantity often brings along its own quality, but also that the quality resulting from massive quantities often takes on the character of form, function and structure themselves.
This fact has never been truer than for the arcing jungle of electrochemical circuits that make up the machinery of the brain.
It is the tens of thousands of elementary circuits taking on the character of form, function and structure that do the heavy lifting in the processes leading to the working of both primary and higher-order consciousness.
A half theory of consciousness: The fMRI's snapshot of a mind thinking in real time
It was a watershed moment for me when I watched a newscast of a subject hooked up to an fMRI in a research laboratory. The subject confirmed that the catlike image the fMRI returned to a monitor was indeed a close facsimile of the cat he had conjured up in his mind at that very moment.
On a second try, the subject also confirmed that he was thinking of the Empire State Building. When, sure enough, a crude outline of the New York City skyline appeared on the monitor with a dome-draped building with a javelin-like spire jutting out at its center.
Can it be ruled out that maybe the fMRI experiment represents a foolproof first-order half-theory that the picture of that setting sun is actually the product of massively complex, qualitatively rich, and quantitatively immense, neuomechanical processing? I think not.
Knowing that the fMRI samples changes in oxygen blood flow levels as neurons fire, does not exactly solve the problem either. For we still cannot describe exactly what is going on within the subject's brain to produce the changes in oxygen blood flow levels that would cause the fMRI to generate the images it outputs to the monitor.
Despite this, for me at least, the fMRI readings were the first experimental confirmation that the neuromechanics of the brain of a human subject, does indeed directly produce thought as an image.
The full story of how the processes within a three-pound gelatinous mass of material become mind, is infinitely more complex than just monitoring and measuring neuronal oxygen blood flows.
But as a half theory that produces a subject-confirmed unified image of brain dynamics, the fMRI can hardly be set aside and ignored as possible confirmation of how the brain produces its images. And, until that time arrives, it can certainly serve as a control for the two biological theories to be introduced now.
For a more complete story of consciousness, I am as convinced as Drs Gerald Edelman and Richard Pico, that we need a global biological theory with extraordinary explanatory powers to fully understand how consciousness produces that setting sun in our mind's eye.
And, so far as I know, they are the only two theorists to have come forth with such theories explaining the biological phenomenon of consciousness.
In this essay I offer a crude summary of their respective theories. Then, I end with a few comments attempting to make sense of what it all means.
The theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS) (The first global biological theory of consciousness)
In his book, "The Remembered Present," Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman offers a compelling alternative to the fMRI experiment. Providing in the process, a theoretically respectable exit from the darkness of the mind-body problem.
Edelman, in explaining how consciousness is probably a process rather than a thing, takes us through the evolutionary developments leading to consciousness.
He marks the beginning of the journey as the breakup at the Cambrian Explosion, when stationary organisms were forced to become mobile in order to better compete for survival in that new and more aggressive environment.
Sensing which direction to move, required that organisms map a representation of both their own inside world as well as that of objects in the outside world.
At the time, about 650 million years ago, the flat worm developed a special kind of protohuman-like cell that we now recognize as the neuron. It produced its own energy and communicated with other neurons.
In TNGS, due entirely to their electrochemical makeup, Edelman reports that neurons acting as neuronal groups, constitute the most basic unit of brain circuitry.
According to TNGS, brain circuitry and Darwinian evolution conspired to turn "a thing" (brain matter), into the most complex set of processes in the known universe (consciousness).
From the Darwinian side, TNGS tells us that within every individual brain, there is a uniquely rich repertoire of population variants. Their sheer enormity and richness suggest that their only purpose is as reservoirs for electrochemical Darwinian selections.
At every level of structure and function, population repertoires of neurons have competed through natural selection until they have been honed into near survival perfection.
We can now fast forward from the Cambrian Explosion into the womb of a humanoid, where we know that within 24 hours of conception, the brainstem and spine are among the first bodily structures to emerge. And that, even in the womb, it is easy to see that evolution is always at play.
The chemistry of the brainstem evolves into the neurotransmitters and value systems emanating from the basal ganglia that still served as guiding constraints on almost every selectional aspect of development -- from morphology to epigenesis to genes to perception, and on to other neurological mechanisms leading to consciousness.
Biology also tells us that for our species, rudimentary perception comes as an epigenetic and morphological given. And that as a result, at birth, the newborn already has the mental equipment to vaguely perceive what is going on inside its own body.
When their eyes open, what the newborn sees is the same indecipherable image a blind person suddenly given the gift of sight would also see.
Our scene of the setting sun would make no sense to either of them. The fMRI would register a blank screen on the monitor if connected to the brain of a blind person or a newborn.
Dr Edelman tells us that, "the sense seeing makes," occurs through a long process of perceptual categorization, constrained by value systems memory, degenerate connections, and most importantly, recursive reentrant brain circuitry.
Later, as language is added to this mix, we finally reach the end of the mind-body tunnel at higher-order consciousness.
With these units of brain processing, Edelman fashions a tightly woven heuristic theory of consciousness, one whose hypotheses, once successfully tested, offer the potential for a high level explanation of how consciousness actually works.
A fundamental tenet of TNGS is that it is our continuously evolving perceptions that turns that vague frame of the outside world into distinguishable features of shapes, colors, movement and body orientation in time and space.
Let us briefly review the function of each of these units, in turn.
Perceptual categorization, guided and constrained by neurotransmitter-based value systems, is the process by which perceptions get broken down into distinct meaningful and nameable parts.
The first of such categories is the partition between self and nonself. From there, the partitions and categories of discrimination literally become infinitely richer and infinitely more complex. They are characterized by high integration and high discrimination simultaneously.
Value systems memory is a neurotransmitter-based non-representational memory that registers as a systemwide or state variable of the brain rather than as a discrete code-based set of storage locations. Edelman declares that the brain is not a Turin machine.
Memory, as a state variable of the brain, can be imagined to be stacked arrays of thousand-sheet layers of blinking Christmas tree lights, with million of lights per sheet.
In which case, the hundreds of billions of connections between them represent the range of qualitative discriminatory power of qualities (qualia) making up every blinking light that registers every possible conscious experience -- recallable only by association as the "remembered present."
The equation of representational memory is: the "new remembered present" equals the "old remembered present" plus the "now."
One lifetime is capable of billions of dimcriminatable remembered experiences. The richness of these experiences are due not just to quantity, but also to the literally infinite richness of their discriminatory pallets.
Cumulatively, registered experiences constitute a catalog of an individual's conscious life, from about age five until death.
Degenerate connections simply represent the many alternative routes through which perceptions, scenes, images and experiences may be created.
While the most common circuits involved in conscious processing are the tens of millions of one-way direct connections, the real work horses of conscious brain processing, are the more complex reciprocal parallel and often recursive reentrant brain circuits.
They modify, and can be modified in both directions on each cycle of communication as their projections range across multiple regions and maps of the brain, connecting to other components of conscious processing.
It is when these primary units of brain mechanics are working together stochastically, within the "dynamic core" that allows a perception to evolve in sentient animals.
And it is these perceptions that allow us to categorize and distinguish complex but vague brain inputs from multiple sensing modalities, and then turn them into a unitary scene full of blended multi-modal information.
The ability of the brain to continuously and progressively improve its perceptive capabilities through natural selection is the hallmark of the processes leading to consciousness.
But there is yet another way to understand how consciousness works using TNGS.
Start with its most central idea, a "quale," a single unit of qualitative discrimination, and then use it to work your way back through the theory.
Philosophers have memorialized a quale as the act of experiencing the "redness" in red. But according to TNGS, a quale is really the root node of a universe of irreducible units of an n-dimensional multimodal perceptual discrimination space. A space made up of every possible discriminable quality of conscious experiences.
And this space is not restricted just to sense qualities alone, but also includes perceptions, concepts, intuition, feelings, ideas, imagination, logic, etc.
When viewed as the basis vectors of an n-dimensional discrimination space, this universe of qualia becomes the qualitative side of a two-sided stochastic dance taking place deep inside the thalamocortical system of the brain.
The other partner to this dance of course, is "the neural correlates of consciousness," the actual firing of neuronal brain circuits, electrochemical reactions, etc."
According to TNGS, a stochastic dance between these two metaphysically opposing sides takes place within what Edelman has labeled the "dynamic core," a self-organized meta-stable process that lies deep within the thalamocortical system of the brain.
This stochastic pas de deux binds together the elements of two opposing metaphysical universes, giving rise to what we recognize as consciousness: perceptions, ideas, images and mental scenes.
The way the dance in the dynamic core unfolds is somewhat as follows:
It begins as mere stochastic covariation between recursive reentrant signals of the respective functional clusters of the two opposing mind-body domains.
Then, on a millisecond time scale, the domains become stochastically correlated; after which they resonate and then are roughly synchronized.
The penultimate step is when their signals eventually gravitate to a kind of spontaneous coherence. And finally, the electrochemical signals of two disparate statistical universes, two separate magisteria, become a bound unit of biomechanics.
Mind and body are stochastically stabilized and united in time, into a single unified conscious perception.
The dynamic core, an evolved self-organized brain process, has bound together "the universe of qualia" to "the universe of neural correlates," and the final product of a spontaneous statistically-driven dance is a fully formed stabilized perception that defines primary consciousness.
In short, the stochastic binding resulting in a unitary perception, defines "primary consciousness," of which all sentient creatures are capable. Moreover, primary consciousness, is also a prerequisite for higher-level consciousness.
To get to this final step, Dr Edelman, further hypothesizes that higher level consciousness is characterized uniquely by the act of being conscious of being conscious.
This too is achieved within the dynamic core, in a secondary intra-core dance, when circuits within the core, communicate only among themselves. It is only then that perceptions are turned into images and scenes.
In this final internal dance, the past is related to the "remembered present,," and thus makes contemplation of a future possible.
But, the very ability to contemplate the future, entails self-awareness, which means that one must then be conscious of being conscious.
And thus, the circle is finally closed as the unitary scene of the setting sun we see as the TV screen in our mind's eye, accords with what the fMRI reads as thoughts coming from our now self-aware brains.
Not only is that setting sun a unitary scene, but we can also contemplate its existence as an idea produced and authored by us because we are now self-aware: conscious of ourselves, and of ourselves being conscious.
If Edelman's rendition of what happens in the brain is anywhere near correct, then the mind-body problem dissolves in the stochastic dance in the dynamic core which gives rise to the binding together of "conscious qualia" with "the neural correlates of consciousness" -- the two competing domains that gave us the mind-body problem in the first place.
Biological Relativity (The Second global Biological theory of Consciousness)
Now we turn to the second biological theory of consciousness. One offered by Dr. Richard Pico, in his book "Consciousness in Four Dimensions."
Biological relativity is a heuristic model of neurobiology that relates life, consciousness and internal sensations to the larger universe of matter, thermodynamics, energy, entropy, relativity, information, and evolution.
In short, existence for embodied matter, came into being in the context of a set of local parameters defined by an organism's own metabolic clock; its location; and by its form, function and structure relative to its own local 4D frame of reference.
For millions of years, the improbable dance of chance by electrochemical reactions led progressively to more complex but also more stable protocellular environments, ending with metabolism and the complete replication of the protocell's own structure.
It is from this basic 4D conception of life that the brain, consciousness, thought, and mind, came into existence.
Life thus may be thought of as an evolutionary production of embodied chemical solutions that accidentally scaled the wall of entropy.
Once over the wall, it became an established order, whose rasion d'etre was to remain viable from moment-to-moment.
Life is the name given to this cross-generational unit-less energy field of cellular behavior.
Entropy provided the basis for understanding the emergence of life across thresholds of order; and the law of the conservation of energy conveyed the cost of creating negative entropy as an organism moved from chaos into a new thermodynamic cellular order.
One possible way that life could have evolved from there is as follows:
Inside one of millions of semi-permeable phospholipid membranes (bubbles found everywhere in the oceans), some chemical reactions persisted long enough to create pathways for energy exchanges between the cosmic mothership and the protocell's own emerging internal energy source, metabolism.
Among many other things, locomotion required an inside representation of the outside world as well as of the cell's own internal processes.
It also required that the representation maintain sufficient order in the cell's structure and function across the critical time thresholds, that its structure and function would have enough time to settle into a homeostatic steady-state.
With this, a new biological organization and order emerged: the 4D frame of reference we now call consciousness.
This new 4D frame served as the reference frame across all levels of organismic structure, binding them in time as a unified system operating under the rhythm of metabolism.
At each level, constituent multimodal information streams are bound in time to produce a novel product that characterizes the behavior at that level, and that then becomes inputs to the next level.
This linked multilevel metabolic chain all began with the neuron.
Streams of incoming electrochemical signals are encoded in the units of behavior peculiar to the physical modality of the sites being sensed.
That information is then sent up nerve pathways all the way to the cortex, but via nuclei, the thalamocortical system, the prefrontal integration module, and the neocortex, where the magic that has been happening all along the metabolic chain comes to a dramatic conclusion in the creation of the 4D reference frame we call consciousness, the new home of the final arbiter of homeostasis for the entire embodied system.
When multiple streams of specialized neuronal signals arrive at the neocortex, they have been rehearsed for their most important function: maximizing the organism's survival from moment-to-moment by promoting the homeostatic stability of the body as a single coherent unit.
How this happens is complex, but according to Dr Pico's theory, goes somewhat as follows:
Within three weeks of an embryo's development, the brain stem, the nervous system, and the cardiovascular systems are up and running.
Nerve cells then begin spreading out into a network across the developing body.
The basic process of stimulus conversion and conduction to the brain is through sensors classified by the types of energy they respond to; such as: mechanical, chemical, thermal and photo energies that transmit information to and from the muscles, nose, skin, ears and eyes, respectively.
Conduction and transduction of multimodal energies is the place where all our sensory realities are based on cellular functions, and where the physics of matter and energy become the biology of nerve impulses, neural transmission and conversion.
Together they capture the entire universe of what we may experience and know, generating all our sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and memories.
Thus, even before consciousness comes into existence, neuronal biomechanics keep our bodily functions in a steady state, while changing the outside world into our inner mental world.
Every group of neurons, from a two-neuron loop, to the multibillion cellular entirety of the brain, functions and behaves as a single cellular system, making the neuron the most basic proto life-form. One that senses the world and reacts to it in a manner that maximizes its own potential to exist into the next moment.
Struggling to remain viable as a thermodynamic order, and maximizing its own potential to exist into the next moment, turns out to be the indispensable homeostatic purpose of the organism as a whole.
Thus, examining the contents of a freeze-framed metabolic moment of a small piece of nerve tissue, is no small thought experiment.
For it yields a representation of the outside stimulus world in which each system within our body, evolves to help maintain, moment-to-moment, a viable metabolic environment for the entire body. This is the newly defined role of higher level consciousness.
Thus, in defining life, we must remember that its tempo has meaning only for the system acting as a unit, as a whole, behaving as an irreducible dimensionless unit moving across time in years and generations.
Thus, from the small number of nerve cells in the flat worm, to the billions in the human, all neural circuits bring together fragments of converted stimuli from various locations -- all done at the rhythm of metabolic action-potential propagation, and at the specificity and resolution provided by the types, distributions, and densities of its receptor cells.
It is the emergent behaviors of receptor cells that are the functional units of the life-field. They are the cells that vector directly to consciousness.
Two and a half theories of Consciousness, an essay review of Gerald M Edelman's book, The Remembered Present and Richard Pico's book, Consciousness in Four Dimensions
The setting sun, a mind's eye view
When we see a setting sun, a massive chain of physical events takes place along the optical nerve to the thalamocortical system of the brain. Each step involves trillions of electrochemical reactions by as many as one hundred billion neurons. The sheer enormity of the activity taking place in a three-pound gelatinous substance called the brain, gives a whole new meaning to the notion that: "if there is enough quantity, there is no need to worry about quality."
However, somewhere along this path, an inexplicable qualitative change is occurring. One that turns these billions of transduced electrochemical pulses into a unitary scene that appears as an image of that setting sun fixed at the center of our mind's eye.
There is little doubt that what we are "seeing" is something neuromechanical. And, it is equally difficult to deny that the immanent mental picture appearing on that TV screen we call our mind's eye is the result of massive and complex neuromechanical processing whose output is of a qualitatively different character than the trillions of physical interactions moving on a millisecond time scale across our nervous system.
The quantity of activity alone hints strongly that consciousness must be the result of massive biomechanical processing, or why else would there be so much electrical activity?
If this is so, then the problem for the scientist is accepting that there is no description possible that can replace the actual experience of conceiving of these billions of processing steps and trillions of neuronal connections that turn them into the subjective experience of seeing that rich qualitative picture of the setting sun as a visual image. The closest we can hope to get to the actual experience is describing the mechanisms that produce such experiences.
To appreciate such descriptions, the reader should bear in mind, not only that massive quantity often brings along its own quality, but also that the quality resulting from massive quantities often takes on the character of form, function and structure themselves. This fact has never been truer than for the arcing jungle of electrochemical circuits that make up the machinery of the brain.
It is the tens of thousands of elementary circuits taking on the character of form, function and structure that do the heavy lifting in the processes leading to the working of both primary and higher-order consciousness.
A half theory of consciousness: The fMRI's snapshot of a mind thinking in real time
It was a watershed moment for me when I watched a newscast of a subject hooked up to an fMRI in a research laboratory. The subject confirmed that the catlike image the fMRI returned to a monitor was indeed a close facsimile of the cat he had conjured up in his mind at that very moment.
On a second try, the subject also confirmed that he was thinking of the Empire State Building. When, sure enough, a crude outline of the New York City skyline appeared on the monitor with a dome-draped building with a javelin-like spire jutting out at its center.
Can it be ruled out that maybe the fMRI experiment represents a foolproof first-order half-theory that the picture of that setting sun is actually the product of massively complex, qualitatively rich, and quantitatively immense, neuomechanical processing? I think not.
Knowing that the fMRI samples changes in oxygen blood flow levels as neurons fire, does not exactly solve the problem either. For we still cannot describe exactly what is going on within the subject's brain to produce the changes in oxygen blood flow levels that would cause the fMRI to generate the images it outputs to the monitor.
Despite this, for me at least, the fMRI readings were the first experimental confirmation that the neuromechanics of the brain of a human subject, does indeed directly produce thought as an image.
The full story of how the processes within a three-pound gelatinous mass of material become mind, is infinitely more complex than just monitoring and measuring neuronal oxygen blood flows.
But as a half theory that produces a subject-confirmed unified image of brain dynamics, the fMRI can hardly be set aside and ignored as possible confirmation of how the brain produces its images. And, until that time arrives, it can certainly serve as a control for the two biological theories to be introduced now.
For a more complete story of consciousness, I am as convinced as Drs Gerald Edelman and Richard Pico, that we need a global biological theory with extraordinary explanatory powers to fully understand how consciousness produces that setting sun in our mind's eye.
And, so far as I know, they are the only two theorists to have come forth with such theories explaining the biological phenomenon of consciousness.
In this essay I offer a crude summary of their respective theories. Then, I end with a few comments attempting to make sense of what it all means.
The theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS) (The first global biological theory of consciousness)
In his book, "The Remembered Present," Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman offers a compelling alternative to the fMRI experiment. Providing in the process, a theoretically respectable exit from the darkness of the mind-body problem.
Edelman, in explaining how consciousness is probably a process rather than a thing, takes us through the evolutionary developments leading to consciousness.
He marks the beginning of the journey as the breakup at the Cambrian Explosion, when stationary organisms were forced to become mobile in order to better compete for survival in the new more aggressive environment.
Sensing which direction to move, required that organisms map a representation of both their own insides as well as that of objects in the outside world.
At the time, about 650 million years ago, the flat worm developed a special kind of protohuman-like cell that we now recognize as the neuron. It produced its own energy and communicated with other neurons.
In TNGS, due entirely to their electrochemical makeup, Edelman reports that neurons acting as neuronal groups, constitute the most basic unit of brain circuitry. According to TNGS, brain circuitry and Darwinian evolution conspired to turn "a thing" (brain matter), into the most complex set of processes in the known universe (consciousness).
From the Darwinian side, TNGS tells us that within every individual brain, there is a uniquely rich repertoire of population variants. Their sheer enormity and richness suggest that their only purpose is as reservoirs for electrochemical Darwinian selections.
At every level of structure and function, population repertoires of neurons have competed through natural selection until they have been honed into near survival perfection.
We can now fast forward from the Cambrian Age into the womb of a humanoid, where we know that within 24 hours of conception, the brainstem and spine are among the first bodily structures to emerge. And that, even in the womb, it is easy to see that evolution is always at play.
The chemistry of the brainstem evolves into the neurotransmitters and value systems emanating from the basal ganglia that still served as guiding constraints on almost every selectional aspect of development -- from morphology to epigenesis to genes to perception, and on to other neurological mechanisms leading to consciousness.
Biology also tells us that for our species, rudimentary perception comes as an epigenetic and morphological given. And that as a result, at birth, the newborn already has the mental equipment to vaguely perceive what is going on inside its own body.
When their eyes open, what the newborn sees is the same indecipherable image a blind person suddenly given the gift of sight would also see. Our scene of the setting sun would make no sense to either of them. The fMRI would register a blank screen on the monitor if connected to the brain of a blind person or a newborn.
Dr Edelman tells us that, "the sense seeing makes," occurs through a long process of perceptual categorization, constrained by value systems memory, degenerate connections, and most importantly, recursive reentrant brain circuitry.
Later, as language is added to this mix, we finally reach the end of the mind-body tunnel at higher-order consciousness.
With these units of brain processing, Edelman fashions a tightly woven heuristic theory of consciousness, one whose hypotheses, once successfully tested, offer the potential for a high level explanation of how consciousness actually works.
A fundamental tenet of TNGS is that it is our continuously evolving perceptions that turns that vague frame of the outside world into distinguishable features of shapes, colors, movement and body orientation in time and space.
Let us briefly review the function of each of these units, in turn.
Perceptual categorization, guided and constrained by neurotransmitter-based value systems, is the process by which perceptions get broken down into distinct meaningful and nameable parts.
The first of such categories is the partition between self and nonself. From there, the partitions and categories of discrimination literally become infinitely richer and infinitely more complex. They are characterized by high integration and high discrimination simultaneously.
Value systems memory is a neurotransmitter-based non-representational memory that registers as a systemwide state variable of the brain rather than as a discrete code-based set of storage locations. Edelman declares that the brain is not a Turin machine.
Memory, as a state variable of the brain, can be imagined to be stacked arrays of thousand-sheet layers of blinking Christmas tree lights, with million of lights per sheet.
In which case, the hundreds of billions of connections between them represent the range of qualitative discriminatory power of qualities (qualia) making up every blinking light that registers every possible conscious experience -- recallable only by association as the "remembered present."
The equation of representational memory is: the "new remembered present" equals the "old remembered present" plus the "now."
One lifetime is capable of billions of dimcriminatable remembered experiences. The richness of these experiences are due not just to quantity, but also to the literally infinite richness of their discriminatory pallets.
Cumulatively, registered experiences constitute a catalog of an individual's conscious life, from about age five until death.
Degenerate connections simply represent the many alternative routes through which perceptions, scenes, images and experiences may be created.
While the most common circuits involved in conscious processing are the tens of millions of one-way direct connections, the real work horses of conscious brain processing, are the more complex reciprocal parallel and often recursive reentrant brain circuits.
They modify, and can be modified in both directions on each cycle of communication as their projections range across multiple regions and maps of the brain, connecting to other components of conscious processing.
It is when these primary units of brain mechanics are working together stochastically, within the "dynamic core" that allows a perception to evolve in sentient animals.
And it is these perceptions that allow us to categorize and distinguish complex but vague brain inputs from multiple sensing modalities, and then turn them into a unitary scene full of blended multi-modal information.
The ability of the brain to continuously and progressively improve its perceptive capabilities through natural selection is the hallmark of the processes leading to consciousness.
But there is another way to understand how consciousness works using TNGS.
Start with its most central idea, a "quale," a single unit of qualitative discrimination, and then use it to work your way back through the theory.
Philosophers have memorialized a quale as the act of experiencing the "redness" in red. But according to TNGS, a quale is really the root node of a universe of irreducible units of an n-dimensional multimodal perceptual discrimination space. A space made up of every possible discriminable quality of conscious experiences. And this space is not restricted just to sense qualities alone, but also includes perceptions, concepts, intuition, feelings, ideas, imagination, logic, etc.
When viewed as the basis vectors of an n-dimensional discrimination space, this universe of qualia becomes the qualitative side of a two-sided stochastic dance taking place deep inside the thalamocortical system of the brain. The other partner to this dance of course, is "the neural correlates of consciousness," the actual firing of neuronal brain circuits, electrochemical reactions, etc."
According to TNGS, a stochastic dance between these two metaphysically opposing sides takes place within what Edelman has labeled the "dynamic core," a self-organized meta-stable process that lies deep within the thalamocortical system of the brain.
This stochastic pas de deux binds together the elements of two opposing metaphysical universes, giving rise to what we recognize as consciousness: perceptions, ideas, images and mental scenes.
The way the dance in the dynamic core unfolds is as follows: It begins as mere stochastic covariation between recursive reentrant signals of the respective functional clusters of the two opposing mind-body domains.
Then, on a millisecond time scale, the domains become stochastically correlated; after which they resonate and then are synchronized.
The penultimate step is when their signals eventually gravitate to a kind of spontaneous coherence. And finally, the electrochemical signals of two disparate statistical universes, two separate magisteria, become a bound unit of biomechanics.
Mind and body are stochastically stabilized and united in time, into a single unified conscious perception.
The dynamic core, an evolved self-organized brain process, has bound together "the universe of qualia" to "the universe of neural correlates," and the final product of a spontaneous statistically driven dance is a fully formed stabilized perception that defines primary consciousness.
In short, the stochastic binding resulting in a unitary perception, defines "primary consciousness," of which all sentient creatures are capable. Moreover, primary consciousness, is also a prerequisite for higher level consciousness.
To get to this final step, Dr Edelman, further hypothesizes that higher level consciousness is characterized uniquely by the act of being conscious of being conscious.
This too is achieved within the dynamic core, in a secondary intra-core dance, when circuits within the core, communicate only among themselves. It is only then that perceptions are turned into images and scenes. In this final internal dance, the past is related to the remembered present, and thus makes contemplation of a future possible.
But the very ability to contemplate the future entails self-awareness, which means that one must then be conscious of being conscious.
And thus, the circle is finally closed as the unitary scene of the setting sun we see as the TV screen in our mind's eye, accords with what the fMRI reads as thoughts coming from our now self-aware brains.
Not only is that setting sun a unitary scene, but we can also contemplate its existence as an idea produced and authored by us because we are now self-aware: conscious of ourselves, and of ourselves being conscious.
If Edelman's rendition of what happens in the brain is anywhere near correct, then the mind-body problem dissolves in the stochastic dance in the dynamic core which gives rise to the binding together of "conscious qualia" with "the neural correlates of consciousness" -- the two competing domains that gave us the mind-body problem in the first place.
Biological Relativity (The Second global Biological theory of Consciousness)
Now we turn to the second biological theory of consciousness. One offered by Dr. Richard Pico, in his book "Consciousness in Four Dimensions."
(Article changed on Oct 25, 2024 at 4:56 PM EDT)
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