New Empiricism

Perceptual modelling in 3D

2011-12-06T03:44:00.001-08:00

You will need red-green 3D glasses such as those available from "Worldwide Co" to see the images in this article. (http://www.npw-usa.com or http://www.npw.co.uk ).

The phi phenomenon is clear in 3D:

There is also a depth version of the phi phenomenon:

The disk moves behind then level with the grid in a continuous pumping motion. The duration of the disk outlines is 250ms and the duration of the blank space is 90ms. Unlike the 2D phi effect the 3D version ceases to be clear if the blank period is more than about 200ms (the 2D phi ceases at about 400ms):

The image above has a 200ms blank period and 250ms duration disks. The disks must also be present for more than about 100ms for the 3D phi to occur:

The image above has 90ms blank period and 90ms display of the disks. There is very little pulsing in and out of the disk, all that occurs is a sort of fluttering. Interestingly the 2D Phi in a 3D setting works fine with 90ms intervals and durations:

It should be stressed that the term "3D" is used colloquially above, of course, none of the images are actually viewed three dimensionally because we cannot see behind them from a constant location. However, each eye has a slightly different view that is not shared by the other and it is this dual view that seems like "looking behind".

The Phi Phenomenon and the half second gap

2011-11-30T01:44:00.001-08:00

The phi phenomenon occurs when two sequentially flashed lights or presented images are accompanied by a vision of movement between the two. An example is shown below:

The moving red bar is actually a 150ms flash of a red bar on the left, a gap of 120ms with no bars shown then a 150ms flash of red bar on the right. Muckli et al (2005), Sterzer etal (2006) and Larsen et al (2006) have shown that the path of the motion is drawn on the visual cortex.

The "colour phi phenomenon" (see Kolers and Von Grunau 1976) occurs when the two stimuli have different colours:

The transition from dark to light blue occurs somewhere between the two extreme positions. Combining this with the discovery of Larsen et al, that the bar is drawn on the visual cortex, suggests that there will be a transition on the cortex from one colour to another. There must be some mechanism in the brain that draws the bar across the cortex and to fit the bar in the right position and at the correct rate this mechanism must only begin to draw the moving bar once the second flash has occurred. This suggests that the appearance of the bar on the cortex is delayed by the time gap from one flash to another.

The phi phenomenon disappears if the gap between the flashes is over about 500ms:

The flashing bars above are presented for 150ms with a 600ms white space gap. This possibility of a half second gap between a physical stimulus and experience was also found to occur in the case of direct brain stimulation by Libet et al 1979. It is also commonly observed in studies of Event Related Potentials in the EEG in which cortical activity is strongest more than 300ms post stimulus, conscious experience being related in some way to electrical events 400ms or more post stimulus.

The brain is quite clever at modelling motion. The moving bar above contains two phi phenomena and shows the colours washing into one another at intermediate positions. This particular effect is enhanced by viewing with one eye. Notice that the bar makes two excursions to the left and then two excursions to the right, it does not make false starts to left or right, again suggesting that the final position of the second flash is available before modelling begins. If you cover the flashes at the left and right with your fingers and then expose one of them it suddenly releases a motion, again showing that the second flash must be available before modelling begins. The motion is interpolated, not extrapolated.

The half second delay is consistent with what is known about visual experience, our eyes dodge everywhere (performing "saccades") and our visual experience is a synthetic phenomenon based on this succession of short duration images. If we see a door close we tend to glance about as it happens, the brain's modelling capacity fills in the gaps to create a smoothly moving door.

Primitive materialists, who only believe in nineteenth century ideas of physics and geometry, dismiss the phi effect, arguing that it is evidence that experience does not exist - how could we be "seeing" our brains? As if something material actually had to flow between the object of sight in our experience and the centre of our experience! We need not be so constrained by faith and can accept our observations then propose a theory to account for them (see Time and conscious experience). One thing is certain, the object of sight in our experience is some peculiar field of events in our brains and not the pixels on this screen.

There are other types of motion modelling performed by the brain, for instance the beta phenomenon:

Courtesy Wikpedia

Kolers, P., & Von Grunau, M. (1976). Shape and color in apparent motion. Vision Research. 16, 329-335.

Muckli L, Kohler A, Kriegeskorte N, Singer W. (2005). Primary visual cortex activity along the apparent-motion trace reflects illusory perception. PLoS Biol. 2005 Aug;3(8):e265. Epub 2005 Jul 19.

Larsen, A., Madsen, K.H., Lund, T.E., and Bundesen, C. (2006). Images of Illusory Motion in Primary Visual Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2006;18:1174-1180.

Libet, B., Wright, E. W., Jr., Feinstein, B., and Pearl, D.(1979). Subjective referral of the timing for a conscious sensory experience. Brain, 102, pp. 192-224.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=427530&dopt=Abstract

Sterzer, P and Haynes, JD and Rees, G (2006) Primary visual cortex activation on the path of apparent motion is mediated by feedback from hMT+/V5. NEUROIMAGE , 32 (3) 1308 - 1316. 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.05.029.

Eagleman, D. M. (2001). Visual Illusions and Neurobiology. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2(12), 920-6. http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/papers/Eagleman.NatureRevNeuro.Illusions.pdf

New Empiricism

2011-11-18T07:06:00.001-08:00

If there really is a thing called consciousness it must be here, it must be current. If it truly exists in you and me we should be able to describe what it is about our experience that is “conscious”.

Now, before jumping to conclusions about where the objects in your experience reside such as "in the brain" or "out there" try to work out the relationships between them. There are continuous, simultaneous objects so there is a "space", how many independent axes are there for arranging the objects? Up-down, left-right etc. Are objects extended in time? You can do this description without needing to stick a measuring rod into the experience. There are lots of hints in the articles on this website.

Events can also be arranged over time.

In fact if we look we find that the radial separation of objects from the viewing point is related to motion and time - there are no spatially independent arrangements in our current experience between the viewing point and more apparently distant locations but there are temporally independent arrangements along this direction.

This image looks the same on paper - print it out to see.

The Necker cube shows how simply moving the eyes over an image can give this depth sensation.

It is hard to believe but the red line below is not moving across the screen at all (just blank out one side of the moving image to see that this is the case - this "illusion" is known as the phi illusion and the movement of the bars is completed in the visual cortex). No photons are required for experience containing the moving bars - the photons just provide enough data and the brain creates the rest.

Once you have worked out the relationships within your experience propose a geometrical theory of these relationships. Remember, nothing flows in your experience from your hand in your experience into some viewing point or from this screen in your experience into the viewing point. Certainly photons flow from a screen into your eyes but can you see flowing photons? Of course not. We are talking about a description of your experience not a theory about flows measured by instruments. Also remember that your experience is quite a bit different from the world beyond your body, how will you describe a single viewing point in terms of the world beyond your body when you have two eyes? If you are not careful you will make Dennett's mistake.

Dennettian Dualism

2011-10-12T07:42:00.000-07:00

(If you disagree with this article feel free to comment)

In Consciousness Explained p407-408. Dennett considers the experiences of someone looking at the world, and describes his idea of the relationship between conscious experience, mind and representation:

"It seemed to him, according to the text, as if his mind - his visual field - were filled with intricate details of gold-green buds and wiggling branches, but although this is how it seemed this was an illusion. No such "plenum" ever came into his mind; the plenum remained out in the world where it didn't have to be represented, but could just be. When we marvel, in those moments of heightened self-consciousness, at the glorious richness of our conscious experience, the richness we marvel at is actually the richness of the world outside, in all its ravishing detail. It does not "enter" our conscious minds, but is simply available"

The key feature of Dennett's description is that it must be explained by physical events beyond the body because "it didn't have to be represented, but could just be" and "It does not "enter" our conscious minds but is simply available". Dennett is declaring that any explanations of the phenomena that he describes must be physical explanations based on the arrangement and transfer of objects beyond the body.

Dennett explicitly describes a "view", events arranged in a plenum but seen from one side and from a viewing point (See Note below where Dennett describes the viewing point). Given that this is the "world outside" how does Dennett imagine that the view is created? Although he does not provide explicit details we have the impression of a pin hole camera type device taking in the view because it is one sided, focused but arranged around the observer. There has to be such a device because the light from the "gold green buds" goes everywhere without one - just hold up a white sheet of paper, there are no images on it.

Where is the pin hole? Light falls all over the cornea of our two eyes so there is no single pin hole in the eyes. All we have is two disparate retinal images. So Dennett's view is the view of some sort of supernatural point or pin hole located somewhere around the bridge of our nose but just "outside". This is surely a new sort of dualism: the brain is a mechanical device connected somehow to the miraculous viewing point on the nose. I propose to call this "Dennettian Dualism"

I am unhappy with this type of dualism because it fails to give a physical explanation for the geometrical form of the "richness of the world outside" as it presents itself to an observer but instead has something akin to Descartes' unextended Res Cogitans sitting on the nose providing "details" to the mechanical brain.

The dualism gets more intense when the "wiggling branches" are considered. How do we have movements in the view? The point on the nose would need some sort of "specious present" to have a view with movements because, as any snap photo will show, the world is static at an instant.

Dennett has done us all a favour because he has shown that if you ignore the viewing point we have "consciousness explained". Once this problem of the viewing point is ignored it is possible to account for almost all of what people might consider to be attributes of consciousness by physical properties of the brain. Dennett's separation of the viewing point from the brain focuses attention on the true problem of consciousness which is how simultaneous and time extended events occur at a point (see Time and conscious experience).

Note: Dennett actually admits to this problem of the viewing point: "My point of view had lagged somewhat behind, but I had already noted the indirect bearing of point of view on personal location. I could not see how a physicalist philosopher could quarrel with this except by taking the dire and counterintuitive route of banishing all talk of persons. " (From the presentation: Where Am I? by Daniel Dennett). "Where am I" shows that Dennett does not understand that viewing points are hugely problematical and require a special physics and geometry to describe simultaneous viewing at a point. See Simultaneity - the key to understanding mind?.

The limits of empiricism

2011-10-07T03:10:00.000-07:00

There is a popular myth that anything we might know about our own experience is not just doubtful but should be discounted. This myth is absurd because if it were true we could not function in the world. However, there is a real problem underlying the myth, it is the problem of how we should interpret the form and content of our experience. This problem is many problems combined.

The first problem is the problem of when an observation is made. If we believe that every set of events at one instant is entirely separate from the set of events at the next instant (presentism) we can only know the immediate past from reports in the form of memories and these reports could be wrong. If this cosmology were correct then there would indeed be grounds for doubting all reports about experience although no grounds at all for dismissing all reports. This all sounds reasonable until you actually inspect your experience. When you actually observe what is happening you have whole words and movements in experience so experience is time-extended and presentism is false. There are not even grounds for doubting the events in your immediate experience, let alone discounting them, unless you are a presentist.

Notice that whilst you are continuously viewing a word on this screen there is no time for any process to intervene between your perception and itself. What you are experiencing is here, now. However you might be surprised that what is here now is not simple - see The form of objects (also see the discussion of simultaneity below).

The second problem when interpreting experience is the level of measurement available within the experience. Can I apply nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio measurements to experience? I will explain these terms below and consider which levels of measurement can be applied.

When I observe an object such as this screen it continues in the extended present of my experience and is separate from other objects. This possibility of separation and classification means that my experience is consistent with a nominal level of measurement.

As well as separate events my experience has arrangements of these events. Indeed, if there were no arrangements then there would be no separate objects because objects are fixed arrangements of events. Arrangements of events are consistent with an ordinal level of measurement.

The existence of ordinal scales in experience means that experience may have independent axes for organising these arrangements. This is clear from the possibility of experience itself because experience would not exist if it were not more than a single point. Extra points are arranged around a single point in experience to make a surface so two dimensional arrangements can be assumed to exist within experience. In other articles on this site it is argued that experience may contain at least four dimensions (including time).

We cannot place a measuring rod into our dreams so it is difficult to maintain that we have interval or ratio measurements available in experience. However events separated by ratio or interval scales may exist but be impossible to measure directly. This is a highly important point: the lack of ratio or interval measurement in some parts of experience does not mean that ratio scales cannot be applied to some events in experience.

If I make a statement such as "I imagine the orange is twice the size of the apple" the imaginary orange may indeed subtend twice the angle at my viewing point as the imaginary apple but I cannot measure this ratio. Should I abandon any hope of a theory about the imaginary fruit? Obviously not. Physicists are confronted by this problem every day, no physicist has ever seen an electron or an atom, no physicist has ever stuck a measuring rod across an electron, instead the physicist develops a theory based on the assumption that the electron could be represented on a ratio scale and uses this theory to predict the ratio measurements that can actually be made.

When a person says that one imaginary object is twice the size of another it is an hypothesis, not an impossibility.

The third problem when interpreting the form and content of experience is the problem of location. Someone suffering from hallucinations may claim that there are pink elephants on their wall but these will be invisible to other observers. The person who sees the pink elephants may be able to measure them but then where is the 90cm high pink elephant? There is a meditation on the location of events in experience at: The spatial modes of experience. The answer appears to be that the pink elephant is in the space of their experience, a possibility that is obvious if indirect realism is accepted.

Muller Lyer Illusion

A fourth problem is the problem of the homotopy of experience. Is perceptual experience arranged in the same way as physical events beyond the body? Is perceptual experience arranged in the same way as physical events in the brain? We know from illusions such as the Muller-Lyer length illusion and many others that perceptual experience does not have an exact correspondence to relations in the world beyond the body. However, the fact that we are surprised by the existence of the difference between the illusion and reality suggests that normally perception is roughly homotopic with reality.

It is also obvious that there can be no three dimensional visual homotopy because vision is not three dimensional - we do not have the rear of objects in our experience. The problem of visual homotopy applies narrowly to the correspondence between the projected image of the world around us, such as the image created by a lens, and the projected image within visual experience.

The flexible positioning of events in perception that underlies the Muller Lyer illusion is also seen in our adaptation to wearing glasses. If I walk around wearing cheap reading glasses for several hours and then take them off to view a window frame I can see the edges of the frame bowed out rather than upright. If I replace the glasses the edges become upright and if I leave the glasses off for a few hours the edges return to upright. The form of my perception is actively returned to a preferred form.

The preferred layout of my perception could be continuously isotropic or anisotropic. (Lengths could be preserved from place to place within perception or vary). Perceptual space could not be generally discontinuous because then as objects move or rotate it would be evident that parts would disappear (eg: the blind spot is a discontinuity in the world that loses data). Given that the layout of perception can be actively changed and homotopy is the simplest layout it might be proposed that perceptual space is continuous and approximately homotopic with the space that it represents: the relations between events in perception are actively changed to an approximate homotopy between perception and images of the world. The word "approximate" is important because the blind spot and optical illusions show that perceptual space is definitely not perfectly homotopic with the layout of objects in the space beyond the body.

The homotopy is never perfect but given that active homotopy exists it is reasonable to advance hypotheses that deal with events in perception at a ratio level of measurement. The proof of such hypotheses would depend on how well they account for the relations within experience and the relations between experience and the world and brain.

This brings us to the possibility of homotopy between perception and events in the brain. Close inspection of perception (see Meditations) suggests that what we believe to be spatial arrangements of events, most obviously along the radial direction in visual perception, can actually be temporal arrangements so what is needed is a deeper understanding of the empirical form of experience before perceptual-neural homotopy can be explored.

A fifth problem is the problem of simultaneity in experience. This is not the problem of whether what is simultaneous in experience is simultaneous in the world, it is the problem of whether anything in experience is simultaneous. If we stare at a uniformly coloured area of space the colours form a surface and we conventionally believe that this surface is simultaneous. There have been no successful attempts to attack this convention, and where there have been attacks on the simultaneity of experience, for instance Dennett and Kinsbourne (1992), these have been attacks on the perceived ordering of events, not on whether or not simultaneity actually exists within each event or object. For example, Dennett and Kinsbourne talk of the ordering of "lights" but these lights are objects that are simultaneously coloured.

When I look at a uniform green field it is clear that the hundreds of thousands of photoreceptors cannot be contributing to perception one at a time because it would take too long to see anything. This means that the contention that we have no simultaneity in experience would be equivalent to a dualism in which experience occurs somewhere outside of space and time. Even if this were the case there would need to be some common property that makes a blue light or blue object "blue" in all its parts so this particular argument against simultaneity would amount to an argument that there is a mental time that is not the same as physical time.

The viewing point

2011-10-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

Summary

The meeting of railway lines at infinity and the apparent convergence of rays within a view are phenomena that can be modelled geometrically by lines meeting at a point (see The Limits of Empiricism).

The most important and obvious feature of this point is that nothing flows into the observation point. There is no flow into the observation point in my experience, it is a point relative to which events have an angular displacement but the events are always in their positions in space and time.

The geometrical model of my vision would be due to light if I were "seeing" from the centre of the pupil of my eye. Clearly this cannot be the case. The way that only one photon can be at a point yet vision is simultaneous, coupled with the way the objects in a view are separate from the viewing point and not carried into it, shows that the geometrical model does not model the path of light rays or the path of any material object. It is purely a geometrical model. If the model applies to my vision then it applies to space and time itself rather than to a material flow.

There is also a temporal viewing point, an instant in the present at the position of the spatial viewing point.

Experiments and observations

If I look through one eye at a pin the pin has a fairly crisp outline until it is brought to within about 20 cm of the eye. Closer than 20 cm and the pin acquires a fuzzy outline with an opaque centre, at about 14cm the pin becomes a grey blur that is wholly transparent. Distant objects that are seen through the fuzzy outline or blur appear slightly distorted and fine upright lines in the distance can appear to be double.

If I trace the light from parts of an object 155mm wide and set 60cm away from my eye using a line of pins (ray tracing) then, provided the nearest pin is >15 cm distant so not blurred excessively, I obtain straight lines of pins that converge to a point that is almost exactly in the middle of my pupil. The pins deviate from the lines by no more than 1.5mm anywhere over the 60cm. The lines converge to a point at the centre of my pupil and maybe plus or minus 1mm from the surface of the eye.

Performing this experiment with two eyes is fraught with difficulty. The pins become double images if I focus on the distant object and the distant object becomes double if I focus on the pins. I imagined for a while that there might be a protocol that would deal with these problems (see note) but they were too complex.

In everyday life I do not notice double images and scarcely ever notice the way I can see right through small objects when focussing on distant scenes. What usually happens when I focus on a small object then look at a distant object is that the small object is transparent if it overlies a distant object of interest and opaque if it is to one side. If I investigate this closely I find the small object forms a double image, both of which are semi transparent. However, unless I am paying attention the double image is not obvious and only one image seems to be present.

If I look at railway lines or straight roads they converge to a point in the far distance. This occurs whether I use one or two eyes. This effect is typical of viewing from a point, the angular displacement of the separation between the tracks decreasing with distance.


Tracks subtending angles at a point.

The temporal Viewing Point

If I look at a painting then look at a view the principle difference is that I can move into the view. The difference between a flat wall and a window is that there is the possibility of movement through the window. If I wave an arm out into the room around me there is a feeling of motion that spans the second or so of the motion. My body is at the centre of a volume of action space that increases with separation from my body.

If I observe a branch swaying in the wind the movement occurs at the branch, the movement is an angular displacement at my viewing point. Distant branches sway through less of an angle at my viewing point that nearby branches. If I listen to someone talking the speech occurs at their lips and I hear whole words extended in time at that position.

The sounds from an orchestra occupy definite positions in perceptual space and are extended through time at those positions. The spatial viewing point is also a "listening point" in that the positions of sounds subtend angles through space at that point.

If I listen to music on a stereophonic music system with my eyes closed I can imagine the sounds of different instruments coming from the positions of the musicians in the orchestra. I hear whole notes extended through time at the positions of the musicians in imaginary perceptual space.

The end of any bar of a tune or word occurs now, at the instant of its ending.

A particular sound, such as a spoken word has the same time extension whether it is heard at a speaker 100m away or 3m away. Although distant sounds subtend an angle through time at my listening point they subtend the same angle no matter how far away is the source. This suggests that either the relationship between time extension and spatial extension is different from the relationship between lateral and radial spatial extensions or that temporal events are placed at a fixed distance from the viewing point or there is some unsuspected model that will describe events. The geometry is further complicated by the probability that what appears to be radial distance from the viewing point is actually a temporal distance or a mixed spacetime displacement.

Note: - a description of an aborted binocular ray tracing experiment.

If I look at a distant object through two eyes with a pin 10cm in front of my nose then shut my left eye there is a slight movement of the distant object to the left. If I shut my right eye the pin jumps to the right. (ie: Right eye dominance).

If I use two eyes to perform the ray tracing experiment it requires a protocol because if I focus on the object for more than about 10 seconds I get a blurry image of two pins (my right eye becomes less dominant). If I shut the left eye then look again the secondary image becomes faint for 2-5 secs. The protocol is therefore to shut the left eye then open both eyes then place the pin within 5 secs.

Focussing on the object and placing the pins in line according to the protocol I obtain fairly straight lines until about 18cm distance from my two eyes. When the pins are closer than 30cm I must guess the central position of the pins, there being a possibility of placing them in a zone defined at its limits by whether the two eyes jointly or right eye is most important. The positions of the pins could be joined by a straight line with, surprisingly, again only 1.5mm max deviation from the line. I was averaging the position of the pins between the positions given by the two eyes jointly and the right eye and the resultant lines through these average positions converged on to a point about 8cms behind and and 0.5cm to the left of my right eye (ie: a point in my head).

If I continue the ray tracing experiment closer than 18cm from my eyes with both eyes open I get two highly discrepant sets of curving converging lines that converge on each eye separately.

The form of objects

2011-09-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

Summary

When I have an object such as these six dots ....: in my experience I am immediately tempted to analyse this phenomenon by modelling how information from the dots could be transferred elsewhere. In other words I could make up a theory about the dots based upon my understanding of how material objects, such as information, are transferred from place to place. If I did this I would be "jumping the gun", as will be evident from the meditation below, the dots in experience are not simple material objects. The purpose of this meditation is to describe objects within experience and only then to develop hypotheses about these objects.

On close inspection the dots in my experience are a combination of a viewing point, angular separations and the individual objects "."

The experience containing the dots is a geometrical form containing the viewing point and the dots. It is not the dots alone. To attempt to explain the experience containing the dots purely in terms of the dots themselves would be absurd because the dots are not the experience.

Meditation

....:

There are six dots on the screen in my experience. If I use one eye the dots are still there, almost unchanged.

I have a viewing point that is apparently separate from the dots. The dots make an acute angle at the viewing point. I can tell there is a viewing point because if I move a drinking straw between the dots and my eye a dot can be seen along the centre hole of the straw and I also notice that the angular displacement of the dots changes with the separation of my eye from the screen.

The dots by themselves are not the dots in my experience. They only exist in my experience if my eye is aligned in their direction and my eyelids are open. The dots are a combination of an open eye, a viewing point, an angular displacement (for separation) and individual objects "." on the screen in my experience.

The dots are also directed from the screen to the viewing point in experience. This is most apparent if I consider the letter "b" on the screen. From the reverse the letter appears as "d", which is a different entity entirely. If I cut out the outline of a "b" from a sheet of paper I could flip it over to make a "d" but this is not the case in my experience containing the "b" now. The "b" has a direction defined by the position of the viewing point. The dots are subject to the same constraint, they would appear as :.... from behind.

The directedness of the dots (their particular form) appears to occur because I am upright and have a left and right relative to this perpendicular. It is also a product of having a viewing point, inside a point there is no form so the only version of the dots is the one in-front of the viewing point. The dots plus the geometry of the view is a single object and there is no transfer elsewhere. This differs from, say the dots as a 2D image on a transparency - the transparency can be copied to another transparency and this can be viewed or processed from either side. My view is not like that, if the dots are considered alone, outside of the view, they lose their directedness and if they are considered to flow into the viewing point they lose their form. At no time do the dots move into the viewing point. Only the totality of dots, viewing point and angular separations is the experience.

The dots are each continuously within my experience and so are simultaneous. If I move my head the angular displacement of the dots changes continuously within my monocular view. The angular displacement, viewing point and dots form a fluidly changeable entity.

The spatial modes of experience

2011-09-29T04:13:00.000-07:00

Summary

When I meditate about the position of events within my experience I find that there are three types or modes of spatial experience. The first is the space of perception, the second is the space of perceptual imagination and the third the space of inner imagination. These spaces are composed of simultaneous events that have an angular displacement at an apparent viewing point.

The spaces overlap one another. Perceptual space directly overlaps imaginary perceptual space. Inner imaginary space is within or almost within the head that appears in my perceptual space and in my imaginary perceptual space. This strongly suggests that all three modes of spatial experience are actually using the same space that I will call the space of experience. The head in this space can contain inner imaginary events, the space beyond the head can contain perceptual imaginary events or perceptions or even both at the same time.

It should be noted that the component of the space of experience that is the distance from the viewing point is almost certainly temporal (see Time and depth).

There is also a mode of spatial experience that occurs when trying to look through closed eyelids when wearing a blindfold, the dark grey/black background of this space is populated by perceptual events in the absolute dark.

It is also probable, although not fully established, that dreams are like imaginary perceptions. It is likely that the space of dreams is also the same space as that of experience in general.

The Meditation

If I view a scene with one eye it appears to contain objects, or more precisely 'events', that occupy different angular positions relative to the eye and other events. As an example, The tree in front of me has another tree about 30 degrees to the left.

If I use one eye and then open a second to observe a view containing objects that are over 5 metres away my entire field of vision expands by about 40 degrees but the more distant objects that were originally within vision scarcely change at all. If I alternate from one eye to the other and then use both it is evident that my centre of vision, the viewing point, shifts to a place between my eyes and possibly behind my forehead. The nearest objects seem to become slightly broader, subtending a greater angle at the centre of vision.

If I am using one eye and attempt to reach out to touch nearby objects in a single motion with my forefinger I can easily miss the objects by a few millimetres. I could easily be fooled about the distance to an object. I scarcely ever miss touching an object when using two eyes.

If I use two eyes some nearby small objects and the edges of nearby large objects become transparent when I look at objects that are further away.

If I look at my desk and shut my eyes I first get a brief afterimage of the desk that fades within perhaps a half second. If I blindfold my eyes I have a black background with faint grey cloudy shapes appearing and disappearing and occasional tiny flashes of light. If I concentrate on looking through my closed eyes the background is a dark grey and appears quite close, possibly a few centimetres in front of my eyes. If I imagine the clock on the wall a rather dull, grey, largely outline, image of the clock appears at the apparent position of the clock. When my eyes are closed the optical sensors provide a nearby background which can be overridden by my imagination into a full imagined view. In the case just described I was first looking at the input from my eyes and then was able to imagine a view with a clock on a wall beyond the input from the eyes. The full imagined view I will call "perceptual imagination".

If have my eyes shut and imagine this computer it appears to be in its normal position relative to me. If I reach out to touch the imagined "space-bar" on the computer keyboard I miss the real space-bar by about a centimetre. My imaginary space overlaps my perceptual space but the objects within these spaces can easily be misaligned. If I imagine the bright white cable on the left of the computer and then open my eyes it is again out of position by about a centimetre. This error is an angular error because when I do the same with a distant object such as a tree the trunk is out of place by about 2-5 degrees which is the same angular error as for the nearby computer cable.

If I stare at a white sheet for about two or three minutes I can imagine a weak image of a green tick on the sheet which confirms the way perceptual space and imaginary perceptual space can overlap. Hallucinogenic drugs greatly enhance this ability to combine imaginary perception with perception in the same space.

If I stare at some patterns and at clouds I can imagine faces or forms, again the imaginary perceptual space overlies perceptual space.

If I have my eyes shut and become discursive, with inner speech dominant, the dark background is contained close to or even within my head, the inner speech being broadly located between my ears and in the lower part of my head towards but above my vocal chords.

When discursive I can imagine objects so that they appear inside my head, for instance I can imagine a silver cross on a black background just behind my eyes and imagine this to move back through my head. The cross is not clearly imaginable when it reaches the viewing point. When I do this it is evident that the viewing point is roughly in the centre of my head, perhaps level with my ears, about 7-9cm behind my eyes. This is roughly the same location as the apparent viewing point for distant objects that is present during binocular vision with my eyes open. This imagined view within my head I will call "inner imagination".

I can imagine the location of colourful scenes, such as that outside my window, in full colour but low resolution even when I am discursive; so the space of inner imagination is indeed just a space within my head within the space of perceptual imagination. The net effect is of being centred in the dark thinking space of my head with imagined objects from the world around and beyond my head being present as bright but blurred images.

When I dream I very occasionally dream of events in or around my bed. Such dreams can be disturbing and when I awake the bed of the dream overlies that of my perception. This suggests that dreams are within imaginary perceptual space.

Higher Meditation might be usefully focused on the boundless "space" that is experience rather than on any of these modes. The spacetime of experience is partly dimensional time and hence unbounded...

What is New Empiricism?

2011-02-11T23:56:00.001-08:00

New Empiricism addresses the simple observations and questions of everyday life such as: 'when I say "now!" how do I hear a word that is in the past?' or 'when I look in a mirror I cannot see my eyes move so what am I seeing while they move?' and integrates these into a scientific description of our human and physical world. It delivers descriptions of our experience in simple terms and then asks what sort of theory can explain these descriptions.

New Empiricism holds that our experience, our mind, is a real phenomenon that will, one day, have a physical explanation and that we should not declare that it is supernatural and inexplicable or use school physics to deny that it exists.

The various articles on New Empiricism are listed in the Table of Contents on the left.

A good starting point is the "Introduction to New Empiricism" and "Time and conscious experience" treats the subject in more depth. If you find yourself bridling at the novelty of this approach and feel it should be dismissed try "Perceiving perception" and "Materialists should read this first" which provide arguments about why you might believe your own experience.

The purpose of this site is to try to alert research workers to the possibility that our conscious experience may be localised in our brains. Bizarre as it may seem to lay visitors, many philosophers and neuroscientists are materialists or dualists and absolutely refuse to countenance the possibility that conscious experience is localised and would actively discourage research on the matter as pointless (See "Where is conscious experience?").

New Empiricism is not just academic or agitating for research, it has consequences such as the insight that digital computers with defined states for each clock pulse cannot have conscious experience and that if God exists He would exist as part of, or the whole of, what we call the physical world. It also has consequences for what is called free will", suggesting that our will is the result of training (See "Conscious free will and empiricism").

New Empiricism is an updated form of William James' Radical Empiricism. Like James it takes the view that our experience can be inspected and analysed and should not be dismissed on the basis of theory. Although there is considerable overlap with James' empirical observations the analysis of New Empiricism is inclined towards indirect and representational realism. (It should not be confused with the 'New Empiricism' movement in architecture).

New Empiricism is a scientific approach which recognises that we can compare our conscious experience and treat our observations scientifically. The most probable physical explanation of our conscious experience is that dimensional time exists and spacetime has a geometry that permits point observation (See An Introduction to New Empiricism). However, the objective of New Empiricism is not to provide certainties, it is to demonstrate that materialism and dualism are in error and that other hypotheses are needed if we are to explain "mind".

If a scientist were to find a phenomenon where the current theory (physical description) of that phenomenon did not correspond to the reality of observations then he would rub his hands with glee. He would have found that most elusive of situations: a chance to expand scientific theory. Philosophers on the other hand have a tendency to dismiss observations that do not correspond to theory, I hope the articles on this web site might convince them otherwise.

Our conscious experience is a projective geometrical space and projective geometry was developed to describe it so that artists could produce a convincing appearance for their pictures. Physics in three dimensions will not be adequate for a description of a projective space such as our experience. Many people have spotted that there is a difference between physical theory and the reality of experience but it would be nice to see more people adapting physical theory to remove the difference.

Meditating

2011-02-09T07:11:00.000-08:00

Relaxation is the first requirement for meditation.

I relax my body by stretching my muscles in turn. If I am lying down I start by stretching my body, extending my legs and arms as far as they will go. Then I relax muscles in turn, flexing my feet, then contracting and releasing my thigh muscles, squeezing the muscles in my abdomen, lightly arching my back and so on. Finally I screw up and release my facial muscles.

The second basic requirement is steady breathing.

Meditative breathing should occur through the nose. I try to breathe as steadily as possible both during inhalation and exhalation. Inhalation should take longer than exhalation. I prefer a few minutes practicing steady breathing before beginning meditation. I find that abdominal breathing, using my diaphragm without swelling my ribcage, is the most relaxing and easiest to control. When I have been breathing abdominally for a few minutes I can forget breathing altogether.

The third requirement is observation.

I find observation is particularly useful for reducing inner speech and imaginings. However, observation can also be a hindrance in later stages.

If I have inner speech it usually takes the form of addressing some other person like my ordinary speech. To reduce or still this inner speech I listen to it as if I were addressing myself. As an example, at this moment I am thinking "how do I stop inner speech?" because I am addressing an imaginary reader (you) on this topic. If I change to addressing myself I listen carefully to the first word, "how", of the sentence. This is usually enough to disrupt the succeeding flow of words. If I have inner speech I often ask "who am I talking to?" and this helps to ensure that I divert attention onto each word in turn. I call this minimising of inner speech "Observing Away".

I can also observe away imaginings in the same way.

I find that observing away produces an observational state of mind. This is quite relaxing, a bit like being quiet in the woods waiting for animals. It is the state that is needed to provide the observations that I have given in "Time and Conscious Experience", "Time and Depth", "Space in the dark", "Motion and change".

If I want to experience other mental events and states I get into the observing away state and then release it.

Now comes the big problem, if I am not in an observational state I find it almost impossible to report how I get to other states. I am working on this problem but I cannot get more than a few seconds into other states before observing disrupts them.

The first and simplest "state of mind" is discursiveness (although discursiveness may not be a truly distinguishable "state"). Discursiveness is probably a natural state for many people and positively encouraged by education. When I am in a discursive state inner speech is dominant, I might be rehearsing what I am to say in business or my profession or I might simply be dwelling on matters. Inner speech takes away attention from the world and all other aspects of experience except those that are an object of inner speech. (For instance "oh dear, my gut hurts" increases the focus on the pain). I find discursiveness actually blurs and darkens my field of view. If I have a problem inner speech massages my emotional responses and the emotions generated can lead to further inner speech. Inner speech can lead to day dreaming in which I have dim imagery of the events being rehearsed. The discursive state can easily be diverted by sensory events, bodily feelings etc. Observing away inner speech is useful at times. The relationships between the elements of the discursive state are the same as between those in the observational state which leads me to question whether discursiveness deserves the label "state of mind" or should just be described as a brain that is out of conscious control.

The second simplest non-observational state that I would like to describe is ecstacy, this is a delusional state where I feel one with my experience. I use the word "delusional" in the Buddhist sense - ecstacy is fun but cannot be pivotal to understanding. Having achieved relaxation and steady breathing the duration of inspiration is increased relative to expiration. I smile slightly and relax my face. Now, if I observe vision or imagination I cannot move into the ecstatic state. If I move my eyes downward and inwards it helps but if I observe this too closely there is no transition. If I am mentally still a transition into ecstacy occurs. The special aspect of this state is the removal of the observer from a still mind. The spatial relationships that occur in ecstacy are the same as those in the observational state and the "oneness" is due to the mind simply being its content without either a discursive flow of the content or the observational process. The remaining flow comes from my body and a small smile seems to be enough to bring happiness to mind if discursion and observation are absent. It is easy to forget that my conscious mind is spatio-temporally arranged events and it is the change of content that has a non-conscious origin. As Aristotle put it, my mind is the 'objects that it thinks' and I am ecstatic if these are peaceful, do not change much and contain a happy feeling. (Where "I" am both the conscious and non-conscious "me"). The ecstatic state is used as a way of selling certain religions - it is a delusion - but the calmness of mind is helpful.

The nature of qualia

2010-09-15T02:18:00.000-07:00

What is a quale? Here are a few examples:

When I stretch out my arms I have the sweep of those arms and a space that appears between them. I use the word "space" for a whole set of concurrent and simultaneous variations in my experience that is present between my hands and have come to use the term even when there is a continuum, such as a continuum of blackness in the dark. The space between my hands is a quale.

The black of a continuum of blackness is a quale.

The pain in an arm is a quale.

These examples seem quite heterogeneous but are there some basic qualia from which the others are constructed? Are there qualities in common between qualia?

Space or extent appears to be a basic quale, without extent there are no other qualia. As an example, if there were no space containing my head there would be no inner speech occurring between my ears and slightly above my larynx.

Dimensional time appears to be a another basic quale, a quale that exists for no time at all is non-existent for me. Notice that a quale with temporal extension does not occur without spatial extension and vice versa. This means that it is not space by itself or time by itself but spacetime that appears to be a basic quale.

The existence of time means that not only do we have spatial extension and temporal extension, we also have change in spatial extension. Change is hugely important, for instance, when I wave an arm outwards there is a "feeling" that is the movement. Feelings and active extension seem to be closely linked. For instance "She gasped in surprise", "He had a throbbing headache", "She sighed" etc. are all examples of motions and changes as emotions and feelings.

The last aspect of qualia that is heterogeneous is the way that a given area and time extension can be black, white, coloured, rough, loud, pungent, painful etc. this aspect of qualia might be called a "quality of substance". This quality appears to be independent of space and time. I say "appears" because there is a lower limit to the definition of spacetime. A space interval of a millionth of the angular displacement of the visual field or a time interval of a millionth of a clock tick may as well be zero in my experience. Either there is a true variety of qualities of substance or there is some underlying substance that alternates in space and time at very short intervals.

The separation of objects from the centre of vision or hearing is a quale that deserves special attention. This separation is as much a separation in time as a separation in space, and it is this confusion between time and space that leads to the mistaken impression that there must be some sort of flow into the centre of our vision or "mind's eye". There is no flow, just a projective geometry that allows qualia to be no distance from each other in certain directions in spacetime as well as distributed in space and time (See Time and Conscious Experience).

Motion and change

2010-06-28T01:17:00.000-07:00

The most striking aspect of my experience, and the aspect of experience that is most at variance with school physics, is the way it contains motion and change. According to school physics only the present instant of no duration exists but my experience is full of whole sounds stretched over time and also contains movement.

My observation of motion and change shows that sounds can be extended through time for about a second at their location in experience but visual motions only extend 100 milliseconds or less at their location. The short duration of visual time extension is consistent with the rapid changes that can demand responses in the visual field such as catching, dodging, following moving patterns with many disparate parts etc. A detailed consideration of change shows it is conceivable that colour and other simple sensory qualia are the result of the different firing rates of neurons creating different 4D objects.

What is lacking in the descriptions below is any consideration of "becoming", that something that is outside time that gives life to time.

The detailed observations of change are described below.

Sound

Sounds occur as whole entities extended in time. When I hear the "vrooom" of a passing car the sound occurs at the apparent location of the car and stretches into the apparent future in a similar way to how someone standing up stretches up into the vertical. When I hear the tick of a clock the experience is similar with the tick stretching into time at the fixed location of the clock. (The sound stretches into an apparent future because I seem to remain contemporaneous with the start of the sound as it progresses, up to a maximum length of perhaps a second).

If I hear the tick of a slow ticking clock the sound seems to just fade away when it has passed. This fading seems to be a mixture of attention to an absence of sound in my ears and the retrieval of a remembered sound.

If I hear a rapid succession of sounds such as music or speech there are successive 'phrases' of sound extended in time. If I attend to a phrase I can preserve about a second of sound and this fades away (the word "hot" in a song is easy to attend to but "anticipation" tends to fragment into "pation"). This process of attending breaks up music, for instance the phrase at the end of a line of verse may grab my attention, leaving the succeeding second or two of music faded into the background until another phrase grabs my attention. If I do not attend to any phrase in music then each succeeding phrase snaps the last out of experience.

Attending to sounds is similar to attending to spatial events, it involves highlighting an angular displacement in time relative to the "now" at the centre of experience of about a second and is disturbed when attention is grabbed by a succeeding event.

Bodily motion

If I shut my eyes and lightly touch two forefingers to my thumb in rapid succession I get a similar extension in time of the taps as I do in the case of sound. If I use two hands, each touching forefingers to thumb, I generate two time extended objects like two words.

If I close my eyes and make patterns by shaking my hands like a percussionist without a drum the patterns are also extended in time and can form objects up to about half a second to a second in length.

If I close my eyes and move two hands that are separated by about 10-30 cms upwards they seem to form a single moving entity that includes the gap.

Dance is a form of motion in which sound and motion act together creating time-extended forms of about 500ms, for instance the circular motion of the hips is an entity and this can create imaginary visual images so giving the impression of time extended vision so conjoining all the most prominent senses.

Visual Motion

Time extended sounds have an obvious character in which all the components of a word or a bar of a tune are present but extended in time at their location so they do not obscure each other. When I look at a moving leaf I can see it move but, unlike in the case of sound, I cannot say that I clearly have its previous positions as a time extended entity near its position on the tree.

The sight of moving objects can be accompanied by a distinct afterimage. For instance, if I move a finger at about quarter of a metre a second just in front of a dark surface (the surface being the object of focus) the finger is followed by a blurred, pink area with a stronger finger-like pink blur about two centimetres behind the finger. When the finger stops moving the blurry finger catches up with the original. The catch up time is consistent with the time taken to move two centimetres at about 0.25 m/s ie: around 80 milliseconds. I see the whole of the "catch up" as a single motion and this may be nearly the extent of the time extension of visual linear motions perpendicular to the radius of my experience. When I hear a clock tick of about a third of a second duration I cannot say that the visual motion of any object extends that far through time. This very short time extension of visual linear motion (<100ms) allows me to see visual motion but does not allow me to attend to it excessively: if a ball hits my hand my attention is close to the hand in experience, not in the past. I can also empathise with a visual movement, for instance I can imagine that the movement of a branch is like the movement of an arm. This empathy should really be called "bodily tracking" because it is especially marked when the body is actively interacting with the world, for example, in the case of a branch that swings across a path what I call visual movement is partly my planned avoidance of the branch hence visual movements can be part of a complex of movement that has a time extension related to the time extension of bodily motion.

Successively flashing lights

If two lights separated by about two centimetres at a metre distant from my eyes are flashed in succession they can appear as a single light that moves between the positions of the two lights. (Known as the Phi Effect). This effect occurs if the interval between flashes is less than about half a second. Some authors have proposed that the effect does not "really" happen but recent experiments have shown that the imaginary path of the lights is traced out on the visual cortex. The brain models the movement. The switch over from two flashing lights to one moving light occurs at about half a second interval between flashes and this suggests that my experience is about a half second behind the events in the world. A half second because, to construct a smooth motion the brain must already have recorded the time of the second flash.

It would be interesting to investigate the time course of the cortical modelling of the moving light in relation to actual timings of events - is the cortex a half second behind events or does it patch in the connection between the lights after the second light has flashed? If it is the latter where does the linear timing of the lights in experience originate? Current data suggests it is the former, the cortex is indeed a half second behind and only produces activity that is part of experience during the P3 phase of event related potentials (after perhaps 400 ms).

How far do I extend in time?

I can only attend to events of up to about 1 second in duration in the case of sound and of almost imperceptible duration in the case of visual movement. Events may well be pre-packaged, my brain generating objects in my experience that are up to 1 second long. It is impossible to tell how long the black background of experience in a dark room with eyes closed extends, perhaps it is being refreshed continuously.

What I call the "present" is most probably a set of events delayed by 0.5 seconds, furthermore, the centre point of my experience, the "now" may be even further behind the present being physically displaced in the past. Such a displacement would be consistent with an experience that contains time extended objects such as sounds that are directed into the future.

Change and change blindness

Events appear to occur fully formed within my experience. Words seem to have been processed elsewhere and offered up as neat, time extended objects. The change that I have in my experience is the appearance of new events that extend into the apparent future. It may be that my experience is a limited spatio-temporal sphere that is being stoked with events from my brain or it may be that experience is continually moving into new stretches of time, again filled with events from the non-conscious parts of my brain.

In fact I do not even usually process the content of experience:

This video is copyright Richard Wiseman, all rights reserved. This video may not be used or re-created for any commercial purpose without permission, and may not be altered or edited for any purpose without permission.

"Change blindness" raises many interesting issues.

It demonstrates the essentially passive nature of experience. Experience itself does not process its content - processing is done elsewhere. This should surprise no-one because experience is a time extended form that contains the results of processes, not the processes themselves.

It reinforces the fact that the area outside of the centre of attention (around 5 degrees either side of the centre of vision in the case of sight) is present in low definition. For instance, a picture on my wall that is 20 degrees to the left of the centre of my attention is just a grey green smudge.

It shows that the 0.5 seconds or so required to fully attend to and model a new event at a different location in experience is close to or exceeds the time extension of experience so that by the time a new scene is acquired the old scene has gone.

It suggests that objects are mounted in experience as four dimensional entities. For instance, if a change is a continuous motion then there is a motion in experience that is present as a time extended motion. In the case of vision, if there is a gap, or interstimulus interval, between changes of more than about 100 ms (see Rensink et al (2000) a change indicator such as surprise is needed for the change to be registered in experience. Change blindness occurs when such an indicator is not placed in experience after an interstimulus interval. Without an indicator events that are separated by more than the time extension of a sensory modality do not contrast with each other in experience.

Auditory change blindness occurs after a 500 ms interstimulus interval, as would be expected from the longer possible time extension of auditory events and also occurs in contiguous events where the events are separate auditory objects. (ie: there is no change blindness to "aaaaeee" where that is a single contiguous sound with "aaaa" changing continuously to "eee" but there can be change blindness to separate sounds see Pavani and Turatto (2008)).

Change blindness shows that if events change within an object within experience, such as within a single short word or during a continuous motion they are perceptually "known" but the nature of "known" deserves further exploration. If events change outside of the time extension of experience (<100ms for vision, <~500ms for sound and tactile sensation) or create new objects then an indicator such as surprise is required to register the change. This suggests that being "known" is a property of being part of a time extended object in experience. The long time extension of auditory objects explains why knowledge and language are often confused.

Sameness and difference

The discussion of change blindness suggested that change is evident within time extended objects in experience but not necessarily evident between such objects. Change is evident in a single, short word that changes pitch but if several words happen concurrently and also successively changes to entire words may go unnoticed. If a table cloth continuously changes colour this will be evident in experience as the nature of the cloth but if the cloth goes out of experience then returns as a cloth of a different colour this could easily be missed, especially if there is no surprise indicator within experience to mark the change. Difference or change is a property of a single time extended object and where it occurs outside of a single object change is only known if it is labelled within experience by the presence of a new, surprise or change indicator.

Sameness, such as the sameness of the black-grey background when relaxing in the dark with eyes closed, is also a property of objects in experience. If I observe a green area on a white sheet it is a particular green because it remains green. Objects that are of short duration, such as during a very brief opening of the eyelids, have colour but the colour is ill defined. On a brief entry into experience an object may be green but on longer exposure it becomes dark green or light green etc. This failure to display clear colours on objects in experience that have a short duration may be due to nothing more than a failure to load the correct colour into experience or it may be the result of some more fundamental graininess in experience itself. It is not just colours that are vague during short exposures in experience, forms are also indistinct.

Minimum duration of experience - persistence

I can open and close my eyes extremely quickly, certainly in under a quarter of a second. If I close my eyes then rapidly open and close my eyes again whilst looking at a scene the scene persists after my eyes have closed. The scene exists for about a half second, a considerable proportion of this time being after my eyes have closed. If I simply close my eyes whilst looking at a scene it also persists. If I move my head past a scene and close my eyes as it passes it remains in its correct location for about .5 secs. This suggests that the internal scene is part of a coordinate system in which the position of my body is kept in the correct relation to the position of visual scenes.

The nature of sensory qualia

If I hear a pure sound it consists of a certain pitch, intensity and duration. The pitch of the sound is evident throughout its duration. If the sound is divided into short durations of the same pitch there is a minimum duration of about 30-50 ms where the pitch can still be discerned but below which the pitch is lost to be replaced by a click at high intensities. It is possible that this effect is solely due to harmonics generated by a sudden square wave of sound but even in my dreams and imagination there are no sounds of ultra short duration. It is probable that a note a sixteenth of a second long (about 60 ms) can have pitch but that a note 30ms long loses this attribute.

So to recap, the fact that sounds of less than about 20Hz tend break into a succession of clicks suggests that hearing is composed of pulse trains with a minimum duration of about 30ms. Each pulse train may be composed of many pulses but in my experience they are heard as a whole note. The pulse trains (notes) are four dimensional objects that constitute a unit of auditory experience.

A minimum duration of sensory qualia also seems to occur in visual qualia, as noted above.

If there is truly a minimum duration for sensory qualia of about 30ms then different pitches of sound can be construed as packets with a given pulse frequency. The note 'C' may indeed be 256, 512 or 1024 pulses per second etc. (or similar) in a 25ms packet. The packets abut continuously in a time extended sound of 0.5 secs.

This idea of qualia as 'pulse packets' can also be applied to vision. Suppose visual experience consists of objects with a time extension of about 30-80 ms and these visual objects can consist of 30 or 20 pulses of whatever makes up the groundform or substance of experience. It is then conceivable that "blue" is a time extended object that has 20 pulses and green has 30 pulses. If qualia are due to fairly high frequency pulse trains of short duration in experience then qualia might correlate with a simple physical phenomenon such as the rate of firing of a neuron. At first sight this might suggest possible tests of the relationships between stimulus frequencies, movement and experience but these are likely to be confounded if the non-conscious part of the brain delivers colour as pre-formed pixels within what appears as a moving object.

Rensink RA, O'Regan JK, and Clark JJ (2000). On the Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes Across Brief Interruptions. Visual Cognition,7:127-145. (pdf file) http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/abs.00.3a.html

Pavani, F and Turatto, M. (2008) Change perception in complex auditory scenes. Perception & Psychophysics 2008, 70 (4), 619-629 doi: 10.3758/PP.70.4.619 http://www.app.psychonomic-journals.org/content/70/4/619.full.pdf

The value and interpretation of meditations

2010-06-28T01:15:00.000-07:00

Suppose that, as seems likely, "presentism" is incorrect (see Presentism and the denial of mind) and there is no reason to reject our experience on the basis of theory. It would then make sense to examine our experience closely to discover how it is arranged in space and time.

There are other possible objections to investigating experience itself beside presentism (see notes) but before discussing these it should be pointed out that if I meditate upon my experience it is evident that it has features that are not found in the world of simple measurements. Even problems such as the possible nature of qualia become more tractable if I observe them.

The various observations are available as separate articles (see list in margin) and some possible interpretations are collected here.

Possible physical descriptions

The possible descriptions given below are not theories, they are attempts at placing the events in conscious experience within a framework that is consistent with those events.

The most basic observation is that events in experience are concurrent, simultaneous and distributed around a central point. Such a layout might be suspected from Minkowski spacetime if time is existent, the equation describing the geometry is:

0 = x² + y² + z² - (ct)²

This describes how a sphere of events at positions x,y,z can have no separation at time t. This is shown diagrammatically for a slice of the sphere (z=0) in the illustration below (with r² = x² + y² + z² and 't' being measured in units of length rather than seconds and the events represented by red dots).

Another observation that requires interpretation is how we can hear a whole bar of a tune at the position of a musical instrument in experience. The simplest model for this experience is to propose that events are laid out in concentric spheres in a small part of the brain like a pattern through the flesh of an onion:

The advantage of this interpretation is that it does not stray beyond the possibilities of standard physical ideas. It also allows considerable control of the temporal sequencing of events by the non-conscious brain. It would also allow events that occupy say 1 second to be projected over 10^-11 seconds on the time axis (r/c secs) if the "onion" structure had a radius of about 3mm. It would also be easy to achieve using injection of sensory data into a central shell of a volume of neurones a few millimetres in diameter. If the substrate were something simple such as electrical fields then it could occur in any small volume of neurones in a part of the brain that is a bulk recipient of cortical data such as the thalamus. As Trehub (2007) has pointed out, neurone assemblies that can shift data from unit to unit may be a natural feature of the brain.

The principle difficulty with this interpretation is that it is not clear whether the temporal separation of the parts of the bar of a tune would be preserved. This need for events distributed in time to have an angular separation in time at the projection point in the same way as events distributed in space have an angular separation at the projection point can only be met if each event has a separate projection and this would seem to require another axis for arranging events beyond space and time. Although it might be feasible to have non-concentric events to achieve an angular separation.

I had imagined that the volume of neurons would need to be loaded with data in a jerky fashion but a continuous load of most recent data into the innermost zone of neurons would work, as fresh data is loaded the more historic data would be continuously shifted outwards.

Arnold Trehub (2007). Space, Self, and the Theater of Consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 16 (2):310-330.

Green's Interpretation

Although I am uncomfortable with Green's five dimensional interpretation of experience it is interesting to consider this.

Green's equation is given below. If the centre of the projection is given by:

0 = x² + y² + z² - ct² + kT²
Then using r² = x² + y² + z²

0 = r² - (ct)² + (kT)²

Assuming that t and T are measured in metres rather than seconds this becomes:

0 = r² - t² + T²

(c and k being conversion constants measured in metres per second).

This describes the geometrical form of events in a five dimensional manifold that are zero distance from a projection point in spacetime along the vector from the event to the projection point. In practice r is much less than ct and kT so effectively, for any given event:

0 = T² - t²

My analysis of the way sound qualia progress from beats to continuous sounds suggests that simple sensory qualia are brief disturbances of less than about 20 ms that have a particular frequency, harmonics and phase so that they form a temporal object:

The event that has the frequency, harmonics etc that we call "blue" is shown diagrammatically above.

What is intriguing about this interpretation is that the original form of the events is of little consequence so long as they are adjacent to each other, the dominance of the terms for time in the geometry means that all that the terms for physical position specify is angular separation. This implies that Green's "sphere of events" is unnecessary, any sheet or even crumpled zone of events might have a suitable projection point.

However, although the spatial angular separations will be clear the temporal angular separations are almost zero. Green's view on this was that time dilation would occur because kT represents a continuously expanding positive time dimension. I cannot at present understand how this would resolve the problem given that t and T must have almost equal values in the metric and ct is very much larger than r.

Notes

There are some possible objections to the idea of examining experience on grounds other than presentism. As an example it might be objected that large objects cannot be in our experience because they would not fit (!) however this objection is obviated if it is noted that experience has a projective geometry and large objects have an angular size, not an absolute size within experience. A more serious objection is that any report about experience would involve comparisons and that these comparisons would refer to the raw sensory data rather than experience itself. This is indeed possible but the fact that I have experience means that I can also report upon its content so although there is a problem discerning what is a property of experience and what is a property of the object that was the original source of a content of experience this is a matter for debate rather than an absolute bar to reporting about experience. As an example the right side of experience might be compressed but we might relate all reports of objects to the sense data so fail to report the relative narrowness of objects on the right hand side in experience. This is possible but can be debated. For instance patients with unilateral visual neglect (i.e: missing half the visual field) report that they feel like they see the whole world, even though half is missing, which suggests that they are putting experience before sensation (such as touch) rather than vice versa.

Meditations: space in the dark

2010-06-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

The experience that occurs in a dark room is especially interesting because the visual component is not due in any great measure to effects beyond the body.

There is considerable visual experience even in the dark with my eyes closed. This visual experience is a set of concurrent and hence simultaneous events that abut each other continuously. The principle events are slabs of grey-blackness. This continuous set of simultaneous events I call 'space', space being the conventional term for concurrent, simultaneous objects that is used in science and mathematics.

Whether I am in the dark or the light I hear whole sounds, not just the sound that is present at my physical ears - if a bird goes "tweet" I hear the whole "tweet", not "t" by itself then "w" by itself then "ee" by itself etc. Sounds are located within my experience at the apparent position of the object that produced them and are oriented from the past to the future. The space that contains these sounds is the same dark space that contains my vision.

Novel events produce "attention" in which a zone of events in the general direction of the novel event become more prominent, this occurs without the need for moving my eyes and is like looking without actually looking.

These observations about the sounds and feelings in my experience show that the space of my experience with my eyes closed is the same space as the perceptual space that occurs when my eyes are open. Perceptual space would appear to be a model space or 'virtual reality' in my brain. The space of my experience extends out in all directions from my head in experience though, as will be seen in the article Time and depth this outward extension is probably an extension in time.

The detailed observations are given below, if I sit in a dark room with my eyes closed I have the following experience.

Visual Experience

I have pulled the curtains, shut my eyes, turned my back on my computer and relaxed. You can do the same at intervals if you wish to check my observations. My immediate visual experience contains a deep blackness with occasional grey-black cloudy forms and very occasional tiny dots of dim light. The grey cloudy forms appear to project somewhere behind my eyes in that they and the blackness occupy a space that is in front of some viewing point. The blackness extends perhaps 60 degrees either side of the midline of my face and thirty or forty degrees above and below the level of my eyes. The angles and black surface form a short, flattened cone or solid angle with its apex somewhere in the position of my head. If I relax and roll my eyes slightly the deep blackness disappears and I am surrounded by grey-black in all directions, including behind my head. This dull, grey-black area extends out to where I imagine objects might lie if my eyes were open. If I attempt to observe the grey-blackness imaginary parts of the room around me appear in very dull outline but only in solid angles similar to those described for the experience that contained deep blackness. I do not need to divert my eyes to the parts of my experience that I observe in this fashion. To recap, if I try to look out through my eyes I have deep blackness in my experience, if I relax and roll my eyes slightly I have a dull grey-black all around and if I concentrate on a part of this grey-black then imaginary, dull outlines of the room appear in segments of the space.

I can deliberately populate the grey-black space with dull imagery (more on this in a separate article). If I observe my body (whilst keeping my closed eyes in a generally forward facing position) there is a very faint outline of my body that comes and goes with parts such as my hands, especially my wrists, becoming transiently prominent.

My visual experience with my eyes closed in a dark room is largely a set of concurrent and hence simultaneous events that range from black to grey that continuously abut each other, within this experience there are several imaginary and other phenomena as described above.

Musculo-skeletal experience

I went surfing a couple of days ago so my shoulders, below and to the rear of my head feel sore, within a few seconds this sensation in the shoulders is replaced by a soreness in my stomach muscles. The soreness in my shoulders is a band across my upper back so encompasses many concurrently present points. The replacement of the soreness in the shoulders with the soreness in my stomach occurs over about half a second and there is a pattern of alternation from shoulders to stomach and back again.

I am sitting in a chair, there being a gap in the chair of about 10 cm between the flat seat and the back. The parts of my body that contact the chair have areas of compressive feeling either as a generalised compressive feeling from the very top of my thighs to my shoulder blades or as an alternation of compressive feeling between the two contact areas of my rear end and back that takes about half a second to change from one site to another .

My feet are especially evident, there being a light compressive feeling on the soles and a slight feeling of spreading in both sets of toes. When my feet are together the compressive feeling is a single sheet of feeling at the location of the soles spanning both feet. If I imagine a movement of the toes a particular foot becomes isolated.

If I relax slightly almost any bilateral set of muscles in my legs and arms can be lightly preparing to contract. Again this alternation from one set of muscles to another takes about half a second to complete when it happens.

More about pain

It is now some weeks since I wrote the piece on "musculo-skeletal experience" above. The day before yesterday I dived to get a ball and injured my left shoulder. This provides an excellent opportunity to describe a lightly severe pain.

What is apparent immediately is that pain is an event of its own type in the same way as colours are not sounds or cutaneous sensations and sounds are not sights pain is pain. It is its own quality. It will become clear in the description below that pain is like any other sensory quality in the way it is positioned and extended. It differs from most other qualities in that moderately severe pain is always accompanied by other events such as muscle tightness/weakness, autonomic nervous system activation etc. (this is not unique because a non-pain such as bitterness is accompanied by screwing up the face, bright light by blinking etc.).

I performed the following observations with my eyes closed and head facing forwards. When I raise the affected arm sideways there is a sharp pain around the shoulder joint that has a peak intensity for about 0.5 secs and then subsides to a fairly severe pain with a temporal profile similar to that of a continuous auditory tone. This is most severe as I lift the arm. It forms a zone of pain wrapped around the joint and centred slightly above it (2 to 3 cms). If I hold the arm at right angles to my body (my hand in front of my body) the pain slowly shifts over about 10 secs to include a tension in the left side of my neck, the original pain slightly above the joint moves into the joint and remains but is reduced to maybe two thirds its previous intensity. My left palm sweats slightly and the right palm sweats slightly less and my breathing has a tendency to occur in gasps. If I hold the arm in a forward direction there can be a loose ball of pain in the right angle between my upper arm and chest. When I focus on this ball of pain it can move into the shoulder joint. If I hold my arm for a minute or two in a flexed position with the hand pointing upwards the pain can appear around the ulna, near the elbow. If I hold the arm extended out in front then after about a minute the pain largely disappears but the side of my neck feels hot and tense and when I finally lower the arm there is a searing pain from the joint. These observations show that a fairly severe pain around the shoulder is poorly localised and has an extent or spread that can extend outside of the body and over a period of time different parts of the affected limb have pain. The spontaneous fluctuations of this reasonably severe pain occur over periods of minutes. Most intriguingly the pain has a definite form, being like a misshapen ball that is densest in the centre or a thin ellipse with the most severe pain in a line along the long axis. Having observed the pain it has ameliorated so that now, after ten minutes of observations, it is no longer lightly severe when I lift my arm although the action is still accompanied by stiffness in my neck, muscle weakness and sweating in my left palm.

The lightly severe pain reported here differs from the soreness reported in the previous section. I would use words like "sharp", "fiery", "agony" to describe the current pain. By comparison soreness is quite well located on and in the body. I have experienced other types of severe pain, including really severe pain and I sincerely hope that it will be some time before I experience these again! However, from what I recall they differ from the musculo-skeletal, light severity pain reported here, for instance really severe skeletal pain can virtually prevent movement, affecting the whole body and gut. Incidentally, I would not recommend observing a fairly severe pain in the manner described above, it will slow down your recovery - pain is there for a reason.

Notice that I have not considered the emotion reaction to pain and the motor reflexes that occur when some pains are experienced. The emotional reaction, such as anxiety, to pain is almost unavoidable with severe pain but the report above was about moderate pain and was accompanied by autonomic reflexes and muscular stiffness and weakness but had little emotional effect. I would avoid this moderate to severe pain because I know it is symptomatic of damage and I do not want to be damaged or extend the damage. The autonomic reactions, such as the sweating and breathing changes, are unpleasant and also lead me to avoid the pain. Emotions may be discussed elsewhere in this blog.

Auditory experience

My immediate auditory experience is of a tick (from a clock) behind me. This tick is very clear and clearly positioned in the space behind my head about 2 metres away. There are bird calls to the right at a distance of many metres. The bird calls and the tick are at their locations (I do not hear the sounds in the centre of my experience such as in my head in my experience). The bird sounds stretch into the future - "tee deet" is not heard as if I am hearing it back through time from the present (ie: not as "teed eet"). I also hear the whole sound of each second or two of song rather than a succession of microsecond snatches or less. I can have all the sounds simultaneously in my experience but if I attend to one sound the other sounds tend to disappear. If I relax I can hear all the sounds, if I lightly attend to a sound my experience tends to contain the sounds at their locations in succession, if I strongly attend to a sound the other sounds become obscured.

These observations about the sounds in my experience show that the space of my experience with my eyes closed is the same space as the perceptual space that occurs when my eyes are open. Perceptual space would appear to be a model space in my brain.

Attention

When there is a novel sound it becomes prominent in my experience and a cone or solid angle of events in the direction of the sound is evident. Apart from the original sound, the events are largely visual and imaginary, for instance, when a bird makes the sound "chiaw" outside the window to my left my eyes stay pointing forward beneath closed lids but there is a crude disk of visual space in the direction of the bird sound that contains the very dull, grey outline of a tree and sky with a vague, ragged, black feather attached to a vague black shape. The vague imaginings depart within a few seconds of the end of the "chiaw".

I can "attend" to sounds (see article on decisions) and when I do so the experience is the same as the attention that occurs when a novel sound appears. "Attending" is the appearance of a prominent area of events at the end of a solid angle based near the centre of my head in my experience. Passive attending usually appears along with a novel event and active attending usually accompanies inner speech or anxiety.

If I actively attend to two sounds then two cones of favoured space appear but these can give way to one alternating cone or to a relaxed general space described earlier.

Maintaining attention is accompanied by a slight muscular tension in my face and can lead to a sort of battle with inner speech where words appear so that the zone of attention is focussed on a volume centred on my head and then a muscular tension appears in my body and the words are shut down so that the attention can resume. I use the words "mental effort" to describe this conflict.

A brief note on the appearance of time in experience

2009-12-06T03:34:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, when I first contemplated how we could have conscious experience I imagined that the brain was like a computer. Its parts were arranged over a few centimetres of space and at each instant it had a particular state in which some components were active and others quiescent. I then wondered how my experience of time passing could occur.

The first model of time passing that sprang to mind was of my "brain machine" being "washed over" by events in the world. A bit like exposing my brain to a 3D movie. I could imagine that only one frame of the movie existed at any moment.

The second model was a bit like the first but with time existing so that my brain moved through time rather than time moving through my brain.

It didn't take long for me to realise that both of these "models" were theories based on ideas about how the world worked, they were based on cosmology - the way events are arranged in time and space. I didn't like this theorizing because a scientist should observe the world and then theorize, not vice versa. This led to another idea of time in my experience.

If I actually look and listen it is obvious that events can occur simultaneously. Simultaneous events define a "space" so the simultaneity in my experience means that it is spatially arranged. I also notice that I can hear whole words and see things move so my experience extends through time. My conscious experience is an actual set of events arranged in space and time somewhere.

When I consider how events are arranged in the space of my experience it is clear that they have different angular displacements at the centre of that experience. The written word "go" on this page makes a smaller angle at the centre of my experience than the written word "simultaneously". It is also clear that when someone says "go" the word appears at their lips in my experience and is extended in time at their lips. If they say "begin" the word has a bigger angular separation at the centre of my experience (at my "now") than the word "go".

Both spatial and temporal "lengths" in my experience have angular separations at the centre of my experience. The centre being a geometrical point that is both a spatial point and instantaneously "now". So two separate times can be simultaneously present "now" because they project at a single point in the present instant. This seems weird but consider a rod on a table in front of you, both ends are simultaneously present and have an angular projection at a viewing point that cannot easily be found in the physical world. The point is not the point at the centre of my eye (I have two eyes and, if you know about geometrical optics it is clear that there is no simple physical point).

It turns out that this observation about the time within my experience is consistent with modern physics and cosmology. More surprising still, my earlier ideas are not consistent with modern cosmology, they are based on the cosmology that is assumed in school physics and this cosmology is wrong! (See Time and Conscious Experience )

An Introduction to New Empiricism

2009-10-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

If I try to describe my conscious experience I should use a scientific approach where I observe, describe my experience and then devise a theory to explain my observations. This approach of observing then theorising is known as an "empirical" approach. The empirical approach is at the heart of science and of "New Empiricism".

So what is an empirical description of my conscious experience? When I look around, my experience contains slabs of colour and movements. The slabs of colour, such as the sky and the ground, are made up of simultaneous parts. Sounds are distributed around about as are smells and textures. I have the impression that my experience is centred on a sort of "mind's eye". The separations between things in my experience are present as angular separations relative to this "mind's eye".

Now look around for yourself. Is your experience colours, sounds etc. distributed around a sort of observation point? Is it a view?

My worst mistake at this point would be to introduce a theory about all experience being subject to doubt and hence dismiss my observation. The use of such theories to trump observation is surprisingly popular despite being unsustainable (see You are totally incorrigible). I could also haul out some rusty old bit of school physics to "prove" that views are impossible. For instance if I use school physics it is "obvious" that I cannot have a "mind's eye" that is the centre of a view because all the light rays would get mixed up in a point! However, if I took this stance I would be putting theory before observation. If I take a closer look at my experience I notice that light doesn't flow into a point in my experience, it is distributed around the point, and in my dreams and imaginings there is certainly no flow of light, just distributed experience. I can say that things are arranged around a point but I cannot infer that there are any flows into that point. My experience is geometrical, not dynamical, it has arrangements of things but no flows into a viewing point. So using school physics to dismiss my observation would be "jumping the gun" because on close examination my observation has a centre point but no flow into that point.

Returning to my observation, when I say "now!" the "now" is always in the past. The present, as a boundary between the past and future, has no duration, it is no time at all so what I call the "present moment" is actually a small slice of the past. I also find that events are laid out in the immediate past in a similar way to how they are laid out in the space of experience. For instance, when someone says "hello" the "h" - "e" - "l" - "o" sounds are heard spread out over about a second at the apparent location of the speaker's lips. This is the crucial feature of my experience: events occur as extended arrangements in dimensional time at locations in mental space and they are arranged around a central point but do not occur within this central point.

My school physics is now becoming useless, I would need a more advanced knowledge of physics to have any physical understanding of events being laid out in time like things being laid out in space. All I could say on the basis of school physics is that "this can't be happening!". But it is happening - just look and listen. My experience is geometrical with time being one of the directions in which things can be arranged. Our minds are four dimensional. Extra dimensions have unexpected consequences, for instance, if two black ink dots are separated on a sheet of white paper they are always separated by white space along the two dimensional sheet. However, fold the sheet through the third dimension and the dots can be joined without any intervening space. The extra dimension has allowed a new phenomenon to occur. It has allowed the dots to be joined in the extra dimension without any motion along the 2D sheet. In a similar way, if my experience is four dimensional then there are possibilities, such as the disappearance in the separation between things, that are almost inconceivable in 3D.

I am not aware in no time at all so being aware "now" implies that a stretch of the past is present, there at a speaker's lips, in the same way as a stretch of space is present, there in the form of the speaker's lips. I am aware because the same experience is both "now" at a connecting point and also extended in time and space.

And that is the essence of the simplest observations available to the "New Empiricist". My experience is a geometrical form that has at least four independent directions for arranging things or "dimensions".

So much for observation, what about a theory? A physical theory of conscious experience has two stages. The first stage is a geometrical hypothesis about conscious experience itself. The second stage is a theory about how this arrangement of events could be supported within the brain.

Possible physical descriptions

Casual readers should probably avoid this section. I raise ideas here that depend upon a knowledge of modern physics and there is not the space in a short article to explain the physical theory. The various points raised here are discussed in more depth, with explanations, in the other articles on this site.

It seems that a physical theory of mind is possible but even if a particular theory were incorrect the empirical observations would still stand and would still require an explanation. New Empiricism does not depend on a particular physical theory, it is about accepting the primacy of observation and experience. However, it is possible to propose a general outline for a physical theory that might describe conscious experience.

The first stage of a theory of conscious experience, a geometrical hypothesis, seems possible although complex. If these dimensions of my mind are like the dimensions of physical spacetime then my experience is feasible provided that time exists and has the character of a dimension. In modern physics dimensional time has an opposite signature to space in the spacetime metric and so permits the disappearance of separation between points in certain directions (those corresponding to the path of light rays). This disappearance of separation produces a new sort of "point" that might correspond to what I have called a "mind's eye". My "mind's eye" would be due to the disappearance of separation between things in my experience, not a result of flows into a point. This possibility of foci in four dimensional forms makes them very different from simple 3D forms.

The second stage, an hypothesis about how part of the brain might contain the form of conscious experience is more problematical. Our measurements give us data on the 3D arrangement of events in the brain at an instant. These measurements show that at any instant the events that represent occurrences in the sense organs are spread out so that adjacent events continue to be adjacent along two dimensional surfaces of brain tissue. The transformation from this basically 2D form to the multidimensional form of experience is the central problem of any second stage hypothesis. Somehow, with increasing distance in time from a volume of brain activity the activity becomes arranged in a form that corresponds to our experience. There are two alternatives, either there is a place in the brain, such as the thalamus, where events become arranged on a spherical surface or there is some transformation that occurs between the past and the present in any given piece of brain tissue so that brain activity from a second or so ago adopts the geometrical form of experience now. To summarise, either brain events are rerouted to a particular place in the brain where they become organised like our experience or spacetime itself is used to provide the rerouting or both.

It seems that a physical theory of mind is possible but even if a particular theory were incorrect the empirical observations would still stand and would still require an explanation. New Empiricism does not depend on a particular physical theory, it is about accepting the primacy of observation and experience.

This was a quick summary of "New Empiricism". Read the other articles for a closer discussion and more explanation.

A Note on Four Dimensionalism

Even those who accept that the universe is four dimensional often make a mistake in imagining the form of four dimensional spacetime. It is common for four dimensions to be represented as:

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But this is a pseudo-three dimensional representation of four dimensions. It is actually seriously wrong when used to describe anything other than the path of an object in 3D space. Four dimensions cannot be portrayed on a sheet of paper, the nearest we can get is to consider the "light cone":

Image courtesy of Wikibooks: Special Relativity.

The light cone is a consequence of the four dimensional metric of spacetime and given by:

0 = x² + y² + z² - (ct)²

which has a negative sign in front of the term for time so what is happening is that, if dimensional time exists, all of those points on the surface of the cone are no distance at all from the centre point along the path represented by the cone. This "path" is actually a zero separation in spacetime so many events are AT the centre point but not IN the centre point.

Conclusion

At this stage you may be shaking your head and hope to just go back to thinking that you can't rely on your own experience, you can only rely on measurements and you can't directly measure experience. Sounds good, fine, a nineteenth century outlook is comforting and lots of people know no better so will agree with you, but remember, your measurements are only 3D slices of a universe that is known to be much more than a set of things arranged in 3D. Your conscious experience confirms this but our primitive measurements do not.

Presentism and the denial of mind

2009-10-05T12:57:00.001-07:00

Presentism is the idea that the universe is three dimensional with "time" being an artefact of record keeping. It is the model of the universe that is taught in school science lessons. The immediate consequence of presentism is that everything that happens is the result of motions so nothing can happen now because there is no motion at an instant^*. If nothing happens now, if "now" is frozen, then nothing can be known "now".

Presentism originates in the fact that I cannot measure events that are a microsecond in the future or easily measure events that are a microsecond in the past, here, at the point of the measuring instrument (But electrons can interfere with their past "selves" - see Lindner et al. (2005). Attosecond double slit experiment. and Horwitz's analysis of these experiments).

The alternative to presentism is four dimensionalism in which there is an aspect of time that occurs as a dimension like the three dimensions of space. This aspect of time is sometimes called "dimensional time" and is another axis, or direction, for arranging things. Four dimensionalism is the modern interpretation of relativity theory, it not only holds that objects are arranged in space and dimensional time, it also says that space and time are interdependent. This interdependence of space and time seems odd until it is realised that Pythagoras' theorem is just a way of saying that distances are interdependent. In Pythagoras' theorem any two dimensions in space are related by:

h² = x² + y²

The Ancient Greeks realised this was weird; why should two independent directions for arranging things be related to each other by an exact mathematical formula? It gets weirder. If we have three independent directions (left-right, forward-back and up-down) they are related by a grand form of Pythagoras' Theorem:

r² = x² + y² + z²

Any readers who are mathematicians will recognise that this is the equation that defines a sphere. The Pythagoreans got mystical about this and thought that spheres were a sacred form. Spheres are indeed odd, why should three independent directions be exactly related? Why is the universe uniform in all directions? Why does the surrounding volume grow in an exact way with distance from a point? In the nineteenth century mathematicians such as Riemann toyed with the idea of space and created powerful tools for analysing geometry. In 1905 Einstein came up with the Special Theory of Relativity and in 1908 Minkoswki, who was Einstein's maths teacher and knew Riemann's work, showed how Einstein's idea was equivalent to adding another direction for arranging things that some philosophers call "dimensional time". Minkowski expressed the relationship between the dimensions as:

s² = x² + y² + z² + (ict)²

Where (ict) is the square root of minus one times the speed of light times the time elapsed. (See Wikibooks Special Relativity). The "speed of light" is just the number of metres that are covered by a single second of dimensional time. Nowadays the square root of minus one is replaced by a change of sign in a "metric tensor" but the significance of the Pythagorean form of the relation between time and space remains the same.

These equations that relate the dimensions are known as metrics and they define a spacetime. In the Wikibook reference it shows how Minkowki's equation leads on to the whole of Special Relativity.

Presentists do not like Relativity Theory. Presentism also denies that we can hear whole words stretched through time rather than individual phonemes, or less, and rejects the idea that we can see movements. The idea that we might have both a question and its answer in our time extended minds is also considered absurd by presentism but no explanation is offered for how we could know anything in no time at all. (See Time and conscious experience for a description of how our minds extend through time). Presentism is "time blind", we hear whole bars of tunes but presentism declares that you coexist with less than a note.

Even those who accept that the universe is four dimensional often make a mistake in imagining the form of four dimensional spacetime. It is common for four dimensions to be represented as:

But this is a pseudo-three dimensional representation of four dimensions. Four dimensions cannot be portrayed on a sheet of paper, the nearest we can get is to consider the "light cone":

Image courtesy of Wikibooks: Special Relativity.

The light cone is a representation of the four dimensional equation:

0 = x² + y² + z² - (ct)²

which has a negative sign in front of the term for time so what is happening is that, if dimensional time exists, all of those points on the surface of the cone are no distance at all from the centre point along the path represented by the cone. This four dimensional form is full of surprises and not at all intuitive, for instance the zero length path is the same path as that taken by photons, it has no length for something on the path but does indeed have a length and duration for any observer who is not on the path.

Unlike four dimensionalism, Presentism is not a scientific theory, it has no corpus of explanatory physics attached to it and has no experimental basis. There is no document anywhere that explains how Presentism can be integrated into science and there are only the vaguest of notions in the philosophical literature of the actual nature of Presentism, most 'Presentist' articles being attacks on four dimensionalism rather than manifestos for Presentism. Yet this unsupportable and barren idea is understood by large numbers of people to be the conventional 'wisdom' about time.

Some speculations

From the empirical viewpoint it is sufficient that we can see things move to know that presentism is false. It is, however, interesting to speculate upon potential physical models of our experience but the reader should be aware that if the speculation is wrong the experience remains. Unlike presentism, empiricism would not claim that the existence of your experience depends upon a scientific hypothesis!

Here is a possible idea for how four dimensionalism might explain experience. When dimensional time is introduced into the metric of spacetime time occurs as a negative factor. This can be seen when the square root of minus one is expanded:

0 = x² + y² + z² - (ct)²

Dimensional time subtracts from the distances specified by the other, spatial, dimensions and creates a geometry akin to the descriptions of conscious experience given by Descartes in which experience occurs at a point. In fact only those events that obey this equation can be 'known' at a given time and place because all other events have a net spatial or temporal separation. Notice that the equation allows events to stay at their proper locations in time and space and the 'point' is created by a disappearance of separation between the events as time progresses (See Some notes on projective geometry).

Notes for physicists

The general form of the metric is a differential equation, the form given here is applicable to the discussion however because it applies to coordinates relative to a point observer in flat spacetime. Minkowski's use of imaginary coordinates has now been replaced with an approach that uses a metric tensor. The bilinear form of the modern theory is important in General Relativity, but the metric remains the same so this removal of i makes no difference to the argument given above which depends upon the fact of dimensional time and the negative sign in the metric.

The application of time extension to time intervals greater than a microsecond would seem to require Green's time-like fifth dimension (Green 2002) to create an appropriate time dilation, the time-like nature of this dimension might be due to the continuous appearance of experience.

* Some readers may realise that it is inconsistent to refer to time intervals when only the present is held to exist. I would suggest that presentism is inherently dualist with the philosopher or observer having time-like qualities that permit the inspection of the universe in the different states that we assign to "time" and "change". This would be a strange and unnecessary dualism because physicalist explanations such as that put forward by de Witt (of the Wheeler-de Witt equation) allow an inherently timeless universe to acquire "time" through the separation of a physical observer system.

See also:

Ashmead, J. 2010 Quantum Time. http://www.timeandquantummechanics.com/papers/single.pdf
Gopal et al. 2009 Three-Dimensional Momentum Imaging of Electron Wave Packet Interference in Few-Cycle Laser Pulses. Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 053001 (2009). http://www.attosecondimaging.com/attosecimaging/pdf/Gopaletal.pdf

Time and depth

2009-07-01T03:11:00.000-07:00

In Time and Conscious Experience it was proposed that our sense of depth is due to the representation of objects in time as well as space. It is interesting that optical depth illusions such as the Necker Cube are activated strongly by scanning the image, moving your eyes from one part to another.

Necker cube (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

It takes about half a second for the cube to change form. The 3D sensation generated by the cube is a neural event, a "representation". The representational nature of the events is shown by the Kanizsa version of the Necker Cube:

Necker Nocube (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Although we call the Necker Cube a "3D" effect it is nothing of the sort because we cannot see behind the bars of the cube.

If the Necker Cube and similar illusions are not 3D effects what is the nature of the apparent distance that occurs between the front and the back of the image? The most likely explanation is that this distance is a time interval that corresponds to the motion that occurs when we scan the image and a part of it pops out towards us. This is also suggested by the instability of the "3D" image where, when we stare at the cube in one configuration for any length of time it loses its "3D" character until it flips into a new form.

This relationship of "3D" to active viewing is beautifully brought out in some "3D" films (for instance in the recently released "Avatar"). In this form of "3D" each eye is fed an image that corresponds to the image that it might receive if I were actually viewing the objects that are on the screen in real life. This allows us to focus on different planes in the image and hence actively explore the visual field. It is the active exploration of the field that gives it a "3D" effect.

Notice that we can never see the back of objects and that when we see "behind" a nearby object using two eyes we are actually looking through a distorted, stretched, transparent, 2D representation of the nearby object. The truth is that "3D" vision is active vision, it is actively focusing from one plane to another in a visual field (not seeing the back of objects as would be the case with real 3D). The "3D" of modern cinema is providing us with the best 2D representation of the world to date. Previous artwork using perspective and other tricks was less able to provide that essential ingredient of 2D representation of an nD world, the active engagement of the onlooker.

The apparently 3D world of our perception is actually a 2D world plus timings to different places within perception. It is a model for the effects of movement, the separation of this page being related to how long it takes to re-focus,the change in length of the ciliary muscles and, given that biological timings of motion will have known relationships in my brain, to how long my arm would take to touch it. The "depth" in perception is an "action space" (Cutting and Vishton 1995).

Cutting, J.E. & Vishton, P.M. (1995) Perceiving layout and knowing distances: The integration, relative potency, and contextual use of different information about depth. In W. Epstein & S. Rogers (eds.) Handbook of perception and cognition, Vol 5; Perception of space and motion. (pp. 69-117). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

New Empiricism and "meaning"

2009-05-06T07:25:00.000-07:00

What is the empirical approach to meaning? At the simplest level I might reach out to an apple and know that it is edible, so apples can "mean" food.

This idea of an apple as something that can be moved into my mouth and consumed, along with its tart, pleasant taste is a model of a succession of events. The succession of events is spread over an interval of time but is available now, in the extended present, the whole sequence of events being present in my experience (see Time and conscious experience). My conscious experience containing the moving form of an apple forms a whole model of behaviour over a short period of time. This empirical description is not much different from Brentano's "intentionality" because it recalls an "apple" as "about" eating and sating hunger, but the empirical account differs from Brentano's materialist account because the motion of the apple and the taste occur as a whole object extended in time. We have whole ideas extended in time in the same way as we hear whole words stretched through time and not just single letter sounds.

If I analyse the idea of an apple into its components the most interesting part is the possibility of the motion of the apple to my mouth. I can see and imagine whole motions extended in time at an instant and this provides the directedness of the apple at my mouth. Having things extended in time but also "at an instant" sounds like a contradiction in terms but this is explained in 'Time and conscious experience'.

Apples can have other meanings than described above. An apple might be a metaphor for gravity, the motion of the apple from tree to ground being a model of the action of gravity. An apple might also be a standard of greenness, I can move a green thing in my mind into juxtaposition with a "Granny Smith" apple and have a conscious experience containing a comparison of green obects.

Notice that in all of the cases above the meaning of an apple is the result of a motion within my extended present, the second or so of time that is my conscious experience. The extended present allows my experience to contain objects that have a directedness towards other obects and it is this directedness (or in the language of intentionality, "aboutness") that gives objects meaning. Compare the actual experience that is your experience containing meaning with the lack of meaning exposed by the "symbol grounding problem" in a digital computer. In the symbol grounding problem there is no extended present so objects have no implicit directedness and the connection between any sets of stored information is not evident at any instant. If a computer could be constructed so that the whole process of creating relations were present at any instant then there would be no symbol grounding problem because the connections between all the parts would be continuously evident. Of course, such a computer would no longer be a digital computer because digital computers have defined, static states at the end of each clock pulse (see Time and conscious experience for an explanation of how more than one time can be present at an instant).

Another aspect of meaning in my experience relies upon the way that my experience is not just a visual field. My experience is more than just a set of forms and colours laid out in space and time that derive from optical data. It is a set of forms, colours, textures, sounds, temperatures, tastes, smells, images produced by my brain to "fill-in" zones of space and time, body image, muscle tension etc, etc. When I look at my hand, the tension in my finger muscles is at the position in the visual field occupied by my fingers. If I click my fingers together the click comes from where the rubbing sensation occurred. I have a perceptual field that is an overlay of a huge variety of obects of all different types. Nearly all of the objects in my perceptual field have meaningfulness pre-assigned; when my brain creates the field it attempts to include the relations between objects as part of the field. As an example, this text reads from left to right, it just does because my brain put that directedness into the text objects in my perceptual field.

One of the most frequent experiences of "meaning" in modern life is where we examine something and feel that we "know the meaning" of or "recognise" the object. This recognition is actually a marker that the relations of the object are stored in our memory so we don't actually know the meaning of the object but can search for the memories that contain the relations of the object and hence the meaning. Recognition is so common that it scarcely exists or is just a comfortable feeling in ordinary experience. The opposite of recognition is "surprise" and this feeling is usually followed by a searching for memories about the object. It is interesting that most of the times that we say we know the meaning of an object we only have a marker that indicates that we could probably recall the meaning of the object.

Conscious free will and Empiricism

2009-04-13T08:19:00.000-07:00

The free will debate is often characterised as a debate about whether we can make decisions that are not simply mechanically determined. It asks whether our decisions are as inevitable as the movement of a car's wheels once the gear train is in motion or whether there is something more to human life than just one event pressing on another. However, although these questions are interesting the empirical approach shows that the problem of free will is far more serious.

Try taking a conscious decision right now. You may be sitting reading but sit back and try to decide to do something. When I sit back and take a "conscious" decision my eyes might focus on a finger or I might have some tension in my leg and then the thought "I will move this finger" or "I will move this leg" pops into mind. It is obvious that non-conscious parts of my body and brain are creating this conscious experience because it just pops into mind. This raises an interesting problem: do we ever have conscious decisions or do decisions just pop into mind?

There is a logical flaw in the concept of simple, conscious, free will because if you are to consciously decide to "will" something to happen this conscious decision cannot just pop into your mind. If it just popped into mind the decision itself would be non-conscious. To make a conscious decision you must consciously decide that you are going to consciously decide that you are going to consciously decide that..... and so on ad infinitum. The only alternative to this infinite regress is to accept that what we believe to be conscious decisions are usually just things that pop into mind - the decision occurs in our experience but we did not make the decision consciously .

Neuroscientists have demonstrated this non-conscious nature of "conscious" decision making by discovering that preparatory electrical activity in the brain can precede a "conscious" decision by 0.2 to 7 seconds (See Time and conscious experience). When a decision is taken the timing of mental and neural events is such that the neural events precede conscious experience by substantial amounts of time^*. The measurements of brain activity confirm the obvious logical point that you cannot know you have made a decision until you have made it!

This means that the only form of "conscious" decision that is feasible is like "biofeedback" in which the conscious state evoked by an event either enhances or depresses the future likelihood of the event. Conscious experience would then allow the acquisition of skills by providing feedback after each trial. Similarly, by rehearsing events mentally it might be possible to test the effects of events on conscious experience and amend future, non-conscious processing appropriately. This would also allow us to rehearse decisions before actually applying them to the world, it would allow us to think "suppose I moved my finger, what would that be like?" without actually moving the finger. Notice that I am not talking about a rehearsal in the non-conscious parts of my brain, I am asking whether introducing a rehearsal into my conscious mind can affect the outcome of the rehearsal in ways that might not occur for non-conscious rehearsals.

In the light of this analysis the proposal might be made that we could have "conscious" decisions if a conscious state can modulate the likelihood of particular actions.

Can the state of my mind affect the non-conscious parts of my brain? Well, the fact that I can write about the form of my conscious experience shows that this is possible: if the state of my mind, called "my conscious experience", can be described then there must be a physical link from this state to the written word via the non-conscious parts of the brain that control writing. Of course, the non-conscious parts of my brain have loaded my conscious experience with most of its data content so the only unknown component of my experience, as far as the non-conscious part of my brain is concerned, is the form of this experience (its multidimensional geometric layout). The most important aspect of this form is the continuity of the content over time. A simple signal that indicates that an image or sound that has popped into my conscious experience is consistent or inconsistent with a sound or image that is already in my experience might be sufficient to provide the required communication of this continuity. The exact mechanism for such a signal is obscure but it might be speculated that interference could occur at the point in the present instant where the vectors that constitute experience are directed.

If conscious experience is able to influence my decisions by training the non-conscious parts of my brain then why would I want to train myself to have a particular conscious state? Am I able to meditate and bring the non-conscious parts of my brain around to the conclusion that a particular state of my conscious mind is preferable? If this is indeed possible then I may have a conscious will that is free because, as is discussed in time and conscious experience, the selection of a mental state may involve a selection of a particular quantum state of my brain. The selection of a particular quantum state is a non-deterministic process and my will would be free, albeit delayed and not too good for rapid decision taking.

Other resources:

See http://www.blutner.de/philom/consc/consc.html for an interesting review of Libet's experiments.

* It is possible to train subjects to respond to flashing lights by pressing a button or by blinking to such an extent that this action becomes a reflex. Subjects who respond to events in a reflex fashion should, in principle, be able to deliver a response before they would report that they have made any decision to respond. This, along with the fact that you can only know you have made a decision once you have made it means that experiments on "conscious" decisions should be able to show the following conditions. Firstly brain activity must always precede the notification that a conscious decision has been made, secondly it should be possible to withhold an action so that the "conscious" decision always precedes the action and thirdly it should be possible to train reflexes so that some actions definitely precede their associated "conscious" decisions. The various experiments on the neuroscience of decision taking have confirmed all of these conditions.

Quantum mechanics and New Empiricism

2009-04-08T02:51:00.000-07:00

Quantum physical interpretations of the universe are not essential or in any way fundamental to the empirical approach to mind. The empirical approach is about stressing that observation is more important than theory, it does not depend on any particular physical theory.

However, along with Relativity, the mere existence of quantum theory shows that a simple model of the world where discrete lumps of matter mediate interactions is incomplete. If simple materialism is not a universal physical theory then the regress arguments in the philosophy of mind are not incontrovertible and mind cannot be dismissed simply because early materialism implies a homunculus (the little man within a little man within a..). Indeed the opposite is true, the homunculus that is implied by materialism means that the observation of mind should be respected and nineteenth century materialism rejected.

Although quantum physics neither validates nor invalidates New Empiricism it does, however, have interesting consequences for the analysis of mind that may or may not be supported by Empiricism. Modern advances in quantum physics, such as decoherence theory, show that there are several problems that have a direct impact on our idea of mind.

Before addressing the role of quantum theory in the philosophy of mind it is essential to distinguish between two different problems, the first problem is whether or not the brain could contain a superposition of quantum states adjacent to our normal environment and the second problem is the nature of the environment itself.

The possibility that the brain may exist in a superposition of states like a quantum computer is interesting but fraught with difficulties (see Tegmark 2000). Electromagnetic fields may be able to sustain a superposition of states (Anglin & Zurek 1996) but I will not discuss superpositions of this type any further here.

The second problem, the problem of the nature of the environment is far more interesting. Decoherence theory has illuminated this problem so that in the 21st century we can get a clearer idea of the problem than ever before.

The problem of the nature of the environment arises because when a measurement is made on an isolated system that has two possible superpositions of state there are two possible outcomes of the measurement, one being the measuring instrument plus system in one state and the other the measuring instrument plus system in the other state. The measuring instrument and the system are said to be "entangled" and form a new conjoint system with its own superpositions of state. But we only ever see the measuring instrument in one state. Zurek analysed this problem and realised that if the measuring instrument and system combination could be isolated it would form a superposition of states and this superposition would be extended if we added more measurements to the conjoint system. For instance, if a beam of light struck the measuring instrument it would create a triple entanglement and if a scientist looked at light photons coming from the instrument it would create a conjoint, four component entanglement. If this four part system were isolated it would exist in a superposition of quantum states, each with its own probability. This predicts that there would be as many copies of the scientist as there were possible states. Zurek took this analysis yet further and demonstrated that the entire environment becomes a conjoint state because of the interactions between its components. This "environment" has the same properties as the world of classical (non-quantum) physics.

Although decoherence theory predicts that there would be as many copies of the scientist as there are states of the system it also predicts that an individual scientist, ie: an individual copy, would only observe one state of the system. This scientist is surrounded by a classical world without any significant superpositions of state. Decoherence theory is essentially a "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory with many copies of an individual being possible in the multiverse but each individual observing a classical universe. So far so good, but what about the observer, you and I?

If I consider you or your brain there is some, but little scope within decoherence theory for a superposition of states. If your brain has a synapse that is briefly in a superposition of firing and not-firing I will discover that it will rapidly adopt one of the two states. So I probably see your brain as a classical device. But what of my own observation?

It could be claimed that if my own observation is the same as a single outcome, if it is not a superposition of states, then it is localised to a single branch, a single, entangled, conjoint state and hence dependent upon the classical state of the brain. However, there is a "sleight of hand" in this argument because there is no way within the argument to distinguish between an environment that is created by the possibility of conscious observation and one that creates conscious observation. According to decoherence theory it would be possible to introduce an observer-system into a non-entangled universe and after a second or two an "environment" would form around the observer-system. A few minutes later the environment that is due to the presence of the observer would be indistinguishable from any other classical environment.

So how can we distinguish between an environment that is created by the possibility of conscious observation and an environment in which this is not the case? If we are to believe the theory that the environment creates our observation then our experience must be fully encompassed by the theory - as scientists we are not entitled to reject observation on the basis of incomplete or flimsy theories. If we are to believe the theory that the environment creates our experience then our experience cannot contain phenomena that are not encompassed by decoherence theory. In fact there is a vast difference between my experience and decoherence theory because my observation contains time as an observable. My own observation is not just like synapses firing, it is composed of objects that are connected in time as well as space (See Time and conscious experience). It has time as a preeminent "observable" and hence does not conform to the Schrödinger equation used in the development of decoherence theory (See Horwitz (2005)). Furthermore, my conscious experience appears to be passive and as Zeh (2000) pointed out, if our conscious experience is passive the rules of decoherence may not apply and it could well be the spacetime point of our observation that selects the universe where we find ourselves. On this model the environment would consist of those events that are compatible with the spacetime form of conscious observation. This would be consistent both with decoherence theory as a limited quantum description of the classical environment and with modern cosmology (See for instance "Hawking's reflections on spacetime and the existence of humans in: Quantum Cosmology, M-theory and the Anthropic Principle ). Our environment would be that part of the multiverse that is consistent with conscious experience ie: that part that has 3 spatial and 1 or more temporal extensive dimensions

This is a different view from the conventional idea of quantum physics and mind. For instance, Zurek (2003) explicitly assumes from the outset that the conscious observer is like a computer to avoid much of the problem of observation. This assumption that we are like a computer leads to the tautology that a Newtonian environment created by decoherence creates a conscious experience that has previously been defined as something created by a Newtonian environment. This "built-in" assumption has misled many commentators into thinking that decoherence proves that the conscious observer is a product of decoherence like a digital computer and hence immaterial to quantum physics.

If Zurek is right and experience is classical then it cannot contain time extended events. If observation is right then our experience is non-classical from the start, embedding the energy-time form of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle within it and the classical world originates in observers.

Proving that Zurek is wrong will require experiments. I would suggest analysing delayed choice experiments, these seem to show that decoherence originates at the position of the observer rather than being a property of the average state of the environment. Kent (2005) points out that if wavefunction collapse were to occur some time after events occur (ie: wavefunction collapse occurs in the brain) then there are ways of testing this using entangled particles. He notes that the qm experiments performed to date cannot distinguish between non-local and local collapse of the wavefunction in the brain but could be amended to do so. Unfortunately Kent presumes that conscious experience occurs at 0.1 sec after sensory events whereas neuroscientists know that the gap is more like 0.5 secs, let us hope that no physicist wastes a year doing this experiment only to be told that the time gap should have been 0.4 secs greater.

Some further reading

Anglin, J.R. & Zurek, J.H. (1996). Decoherence of quantum fields: decoherence and predictability. Phys.Rev. D53 (1996) 7327-7335 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9510021

Baker, D (2006) Measurement Outcomes and Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002717/

Bachtold, M (2008). Five Formulations of the Quantum Measurement
Problem in the Frame of the Standard Interpretation. J Gen Philos Sci (2008) 39:17–33

Bitbol, M (2008) Consciousness, Situations and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. NEUROQUANTOLOGY, 6, 203-213, 2008

Horwitz, L.P. (2005) On the Significance of a Recent Experiment
Demonstrating Quantum Interference in Time. http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0507044

Janssen, Hanneke (2008) Reconstructing Reality: Environment-Induced Decoherence, the Measurement Problem, and the Emergence of Definiteness in Quantum Mechanics.
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004224/

Kent, A (2005). Causal Quantum Theory and the Collapse Locality Loophole. Physical Review A 72:11, 12107, American Physical Society, 7/2005. http://www.citebase.org/abstract?id=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Aquant-ph%2F0204104

Saunders, S (1996). Time, Quantum Mechanics and Probability. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000465/00/Part3uj(S).pdf

Tegmark, M. (2000)The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes. Phys.Rev. E61 (2000) 4194-4206

Wallace, D (2007). The Quantum Measurement Problem: State of Play http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.0149

Zeh, H.D. (2000) The Problem of Conscious Observation in Quantum Mechanical Description http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908084

Zurek, W.H. (2003). Decoherence, einselection and the quantum origins of the classical. Rev. Mod. Phys. 75, 715 (2003) http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105127

Soul of a man

2009-04-03T03:27:00.001-07:00

These are the lyrics for Blind Willie Johnson's song

Click here to hear the song

"Soul of a Man"

I'm going to ask the question
Please answer if you can
Is there anybody's children can tell me
What is the soul of a man?

(CHORUS:)
Won't somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won't somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?

I've travelled different countries
Travelled to the furthest lands
Couldn't find nobody could tell me
What is the soul of a man

(Chorus)

I saw a crowd stand talking
I just came up in time
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
That a man ain't nothing but his mind

(Chorus)

I read the Bible often
I try to read it right
As far as I can understand
It's nothing but a burning light

(Chorus)

When Christ taught in the temple
The people all stood amazed
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
How to raise a man from the grave

Materialists should read this first

2009-03-31T02:28:00.001-07:00

What is this life if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
(WH Davies)

Materialism is the belief that everything is due to matter and the flow of matter from place to place. Materialists tend to believe that we get our identity and meaning from our interactions with society and the world in general and there is no need for any inner mind or soul. Materialism differs from Physicalism (see Note 1), Physicalism does not as yet make any emphatic predictions about mind or soul. Materialism is widespread because it is taught in school as "science".

Materialism does not allow the transfer of information from the past to the present except as recorded data so the frozen instant is all that exists in the materialist paradigm. The instant is frozen because there is no time for motion to take place at an instant. If everything is due to the flow of matter and only the frozen instant exists then time is like the succession of frames in a motion picture. At every instant reality is a frozen three dimensional pattern, like a single frame in a movie.

The materialist concept of reality as but a single instant is what underlies the "homunculus" argument in the philosophy of mind. The homunculus argument runs as follows: photons might flow to create an image on the retina and the image on a retina can create a pattern in nerve cells in the brain but then what sees that pattern? The pattern on the nerve cells might be transferred to another set of nerve cells but then what sees that pattern? According to materialist reasoning it always seems as if another person, a little man or homunculus within us, is needed to view the content of our minds. So materialism contains a contradiction - all reality is held to be due to the flow of matter but this flow can never be our experience now, at this moment, and materialism has no other time available for experiencing anything. The problem of how we can experience anything will require a scientific approach rather than the ideological approach of Materialism.

Aristotle understood this flaw in materialism, he said that perception is a problem because it seems to involve the endless transfer of "impressions" from place to place. Leibnitz saw the difficulty when he realised that mechanical devices just push one upon another. Modern philosophers see this problem when they debate how perception can be any more than the transfer of "information" from place to place. Computer scientists see the problem when they argue about the "grounding" of data or information in computers, in Leibnitz's terminology computers are just electrons pushing one on another. Aristotle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Searle, Ryle and hundreds of other philosophers have all made reputations from pointing out that you can't get to the way we perceive the world by just transferring stuff from place to place.

These arguments all describe how successions of fixed 3D states seem to fail to describe mind and the arguments are still fairly topical – Harnad, Searle, Ryle etc are recent philosophers. This topicality demonstrates that the materialism being considered here is not a straw man but an active philosophical paradigm (See Note 1).

The problem is very severe, people have been thinking about it for millennia and have split into two main groups:

The materialists say that the physical world is made from stuff moving from place to place and time is like the frames of a film so if this does not describe mind then mind does not really exist. As a result everything we call mind is really "functions" (ie: motions from place to place) and judgements are the result of functions. We only judge that we have conscious experience.

The dualists say that the physical world is made from stuff moving from place to place and time is like the frames of a film so if this does not describe mind then the mind is non-physical. As a result science has little to say about religion.

Now, notice that both the materialists and the dualists have the same theory: that the physical world is made from stuff moving from place to place and time is like the frames of a film. This underpins both philosophies which is why they love debating the issue with each other.

Nowadays materialists are a subset of "physicalists" (see note 1) that adheres to nineteenth century science with the same tenacity that dualists adhere to pre-sixteenth century science. Both agree that they should use the idea of time and space that was current when Alexandria was in its heyday. Both groups use the Alexandrian model of time in which only the present instant exists without addressing the problem of how anything can exist for no time at all (the present has no duration) or, given that reality would be frozen at the hypothetical present, how anything can be known. Both groups use the time-extended nature of their actual experience to knit together the impossible instants of their theoretical idea of the world into a continuous whole without realising that this continuum is impossible in their Alexandrian cosmology.

Both materialists and dualists have the wrong cosmology, the physical world is not made from stuff moving from place to place in a simple way and time is not like the frames of a film. Over the past hundred years scientists have discovered that the world is not like this. Of course, it could never have been like this because we are not frozen like frames in a movie and do not experience an endless regress as the individual frames play from one homunculus to another without ever being seen. Now I wait for the gasps of denial, remember, materialism and dualism are not scientific ideas, they don't say "show us the observations and we will make testable hypotheses", they just deny that any cosmology after 100 AD has any relevance to what they claim is the "real" world. Relativity? It will be claimed that it is a materialist idea and anyway, only applies to things moving at high speed. Quantum physics? It will be claimed that it is just spooky nonsense that only applies to things that can't be seen.

Both materialists and dualists should update their cosmology and read some simple introductory texts such as Wikibooks Special Relativity, especially the section on the modern approach or Taylor's elementary educational texts such as Quantum physics explains Newton's laws of motion.

It is really shocking for materialists and dualists but the truth is that the whole of physics is based on relativity and quantum theory. As an example, dynamics, which is the basis of materialism, is due to the interchange of kinetic and potential energy and kinetic energy is an entirely relativistic effect even at low velocities. The true import of Relativity is that it tells us that the universe has four dimensions. Time is not like a series of movie frames, it is another direction for arranging things, a dimension, that is interdependent with the dimensions of space. Furthermore the path taken by moving objects is a quantum effect due to the interference between all the possible paths that an object can take so the materialist idea of motion itself is suspect. Physics portrays reality as a shimmering kaleidoscope of possible events that is unmasked as the point of the present moment sweeps over it.

I know that any materialists and dualists reading this are likely to just shrug their shoulders and declare that all of this "New" (ie: century old) physics only applies to special situations like high energy laboratories. Firstly it doesn't only apply to high energy laboratories, secondly, even if it did, it shows that the physical world is not simply stuff moving from place to place and so undermines the entire basis for the dualism/materialism debate. Just read the simple introductory texts in the links above.

Any scientist will always have been appalled by the way that materialists use theory to deny observation. This dismissal of observation is now doubly appalling because modern physicalism is much wider than materialism. Materialist cosmology is now known to be false and just a sort of "folk physics" that offers illusory certainties.

The alternative to materialism and dualism is empiricism. According to empiricism the mind is a valid observation that needs to be explained and we should not jump to premature conclusions when we know so little about how the universe works (see Time and conscious experience for a new empirical start to the problem of mind). Materialists reject empiricism because if there is only the frozen instant then all experience must be doubted because nothing can be known right now. This is a highly successful intellectual trap where the erroneous theory protects itself by denying even the possibility of evidence that might contradict it. If you remove the frozen instant then the absolute doubt is unwarranted. Given that Alexandrian cosmology is false it is amazing that this creed of doubt is so widely believed. See Time and Conscious Experience for another approach that is not constrained by ancient ideas about time.

The big difference between materialism and empiricism is that materialists believe we are like frames in a film whereas empiricists can see that we are looking at the film and try to explain how this could happen. The materialist error is straightforward, materialism reasons that a geometric line is obtained by placing points adjacent to each other, a plane is obtained by placing lines next to each other and a volume is a stack of planes so time is a stack of volumes. No! Dimensional time does not enter into physics as a stack of volumes and this is evident from the equations that describe spacetime. (See Presentism and the denial of mind and Some notes on projective geometry for more discussion).

Incidentally, it is precisely because we are not like frames in a film that we find it so easy to fantasise that computers could be like us. We have the ability to join the frames together into a continuous piece of cinema, we experience the movie but each frame of the film in the projector cannot experience anything. Digital computers are just static arrangements at the end of each clock pulse so the materialist claim that digital computers could be conscious is exactly equivalent to claiming that a photograph is conscious.

Please feel free to comment below.

Image courtesy Wiki Commons

Notes

Note 1: There is a difference between materialism and physicalism. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for physicalism it states: "Physicalism is sometimes known as materialism. Historically, materialists held that everything was matter -- where matter was conceived as "an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist" (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, par. 9). The reason for speaking of physicalism rather than materialism is to abstract away from this historical notion, which is usually thought of as too restrictive -- for example, forces such as gravity are physical but it is not clear that they are material in the traditional sense (Dijksterhuis 1961, Yolton 1983)."

Note 2: Look at any recent issue of philosophy journals that deal with conscious experience. In the Journal of Consciousness Studies December issue the titles are: "Must Phenomenology Rest on Paradox? Implications of Methodology-Limited Theories" and "False-Belief Understanding and the Phenomenological Critics of Folk Psychology", both of which are saying no more than that materialism does not explain mind, the paradoxes of phenomenology being related to the regress argument and "Folk Psychology" being the term used by folk physicists to describe the observation of mind.

Helping empiricism gain a voice

2009-03-26T05:26:00.000-07:00

The battle between materialism, dualism and empiricism is a serious matter. Both Dualism and Materialism stem from deep seated beliefs, in the case of Materialism* the belief is that nineteenth century cosmology holds all the answers.

Empiricism differs from Dualism and Materialism because it asks each person to take a look at what is actually occurring and asks how these events might be explained without using preconceived theories to dismiss our observations. New Empiricism continues the liberal approach of the Enlightenment by insisting on the scientific method of observing then theorising.

I hope that I have demonstrated in this Blog (see "Contents" on the left) that there are plentiful grounds for doubting materialism and no definite evidence for dualism. I interpret my observations as suggestive of the existence of spirituality but given our current state of knowledge Empiricists may believe in a God, reject a God or be agnostic. Although the ideas behind New Empiricism are too technical for the philosophical journals and too philosophical for technical journals the Internet has provided another path for publication so if you largely agree with the idea of New Empiricism you can help by mentioning it and linking to it wherever possible on the net.

Please comment freely if you wish.

*Note: there is a difference between materialism and physicalism. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for physicalism it states: "Physicalism is sometimes known as materialism. Historically, materialists held that everything was matter -- where matter was conceived as "an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist" (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, par. 9). The reason for speaking of physicalism rather than materialism is to abstract away from this historical notion, which is usually thought of as too restrictive -- for example, forces such as gravity are physical but it is not clear that they are material in the traditional sense (Dijksterhuis 1961, Yolton 1983)."

Where is conscious experience?

2009-03-19T07:21:00.001-07:00

"The tacit consensus concerning the cerebral cortex as the “organ of consciousness” would thus have been reached prematurely, and may in fact be seriously in error." Merker 2007.

"All parts of the brain may well be involved in normal conscious processes but the indispensable substratum of consciousness lies outside the cerebral cortex, probably in the diencephalon" Penfield 1937.

"The brain stem-thalamocortical axis supports the state, but not the detailed contents of consciousness, which are produced by cortex" Baars et al 1998.

Readers who believe that there can be no images in the brain should read Perceiving perception and Time and conscious experience before tackling this article.

Conscious experience is a simultaneous set of events, this means that it is a space, more than one thing at an instant being the definition of a spatial arrangement of things. If we are physicalists then events in a space must have a location in the universe. So where are the events that compose conscious experience?

Natural Realists and Direct Realists believe that the events that compose conscious experience are the actual objects in the world that are related to this experience. This idea has been discussed elsewhere (why direct and naive realism are unscientific). I can meditate and produce quite strong lucid dreams so naive realism has never seemed like a reasonable idea to me. I also enjoy art and when I look at the beautiful embroidery on the sleeve of

Directly linked to The Museum Network: Portraits and Portraiture http://www.museumnetworkuk.org/portraits/artworks/wallace/img4.html

Franz Hals' "Laughing Cavalier" I know that what I imagine to be beautiful embroidery is just a couple of masterful brush strokes.

My brain creates the image of the world that I call "experience" and this process is obvious when we look at the way our eyes dart from place to place to supply data about the salient points in a view. Our eyes dart about but the view is steady. Neuroscience has shown that the brain fills in any gaps between the salient points in our experience, for instance if two lights flash in succession it fills in the gap between them in the visual cortex with a moving pattern of nerve activity (See larsen et al 2006). The embroidery on the "Laughing Cavalier" is probably completed by my brain in a similar fashion. So, if the brain goes to all the trouble of "filling in" the missing parts of sensation to make a fulfilling perceptual experience, where is this experience?

Wherever conscious experience might occur it does not require much detail. Notice how, when you look at this page, you only see a few letters in any detail at any moment. Only an area of about 2 cm in diameter is present at high resolution and this would require less than a million pixels. If each pixel needed one neurone and the brain has a hundred thousand million neurones then my experience could reside in about a fifty thousandth part of the brain - it could happen in a volume the size of half a drop of water. (Incidently, it is the time extension of experience that contains the ephemeral higher detail that we cannot quite pin down).

The other important feature of conscious experience is that almost any single part of the brain can be removed without permanently removing consciousness (Bogen 1995). This suggests that wherever the site of conscious experience might reside it is relocatable or multiple. The idea that we might have multiple sites that can host consciousness is vaguely disturbing but not impossible and is compatible with the idea of "dominance" in neural function.

Any site that hosts conscious experience would need to be connected in such a way that the features in the visual field are related to each other in the same way as the neural activity that represents it. The neural activity that represents the letter "t" in the written word "it" would be next to the neural activity that represents the "i". This adjacency of sensory events is normal in the brain and known as 'topological mapping'. Topological maps in the brain tend to be fairly robust, requiring long periods to be re-wired, so the topological veracity of experience suggests that wherever our experience is located it should be the recipient of organised, topological projections from the various specialised processing centres of the cerebral cortex.

The existence of dreams etc. means that experience must be able to receive the output of a flexible modelling system (temporo-frontal cortex?), although this is overridden by sensory input to the cortex.

The spatial properties of experience are linked to the vestibular system (experience rotates if we turn round and round too much and moves with the movement of the head). This means that wherever experience is located must receive an important input from the organs of balance and motion detection in the head.

The fact that people remain conscious after large areas of cerebral cortex are removed and even anencephalic children are regarded as conscious suggests that the site of conscious experience is somewhere between the medulla oblongata and the thalamus inclusive. The most likely location for conscious experience in this zone is the thalamus because it receives a truly vast innervation from the cerebral cortex. (Even neuroscientists often forget that the cerebral cortex is a collection of specialist processors that provide an input to the thalamus - in functional terms the thalamus is at the top of the processing heirarchy, the cortex is only physically on top).

The thalamus is also an important site for long range synchronisation of cortical processes, being implicated in both long range gamma and beta band EEG synchrony. It is important in this role because the cortico-thalamo-cortical pathways are more numerous than the cortico-cortical pathways. That cerebral cortical synchronisation is needed for the occurrence of conscious experience is strong evidence that conscious experience is not directly in the cortex: it confirms the data from subliminal stimulation, general anaesthesia, coma etc that shows that unsynchronised cortical activity is always occurring without any conscious experience even in awake patients. This dependence of consciousness on cortical input to the thalamus is nicely demonstrated by the recovery of thalamo-cortical connectivity during recovery from persistent vegetative state (Laureys et al 2002).

There are areas of the thalamus, such as the intralaminar nuclei (ILN), which cannot be bilaterally removed without causing loss of consciousness through coma, mutism etc. . However, one side of the ILN can be removed and the patient can recover. It would be interesting to know what patients experience after the removal of one side of the ILN, if this were the side that was the putative host for conscious experience. My guess is that conscious experience would be transiently hazy but that patients may respond to external stimuli as if they were functioning well. This prediction is based on the function of conscious experience as a manager of the global state of the brain (see below).

The function of conscious experience is somewhat obscure because it does not seem to do anything in particular. For instance, non-conscious reflex reactions occur in a quarter of a second or less but there is a delay of about half a second before sensory stimuli become part of conscious experience (Libet et al 1979). So conscious experience is not needed to deal with most events. However, when a person is unconscious the brain can do very little to respond to the world. This means that conscious experience is not directly required for responding to most events in the world but is crucial for the overall function of the brain. Conscious experience is therefore most likely to be involved in the global stability and control of brain function.

The Intralaminar Nuclei of the thalamus are possible candidates for conscious experience. The Reticular Nucleus of the thalamus is also a possible candidate although this seems to be divided up into specialised areas like the cerebral cortex. Merker's work with anencephalic children suggests that there is also the possibility of conscious experience residing at the level of the superior colliculus (See Strehler 1991). However, I would guess that Merker's patients had developed this possible mesencephalic site for conscious experience to a higher degree than might be found in people with an intact cerebrum.

Perhaps many areas of the non-cerebro-cortical brain can take over the function of consciousness (ie: stabilising brain function as a whole) but conscious experience will be impoverished if it is not hosted in areas that have been evolved to host cerebro-cortical output.

In summary, I would largely agree with Alex Green's analysis of the location of conscious experience but would consider it to be more flexibly located than Green proposed. I also suspect that the neural representation of conscious experience might be stretched or deformed provided the adjacency relations (what is next to what) are preserved.(ie:the mapping from the brain in 3D to experience in 4D may involve further transformations that restore homotopy). The main reason why no-one is looking for a site for conscious experience is that they do not believe in the existence of time and so adhere to a cosmology that does not permit the idea of conscious experience in the brain (see the other articles on this site). However, if someone wants to look they will find that conscious experience is hosted in a volume of brain that is probably less than the size of a pea that normally receives input from all areas of the cerebral cortex in an organised, topological fashion and which has activity that is delayed by about 0.5 secs relative to the time of sensory stimulation. The function of consciousness is so crucial to the operation of the organism that this site for consciousness will be protected by a secure location and multiple redundancy.

The empirical description of conscious experience does not forbid more esoteric locations such as whole brain electromagnetic fields etc. but the ordered form of experience favours definite locations that have pre-arranged connections with the cortex.

Readers should beware of regarding this analysis as reductionist. According to the analysis given elsewhere in this blog our future accretes onto the time extended form of our experience. We are at least four dimensional and experience is not a passive screen, rather it is a template and an impulsion.

Where to start looking

Modern magnetic resonance imaging has sufficient resolution to pick up activity in a pea sized piece of brain. If it is possible to find a non-cerebro-cortical site that has activity in response to any stimulus that becomes part of conscious experience then that site is a prime contender for being the location of conscious experience. It is possible that the ILN already fulfill this criterion.

Postscript: the Canadian Hogan twins have a link between their thalami and appear to share sensations and even share a common mental space.

An MRI scan of the Hogan twins brain is shown above with the inter-thalamic link clearly demonstrated.

Interesting articles

Arnold Trehub (2007). Space, Self, and the Theater of Consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 16 (2):310-330.

References

Bogen, J.E. (1995). On the neurophysiology of consciousness: I. An overview. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 52-62. http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jbogen/text/bogen-95.pdf

Bogen, J.E. (1995). On the neurophysiology of consciousness: Part II. Constraining the semantic problem. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 137-158. http://www.its.caltech.edu/~jbogen/text/concog95.htm

Larsen, A., Madsen, K.H., Lund, T.E., and Bundesen, C. (2006). Images of Illusory Motion in Primary Visual Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2006;18:1174-1180.

Laureys, S. et al. (2002). Brain function in the vegetative state. Acta neurol. belg., 2002, 102, 177-185 http://www.jsmf.org/meetings/2003/nov/LaureysANB2002.pdf

Libet, B., Wright, E. W., Jr., Feinstein, B., and Pearl, D.(1979). Subjective referral of the timing for a conscious sensory experience. Brain, 102, pp. 192-224.

Merker, B. (2007) Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: A challenge for neuroscience
and medicine. Behavioral and Brain Science http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Merker-03062006/Referees/Merker-03062006_preprint.pdf

Strehler, B.L. (1991) Where Is the Self? A Neuroanatomical Theory of Consciousness. Synapse 4:44-91. 1991. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109702768/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

McTaggart's unreality of time

2009-02-17T02:36:00.000-08:00

At the end of the nineteenth century John McTaggart discovered a serious problem with the idea of time and, on the basis of this, he proposed that time was unreal. He considered the way that things could be ordered in time and reasoned that the procedure that creates the temporal ordering from future to present to past was outside time. His argument is simplified below.

Consider a simple ordered list of events, if the list were read from the bottom upwards the items would occur in a different progression in time from reading them from top to bottom. McTaggart called this list the "C Series". This list of events, the "C" Series, has no definite ordering in time. As an alternative there could be a convention that the list is always read from the bottom upwards (B Series), the list itself represents events arranged from earlier to later but has within it no change, it is fixed forever. Lastly a cursor could be placed against the items as the list is read and the items below the cursor called "past" and those ahead of the cursor called "future" with the cursor being in the present (A Series). The last way of ordering events is closest to the way that we think of the passing of time.

What McTaggart spotted was that if the cursor moves up the list it is not a part of the list but creates a new list, with different relations between past, present and future, at every point that it traverses. If the lists are regarded as events distributed in time then the changes that give events the labels "past", "present" or "future" cannot be in time. McTaggart puts it thus:

"The difficulty may be put in another way, in which the fallacy will exhibit itself rather as a vicious infinite series than as a vicious circle. If we avoid the incompatibility of the three characteristics [past,present and future] by asserting that M is present, has been future, and will be past, we are constructing a second A series, within which the first falls, in the same way in which events fall within the first. It may be doubted whether any intelligible meaning can be given to the assertion that time is in time. But, in any case, the second A series will suffer from the same difficulty as the first, which can only be removed by placing it inside a third A series. The same principle will place the third inside a fourth, and so on without end. You can never get rid of the contradiction, for, by the act of removing it from what is to be explained, you produce it over again in the explanation. And so the explanation is invalid."

It is intriguing that the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, in his 2nd century AD work the "Mulamadhyamikakarika", also spotted this problem of past, present and future being present in a series that is apparently about the past.

McTaggart's conclusion that time is unreal is unwarranted because there are other possibilities. One possibility is that the future does not exist as a fixed entity. If this were the case then, given that instantaneous observation is impossible, there is only "becoming", the sudden appearance of events in the immediate past. All events would then be past. The A Series would be a growing list generated by something that is indeed outside time. There are other possibilities but this possibility seems closest to our conscious experience. We have an extended present moment that includes events from the present instant back through a second or so of time and this is indeed like a growing A Series (see Notes 1 & 2).

What McTaggart does demonstrate in his paper is that the sort of time that he defines, the everyday nineteenth century idea of time, is unreal. What he calls time has a component that is like space, being a direction in which things can be arranged (time as a dimension), and another component that involves change (what might be called "becoming"). Change is different from time as a dimension.

It is interesting to compare McTaggart's time with space. A position in space can be marked by points on a scale but it is accepted that we can go forward or backwards in space. However, we can only go forward or backwards in space because there is "time", if time is unreal then space is unreal.

The analysis given above leaves the question of the nature of "becoming" wide open. Why is our conscious experience just one thing after another? In the Newtonian paradigm events occur entirely because of the previous state of the world (determinism) but in the twenty first century events are thought to occur because of both the previous state of the world and as a result of quantum mechanical uncertainty. In modern analyses qm events are held to be dominant but statistically reduce to a picture that is almost indistinguishable from the classical prediction (See Ogborn and Taylor 2005 for a simple introduction).

In the most extreme cases, such as in the double slit experiment, there are periods of time where qm uncertainty is actually the dominant factor and even the appearance of determinism takes a back seat. This is disturbing because our brains may be sensitive to occasional qm uncertainties. A synapse might be on the verge of becoming facilitated and as it is being "read out" could be in a superposed state of facilitated/not facilitated. How far would the uncertainty propagate downstream in the brain and into the world as a superposition of actions? Does the form of conscious experience, in which there is an interrelationship between time and spatial distance ensure that only one alternative is realised (See Time and Conscious Experience)? Or do both alternatives occur and is there a "me" in both?

(With thanks to the blog:True Nature: Notes on Spirit and Science for pointing out the work of Nagarjuna).

References

McTaggart, J. (1908). The Unreality of Time. Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17 (1908): 456-473. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Unreality_of_Time

Ogborn, K. and Taylor, E.F. (2005). Quantum Physics explains Newton's laws
of motion. Physics education. 40(1) 26-34. http://www.eftaylor.com/leastaction.html#qm2newton

Further reading

Why you don’t want to get in the box with Schrödinger’s cat. David Papineau
A Many-Minds Interpretation Of Quantum Theory. Matthew J. Donald http://www.bss.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mjd1014/

Horwitz, L.P. (2005) On the significance of a recent experiment demonstrating quantum interference in time. http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0507044

Earman, J. (2002) Thoroughly Modern McTaggart: Or, What McTaggart Would Have Said if He Had Read the General Theory of Relativity. Ann Arbor, MI: Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan, University Library vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 1-28, August 2002. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=phimp;cc=phimp;rgn=main;view=text;idno=3521354.0002.003

Note 1: McTaggart dismisses what he pejoratively labels the "specious present" and I have here called the "extended present". He notes that only the present instant can be present without noticing that distant past instants are visibly and audibly present as movements and sounds that project through time to the observer's present instant. Just look at someone speaking, you hear whole words extended in time at the apparent position of their lips, now. However, I would agree with McTaggart that we cannot use our subjective experience of time as an absolute guide to the current time. This is also the case for length, I would not trust a subjective estimate of the length of a thing but this would not invalidate the concept of length.

Note 2: The "growing block" model of time was proposed by CD Broad. It differs from the purely empirical growing block idea of time presented here because the "becoming" of an individual could be a personal event.

The symbol grounding problem and Chinese Room

2009-02-17T01:31:00.000-08:00

The "Symbol Grounding Problem" was formulated by Harnad (1990). He pointed out that the symbols in an information processor can only be internally described by using an address to obtain other symbols which can only be described by looking up yet further symbols and so on. There is nothing within an information processor that gives its internal symbols any meaning.

The Symbol Grounding Problem can be seen as another way of stating Aristotle's regress. In Aristotle's regress it is argued that perception is problematic because the image on the eye must be seen by an inner eye that in turn must be seen by another inner eye whilst in a computer the contents of a data store are categorised by being related to data in another data store but unfortunately the content of this data store is just another set of symbols that can only be categorised by relating them to another data store and so on.

The symbol grounding problem is a scientific way of describing Searle's Chinese Room Argument (Searle 1980) in which a person translates English into Chinese by following a set of instructions (ie: by manually implementing a computer program) and might appear to know Chinese without actually knowing Chinese at all.

Both the symbol grounding and Chinese room problems had already been explored by Aristotle when he pointed out that perception would create an infinite regress or require a sense that is self aware. In the symbol grounding problem an infinite regress would occur in a processor if it sought for any internal meaning for its symbols and in the Chinese room the symbols only acquire meaning when they are passed outside the processor to a recipient that is self aware.

Leibniz knew about the problem of mechanical systems being no more than parts that act upon each other three hundred years ago:

"One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception." Leibniz. Monadology, 17.

The Symbol Grounding Problem is directly related to Leibniz's windmill, computers being machines in which electrons are just "parts pushing one another". Even if a computer were attached to a robotic arm and recorded its own actions all it would have internally would be a set of symbols.

All that has changed in the past three hundred years is that modern people really love their machines. The idea that our own creations might be conscious is not new, for instance the ancient Greeks loved their ceramics like we love computers and believed that Man himself was made by the gods breathing on a clay man.

The symbol grounding problem does not seem to apply to us. Unlike a digital computer, we know what we are doing, for instance if I fill a hole by digging soil with a spade my mind contains the directedness of the loaded spade towards the hole as a real extension in time (see Time and conscious experience). It is this extension in time that allows me to know my own symbols.

Harnad (1990) shows that symbols can be grounded by association with real objects in the world but this demonstration only means that we can construct machines that work, not that the machines have any internal conscious experience.

References

Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346.

Searle, J.R. 1980. Minds Brains and Programs. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 3. Copyright 1980 Cambridge University Press. http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/MindsBrainsPrograms.html

Notes

It is curious that the symbol grounding problem is really a restatement of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: we cannot simultaneously observe the position and momentum (elapsed time) of an event. Information is always physically instantiated so uncertainty applies as much because two sets of information must be generated to represent both position and momentum as because, in Heisenberg's original example, a measuring photon will perturb the electron that it strikes to make a measurement. (See Entropic uncertainty principle

Alex Green's original paper

2009-02-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

The following paper was submitted to numerous journals by Dr Green in 2002. I saw it on the internet a few years ago and it inspired my interest in this subject. I asked why it had not been published. The grounds for rejection were peculiar and showed that the editors had little understanding of relativity (my speciality) and no understanding that science progresses from empirical observation to (empirical) hypothesis to theory. Green refers to the fact that relativity is due to a 4D universe and that perception is empirically at least four dimensional so our experience might be expected if physics is right. My only gripe would be with the use of imaginary axes (a modern approach should use a metric tensor) but this is not unreasonable in an empirical hypothesis, and, of course, Minkowski did originally use imaginary axes. The paper is reproduced here with the author's permission.

A Testable, Geometrical Theory of Consciousness

ALEX GREEN

Abstract - Descartes, Kant and others have given detailed empirical accounts of what it is like to be a conscious observer. Descartes described the observer as a non-extended entity (a geometric point) viewing things in an extended space. William James noted that our experience was extended in time as well as space. These descriptions can be combined to define conscious experience as things arranged in time and space that are at a point. This definition can be analysed using multidimensional geometry to produce a model where the contents of consciousness are 'folded' into a single place yet still in their original three dimensional positions. According to this model consciousness is brain activity, some of which derives from sense data. This brain activity is probably located in the thalamus although a more extensive field of activity cannot be ruled out. Any part of the brain that is conscious would be sensitive to mechanical deformation.

Key Words: Consciousness, thalamus, centromedian, intralaminar, relativity, multidimensional, quantum, deformation, localized.

Introduction

It is frequently stated that conscious experience cannot be defined or described. Such statements are puzzling because philosophers of the western tradition have produced many descriptions of conscious experience that are consistent and generally in agreement with each other (Descartes 1641, Kant 1781, Green 2002).

Conscious experience was described by Descartes (1641) as the experience of things arranged in an extended space around a central, thinking observer who seems to occupy no space. Descartes also mentions that things in our experience can be assigned a duration and Kant elaborates upon this, pointing out that without representation in time the concepts of simultaneity and succession would be unknown to us.

These descriptions of conscious experience concur with our own experience. They can be summarised as an experience of things, including our bodies, smells, sounds, dreams etc. arranged around us in such a way that they are viewed and felt simultaneously at a point and extended in time and space.

Unfortunately this experience of consciousness contains numerous problems and paradoxes such as the problem of mental space, the problem of the experience of time, the problem of mental content and the problem of the "homunculus". These problems and paradoxes require explanation.

The problem of mental space is the paradox of how things which are evidently in our minds are seen as if they are separate from us. As an example, when you look at this page it seems separate from you but what are you actually seeing? The page makes an image on the retina that becomes activity in the brain; does this form some sort of electrical image in the brain and, if so, how can it be seen as if it is separate from the observer? Gregory (1966) describes this problem and qualifies it with the single sentence: "This is absurd." McGinn (1996) has reviewed the problem of mental space and concludes with the comment that consciousness "marks the place of a deep lack of knowledge about space, which is hard even to get into focus".

James (1890) described our conscious experience of time as "the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible". Le Poidevin (2000) summarises Gombrich's (1964) view of this as: "If the experienced present were only a durationless instant, then we could not understand a spoken sentence, because what would be presented to the senses at any point would only be a meaningless phoneme - indeed not even that, since any sound necessarily takes up time". Both James and Gombrich are describing a conscious experience that is extended through time, not as memories retrieved into the "durationless instant" but as a real extension in time that is similar to the way this text is extended in space.

The problem of content is linked to the problem of qualia. A typical quale is the experience of the colour "purple" (Tye (1997)). This experience can be prompted by light but also occurs in dreams and can be imagined. The nature of qualia is a mystery, are they brain activity and if so, how do nerve impulses become purple? Qualia, combined with extent and duration, compose things that are part of the content of consciousness.

The problem of the homunculus is closely related to the problems of space and time, if we observe the contents of our minds as if they are separate from us or historical then what is doing the observing? (cf: Ryle's "Ghost in the Machine" (Ryle 1949)) .

Any theory of consciousness would need to describe mental space, time and content even if it were concluded that the experiences of space, time or content were absurd, illusory or wrongly construed because most people believe that their experiences are events in space. Searle (1992) wrote that "conscious states are situated and they are experienced as situated" and further commented that "it is precisely the task of neurobiology to explain these and other questions about consciousness".

Each of these problems will be analysed below and a theory proposed to incorporate them all.

Mental Space

Consider this page of text when viewed through one eye. Your sense of depth is slightly reduced compared with binocular vision but if you move closer to the page it is evident that you are closer because the page fills more of your field of view. As you might expect, the world appears as if a 'point eye' is viewing it. There is a spherical space arranged all around this 'point eye' and things are seen simultaneously. Observation from a point is also suggested by the way every point on the text seems to send a unique ray to your 'point eye' that is not smudged or obscured by rays coming from other parts of the text.

There is a problem with viewing from a point: according to the simple geometry and physics taught at school, something separated from an observation point cannot be observed unless another thing, such as a photon of light, or other information carrier, moves from it to the observation point. If this were the case then all the bits of information would pile up on top of each other at the point so that nothing could be seen distinctly. Clearly if we do observe from a point it must involve something more than simple geometry and physics.

What we seem to observe in mental space is a sphere of information that is viewed from a point with the paradox that the information would also need to be at the point to be viewed.

This description can be put in a simple mathematical form. Suppose the observation point is the origin of a co-ordinate system and x, y, z is the position of any bit of information on the inside of a sphere. The separation (h) of the bit of information from the viewing point is given by the three dimensional version of Pythagoras' theorem as:

h² = x² + y² + z²

In three dimensions information can only be at the origin when x, y, and z are zero so that h is zero.

The analysis shows that in 3D information can either be on the inside of a sphere or jumbled up at a point, it cannot be in both places. Gregory (1966) realised this when he considered the observation of the retinal image and concluded that transferring information from place to place in the brain was an "absurd" way of explaining our conscious experience. The impossibility of a 3D point observation shows that such an observation is not three dimensional. Our observation exists so it must be something other than a 3D projection.

What is required to describe our actual experience is a geometrical formula where the original positions of the information are preserved but where the projection, h, is zero, in other words a description where the information is projected in 3D but also at a point. This can be described by introducing a new co-ordinate (f) at right angles to the other three so that:

(1) 0 = x² + y² + z² - f²

The new co-ordinate would be measured in units of "imaginary" metres (the square root of minus one times metres) or would be composed of a conjugate such as minus f times plus f. The "imaginary" co-ordinate is at right angles to the x, y and z axes and when an object is displaced along this co-ordinate its projection from the origin can vary until it is zero. Equation (1) seems to be a credible description of mental space: (x2 + y2 + z2) represents the squared projection of information on the inside of a 3D sphere and the way the entire equation sums to zero describes how the information is also no distance from the observation point.

If we experience things so that their projection from the viewing point is zero then they would appear to be separated from each other by angles subtended at the viewing point rather than by actual 3D space. This is indeed how things appear to us, even things in dreams subtend angles at our mind's viewing point or 'mind's eye'. The mind's eye is not limited to vision, the positions of all sensations are related back to this observation point. Perhaps, in the spirit of science, before we ask what sees what the mind's eye sees, it would be productive to explore this empirical viewing point further.

Equation (1) is an empirical formula that describes experience, not an application of physical theory to experience, it does however have the same form as a well-known equation in physics called the "Minkowski Light Cone Equation" (Minkowski 1908). The "Minkowski Light Cone Equation" transformed Einstein's principle of relativity into a theory of a universe that is a space-time continuum where space and time are geometrically interdependent. This formulation of relativity is now the accepted form in physics and underpins the whole of special relativity, general relativity and much of quantum physics (cf: Dirac's relativistic version of the Schrodinger equation). The surface of the "Minkowski Light Cone" has the form:

(2) 0 = x² + y² + z² - (ct) ²

where c is a constant that converts seconds to metres, t is the time difference between the origin and the time of an event and linearity is assumed (see Note 1). The constant "c", the factor for converting seconds into metres, is also known as the "speed of light" and is the maximum velocity. These zero length vectors are known as "null geodesics" and are simultaneously at the origin because they have no projection.

When Minkowski derived the "light cone equation" he proposed that space and time are geometrically interrelated and that the universe is a four dimensional space-time. This is now the conventional view in physics. Hermann Weyl wrote that reality is a "four-dimensional continuum which is neither "time" nor "space". Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it, as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space" (Weyl 1918). Almost every text on Special Relativity after Minkowski's formulation of space-time stresses the geometric interdependence of space and time but it is characteristic of Weyl's genius to note that the physical time which composes the fourth dimension is not the same as mental time.

Most students have difficulty conceptualising a physical time that interacts geometrically with the extension of a thing in space. They have a feeling that the simple length of things must be constant. In fact it is only the four dimensional extension of a thing that is constant (invariant) between inertial observers, other measurements such as length vary according to who observes them (see for instance Carroll 2001 or any advanced physics textbook). The fact that length measurements differ in the expected manner between inertial observers proves that the universe is at least four dimensional. This geometrical interaction of space and physical time is an integral part of Special Relativity and has been the bedrock of the ontology of physics for about a century.

The similarity between equations (1) and (2) is such that it would be surprising if they did not describe the same thing. Our empirical experience of viewing from a point and of seeing things simultaneously and projected is an experience of variables of an identical type and in an identical relationship to those described by Minkowski's equation. Given this identical type and relationship, it is not at all speculative to propose that Minkowski's equation describes some of the geometry of our experience.

Notice that Minkowski's equation (2) is insensitive to the sign of the coordinates and could describe a vector pointing into the future or a vector pointing into the past along the same path. It might, for instance, describe the path of an electromagnetic wave with the retarded wave travelling forwards in time and the advanced wave travelling backwards in time (See for example Cramer 1986).

Minkowski's equation (2) is a description of a sphere of things connected to the centre by null geodesics. Any tendency of a field or particle to perform an oscillation into the centre and back again along a null geodesic would appear as an alignment that favours such a motion, the motion itself being completed instantaneously at the position of the particle. Fields or particles possessing such an alignment would be extended along the zero length path that constitutes the null geodesic. Another way in which equations (1) and (2) could be interpreted is to propose that time can be calculated using imaginary numbers (cf: Hawking 1993) so that a real zero projection exists provided that no energy is transferred along it. The sphere of things would then be at a Euclidean geometric point in 4D.

That physical interpretations may exist is intriguing but in an empirical analysis of conscious experience it is sufficient to point out that null geodesics appear to have the same mathematical form and are composed of the same variables in the same relationships as the vectors that populate our conscious experience. It is the role of theoretical physicists to extend the analysis beyond this identification of conscious experience with the classical four dimensional observer that is embodied in physical theory and described by Minkowski's equation.

Minkowski's equation is a description of physical space-time and the standard neurobiological model of the mind is that it is produced by the brain as a combination of sense data and internal processes. This means that if Minkowski's equation is also a description of our mental space there must be clear physical correlates of mental space in the brain. The spherical shell of observed mental events would need to be represented in a smooth volume of brain activity. The x, y, z co-ordinates would be positions of activity relative to the observation point and the observation point itself would be at the geometric centre of such activity (the origin of the co-ordinate system). The convolutions of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum are unlikely locations for smooth volumes of activity. In view of this it is probable either that such a uniform volumes are physically located in the smooth, phylogenetically older parts of the brain or in some form of "field", like an electric, magnetic, quantum field etc. that is created by the whole, or part of, the brain.

The activity at the observation point itself would be the activity of all those parts of the brain that are zero distance from it in the direction of the null geodesics. This could be brain activity that occurred a few pico-seconds ago, depending upon the radius of the brain activity that is observed (this value is calculated from t = radius/c). The observation point would be in the future relative to the physical present.

If some part of the brain specialises in creating mental space then lesions in that part would abolish our mental space and, probably, our consciousness. The idea that consciousness might be localised in a small part of the brain has been current since Descartes' proposed the pineal body for this role. Bogen (1995) has proposed that consciousness may be localised in the Intralaminar Nuclei (ILN) of the thalamus because these are related to arousal and intimately connected to the cerebral cortex and because bilateral lesions of the ILN can abolish consciousness. Combining the model in equation (1) and Bogen's analysis of the site of consciousness leads to the proposition that mental space could be located in the ILN or in nuclei dependent upon them.

The Experience of Time

If someone is speaking we hear their words from the direction of their mouths, if we feel pressure or pain we feel it at a particular place in our bodies. In general, when we observe events they take place at the positions of the events in our mental space.

When we hear someone say a word such as "hello" we hear the "h", "e", "l" and "o" sounds distributed through time. An entire period of about a second is available to us. This spread of a word through time is reminiscent of the extension of a line through space. As an example, the line "_______" occupies a length of a co-ordinate axis which is at right angles to your direction of observation and located on the page so that you see the line as an angle made at your observation point. In a similar way the temporal extension of a word seems to be arranged along a time axis that extends from the location of the person who said the word and makes an angle through time at your observation point.

Notice that the "h" of "hello" becomes increasingly historical the moment it has left the mouth, it seems that everything we experience is actually historical. There appears to be no such thing as an experience of "now".

Temporal extension seems to occupy no more than one or two seconds, beyond this interval we must use recall to insert a word or event back into our experience.

You, the observer of the word, seem to be at a point in both space and time. The point in space is the observation point and the point in time is assumed to be the present instant. In other words your experience of time consists of events in mental space that extend through time and which are observed at an observation point. The observation point is both a point in space and a "durationless instant", or point, in time whilst the observation is extended in time and space.

Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry do not contain the appropriate tools for analysing the way our experience is extended in time. These archaic models of the world do not involve a continuously existing past. Fortunately, from the time of Riemann onwards tools have been available for dealing with things arranged in time as well as space.

As Hermann Weyl noted, the mental experience of time is not the same as physical time. Physical time subtracts from space, drawing events toward an observation point, whereas mental time is a direction where events are laid out for observation. Mental time seems to be a new direction where events can be arranged, a new co-ordinate axis. The relationship between mental time (T), physical time and space might be described mathematically because all of these are zero distance from the observation point when they are observable:

(3) 0 = dx² + dy² + dz² + k²dT² - c²dt²

Where T is mental time and k is a conversion factor from mental seconds to metres, a differential form is used because mental time spans a short interval. This equation describes how we seem to experience events laid out within a sphere of indeterminate radius yet observed at a point. The events extend through mental time at their positions in space yet the observation point is at the present instant. This equation might be dismissed as highly speculative but this is not the case. The equation is based on our empirical experience: we do indeed experience things extended in time and we do indeed experience these from the same point as our general experience. It is an empirical equation that describes the trans-temporal projection of experience and uses no other authority than the multidimensional version of Pythagoras' theorem.

Mental time (T) could be any direction (or resultant direction of further dimensions) where information can be ordered independently of the other dimensions (x, y, z and t). It would acquire a time-like character from the fact that physical position (x2+ y2+z2)1/2 is constant and small compared with physical time in metres (ct) for times in excess of a microsecond or so. At relatively long times (microseconds) after an event, mental time (kT) becomes dependent on physical time (ct) and any ordering of events in physical time will appear as a sequence of events in mental time. Notice that, to remain observable, an event would need to increase displacement in mental time as it is displaced in physical time, this might be accomplished by a movement of our observation point along the fifth dimension at nearly the speed of light.

Unlike equation (1), equation (3) does not correspond to a universally accepted physical reality although five dimensional space-times are currently at the forefront of physical theories of the cosmos and matter (Overduin and Wesson 1997, Sajko, Wesson and Liu 1999, Linde 1990-2002). Five dimensional space-time has long been a possible interpretation of General Relativity Theory and in the form given here is known as a "de Sitter universe", physical time is conventionally imaginary in such a universe. The physical correlates of equation (3) are clear: it would describe a sequence of activity inside of a sphere of brain tissue or a sequence of changes in some whole brain field (electric, quantum etc). This sequence of activity would have a zero-length projection from a central, five dimensional observation point.

Although words appear to extend in time for perhaps a second or so, change in visual content seems to extend in time for much briefer intervals. If you move a finger in front of this text the image of the underlying text appears to replace the image of the finger almost as soon as it has passed. In the case of vision it seems to be the static part of the visual field that extends through time in preference to changes in the visual field (although changes may have a small extension in time).

Given that it is the static part of the visual field that seems to persist in preference to changes it is possible that some of our sense of depth is encoded in mental time, each view at a particular depth being placed in conscious experience in time sequence. Such an effect would occur naturally as a result of focusing in and out when viewing a scene. (See Peters (2000) for a review of modern theories of depth perception.)

Our experience of time is central to our feeling of being conscious. If we experienced no more than a durationless instant we would experience nothing. Nothing happens in no time at all. Our conscious experience is an experience of the duration of things and it is because the "I" and the "am" of "I am" are both available that you "are".

Mental Content

If mental time and space are accepted, mental content can only be things in this time and space. Even content such as emotions exists in mental time and space, being a mixture of sensations from the body and global changes in the texture and vividness of other mental content. Objects would be represented by the brain activity that outlines and fills the shape of the object and colours would be particular types or sequences of activity, as would other qualia such as sounds, sickness or intuitions.

The exact nature of the brain activity that generates content, whether it is electrical impulses, electrical fields (McFadden 2002), states of microtubules (Hammeroff and Penrose 1996) or quantum fields (Flanagan 2002) is not clear.

A completely representational model of mental content is being proposed but such a model is inevitable once mental space and time are identified with the real space and time of the brain.

The Homunculus

It was proposed above that the contents of mental time and space are brain activity observed at a point. But what observes this activity? We feel 'we' are at the point of observation but the equations given above suggest that only the observed brain activity is 'at' this point, being zero distance from it. In other words the observation is also the observer. This sounds bizarre but consider your analysis of the phrase "the observation is also the observer", you might think pictorially of a person looking out at something but where is that picture? It is in your mental space. Alternatively you may have an intuition that there must be something at the observation point that processes the observation, but where is that intuition? It might be a verbal thought in that part of mental space that represents your head.

The identification of the observer with the observation is also true of time. The extension of the mind in time allows the intuition of the question "am I conscious?" and of the answer "yes" to be embraced in the same trans-temporal experience in the same way as the sound "h" and the sound "o" are both part of the entire trans-temporal experience of the word "hello". This is not a speculation but an observed part of our everyday lives. Again the observation is extended, in this case extended in time, but the observation point is just a geometric phenomenon that we call the present instant.

Whatever 'we' might be we are to be found in our observation, in the content of our minds, in contrast the observation point itself is nothing more than a geometric phenomenon where this observation has zero projection in four or more dimensions.

This entire article is a description of mental geometry so it must be possible to communicate the geometrical form of being an observer to our material brain. A possible candidate for this communication is part of what is known as "attention". When we attend to something it is usually either because our unconscious brain has inserted a thought such as "find a doughnut" or because something unexpected occurs. In both these cases we are matching our perception to a template created by the unconscious brain. In the first case we are explicitly matching the form of the doughnut of our desires with the form of a "doughnut" derived from our senses and in the second we are matching the expected sequence of events with that which actually occurred.

It seems that the observation point/observation structure may communicate whether there is a match or mismatch between states of brain activity.

The ability of the conscious mind to match the current state of an observation to previous states has been proposed as a feature of quantum computation in the brain (Woolf and Hameroff, 2001). These authors propose that the state vector of the quantum computation is reduced by "Orchestrated Objective Reduction" (Orch OR) (Penrose 1989) to provide a defined output when superposed quantum states match.

An alternative form of state vector reduction could occur if quantum events are actually due to 5D waves such as those suggested by Sajko,Wesson and Liu 1999. Mental content would have a highly constrained position in five dimensions because, to remain observable, an event would need to increase displacement in the fifth dimension as physical time increases. This suggests that a five dimensional observation might achieve state vector reduction by selection of a particular state rather than by "collapsing" the state vector. Such a suggestion is highly speculative but might link a 5D theory of consciousness into the wider problem of the observer in quantum physics. The result of the quantum computation would be brain activity that would constitute an observation and also be capable of communicating with the unconscious brain.

A model of consciousness can now be proposed that does not require a homunculus and which can be described in terms of experience and brain activity. Our experience of consciousness consists of information that is arranged in space and time but has zero projection from a geometric point. There is nothing at this geometric observation point but the projected observation. Observations, including thoughts and emotions appear almost fully formed in this mental space and time, being inserted there by the unconscious part of our brains. Attention occurs within consciousness and it is this attention that communicates the conscious state to the unconscious part of the brain. Above all it is extension in time that imparts awareness because both an event and the analysis of the event are within an observation.

If the brain activity that is the mind is at a geometric point then our experience is entirely an experience of vectors pointing inwards and our knowledge of both space and time is the experience of these vectors and their angular separations. This might explain why everything has a "sidedness", why "bob" does not appear as "dod" or "bod" or just a jumble of points. Experience is the vectors emanating from the brain activity that represents a thing rather than the brain activity itself. Brain activity itself has no "sidedness", there is no reason to prefer one side of an EM field or one side of a synaptic field to another unless experience is a directed set of vectors emanating from the field.

This model also explains how our experience becomes a whole. Every vector in our experience has an angular relationship to every other vector as a result of the termination of all the vectors at the same point where they are a single entity.

It is the fact that all of our immediate experience is historical up to a limit of about 1 to 2 seconds coupled with our inexorable flight into the future that makes us aware. At any instant there are vectors pointing inwards from the entire second or so of extended present, as new vectors appear the oldest vectors are lost. Our minds become a continuous reappraisal by our unconscious brain of the current slice of extended present.

Conclusions

The model of the observer proposed above is an empirical model. It analyses the time and space that is evident in our experience using the multidimensional version of Pythagoras' theorem, the simplest tool available for such a task. The resulting 5D mathematical model is simple but describes our empirical experience of time and space. The model turns out to be very similar to the model of time and space that physicists use to describe the physical world. This would be expected if the mind is brain activity or part of the brain's activity.

The link between the geometry of our experience and the geometry of the physical world is most simply understood if physical time is a true geometrical entity. The geometrical nature of physical time is widely assumed in physics (Weyl 1918, Rietdijk 1966, Petkov 1988, Dowden 2001) and in practice physical time is integrated into the geometry of the world used in Special Relativity, General Relativity and Quantum Theory. It is largely non-physicists who regard the fourth dimension as something to do with "Star Trek" and not something that interacts with our everyday lives through phenomena as common as kinetic energy, magnetism and gravity.

It should be stressed that the geometrical theory does not depend on time as an "imaginary" dimension, the standard model in physics that uses "real" time also supports the theory and is also understood by physicists to be a dimension that interacts geometrically with space. In fact the geometrical theory could be interpreted as a simple mathematical description of conscious experience without noting that it has exact parallels in the physical world, however, if the world is, at least, 4 dimensional it would not be surprising if our brains reflected this in the form of a mind.

In the geometrical theory of consciousness the brain activity that gives rise to conscious experience could be a field of activity generated by a substantial portion of the brain or, more probably, activity in a small part of the brain that becomes a 'consciousness centre'. Brain activity would be arranged in at least five dimensions and would form a set of zero length vectors terminating at a point. This would allow things to be present on the inside of a sphere of indeterminate radius and positioned according to their angular separation. Brain activity would also be extended into a putative 5th co-ordinate axis along which the succession of arrangements of things that are experienced would be ordered. The observation point would be a geometrical phenomenon that would move continually along the diagonal between the fourth and fifth co-ordinate axes so providing the flow of time.

The conscious mind would be the five dimensional null geodesics at a point that would span a few millimetres of brain tissue and a second or so of time, the starting points of the vectors being a multidimensional matrix of brain activity.

It is the fact that we can experience events trans-temporally that results in awareness. The state of a matrix of conscious brain activity at one instant can become an input to the unconscious, processing parts of the brain. The unconscious brain can modify the matrix at a later instant in response to the input and the matrix as a whole can span both instants. As an example the unconscious brain might load the matrix with "am I conscious?", this would become an input to the unconscious brain which would then load the matrix with "yes". Both the question and the answer would be present trans-temporally in the matrix. Any immediate uncertainty about whether the reply had really been "yes" would be resolved by the evident presence of "yes" half a second away in the matrix, the unconscious brain would insert the intuition "definitely" to confirm this. If you ask yourself the questions and provide the answers you can experience this happening.

It is also proposed that the geometry of conscious experience would be the phenomenon that would resolve the state of a quantum processor that matches the patterns of brain activity to the patterns of the world. This means that the 'consciousness centre' would be part of a feedback loop that controls the state of the cerebral cortex. The thalamus is the most probable location for a 'consciousness centre' because it receives input from every part of the cerebral cortex by way of the corticothalamic tracts and is able to provide feedback to the entire cortex through the thalamocortical tracts. The "corticothalamic synapses on thalamic neurons largely outnumber afferent synapses" (Destexhe 2000) which suggests that the primary role of the thalamus is the integration of cortical activity. (The cerebral cortex itself is composed of specialised areas rather than areas that integrate all activity; see for instance Zeki & Bartel (1999).)

The size of a brain nucleus that might support conscious experience would depend on the density of information required. The optic nerve contains about a million fibres so a total of at least one million information points might be needed. The geometrical theory of consciousness presented here would allow the integration of information throughout the volume of a solid nucleus in the brain and would permit information to be held at the level of individual synapses. There might be over 100000 synapses per mm3 (over 1000 per neuron) in a nucleus which means that a nucleus of 2 mm in radius (about 3 million synapses) might support a sufficient density of information to be a consciousness centre. Even the smallest thalamic nucleus could be a potential candidate for a consciousness centre but as Bogen (1995) has pointed out, the ILN are particularly good candidates.

The observation that destruction of both sets of ILN causes irreversible coma, that electrical stimulation of the centromedian nuclei of the ILN causes absence seizures, that the thalamus and ILN are intimately connected to the output and input of the cortex and the many other arguments proposed by Bogen (1995) all suggest that the ILN could be a location for the experience of consciousness. The geometrical model of consciousness proposed here provides a description of how a small nucleus in the brain could contain this experience of consciousness and supports Bogen's hypothesis.

If there are localised centres for consciousness and if the geometric model of consciousness is correct then any physical manipulation that significantly deforms the centre should cause definite effects such as seizures, absence seizures, pre-epileptic auras or loss of consciousness. The effects could be monitored behaviourally or with an EEG. The design of an experiment to test this prediction might be difficult because of the effects of mechanical distortion on blood flow, the possibility of mechanisms that compensate for distortion and the difficulty of producing deformation in a solid nucleus. Bilateral symmetry and the possible existence of mechanisms that compensate for distortion means that a bilateral vibrating stimulus might be most effective.

Deforming putative centres for consciousness would test whether the geometry of the mind can affect brain activity. Such deformations may not have been tried in conscious patients because of the known danger of irreversible coma should the ILN be damaged. If bilateral deformation were to have no effect then the proposed feedback mechanism would not exist and, according to the geometrical theory, consciousness would be epiphenomenal, simply displaying brain activity.

Direct electrical stimulation of the consciousness centre should have perceptible effects. Extracellular stimulation might cause pre-epileptic auras, absence seizures, or other suspension of consciousness, intracellular or synaptic stimulation might cause localised qualia. Velasco et al (2000) have discovered that 3Hz stimulation of the Centromedian Nucleus of the Thalamus (part of the ILN) causes absence seizures.

The proposed centre would contain a representation of the contents of mental space that would be laid out as an exact mapping of the experience of the contents. This representation would be physiological rather than anatomical because mental space can contain visual images, dreams, sounds, feelings etc. In-vivo recording in the centre in a subject attending to a visual scene or cutaneous sensation should demonstrate neural activity that is positioned retino-topically or somato-topically.

Bilateral symmetry means that if consciousness is localised then there would be two centres for consciousness. In the case of the ILN, the centromedian nucleus of one side can be removed without severe adverse effects but bilateral damage causes coma, death, delirium and a range of other defects depending upon the severity of the lesions (Schiff & Plum 1999). This shows that, if there are two centres for consciousness within the ILN, then either can provide full functionality. The geometric model of consciousness would require that one side of the brain would be dominant but there could be two consciousness centres, the non-dominant acting as a substitute if the dominant centre were destroyed.

Although much emphasis has been placed on the ILN and especially the centromedian nucleus it is possible that any centre for consciousness would be in nuclei dependent upon these or even that consciousness exists in a field that extends over a volume of brain.

Although this article is concerned with neurophysiology and neurology, the geometrical model of consciousness may be regarded as direct observational evidence that the universe may conform to a geometry that is similar to that proposed by de Sitter.

References

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Notes:

(1) Note that equation (1) can also be written as 0 = f² - x² - y² - z² and equation(2) as 0 = (ct)² - x² - y² - z² where x, y, z are the "imaginary" lengths. All variables in the equation are small displacements and the space-time is assumed to be linear. A more exact differential formulation that takes non-linearity into account is:

0 = df² - dx² - dy² - dz²

Some notes on projective geometry

2009-02-12T02:54:00.000-08:00

Projective geometry originated in the Renaissance when artists sought a method to introduce accurate perspective into art. This artistic perspective assumed that the viewer had a single, point eye and that the artist's canvas lay between the eye and the contents of the view. The problem of projective geometry then consisted of discovering how the relationships in the view would be transferred onto the canvas. Projective geometry allowed the creation of highly convincing pictures.

Canaletto - La Regata Vista da Ca' Foscari Courtesy Wikicommons

In ordinary projective geometry the eye, the plane of the canvas and the planes in the view are separated by the space along a line from the point eye to the objects in the view.

Principle of perspectiveCourtesy Wikicommons

There is an interesting guide to perspective in art at: Scribd: Projective Geometry and a good introduction to simple projective geometry at: Projective geometry by Tom Davis.

Until the twentieth century physicists regarded this geometry as little more than an interesting insight into perspective drawing although mathematicians such as Klein thought that it might lie at the root of all geometry. However, in 1908 Hermann Minkowski discovered that Einstein's theory of Special Relativity was actually due to the existence of four dimensional spacetime and could be analysed using projective geometry (See Silagadze 2007).

Einstein's Theory of Relativity is one of the most important discoveries of all time because it describes the world as four dimensional. According to relativity theory things can be arranged left-right, up-down, back-forwards and past-future.

Suppose you and I are together then you walk straight down the street for 3 metres and make a right angled turn to the left then carry on walking for 4 metres. How far away from me will you be "as the crow flies", or, to put it more technically, what is the relationship between 3 metres in the forward-back direction and 4 metres in the left-right direction?

Most older children know the answer to this question, the relationship is known as Pythagoras' Theorem and we all learnt Pythagoras' Theorem at school: in a right angled triangle the square on the hypoteneuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides. In my example 3 squared plus 4 squared is 9 + 16, or 25, and this is the square of the distance as the crow flies. So the distance as the crow flies is the square root of 25 or 5 metres. The same reasoning applies to you walking 3 metres away from me then climbing a 4 metre pole, you will again be 5 metres away as the crow flies. So up-down, forward-back and left-right directions are related to each other by Pythagoras' Theorem (h²=x²+y²).

But how are these three directions in space related to time?

How far away is something that is 4 metres away but also a second in the past? According to physicists this distance (called a space-time interval) is given by a modified version of Pythagoras' Theorem where the square of the space-time interval equals the square of the spatial distance MINUS the square of the distance in time - in maths: h²=x²-T². The distance in time is measured in metres and is related to the time in seconds by a constant, "c", which is numerically equal to the speed of light in a vacuum.

If you are not familiar with relativity this idea of things being separated from you by both time and space will be strange and may seem simply wrong. I would strongly recommend Wikibooks: Special Relativity as an introduction.

The immediate consequence of this interdependence of space and time is that only things that have a space-time interval of zero relative to you can be in contact with you now. All other things are separated from you by time or by space. This gives rise to the modern, physical idea of an observer as a point at the centre of all incoming and outgoing light rays because only things travelling at the speed of light can have a space-time interval of zero.

Those events that have a space-time interval of zero relative to an observation point can be represented by a geometrical form known as the "light cone". The diagram below shows a light cone.

Image courtesy of Wikibooks: Special Relativity.

When people first come across the "lightcone" they think that it is straightforward because information must be transmitted to us by photons or by lumps of matter actually hitting us. So, of course, it is obvious that the only things we can know are things that have a zero space-time distance from us. At first sight it seems that the light cone is about the delivery of photons and nothing else. However, when I was considering simple distances the hypotenuse was a real distance, it was shorter than walking along two sides of a triangle. If this is true then the space-time interval should actually be shorter than the combined distance travelled through space and time. So when we see a photon is its source right next to us because the space-time interval is zero or is the source separate from us? The answer to this question depends upon the reality of dimensional time.

Another consequence of the reality of time would be that when we move about each of us has a very slightly different set of things in what we regard as our "present instant". In other words, in a 4D universe, different events are simultaneous for different, moving observers.

This prediction of Relativity Theory theory is exposed in an exaggerated form in the "Rietdijk-Putnam-Penrose" argument. Penrose described the argument:

"Two people pass each other on the street; and according to one of the two people, an Andromedean space fleet has already set off on its journey, while to the other, the decision as to whether or not the journey will actually take place has not yet been made. How can there still be some uncertainty as to the outcome of that decision? If to either person the decision has already been made, then surely there cannot be any uncertainty. The launching of the space fleet is an inevitability." (Penrose 1989).

Image courtesy of Wikibooks: Special Relativity.

The important thing to remember about this argument is that it applies to things that occur in the hypothetical present moment at great distances from the two people. What the people actually see at any moment is the light that left Andromeda 2 million years ago and they both see near enough the same light when they are together. The light left Andromeda 2 million years ago and the burning question for our two observers is to guess what is happening now. It turns out that relativity predicts that each individual has different events in their distant present moments and this means that either time exists or we each live in our own fantasy world. Recently the existence of time has been confirmed by experiments that allow electrons to interfere with their own past selves.

Philosophers tend to recoil from this approach to the universe because it appears as if all events would be fixed forever and there would be no free will (See Is There an Alternative to the Block Universe View? Petkov 2007). Scientists, on the other hand, would suspect that there must be more to the universe than four dimensional space-time. Perhaps another direction for arranging things (a fifth dimension) or maybe quantum theory puts the variability into life.

What is interesting about relativity in the context of the philosophy of mind is that, if dimensional time exists, any set of events that lie on a light cone can be at no distance from the point at the centre of the cone. In effect the events can all be at a single point even though they are still separated in space and time. This possibility of events being "out there" in space and time but bridged together at a point is very similar to our empirical conscious experience. In other words, projective geometry gets really interesting when one of the directions for arranging things has a negative sign in Pythagoras' Theorem (what Hermann Weyl called a "negative dimension") - when negative dimensions are present there are paths, such as the paths of photons, that are measured to have zero length in the spatiotemporal direction of travel.

Introductory texts

Nineteenth Century Geometry. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/geometry-19th/#ProGeo

Investigations in Projective Geometry. Dwayne Alvis and Wanda Naborshttp http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT669/Student.Folders/Alvis.Dwayne/instruct/iu.html

More advanced texts

Davis, T. Projective geometry. http://www.geometer.org/mathcircles/projective.pdf

Silagadze, Z.K. 2007 Relativity without tears. http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/0708.0929

Wolfram MathWorld Projective Geometry. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ProjectiveGeometry.html

Projective Geometry http://www.cs.elte.hu/geometry/csikos/proj/proj.html

Time and conscious experience

2009-02-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

"Should we be scientists and describe our experience before developing hypotheses to explain it ...?"

Conscious experience has been described by numerous philosophers over the ages. For instance, Aristotle regards conscious experience as a representation composed of images, Descartes(1641) describes conscious experience as things laid out in space and time, Dennett(1991) describes a person viewing events in a “plenum” (a material space), and so on. In general conscious experience is described as things within the view of an observer that are laid out in space and time. These descriptions can be agreed by all of us as we look around and sense the world and our bodies.

Plato and Aristotle by RaphaelCourtesy Wikimedia Commons

Most people would agree with the general description and even place verbal thoughts “in their head” (Ryle 1949). How this experience becomes “conscious” is generally regarded as a mystery but the experience itself also has mysterious qualities. The most mysterious quality of experience is how a simultaneous and continuous set of things that are distributed in space can become part of a “view” in which they appear to be arranged around an observation point. We seem to look out at the world as if seeing it from a point eye and even our dreams and imaginings appear as if seen from an inner eye. How can we explain this? Is conscious experience an illusion and simply an inference produced by the processing engine of the brain or is it a physical phenomenon in its own right? If it is a physical phenomenon then what is its physical description?

A note on naïve realism
"There is no point eye that receives a conical view of the world"

Before proceeding further I should consider a couple of misconceptions about geometrical optics. The first misconception is that there are images out there in the world. Images are properties of optical instruments and the reason that paper is white is that the light that falls on it is disorganised and comes from everywhere around: photons go all over the place and do not make images outside of instruments. The second misconception is the belief that our eyes act as a single point that sees the world projected around it. There is no “point eye” that receives a conical view of the world, the reality is that light falls all over the cornea to be redirected to the retina. It is also the case that when I wink about thirty percent of the visual field is blanked out, I have two eyes with sometimes quite different images in each and only one conscious, visual experience so the idea of a physical “point eye” looking out at a cone of light rays does not correspond with the physical facts.

Images are different in the two eyes Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Aristotle's analysis
"..if we have experience then the impressions that are the source of this experience cannot endlessly give rise to further impressions; somewhere the chain of impressions stops and something other than transferring impressions occurs to make experience."

Aristotle, some two and a half millennia ago appears to have understood that we could not explain conscious experience through optical considerations alone. In his book, “On the Soul”, he notes that information travels from the world to the eye by making “impressions” on the materials that intervene between the object of vision and the eye (1). He also spots that successions of impressions could never lead to our visual experience because the simple transfer of impressions from place to place would lead to an infinite regress (2). Aristotle responds to this problem by proposing that the transfer of impressions must end somewhere so that “in every case the mind which is actively thinking is the objects which it thinks.” (3).

In other words, according to Aristotle, if we have experience then the impressions that are the source of this experience cannot endlessly give rise to further impressions; somewhere the chain of impressions stops and something other than transferring impressions occurs to make experience.

The alternative to Aristotle's view is to deny much of conscious experience and to maintain that there are only judgments about the world (Dennett 1988). This approach allows the neuroscientist to investigate reflexes and behavioural responses but it may be avoiding the issue of the nature of experience itself. The problem of whether or not we fool ourselves with incorrect judgments about conscious experience will be considered after describing this experience.

Describing conscious experience
"..When I look in a mirror I cannot observe my eyes moving even when I deliberately move them to left and right,.."

A description of conscious experience is needed before I can address the problem of the nature of conscious experience.

As a simple beginning, suppose that I limit my description to visual experience obtained using one eye. This provides me with a limited view of the surroundings with a small segment of my nose on one side and little sense of depth. Several things can persist in my view over a period of time and so I say that I have things simultaneously in my view. I describe the way that there is more than one thing present at any instant by using the word “space”, for instance I say that these two letters "ii" occupy space. My view is clearest in a small, central zone. The relative lateral separation of the elements of the view from the central zone depends, approximately, upon the angle that they make at a point that coincides with the one eye. The elements of the view also compose what I call a “surface” because only one side of anything is in the view.

If I hold the shaft of a pin or paper clip immediately in front of the one eye then I can see right through it. This demonstrates how the image in the view is formed from light that falls all over the cornea of the one eye. The shaft would obscure any "point eye".

When I look at the world using two eyes instead of one the view scarcely changes but the side of my nose disappears and the view expands by about a third. The point at which things are directed is like a centre of the possible visual field. This description of a viewing point corresponds to the descriptions given by Reid(1764), Descartes(1664) and Leibniz(1695).

If I place a finger in front of the centre of one of my two eyes it seems as if I can see straight through the finger, although a semi-transparent outline of the finger remains. If I gently press the side of one eye through the eyelid the view becomes a double image. These effects demonstrate how the images from both eyes are combined to form a single image.

When I look in a mirror I cannot observe my eyes moving even when I deliberately move them to left and right, looking from one eye to another. This “saccadic suppression” suggests that what I am observing may not be the images that are on the back of my eyes but an image in my brain. If I rotate my whole body as rapidly as possible to simulate eye movement without saccadic suppression then the moving retinal image is not suppressed and I can see that without saccadic suppression and the creation of a stable, internal model, my view of the world would be a useless blur. (This actual observation is the opposite of Blackmore's (Blackmore 2002) inferred conclusion that there is no visual content between saccades, as are the red dots that appear during saccades across modern, pulsed, LED rear car lights at night).

Over longer periods my experience also seems to involve what I call “time” in the form of continuity and change. Philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes(1641), Kant(1781), Clay(1890), James(1890) and Whitehead(1920) have all noted that experience seems to contain a whole interval of time, a “specious”, “psychological” or extended present moment. But what is the extension in time within experience like? Clay(1890) observes that we hear all the notes of a bar of a tune as a single segment of time and Gombrich(1964) writes that we do not just hear a single phoneme of a word but hear the whole word spread through time. The essential feature of these reports is that experience seems to be arranged along an independent time axis with the various events, such as the phonemes of a word, being separated along this axis. I also find that words, bars of tunes etc. appear to be extended through about a second of time but experienced now. (The way that two separate times can be present now is explained below).

I notice that the existence of time within my experience also allows me to have “directions” within it. If I drop a small object a short distance then the motion occurs inside my experience and it is a whole sweep of experience that lasts through the time taken. The motion is from the start point to the end point and so has a direction.

Time also seems to affect the view within my experience, for instance, if I change visual focus from a nearby to a distant object then the change of visual content occurs within my extended present. I call this possibility of motion away from my viewing point “depth”. This description of depth corresponds with Cutting and Vishton's (1995) idea of “action space” and means that what I call spatial separation in directions along a line from the apparent observation point away from me is actually a possibility of temporal separation that can be made active by movement into it or imagining a movement into it.

The existence of directions within my experience can be used to describe the surfaces that occur all around me as surface elements that are directed towards my viewing point.

When I listen to music on a “Hi Fi” with one loudspeaker the sounds come from the direction of the loudspeaker. Each bar of music comes from the direction of the loudspeaker but the start of each bar is prior to the end of each bar at that position. I find that as the elements of music move into the past they appear to continue to be directed at a listening point in the present instant. This allows a segment of the past to be in my experience now.

I will give an example of how a segment of the past can be in my experience now. When I see someone speaking the sound seems to occur at the same place as the sight of their mouth. Each phoneme forms auditory elements at the mouth that are directed at my apparent listening point. As “time passes” the phonemes are not lost. I do not just hear the “o” of “hello” but hear the whole word and still have the “he” in experience. The word forms an arrangement of directed elements, the phonemes, extended through time at the position of the mouth of the speaker, each element being directed at a common point, the centre of my experience, in my instantaneous present. The elements that compose the word are terminated abruptly at the end of the word.

The time extension of my experience is similar to the spatial extension of my experience. Spatial extension involves the angular separation of elements at a point and time extension involves the angular separation of events in the past that are directed at the point of my present instant. This description of the extended or “specious” present agrees with William James' (1890) description: “In short, the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our perception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were -- a rearward -- and a forward-looking end.”.

The time extended sets of events in my experience always have the direction earlier to later. Despite this directedness of events I feel as if I am "now". If I am "now" then why do not events appear as if they are directed from the present into the past? They do not appear directed from the present into the past because they are separate from the apparent observation point. As in William James' analogy of a "saddle-back", I experience events laid out at a distance and directed from past to present but viewed as if from the point of the present instant of my viewing point. Like James, my "now" seems a bit behind the leading edge of events, for example, if I hear a pigeon cooing my listening point seems to be between the two repeated "coos", with the second ahead of it in time and the first slightly behind it although both "coos" are in my experience. As experience progresses my listening point moves along the time axis with the sounds.

I mentioned earlier that experience terminates abruptly at the end of a whole word. When my apparent listening point draws level in time with the end of a word it ceases to be in my experience unless I actively recall it. It is as if whole, time extended words are mounted in my experience at the location of the speaker and then the relation between the listening point and the time extension of the word is such that the listening point travels from the start of the word to its end.

All parts of my experience, whether thoughts, imaginings, touch, taste or sight etc. occur over a period of time. To say that something occurred for no time at all would be equivalent to saying that it did not occur.

I also cannot find any experiences that do not have a spatial component and disagree with Descartes(1641), who writes that thoughts have no spatial extension; my thoughts are in the position of my head and have a rather nebulous position within it. Sometimes inner speech seems to come from near my vocal chords and mouth, sometimes from around the back of my head and sometimes from between my ears. But wherever my thoughts reside they have a spatial location. I also disagree with Clarke(1995) that some thoughts are non-spatial, especially during meditation. When I perform an Eastern style of meditation I am left with space, not no space at all. If I allow the meditation to expand then my experience is a boundless space and if I perform the meditation in the Taoist style, with eyes turned slightly inwards, I experience a continuum of light as the space rather than relative darkness. The various sources on meditation agree with my experience, for instance standard Theravada Buddhist texts describe advanced meditation as modulations of the state of boundless space (Gunaratana 1988). However, even if Clarke has a private meditational experience that disappears as a content-less geometric point he still describes his perceptual experience as spatial.

Although I cannot find any non-spatial parts of conscious experience I can find things in my experience that seem to come from processes that are outside of my experience. For instance words occur but nowhere in experience is there the action of putting together the phonemes of the word, I engage in movement but the muscles have their own instructions that are outside of my experience and so on.

The apparent paradox of two times being simultaneously present
"..different times can in principle subtend an angle at a separate point in space and time in the same way as different positions in space can subtend an angle at a separate point in space."

The description and analysis given above treats the extended present as real and this idea of a real, extended, present moment has been attacked by numerous philosophers on the basis that, by the definition of the word “simultaneous”, events at two separate times cannot be simultaneous (Le Poidevin 2000). However my actual experience is having events at two times that are directed at a common point elsewhere. If time is an existent direction for arranging things and space-time exists then different times can in principle subtend an angle at a separate point in space and time in the same way as different positions in space can subtend an angle at a separate point in space. This idea of the extended present as a segment of a real, existent time dimension is consistent with “four dimensionalism” (Rea 2003) and also consistent with the recent experimental demonstration of the existence of physical time (Lindner et al 2005).

The passive nature of conscious experience and the function of conscious experience
"..it is impossible for an idea to do anything, or, strictly speaking, to be the cause of anything."

I noted above that words and motions occur in my experience without the detailed construction of these words or motions being evident. My own actions and thoughts all seem to be historical in the sense that they appear fully formed and in the past. When I say "now!" the "now" is always past and fully formed, I do not have an "n" in my experience and then undergo a dialogue about whether to put an "o" afterwards to make the word "now". Berkeley noticed this aspect of experience: "A little attention will discover to us that the very being of an idea implies passiveness and inertness in it, insomuch that it is impossible for an idea to do anything, or, strictly speaking, to be the cause of anything.."(Berkeley 1710).

The passive nature of conscious experience is not surprising because it occupies a small segment of the past and action occurs now.

My conscious experience is where thoughts and sensations are displayed, not where they are mechanically created. It is possible that my conscious experience is in some way involved in the selection or creation of thoughts but this would occur at the boundary between the future and the past and I have no insight into instantaneous events. When I am unconscious I do nothing but when I am undergoing conscious experience I can perform actions so my conscious experience is permissive of, or enables, action but it does not directly cause what is classically known as "action".

A consequence of Berkeley's observation of the passive nature of conscious experience is that what we call "conscious" actions must be non-conscious and due to activity in non-conscious parts of the brain. In confirmation of this prediction a delay between the first neural indication of a conscious action and the appearance of intention in conscious experience has been shown by Kornhuber and Deecke (1964), Soon et al (2008) etc. This delay is known as the "readiness potential". The delay varies between 0.2 and 7 seconds. These results confirm that attempts to use functionalism to explain experience are a category mistake (See Ryle 1949), conscious experience is not a set of actions, it cannot generate classical actions and cannot be explained by processes alone.

An analysis of the description

I have described the existence of geometrical elements such as independent directions (dimensions) and directed elements within my experience but what of this peculiar, “apparent” observation point?

The elements that are directed at the apparent observation point have characteristics such as orientation towards the point (one sidedness) and angular separation at the point that are properties of something that has a direction. I have already mentioned the way that “depth” is due to a potential for movement towards or away from the centre of the view within experience so it is possible that the things within my experience, such as the surface containing this writing, have a direction along the time axis towards the centre of my experience. However, although they are directed towards a viewing point these things cannot actually move into the point because they would become scrambled up together and many things cannot coexist in a 3D geometrical point.

So there is a conundrum: how can something be at a point but also arranged in space and time? If a movement through space into a point is forbidden because many material things cannot be at a point then the alternative is that the net separation between the point and the elements of my experience in the direction of the point could be zero. This may sound impossible but, according to modern geometry, this disappearance of separation without movement can occur in certain higher dimensional spaces and is akin to having two separate spots on a two dimensional sheet of newspaper and bringing them together by folding the sheet in the third dimension. Spots that are separated in two dimensions can be together in three. If such a phenomenon were to occur in my experience then the elements that are directed towards the apparent viewing point would have separate positions in space and time but be in contact with each other in a higher dimensional space.

This idea of the disappearance of separation may seem outrageous but it is consistent with some modern, physical hypotheses. For instance, experience could be a set of events loaded into a small, roughly spherical, volume of brain with the most recent events nearest to the centre, the events would be brought together by a geometrical effect analogous to the folding of a sheet of paper mentioned above. The disappearance of separation is also consistent with a projective geometry embedded in a five dimensional de Sitter space-time. This would be like ordinary four dimensional space-time but have one extra dimension to host the projection and zero net separations from an origin would be interpreted as a real lack of separation. The idea that the universe might involve de Sitter space-time is very common in physics and cosmology (see Silagadze 2007) and it would be curious to exclude such a possibility from neuroscience and philosophy of mind. When the alternative explanation in terms of lumps of stuff moving into an observation point is obviously wrong we should take the scientific approach of considering another possible hypothesis.

I am not saying that the apparent disappearance of separation discussed above is definitely explicable using higher dimensional spaces but I am pointing out that a disappearance of separation between the events in my experience is not unimaginable and might be described using physical theories (see Note 8).

The disappearance of separation described above means that my experience would not be “seen” by the apparent viewing point. If anything does the “seeing” it would be the whole interconnected geometrical entity that I call “experience” because, like the spots on the newspaper example above, the experience containing this page “now” would be directly connected at a point, and at no separation from, the experience containing this page “then”. In other words now can “see” then within the extended present (and possibly vice versa). As Aristotle put it, "the mind which is actively thinking is the objects which it thinks", there is no flow from experience to a centre point, experience is the centre point as well as distributed in space and time there being no separation between these locations in four dimensions.

This analysis shows that some concepts of geometry can be applied to the relationships within my experience and that an apparent observation point is not impossible.

Aristotle's regress

The way that two successive steps in a process can be both at the same instant in experience and separated in time answers Aristotle's regress because there is no need for an endless transfer of impressions from place to place: the form, motion, and other properties of mental objects within experience can all be present at the instant even though they may have required several processing steps over a period of time to be created. In answer to Aristotle's regress I can say that my experience has “both sight and its object” now. This agrees with Aristotle's own resolution of the problem: my mind is the objects that it thinks.

The Alexandrian theory of time, presentism and functionalism

A consequence of the description of conscious experience is that what Whitehead(1920) calls the “Alexandrian” theory of time (7), in which time is imagined as a simple succession of independent, instantaneous, spatially arranged events, should cease to be used in discussions of conscious experience, consciousness and mind. Alexandrian time is an everyday interpretation of time that roughly corresponds to the philosophical position known as “presentism”. My experience is nothing like the Alexandrian theory. It does not contain simple arrangements of things laid out in 3D but has a projective geometry of some kind and it does not contain independent successions of events but has events extended through an interval that are directed at a point in space and time.

The Alexandrian theory of time has been known to be false since the birth of Special Relativity Theory but it is still widely believed. If the Alexandrian theory is believed then conscious experience can only be successions of instantaneous and disconnected three dimensional spaces and a deep belief in the theory will result in the rejection of any descriptions of conscious experience that are in conflict with it. This then leads to the easy acceptance of proposals such as conscious experience being due to functions like those found in a digital computer (Putnam 1960, Dennett 1991), digital computers being successions of defined three dimensional states at each clock cycle. It also leads to reflexive models in which the mind results from no more than each three dimensional state acting on the next (Vygotsky (1925), Edelman (1993)). Such models embody a purely “intellectual rendering of experience” (Whitehead 1925) so they do not feel consistent with real experience and they give rise to an endless chain of relations (Harnad 1990). This approach also gives rise to the circular claim that conscious experience is a "judgment" of conscious experience (Dennett 1988).

The reason for the Alexandrian idea of space and time being so widely accepted in neuroscience is that most of our inferences and judgements and our pre-perceptual processing is performed using information processing in the cerebral cortex that occurs without conscious experience (Libet et al 1967). This means that a substantial fraction of what we call “awareness”, in the form of reports and inner speech, is derived from unconscious processes that may indeed be described using the analogies for physical processes that are available in the Alexandrian theory. As a result, in the same way as engineers can fashion new motor cars without having any knowledge of the real physics behind kinetic energy, neuroscientists can make progress on the aetiology and treatment of the brain without any insight into the nature of mind.

The reason why we have not yet understood the nature of conscious experience is that we have not yet understood the cosmos in sufficient depth. Most of the physical laws used in everyday scientific work are approximations for laws applying to quantum mechanical and relativistic phenomena such as kinetic energy and electromagnetism (Rindler 2001) and the path taken by moving objects involves the quantum interference between possible different paths available in both space and time (Ogborn and Taylor 2005). However, once this basic ontology of physical events is known it becomes clear that there are major problems that implicate conscious experience in physical theory. For instance, although Relativity Theory provides a physical ontology for kinetic energy it predicts a “block universe” in which all times exist and the universe is an eternally fixed four dimensional object. The fixed universe of Relativity Theory cannot explain change and this led Hermann Weyl (1918) to comment that reality is a "four-dimensional continuum which is neither 'time' nor 'space'. Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it, as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space" (See Petkov (2006) for a modern update on Weyl's viewpoint). It is also the case that the state of the world described by quantum physics is heavily dependent on the state of the observer if that observer consists of passive ideas as described above (Zeh 1979) and that the "preferred basis" of quantum decoherence theory could be linked to conscious experience (Barrett 2005).

It can be seen that in the real world, with its non-Alexandrian ontology of physics, invoking “functions” to explain conscious experience leads to an examination of how functions operate. These functions operate as a result of relativistic and quantum physics which in turn require explanations that involve conscious experience. There is an endless loop or "infinite regress" inherent in functionalist explanations of mind in which conscious experience must be invoked to explain the functions that explain conscious experience. This regress applies to digital computers where proposing that the brain is a simple device like a digital computer leads to the question "how does a digital computer work?" which leads to the question "how do relativity and quantum theory work?" which leads to the problem of conscious observation. This circularity suggests it is time to rid neuroscience and philosophy of mind of “folk physics” such as functionalism.

The existence of time in conscious experience means that Alexandrian cosmology is an inappropriate foundation for analysing the mind. Should we be scientists and describe our experience before developing hypotheses to explain it or, like many philosophers, use a primitive cosmology to declare that conscious experience cannot exist?

Conclusion

My experience has a projective geometry with events extended through both time and space and directed at an instantaneous apparent observation point. This is inexplicable using mechanical functions but the relations between the events within my experience can probably be described using mathematics and physics. Conscious experience is likely to be susceptible to physical analysis. However, being largely epiphenomenal my experience cannot be simply integrated into the “environment” as a type of information processing and will require a more sophisticated analysis (see Note 5).

Notes

1.Aristotle states that: “By a 'sense' is meant what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter. This must be conceived of as taking place in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold;..” Book II.
2.On the subject of a regress Aristotle says: “Since it is through sense that we are aware that we are seeing or hearing, it must be either by sight that we are aware of seeing, or by some sense other than sight. But the sense that gives us this new sensation must perceive both sight and its object, viz. colour: so that either (1) there will be two senses both percipient of the same sensible object, or (2) the sense must be percipient of itself. Further, even if the sense which perceives sight were different from sight, we must either fall into an infinite regress, or we must somewhere assume a sense which is aware of itself.” Book III.
3.“In every case the mind which is actively thinking is the objects which it thinks. Whether it is possible for it while not existing separate from spatial conditions to think anything that is separate, or not, we must consider later.” Book III.
4.Descartes, Treatise on Man, writes: “Now among these figures, it is not those imprinted on the external sense organs, or on the internal surface of the brain, which should be taken to be ideas - but only those which are traced in the spirits on the surface of gland H (where the seat of the imagination and the 'common sense' is located). That is to say, it is only the latter figures which should be taken to be the forms or images which the rational soul united to this machine will consider directly when it imagines some object or perceives it by the senses.” Ideas are extended on the gland whereas the Res Cogitans has no extension, it is a point that views the ideas.
5.Zurek(2003) writes that: “The ‘higher functions’ of observers – e.g., consciousness, etc. – may be at present poorly understood, but it is safe to assume that they reflect physical processes in the information processing hardware of the brain. Hence, mental processes are in effect objective, as they leave an indelible imprint on the environment: The observer has no chance of perceiving either his memory, or any other macroscopic part of the Universe in some arbitrary superposition.” In other words, conscious experience has one form and does not consist of a superposition of states. As such conscious experience seems to be fairly unique because even after decoherence there is still a tiny quantum probability that any material object could also be elsewhere. If the part of the brain that hosts experience could be elsewhere or have several superposed forms then what would be the probability of observation being double or superposed? We know that the probability of an external observer seeing any significant superposition of brain states might be vanishingly small but why would our observation be constrained to that which has the highest probability? Where do the other possible forms of our observation go to when we are the only ones looking? Unless there is some property of the form of our observation itself that makes it the only possible observation then Aristotle's regress returns and we are left imagining an internal observer who observes our observation and finds it to be in the "most probable" state.
6.Kant(1781) writes that “Space is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions. We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects. It must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determination dependent upon them. It is an a priori representation, which necessarily underlies outer appearances. 3. The apodeictic certainty of all geometrical propositions and the possibility of their a priori construction is grounded in this a priori necessity of space. ........." and on the subject of time writes: ....“Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience. For neither coexistence nor succession would ever come within our perception, if the representation of time were not presupposed as underlying them a priori.”
7.Whitehead has strong views on the prevailing models of time in philosophy: "The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries accepted as their natural philosophy a certain circle of concepts which were as rigid and definite as those of the philosophy of the middle ages, and were accepted with as little critical research. I will call this natural philosophy 'materialism.' ..... It can be summarised as the belief that nature is an aggregate of material and that this material exists in some sense at each successive member of a one-dimensional series of extensionless instants of time. ..... This theory is a purely intellectual rendering of experience which has had the luck to get itself formulated at the dawn of scientific thought. It has dominated the language and the imagination of science since science flourished in Alexandria, with the result that it is now hardly possible to speak without appearing to assume its immediate obviousness." (Whitehead 1920).
8. If time exists then Minkowski's equation for separations in space-time could be interpreted as describing real separations. Minkowski's equation is:
ds² = dr² - (cdt)²
Where "dr" is spatial separation, "c" is the speed of light and "dt" is temporal separation. Notice the negative sign which results in "ds", the net separation, being zero when dr equals cdt. Of course, this analysis only applies if dimensional time exists and the events described by the equation are still separated in space and in time even though, in the direction of ds in spacetime they have zero net separation. The separation, ds, is actually the path of a photon and if you went down this path with a clock and a ruler you would find that it has no length and it takes no time to traverse the path.

Bibliography

Aristotle. On the Soul.

Berkeley, G. (1710). A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.

Barrett, J.A.(2005) The preferred basis problem and the quantum mechanics of everything. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 56, 2, June 2005 , pp. 199-220(22)

Blackmore, S. (2002) There is no stream of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 9, number 5-6

Clarke, C.J.S. (1995). The nonlocality of mind. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2:231-40.

Clay, E.R. Quoted in Principles of Psychology by William James. First published 1890. Published 1950 Courier Dover Publications.

Corti, W.R. (1976) The Philosophy of William James. Meiner Verlag.

Cutting, J.E. & Vishton, P.M. (1995) Perceiving layout and knowing distances: The integration, relative potency, and contextual use of different information about depth. In W. Epstein & S. Rogers (eds.) Handbook of perception and cognition, Vol 5; Perception of space and motion. (pp. 69-117). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Daniel C Dennett. (1988). Quining Qualia. in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press 1988. Reprinted in W. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader, MIT Press, 1990, A. Goldman, ed. Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 1993.
Daniel C Dennett. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown & Co. USA.

Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy.

Descartes, R. (1664) Treatise on Man. Translated by John Cottingham, et al. The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985) 99-108.

Edelman, G.M. (1993). Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. New York.

Gombrich, E. (1964) Moment and Movement in Art, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XXVII, 293-306

Gunaratana, H. (1988). The Buddhist Publication Society. Especially: The Jhanas In Theravada Buddhist Meditation. The Wheel Publication No. 351/353. 1988 Buddhist Publication Society

Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346.
Kant, I. (1781) Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith with preface by Howard Caygill. Pub: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kornhuber HH, Deecke L: Hirnpotentialänderungen beim Menschen vor und nach Willkürbewegungen, dargestellt mit Magnetbandspeicherung und Rückwärtsanalyse. Pflügers Arch. ges. Physiol. 281 (1964) 52.

Leibniz, G (1695). The New System.
Le Morvan, P. (2004). Arguments against direct realism and how to counter them, American Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 221-234.
Le Poidevin (2000). The Experience and Perception of Time. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu//archives/spr2001/entries/time-experience

Libet, B., Alberts, E.W., Wright, E. W., Feinstein, B.(1967). Responses of Human Somatosensory Cortex to Stimuli Below Threshold for Conscious Sensation. Science 158, 1597-1600.
Lindner, F., Schaetzel, F.G., Walther, H., Baltuska, A., Goulielmakis, E., Krausz, F., Milosevic, D.B., Bauer, D., Becker, W., and Paulus, G.G.. (2005) Attosecond double-slit experiment. Phys.Rev.Lett. 95,040401 (2005)

McTaggart, J. (1908). The Unreality of Time. Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17 (1908): 456-473.

Ogborn, K. and Taylor, E.F. (2005). Quantum Physics explains Newton's laws
of motion. Physics education. 40(1) 26-34.

Petkov, V. (2006). Is There an Alternative to the Block Universe View?, in: D. Dieks and M. Redei (eds.), The Ontology of Spacetime. Series on the Philosophy and Foundations of Physics (Elsevier, Amsterdam)

Putnam, H (1960). Minds and Machines. Dimensions of Mind, ed. Sidney Hook. New York University Press.

Rea, M. C., (2003). Four Dimensionalism. The Oxford Handbook for Metaphysics. Oxford Univ. Press.

Reid, T. (1764). An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense.
Edited by Brookes, Derek. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997

Rindler, W. (2001): Relativity: Special, General and Cosmological. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York

Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. Penguin Classics. Original Hutchinson edition republished by Penguin Books (2000), London, with an introduction by Daniel C. Dennett.

Silagadze, Z.K. (2007). Relativity without tears. eprint arXiv:0708.0929

Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H-J. and Haynes, J-D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience 11, 543 - 545 (2008)

Vygotsky, L.S.(1925) Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior. Undiscovered Vygotsky: Etudes on the pre-history of cultural-historical psychology (European Studies in the History of Science and Ideas. Vol. 8), pp. 251-281. Peter Lang Publishing. http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/consciousness.htm

Weyl, H. (1918). Space Time Matter. Dover Edition 1952, p.217.

Whitehead, A.N. (1920) The concept of nature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1920.

Whitehead, A.N. (1925). Science and the Modern World (1925). 1997 Free Press (Simon & Schuster)

Zeh, H. D. (1979). Quantum Theory and Time Asymmetry. Foundations of Physics, Vol 9, pp 803-818 (1979) http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0307013

Zurek, W.H. (2003). Decoherence, einselection and the quantum origins of the
classical. Rev. Mod. Phys. 75, 715 (2003)

Superscientist Mary and types of physicalism

2009-01-27T05:17:00.000-08:00

.
The fact that we can see colours and smell smells is often used as an argument against the idea that the world is physical. It is held that redness or rancidness are qualities that transcend the physical nature of the brain. This intuition is really just another version of Aristotle's regress argument because if we have "red" in the brain then what sees this "red"? Another bit of "red" in another part of the brain? (See Time and conscious experience for more on regress).

Some philosophers have claimed that the problem of explaining conscious experience shows that there is a problem with the whole enterprise of science, for instance there is an entire "Knowledge Argument" (Jackson 1982) industry in philosophy that deals with a "super scientist" called Mary who has never seen the colour red. It is asked if she could ever know the colour red even if she knew everything that science and physical theory could tell her about red and redness. It is declared that if science does not include the experience called "red" then there is "knowledge" that is forever outside of scientific knowledge.

To answer this conundrum we need to know a bit more about science. Science gathers information about the world and uses physical information to embody theories about future changes in information about the world.

Information is simply a change in state induced in a system that can have more than one state. This allows us to create descriptions of the world in terms of information. For instance I can tabulate the observations of a moving body by changing the state of ink on a sheet of paper. It also allows us to process information, for instance I could tabulate observations as patterns of holes on a paper tape and also tabulate potential relationships between these holes. Having done this I could run the tape through a Turing machine (a simple computer that uses marks on tapes) and produce predictions for future observations. Mathematical theories of the world are just advanced forms of this sort of processing and can be reduced to computational forms that use paper tapes.

The successions of state changes that are equivalent to the operation of physical theories are obviously different from the original physical events that these theories describe. The fact that Mary cannot see red if she just reads books about it or sees paper tapes about it does not mean that science is false. Science is a description of how the world works, it is not the world itself. So, the introduction of science into this debate about whether knowledge can cause Mary to see red is a red herring, a category mistake, because scientific knowledge is not identical to the events that science describes. Scientific knowledge is marks on a medium, it includes instructions on how to observe events but is not those events itself. Science is a set of descriptions, it is not the things it describes so maintaining that "science is wrong" because a theory of the motion of a ball is not the same as a ball itself is just a crazy non-sequitur.

The "superscientist" part of Jackson's example is clearly irrelevant but the central issue of whether or not the redness in Mary's mind is physical remains. Her "red" is a changed state in her mind and so is a form of information. This suggests that a signal in the world, such as a photon of red light has changed the state of Mary's brain. Whether she is a super scientist or not has got nothing to do with this changed state but the existence of the change suggests a physical connection between the world and the mind. Is it possible to have a scientific theory about this "red" in Mary's mind? Basically this is Aristotle's conundrum - is it possible to have a sense that is self aware? (See Perceiving perception and seeing seeing). Can we have a scientific theory of self awareness, a description that describes how self awareness occurs?

If red is a physical state then it is an arrangement of things in the various directions in which these things can exist. If the things just exist in space and do not move then there is no physical theory that could turn this fixed arrangement into "red". If the things can move then information can be processed but there is still nothing about a moving collection of electrons or carrots or steel balls or other physical things that would imply "redness". Perhaps the part of the brain that has "red" is arranged in more than space and time, who knows? Unfortunately, until we know a lot more about states of things in the physical brain the answer to the problem of the nature of the "red" in our experience is unknown.

There have been many attempts to define physicalism. As an example, Stoljar(2001) uses "theory based", or "t-physical", properties for the extrinsic properties of things that are known by their relations and "object based", or "o-physical", properties to describe the intrinsic properties of things. Others have used similar ideas such as "token" and "type" physicalism. These distinctions revolve around the simple fact that physical theories are not the objects of those theories. When I write E=mc² on a blackboard I do not vaporize the tutorial group! In the case of Mary this means she can do science but cannot be science.

In the sense that we can have a theory about how electrons flow in ammonia or in a superconductor even when no-one has seen an electron we can have a physical theory about conscious experience even though no-one can measure subjective "red" with an instrument. The theory will be tested by its predictions. However, even if we do eventually obtain a description of the state that is "red" the description will not be the state itself. (See There is no information without representation).

References

Jackson 1982. Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127–136.

Stoljar, D. (2001). Two conceptions of the physical. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
62: 253–81.

The spiritual aspect of empiricism

2009-01-21T03:07:00.000-08:00

.
Won't somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won't somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?
Blind Willie Johnson

People have believed in a spiritual aspect to life for millennia. Either they were all crazy and over attached to mythical stories or there is a genuine core to experience that might be called "spiritual". This core is about conscious experience itself rather than about events in the world beyond the body (the term "spiritual" means incorporeal).

The term "spiritual" can be defined in an empirical manner by examining what a spiritual feeling is like. The most primitive form of spiritual feeling is the "oneness" that can occur where we do not just feel like observers of the content of our minds but become one with them. William James investigated this experience and recorded his findings in his lectures called "The Varieties of Religious Experience". The following excerpt is typical of the various reports:

"I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life.... Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors.

What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without its presence."(James 1902).

Many readers will have had experiences of this sort. These experiences can also happen in meditative states and are what are known by practitioners of yoga and Buddhist meditation as states of "rapture" or "ecstacy".

I would contend that the poetic and ecstatic are both what are known as "spiritual" experiences. In common to both of these is the presence of meaningfulness within the mind. It is a state of being extended in space and time without being filled with the mechanical analysis of this state.

The time extension in these experiences is also important because, if time exists, then the past is still existent with all that that implies..

It is also likely that the Buddhists are right about rapture. Rapture itself is a delusion being the physiological state induced by the spiritual experience, but the non-physiological part of the state itself is a spiritual form (see Gunaratana 1988).

References

Henepola Gunaratana. (1988) The Jhanas In Theravada Buddhist Meditation. The Wheel Publication No. 351/353 ISBN 955-24-0035-X. 1988 Buddhist Publication Society. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/bps/index.html

William James (1902). "The Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature".
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/621

Radical Empiricism and New Empiricism

2009-01-20T05:28:00.000-08:00

.
It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, ... Life is confused and superabundant, and what the younger generation appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical rigor and of formal purity. Transcendental idealism is inclining to let the world wag incomprehensibly, in spite of its Absolute Subject and his unity of purpose. Berkeleyan idealism is abandoning the principle of parsimony and dabbling in panpsychic speculations. Empiricism flirts with teleology; and, strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently buried, raises its head above the turf, and finds glad hands outstretched from the most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet again.(William James 1904)

In 1904 William James, the famous American philosopher and psychologist described his philosophy as "Radical Empiricism". Radical Empiricism holds that our minds are identical with our experience. They are nothing more and nothing less than this experience. James uses this identification of mind with experience to abolish the "subject-object" paradox:

"The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome." James (1904).

If our minds are our experience itself then there is no need for this experience to further perceive this experience. So far so good, but how can a mind perceive if there is not some notion of change where an object of perception becomes analysed? James tries to explain this by saying that "every later moment continues and corroborates an earlier one." Unfortunately in any of these theoretical, instantaneous moments perception is frozen so at any moment the subject would know nothing.

James' analysis is strange because in his "The Principles of Psychology" he writes that we experience whole durations of time and remarks that:

"First of all, we note a marked difference between the elementary sensations of duration and those of space. The former have a much narrower range; the time-sense may be called a myopic organ, in comparison with the eye, for example. The eye sees rods, acres, even miles, at a single glance, and these totals it can afterward subdivide into an almost infinite number of distinctly identified parts. The units of duration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these units very few subdivisions -- perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see -- can be clearly discerned."

Perhaps when James talks of a moment he really means a short duration in experience taken in at "a single stroke". If this is the case then perception would not be a succession of frozen instants of no duration but whole sequences and actions. This is more like our experience.

If James' "Radical Empiricism" embraces durations, if his observer is extended in time, then Radical Empiricism is very similar to New Empiricism. Sadly it is difficult to find a clear exposition to this effect in James' statement of Radical Empiricism.

It is also extremely difficult to tease out James' ideas on "Natural Realism" and the location of the space of experience. In contrast with James' apparent natural realism, New Empiricism uses the existence of illusions, dreams, and modern fMRI studies to analyse experience as representational rather than Natural Realist.

In summary, the empirical content of Radical and New Empiricism is very similar but the analysis differs, modern data suggesting a representational rather than Natural Realist interpretation.

Interesting reading

Field, R.W. (1983).William James and the Epochal Theory of Time
Process Studies, pp. 260-274, Vol. 13, Number 4, Winter, 1983
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2540
(Whitehead got it right, dimensional time and 'change' are two different things)

References

William James (1890). The Principles of Psychology. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin15.htm

William James (1904). A World of Pure Experience. First published in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1, 533-543, 561-570. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/experience.htm

Science: empirical or platonic?

2009-01-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

I've travelled different countries
Travelled to the furthest lands
Couldn't find nobody could tell me
What is the soul of a man
Blind Willie Johnson

The conventional idea of science is that scientists have hypotheses, design experiments to test these hypotheses and then, if the experiments do not show that the hypotheses are wrong they say that they have a "scientific theory".

To some extent this is true but what often happens in the lab is that the boss buys a new piece of equipment that few people have used before and the scientists point this bit of kit at anything that takes their fancy. The observations are new so the lab can publish loads of papers, occasionally linking their observations to current theories. This doesn't just happen with new instruments, for instance, in a drug company the chemists are making thousands of new substances and the biological scientists screen these. If one of the chemicals cures a disease they publish the story of their work.

Scientific progress is often about observation with a bit of theory at the back of things. Even the theories are usually empirical in the sense that they do not reach back into the fundamentals of quantum theory and relativity but instead describe how sets of observations fit together. For example, the theories about the human immune system are incredibly complex but actually summarise thousands of observations. They are Empirical Theories.

Usually it is the other sort of theory that grabs the headlines, the non-empirical Platonic Theories. Platonic Theories start from simple assumptions about space, time and matter and attempt to explain the world in terms of the mathematics of these simple building blocks. 90% of working scientists know little about the inner workings of these Platonic Theories and don't need to know about them to do their job. An ecologist is interested in how the changing fly population affects the local frogs, not the quantum mechanical basis of fly capture!

Empirical theories differ from Platonic theories because the former are really just descriptions of the world whereas the latter are a set of absolute rules. Empirical theories are recipes for retrieving observations or repeating a set of events. There is normally an implication that the empirical theory will apply if the conditions of the original observations that gave rise to the empirical theory are present. This limited scope means that empirical theories can only be invalidated by demonstrating that the original observations were dishonest. In contrast, in science, Platonic theories are invalidated if there are any circumstances in which they are contradicted by empirical observation.

Science is largely an empirical art, it is the art of observation and description. The inferences that go between the observations are interesting but frequently of secondary importance.

The Platonic and empirical collide where there are deeply held convictions about Platonic theories. The most obvious example of this is the "mind". The empirical description of the mind is that it is like a set of things laid out around an observation point (Descartes' "res cogitans", the unextended viewing point). Look around, imagine things or have a day dream, see, the mind is like this. Nineteenth century Platonic theories of physics cannot explain such an observation so those Platonists who use nineteenth century ideas deny that the mind exists (and the Dualists say that the mind obviously exists so "science" is wrong).

We know that we have minds, just look, but if we believe strongly enough in nineteenth century Platonic theories of physics we can persuade ourselves that these minds do not exist. The fact that theories can be created is wonderful but if they contradict or forbid observation they are of limited applicability or wrong and are certainly not scientific.

You are totally incorrigible

2009-01-17T09:22:00.000-08:00

"I have time-extended images therefore I am."

Descartes said "cogito ergo sum", "I think therefore I am". This simple statement is regarded by many as the definite truth on which philosophy might be based. (See Note 2).

Over the years, people have become confused about what "cogito ergo sum" actually means. Nowadays people use the word "think" to mean inner speech but in Descartes' time philosophers used it to mean mental images, sensations, perceptions, inner speech, feelings etc. so "cogito ergo sum" meant "I am a mind" or more simply "stuff happens"! (see Note 2) You cant argue with that, its an incorrigible argument.

Descartes courtesy Wiki Commons

The misunderstanding about the nature of 'think' in the 'cogito' has also confused people about the geometrical nature of Descartes' statement. Descartes' "think" included phenomena such as mental images and the statement "There are images therefore I am" leads the scientist to a different analysis from "There is inner speech therefore I am".

Another way in which people have misunderstood the "cogito" is that they have ignored Descartes' description of things happening for whole durations of time. Descartes' thoughts are time extended images so the 'cogito' is truly "I have time extended images therefore I am". As an example of this misunderstanding, Daniel Dennett in his book "Consciousness Explained" and in his article "Quining Qualia", assumes that only the present instant exists so that the mind has no duration. It is then simple to argue that the mind cannot know itself because at any moment it would misremember or misjudge what went before. So, according to Dennett stuff happens but we've got no idea about whether it really happened or not. (See Note 1 below).

There is a self contradiction in Dennett's argument because if time does not exist and the present has no duration (being zero seconds long) then nothing could be known because we would have no time to know it. Dennett could not even know his own argument.

Dennett should be forgiven for this argument because he is using widely accepted school book cosmology, in which time is a simple succession of three dimensional instants, to argue away his mind. Dennett's real message is to show how cosmological ideas can undermine our belief in everyday reality (See Presentism and the Denial of Mind). If you have erroneous ideas about how space, time and matter are interrelated then you will have all sorts of dubious ideas. The empirical truth is that we obviously do have minds and our minds extend over a whole interval of time so that we can be aware at any moment (See Time and conscious experience). Explaining this experience will require more advanced cosmological ideas than the "folk physics" used by Dennett.

Perhaps a modern statement of incorrigibility is needed. If there is a continuous event in my experience, whether in perception or in a dream, then it is present now. Existing events are events that are present now. If an event is present now there is no time for further processing or change of the event between now and when it is occurring. So present experience is incorrigible.

Notes

Note 1: Dennett (1988) says:
"The infallibilist line on qualia treats them as properties of one's experience one cannot in principle misdiscover, and this is a mysterious doctrine (at least as mysterious as papal infal libility) unless we shift the emphasis a little and treat qualia as logical constructs out of subjects' qualia-judgments: a subject's experience has the quale F if and only if the subject judges his experience to have quale F."

Notice how he redefines experience as a judgement of experience. Once he has done this Dennett can use school cosmology to deny it.

Note 2: Descartes' 'cogito' was stated by him as:

"But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am (COGITO ERGO SUM), was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search."

Descartes is clear that what he means by thought is all the things that occur in experience, whether dreams, sensations, symbols etc.:

"5. Of my thoughts some are, as it were, images of things, and to these alone properly belongs the name IDEA; as when I think [ represent to my mind ] a man, a chimera, the sky, an angel or God. Others, again, have certain other forms; as when I will, fear, affirm, or deny, I always, indeed, apprehend something as the object of my thought, but I also embrace in thought something more than the representation of the object; and of this class of thoughts some are called volitions or affections, and others judgments." (Meditation III).

References

Daniel C Dennett. (1988). Quining Qualia. in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds, Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press 1988. Reprinted in W. Lycan, ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader, MIT Press, 1990, A. Goldman, ed. Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, MIT Press, 1993. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm

Dennett, D. and Kinsbourne, M. (1992) Time and the Observer: the Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain. (1992) Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 183-247, 1992. Reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual, Grim, Mar and Williams, eds., vol. XV-1992, 1994, pp. 23-68; Noel Sheehy and Tony Chapman, eds., Cognitive Science, Vol. I, Elgar, 1995, pp.210-274.http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/time&obs.htm

The Nature of the Soul

2009-01-17T09:16:00.000-08:00

Won't somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won't somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?
Blind Willie Johnson

If there is a religious or spiritual aspect to life then it must be here, now. If it exists we must be exposed to it every day but we do not see it or we misinterpret it. It may come as a shock but there really is an aspect of life that we overlook and misinterpret every day. In fact its not just an aspect, it is our life itself that we overlook. I'll explain.

The first thing we overlook is the fact that no-one knows how we can see anything. Yes, this thing that we call "seeing" is unexplained. Just look around. How do you see the world? Light comes from the sun and the light rays that are not absorbed by objects are reflected in all directions. This reflected light falls all over the lens system of your eye and is focussed to form an image on the back of your eye (on the retina). So what are you seeing? Are you seeing the sun, the image on your retina or the last thing that reflected the light?

The answer to this question has caused a lot of debate because we use the word "see" in an odd way: if I see a cow then I believe its the cow that I see. But if I go up to a cow I find that its a dirty great thing, a whole volume of body, and it has parts that I didn't see before I got close up. What's more, if its dark and I shine a bright light on the cow I can use a lens to make an image of it on a screen and this image looks more like the cow I "saw" than the real thing. So when I say I "see" a cow what I actually see is like the image on the back of my eye made from the light that has bounced off a cow. Our words refer to the actual cow, out there, but our sight contains an image.

Why is this cow important? Its important because even though our sight contains a flattish image this image appears as if it is out there, in a field. You've got a flattish image of a cow on your retina, like a photo, but you appreciate this image as if you were at some point a hundred metres away from it. How do you do that? Its like sticking a flat photo in your brain and your brain creates a whole space where the things in the photo can reside. No wonder we get mixed up between whether we are seeing an image or an actual cow.

This trick of making some sort of visual space is amazing. I can have dreams that have things in a visual space. I can shut my eyes and imagine things in a visual space. Even if you cannot form images with your eyes shut you can still notice a dark, visual space.

Still don't believe this is weird? Well, look at your eyes in a mirror. Do you ever see them move? Move your eyes, do they move in the mirror? No, they don't move. They don't move because what you have in your experience is a visual space within your brain that is based on data from your eyes. You don't even see the image on your retina, you see an entirely mental image based on the data on your retina.

So, here is an aspect of everyday life that is amazing and unexplained - the visual space that our brains make.

The second aspect of life that we overlook all the time is our ability to know our thoughts. Knowing our thoughts is deeply related to the existence of time. When is "now"? Say "Now!". When was that? Is it now or has it gone? Yes, its weird but now is always just gone. The present moment occupies no time at all, it is zero seconds long so if you have anything that takes time in your experience it is always composed of a slice of time from the past. You know your thoughts because your experience contains a second or two of the past, not as memories but as what we call the "present" - even though it is just past.

So, what are you? You probably think of yourself as the person who meets your relatives and friends and talks to them, a player on the stage of life. But what is the stage you experience but the mental space that you generate in your head and what are the events that you mull over except segments of time past that you generate in your head. So what are you? You are the events distributed in the space and time in your head - what people call a "mind". A man is his mind.

Most people splutter when they hear this and say "You might live in a dream but I see the world mate!". Do you? Or do most people have no idea what the actual world is like? The real world is almost entirely empty space with little tiny atoms surrounded by waves of electrons, photons carry energy from the world to our eyes and electrical forces allow us to touch things. Do you really see mostly space, do you watch the oscillating electric and magnetic field in photons, do you see the back of three dimensional objects or do you see a wonderful interpretation of these things that we call our minds?

How your mind is made is a complete mystery. As a scientist I would guess that its components such as events, space and time, are the stuff of the ordinary world and we just don't know how they can come together as a mind. Another name for this spatio-temporal mind is the "soul". The soul involves time as a "form" and so actions are crucial to its harmony - but what are the right actions? (See Time and conscious experience).

There is the most remarkable amount of discussion by philosophers about this soul. Some of them deny that they have minds and others are transfixed by nineteenth century science and claim that because the possibility of mind is incompatible with what we knew about the world a century or more ago then the mind could only exist if "dualism" applied. The simple truth is that we don't know how the physical world has minds, it obviously has them but we will need to know a whole lot more about space, time, matter, quantum theory etc. before we can integrate the spiritual into our knowledge of the universe. Religious folk are often even worse than philosophers, many of them have so little faith that they declare that the spiritual is unknowable and forever inexplicable. Well, if there is a God He is here, now and also then and He is part of ourselves and the world or even the totality of these things and the problem of explaining this would be entirely our own.

If our minds do indeed extend in time to allow us to hear whole words and see movement then there would be an existent time dimension. We still exist. Furthermore we could exist at any instant in the past as much as now. This has huge implications because it means we live before death and continue to do so. Of course, this would only be of interest if it is possible that even now I am taking decisions that branch my life into a different existence from the one that I experienced, if that were the case then "Heaven is amongst you" would be true, it would just be a matter of adopting it.

See also:

Presentism and the denial of mind.
Materialists should read this first.

Zombies and progressive replacement of the brain

2009-01-17T09:14:00.000-08:00

Pylyshyn (1980) proposed a thought experiment in which he asked what would happen if the physical brain were progressively replaced with components that performed the same functions as those biological components that they replaced. This thought experiment has been used to support types of "functionalism" - the idea that we are the sum of the processes that occur between us and the environment (Chalmers 1996).

What would happen if the brain were replaced with artificial components? Wikimedia commons

What would we expect if the general idea of Pylyshyn's experiment could be put into effect?

At one extreme the experiment could involve the replacement of the brain with organic components that are identical to those that already exist. In this case the new brain would only differ from the old brain in terms of its quantum state and its history. If the mind involves quantum states or history (eg: if it is extended in dimensional time) then the new mind would differ from the old, otherwise the new mind would be the same as the old mind.

At the other extreme the brain might be replaced by computer cards held in racks at various different locations in the world but interconnected by broadband. These cards would be designed to perform, as far as is possible, the same overall processes as the original brain, converting a pattern of input into the same pattern of output as the original organic brain might have produced. This system would differ from the original brain in terms of physical form, internal state and history. If the mind depends upon the form of its content then it would not be replicated if half of the data from a retina were processed in France and another ten percent in Brasilia etc.

It seems that Pylyshyn's "experiment" teaches us nothing that we did not already know - if the spacetime form of the world is of no significance for creating mind then we could be replicated by simple machines like silicon chip based computers. If the spacetime form of the world is significant for the presence of mind then we can only be replicated by conceptually complex machines or cannot be replicated at all.

Considerable discussion has been devoted to whether a progressive replacement of the brain would lead to the slow fading of the content of experience or the disappearance of areas of experience etc (Chalmers 1996). Just asking this question presupposes that we would "see" the content of our brains in a type of Cartesian Theatre and hence suggests that the spatio-temporal form of the mind and brain are important.

Chalmers believes that the progressive replacement would not affect the content of experience. I would agree provided that the replacement were with parts that perfectly replaced both the form and function of the original parts, not just the function of the originals.

Chalmers uses Pylyshyn's "thought experiment" to suggest that if two processors share exactly the same functional architecture then if one is conscious so is the other. Chalmers writes: "I claim that conscious experience arises from fine-grained functional organization. More specifically, I will argue for a principle of organizational invariance, holding that given any system that has conscious experiences, then any system that has the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences." (The Conscious Mind). The inclusion of 'fine-grained' means that what Chalmers is really saying is that if two things are identical in form and function they are the same. This argument cannot be used to suggest that a robot that has the same behaviour as a person has the same 'conscious experiences' because the robot does not have the same 'fine grained functional organisation'. If it had exactly the same 'fine grained' functional organisation it would consist of exactly the same macromolecules and materials as a person and would not be a 'robot'. Unfortunately the argument is often referenced to support the possibility of conscious experience in machines that only replicate our overall behaviour. This mistaken interpretation of the argument is often seen in the discussions of "philosophical zombies" in which the possibility that there could be organisms that perform the same functions as humans but have no conscious experience is debated, unfortunately few, if any of these discussions focus on the possible significance of geometrical form in a multidimensional universe.

In conclusion it can be seen that the role of geometrical form and the time extension within the form of our experience is crucial for working out what might happen during replacement of the brain. If our minds depend on extension in time then a progressive replacement of the brain with organic components that are identical to the original would probably lead to some loss of awareness of the past but would otherwise have little effect. If mind depends on time extension (see Time and conscious experience) then replacement with parts that could not duplicate the time extension would lead to the disappearance of conscious experience. Of course, we do not know what sort of components would support a time extended mind, it may be the case that even replacement with organic components that are identical to the original might not work for reasons as yet unknown.

References

Pylyshyn, Z. (1980) The "causal power" of machines. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3:442-444.

Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marcel AJ. (1998). Blindsight and shape perception: deficit of visual consciousness or visual function? Brain 1998, 121, 1565-1588. http://brain.oupjournals.org/cgi/reprint/121/8/1565.pdf

Inner speech

2009-01-17T09:12:00.000-08:00

Our verbal thoughts, also known as "inner speech", are a special part of the contents of our minds. Many people believe that this "inner speech" is their inner self. However, the philosophers Renee Descartes and later, Gilbert Ryle, spotted that inner speech has a problem. Descartes noticed that inner speech simply pops into mind unbidden. You can notice this too, just close your eyes and wait for an item of inner speech - it just pops into mind. Ryle went further than Descartes, he pointed out that if inner speech were truly the product of conscious "thinking" then you would need to think of a thought before you could have a thought. Try it, thoughts just pop into mind, you cant consciously think "now I am going to have a thought" because if this were "conscious" you would need to think "now I am going to think that I am going to have a thought" and before this you would need to think "now I am going to think that I am going to think that I am going to have a thought". Ryle pointed out that having conscious verbal thoughts would involve an infinity of prior thoughts (this is known as Ryle's Regress).

So inner speech is derived from the activity of some part of our brains that is not conscious. Verbal thoughts just pop into mind as this inner speech processor generates a stream of words. This means that our inner speech is only a peripheral part of our minds - it pops into mind for consideration. It is the least part of us, our true minds being this glorious space and time where we exist that is based on the data from our senses.

So why do we have inner speech? My best guess is that it is normally a way of working on our emotions, making our glands release adrenaline and other hormones to create the peripheral vasodilation and discomfort of anger or the gastric inflammation of worry etc. It is also used to rehearse social interactions and to solve problems.

Ryle, G. (1949). Concept of Mind. (Incidently, Ryle used his "regress" in an attempt to prove that mind itself does not exist!).

The Christian Manifesto

2009-01-17T09:10:00.000-08:00

Ethics and morality may be derivable from a knowledge of the nature of mind but it is interesting to explore some intuitive ethical codes prior to developing an ethics. What exactly do Christians believe? The nearest I can find to a declaration of belief are these sections from the Gospels.

According to St Matthew:

Chapter 5

1 When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.
2 Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

3 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5 ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

6 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

7 ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

8 ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

9 ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

10 ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11 ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely* on my account. 12Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

13 ‘You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.

14 ‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

17 ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. 18For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter,* not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19Therefore, whoever breaks* one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

21 ‘You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”; and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgement.” 22But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister,* you will be liable to judgement; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, “You fool”, you will be liable to the hell* of fire. 23So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister,* and then come and offer your gift. 25Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

Chapter 6
1‘Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

2 ‘So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 3But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

5 ‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

7 ‘When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

9 ‘Pray then in this way:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
10 Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.
14For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

16 ‘And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 17But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.*

19 ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust* consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

22 ‘The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; 23but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
Serving Two Masters

24 ‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.*

25 ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink,* or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?* 28And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” 32For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But strive first for the kingdom of God* and his* righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

34 ‘So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

27 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” 28But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.* 30And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell.*

31 ‘It was also said, “Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” 32But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

33 ‘Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.” 34But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, 35or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. 37Let your word be “Yes, Yes” or “No, No”; anything more than this comes from the evil one.*

38 ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” 39But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 40and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; 41and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.

43 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? 47And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,* what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Chapter 7
1 ‘Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. 2For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. 3Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s* eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? 4Or how can you say to your neighbour,* “Let me take the speck out of your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? 5You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s* eye.

6 ‘Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.

7 ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 8For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 9Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? 10Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? 11If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

12 ‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

13 ‘Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy* that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. 14For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

15 ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? 17In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20Thus you will know them by their fruits.

21 ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven. 22On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” 23Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.”
Hearers and Doers

24 ‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. 26And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!’

28 Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, 29for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.

According to St Luke:

20 Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.

22 ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.
23 Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
24 ‘But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
25 ‘Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.

26 ‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

27 ‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
29 If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.
30 Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.
31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.

32 ‘If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.
33 If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.
34 If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again.
35 But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

37 ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven;
38 give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.’

39 He also told them a parable: ‘Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?
40 A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher.
41 Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?
42 Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye”, when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye.

43 ‘No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit;
44 for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush.
45 The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.

46 ‘Why do you call me “Lord, Lord”, and do not do what I tell you?
47 I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them.
48 That one is like a man building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built.
49 But the one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, and great was the ruin of that house.’

According to St John:

Jesus as the Son of God:

34 Jesus answered, ‘Is it not written in your law, “I said, you are gods”?
35 If those to whom the word of God came were called “gods”—and the scripture cannot be annulled—
36 can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, “I am God’s Son”?
37 If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me.
38 But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand* that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.’

Simultaneity - the key to understanding mind?

2009-01-17T09:08:00.000-08:00

When Christ taught in the temple
The people all stood amazed
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
How to raise a man from the grave
Blind Willie Johnson

Do we see and generally experience things simultaneously? If we do then having more than one distinct thing in our experience at a time means that our experience is a "space". Indeed, more than one thing being present at an instant is a definition of the term "space".

On reflection it would be difficult to imagine how our experience could occur if it were not events in a space. Suppose your experience was a single quantum flowing in a wire, would that be like an experience that contains this text? Suppose it was billions of quanta flowing sequentially in a wire, at each instant it would still be but one quantum in a wire at a given point. If we are to experience slabs of colour or sounds and sights occurring together then we must have a space that is our experience.

It seems that our minds, which are simply our experience, are events in a space. If this is so then it is most likely that the events in our minds are some sort of copy of the events in the world around us (See Why direct and naive realism are unscientific ). This copy is probably held in our brains.

The main problem with this reasoning is that, as yet, there is no single set of events distributed in space in our brains that appears to correlate exactly with experience. This is not an insurmountable problem however, because the most likely place for such a space is the thalamus and small scale events in the thalamus have not been explored in any depth as yet. Certainly removal of the thalamus removes the mind but it also removes most of the connections from the cerebral cortex to the periphery and vice versa. Whether the thalamus is simply a junction or the location of the mind is still an open question. It is also evident that our experience is arranged in at least four dimensions (see An Introduction to New Empiricism) so the instantaneous, 3D measurements of brain activity do not represent the final form that this activity adopts in our minds and hence the failure to find an exact correspondence between measurements and experience would not be unexpected.

There have been a few attempts to undermine the idea of simultaneity in our experience. Dennett and Kinsbourne (1992) developed a "Multiple Drafts" theory of perception in which the brain was supposed to simply produce verbal reports in response to what was happening in the world and has no representations of the world modelled inside it. In this theory we do not experience anything in our brains, we only experience the world at large. However, work by Larsen et al (2006) and Blankenburg et al (2006) tested the predictions of the Multiple Drafts theory and showed that the brain really does model events in the world and we experience these models. It is also the case that the Multiple Drafts Theory assumes the appearance of lights as slabs of colour and hence contains the contradiction of both assuming simultaneous events in a mental space and denying that these occur.

What sort of physics might explain mental space? Several theorists have had a stab at this problem (See for instance Green (2002) and Rauscher & Targ (2001). The basic idea is that the universe may have five or more dimensions (3 space, time and at least one more time like dimension) and that the space of the mind is due to projective geometry. The projective geometry would create a geometrical focus where all the events in the mind appear to be directed. I do not think that these theorists are definitely right but I do believe they are looking in the right direction!

Relativity, simultaneity, measurement and observation

Measurement is a transfer of state from one place to another whereas observation places events such as measurements in the space and time of an observer. In an observation events occur relative to an observation point and are simultaneously present. Observation gives measurements immediate meaning and is at the heart of science (see New empiricism and meaning). The scientific method works because it uses an experimental approach that, in principle, allows any person to check an empirical theory through direct observation.

Measurement can be used to create a model of a system under observation, a sort of copy of the world, for instance, as a simulation in a computer, but measurement does not perform observations. Zurek and others have tried to redefine observation as simulation and have developed "decoherence theory" on this basis. However, there still remains a "preferred basis problem". As Wallace 2007 says: "Sometimes it is easy to forget how grave a problem the ‘measurement problem’ actually is". It is also becoming evident that there are serious problems with the treatment of time in modern quantum theory (See Horwitz 2006) that undermine Zurek's reasoning.

In general any observer has their own manifold of events around them (a manifold is a set of events that are arranged in independent directions like up-down, left-right etc, the number of independent axes used in the arrangement is the number of dimensions in the manifold). In Newtonian physics these manifolds are related by the separations of the observers. In Relativistic Physics the manifolds are also separated by phase, the progressive temporal discrepancy that occurs along the direction of any relative motion. The existence of phase means that each particle in the world has its own peculiar observational manifold because even tiny motions can create attosecond phase differences, as Stein put it: "in Einstein Minkowski spacetime an event's present is constituted by itself alone". So, according to Relativity the only true observer is a space-time point. However, a point in three dimensional space cannot contain any information because information requires representation in a physical substrate. What about a four dimensional point? If Minkowski's light cone equation is regarded as a truly geometrical relationship so that:

0 = x² + y² + z² - (ct)²

is the equation of an observation point where the shell of events with spatial positions (x² + y² + z²) are bridged together at a point then the problem of observation might be solved because information can be instantiated as events in space and time but also at a point. (See Time and conscious experience).

Can a Turing Machine be a “scientist”?

The difference between measurement and observation becomes clearer if the mechanics of machines that just shift matter from place to place are compared with the abilities of a scientist.

Suppose a Turing Machine had a program that directed it to produce the simplest possible computational description of the universe and controlled robotic machines that could be directed to create the appropriate apparatus and perform experiments. In principle the machine might eventually contain a set of bits that represent the elements of the computation. In fact here is the answer:

%^$&^$^&xx iuytfgdvgjh = 6576fhgf [dkjdgdjdyryte] {uytuyb} %jhg %$$&^)(_

Well, one day, when the machine has done its work we will be able to find the transformation equation from my bits to the bits in the machine.

Of course, the machine’s constructors will be able to say that it is not the final equation that is the substance of the Turing Machine’s achievement, it is the models that it makes. They will be able to demonstrate flying machines and food creators, molecular manipulators and planetary classifiers… These models, or four dimensional descriptions of nature, will be very impressive but then I will ask “how do they work?” and the operators will have to admit that I had a possible answer in May 2011. Not only did I have a possible answer but had the machine used the correct encoding from the outset it would scarcely have needed a transformation equation to produce my original answer. Yes, the objective, computational machine knows everything but understands nothing, its final equation is gibberish on its own.

Fortunately, as I watch the Turing Machine construct its models I will be able to remember how they were made. In a quiet moment, as I load these memories into my conscious mind I will be able to imagine how the equation relates to the flight of a plane with the meaning of y = 3x^2 as an actual motion of the vehicle in the multidimensional geometrical manifold that is my mind which contains both motion and position now. Understanding includes time extended events now, it is the placing of measured (objective) variables into a manifold that has an existent time coordinate. The “objective” is measurement, the subjective is “observation”.

References

Blankenburg, F., Ruff, C.C., Deichmann, R., Rees, G. and Driver, J. (2006) The cutaneous rabbit illusion affects human primary sensory cortex somatotopically, PLoS Biol 2006;4(3):e69.
Dennett, D. and Kinsbourne, M. (1992) Time and the Observer: the Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain. (1992) Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 183-247, 1992. Reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual, Grim, Mar and Williams, eds., vol. XV-1992, 1994, pp. 23-68; Noel Sheehy and Tony Chapman, eds., Cognitive Science, Vol. I, Elgar, 1995, pp.210-274.http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/time&obs.htm
Green, A (2003). The Science and Philosophy of Consciousness. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~lka/conz.htm
Green, Alex (2002). The Description and Definition of Consciousness. Science and Consciousness Review
Larsen, A., Madsen, K.H., Lund, T.E., and Bundesen, C. (2006). Images of Illusory Motion in Primary Visual Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2006;18:1174-1180.
Rauscher, E.A. & Targ, R. (2001) "Speed of Thought: Investigation of a Complex Space-Time Metric to Describe Psychic Phenomena." Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 331;354, 2001

Wallace, D. (2007) The Quantum Measurement Problem: State of Play. arXiv:0712.0149v1 [quant-ph] 3 Dec 2007 http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.0149

Horwitz, L,P. (2006) On the significance of a recent experiment demonstrating quantum interference in time. http://www.citebase.org/abstract?id=oai:arXiv.org:quant-ph/0507044

There is no information without representation

2009-01-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

Information is one of the most poorly defined terms in philosophy but it is a well defined concept in physical theory. How can it be that a clear idea in one branch of knowledge can be murky in another?

The physical meaning of information is succinctly summarised in the Wikibook on "Consciousness Studies":

"The number of distinguishable states that a system can possess is the amount of information that can be encoded by the system."

In most cases a "state of a system" boils down to arrangements of objects, either material objects laid out in the world or sequences of objects such as the succession of signals in a telephone line. So information is represented by physical things laid out in space and time. There is no information without this representation as an arrangement of physical objects.

Information can be processed by machines. As an example, computers use the "distinguishable states" of charge in electrical components to perform a host of useful tasks. They use the state of electrical charge in electronic components because charge can be manipulated rapidly and can be impressed on tiny components, however, computers could use the states of steel balls in boxes or carrots flowing on conveyor belts to achieve the same effect, albeit more slowly. There is nothing special about electronic computers beyond their speed, complexity and compactness. They are just machines that contain three dimensional arrangements of matter.

Philosophers use information in a much less well-defined fashion. Philosophical information is far more fuzzy and involves the quality of things such as hardness or blueness. So how does philosophical blueness differ from a physical information state?

Physical information about the world is a generalised state change that is related to particular events in the world and could be impressed on any substrate such as steel balls etc.. This allows information to be transmitted from place to place. As an example, a heat sensor in England could trigger a switch that opens a trapdoor that drops a ball that is monitored on a camera that causes changes in charge patterns in a computer that are transmitted as sounds on a radio in the USA. If the sound on the radio makes a cat jump and knock over a vase then it is probably valid to look at the vase and say "its hot in England". So physical information is related to its source by the causal chain of preceding steps. Notice that each of these steps is a physical event so there is no information without representation as a state in the real world.

In the philosophical idea of information "hot" or "cold" are particular states in the mind. Our mental states are not uniquely related to the state of the world outside our bodies. As an example, human heat sensors are fickle so a blindfolded person might contain the state called "cold" when their hand is placed in water at 60 degrees or ice water at zero degrees. Our "cold" is subjective and does not have a fixed reference point in the world. Our own information is a particular state that could be induced by a variety of events in the world whereas physical information can be a variety of states triggered by a particular event in the world.

To summarise, information in physics is a state change in any substrate. It can be related to the state change in another substrate if a causal chain exists between the two substrates. Information in the mind is the state of the particular substrate that forms your particular mind.

Your mind is a state of a particular substrate but a "state" is an arrangement of events. The crucial questions for the scientist are "what events?" and "how many independent directions can be used for arranging these events?". We can tell from our experience that at least four independent axes (or "dimensions") are involved.

Note

The fact that there is no information without representation of the information as a physical state means that peculiar non-physical claims such as Cartesian Dualism and Dennett's "logical space" are not credible.

Daniel C Dennett. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown & Co. USA. Available as a Penguin Book.

Dennett says: "So we do have a way of making sense of the idea of phenomenal space - as a logical space. This is a space into which or in which nothing is literally projected; its properties are simply constituted by the beliefs of the (heterophenomenological) subject." Dennett is wrong because if the space contains information then it must be instantiated as a physical entity, if it is not instantiated then it does not exist and Dennett is simply denying the experience that we all share to avoid explaining it. Either we have simultaneous events or are just a single point, if we have simultaneous events the space of our experience exists.

Dualism is a physical problem

2009-01-17T09:02:00.000-08:00

Modern philosophy is full of the discussion of dualism, the belief that somehow the mind is separate from the physical body. However, dualism is not just a problem of the philosophy of mind, it is also a fundamental problem in physics.

Cartesian Dualism arose because Renee Descartes found that although light could be traced to the eye and the excitation of the retina could be traced to the brain he could find no physical process or theory by which a pattern in the brain could be converted into a view containing the world such as exists in our minds. He was forced to suggest that there was a supernatural phase to perception where an image laid out in the brain became the image in our minds.

If we retrace Descartes' reasoning in his "Meditations" and "Treatise on Man" we discover that he describes perception in terms of the transfer of material signals from place to place. Light goes from things to the eyes and "animal spirits" (what we now call electricity) travel through the brain. Signals travel from place to place but Descartes cannot say that it is physically possible for these material signals to all end up at a point from which they are seen, he has to resort to a supernatural, non-extended place that he calls the "res cogitans" to act as the viewing point. He can only obtain, or model, the spatial form of the mind by abandoning material signals. Historians of science may be intrigued to know that Aristotle, in his book "On the Soul", mentions this problem almost two millennia before Descartes.

Descartes' reasoning in Treatise on Man.

Descartes describes material signals going from place to place but when he actually wants the signals to be themselves he ends up with a geometrical point. The dualism here is between information as an arrangement of things in space and time and the observation of this arrangement which would have to occur at a physically impossible point.

This problem of the impossibility of a point observation is created by the concept of space and the concept of material object or signal. What is space? We cannot actually measure space - what we call a spatial measurement always ends up as a comparison of material marks. What is a material object? When we probe material objects we find that they are mostly composed of space and we can only interact with these objects by virtue of "fields" of "virtual particles" that cannot be isolated. In fact it is only the brash overconfidence of school physics that would allow us to conclude that Descartes MUST be wrong because the world is simply lumps of stuff flowing from place to place. Perhaps material objects are not simple lumps in 3D space and perhaps space is not an instantaneous container for lumps of stuff.

Personally, I do not believe that Descartes was right. Certainly he was right to notice that there is a problem modelling the form of the mind using primitive materialism but he was wrong to abandon physics. He should have said "I don't know how a pattern in the brain becomes a mind, maybe people in a thousand years time will figure out how a pattern in space and time can also be at a point".

Another form of dualism has been proposed in more recent years. This is "property dualism". Property dualism holds that the mind could indeed be a ghost in the machine of the brain, such ghosts being possible counterparts of ordinary matter that do not get involved in ordinary physical interactions. This is no more than an acceptance that erroneous nineteenth century materialism describes the world coupled with the obvious fact of the existence of mind. A sort of bizarre combination of "folk physics" with empirical truth.

References

Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/meditations/Meditation1.html

Descartes, R. (1664) "Treatise on Man". Translated by John Cottingham, et al. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 99-108. http://lrc.csun.edu/~battias/454/descartes/

A ghost in your machine!

2009-01-17T04:46:00.000-08:00

I saw a crowd stand talking
I just came up in time
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
That a man ain't nothing but his mind
Blind Willie Johnson

According to many philosophers the mind is unnecessary for the functions of the brain and so does not exist. At first sight this does not sound too serious. However, what are you if you are not your mind? Get rid of the mind and you can dismiss all talk of spirituality, undermine the mind and you can treat people as human resources, mere products of social interaction that can be disposed of by the state. As Blind Willie Johnson put it "a man ain't nothing but his mind", in other words, take away the mind and you remove the man.

The arguments for the proposal that your mind is non-existent run as follows:

The modern argument is that all the functions of a human being could be performed by a mechanism, nowadays the mechanism is likened to a computer or robot. This argument was proposed by La Mettrie(1745) and gathered strength in the nineteenth century (esp. Huxley 1874). If all of the functions of a human can be performed by a mechanism why should we propose an entirely superfluous entity like a mind?

The historical argument is that there is no need for a mind to look at what is happening in our lives, just to have things happening should be enough - in fact seeing yourself doing things is absurd because if you could see yourself doing things then you would see yourself seeing yourself doing things and so on ad infinitum. This historical argument was first spotted by Aristotle in his brilliant book called "On the Soul" (he rejects the argument).

These arguments convinced Gilbert Ryle (1949) that there was no place for a mind and he called the mind a "ghost in the machine" of the brain.

The amazing thing about these arguments is that they use theory to disprove observation. The hubris of some philosophers is breathtaking.

As scientists we should take a step back from the debate and ask what it is that we are trying to explain. Fortunately those who have dismissed the mind have described it quite well, they talk of the "Cartesian Theatre" (Dennett 1991). The Cartesian Theatre is the impression of viewing the world as if it were a stage that we see from a single observation point. Our dreams and visual imaginings appear in a similar "Cartesian Theatre". So, this is what we must explain, how could we have sensations, dreams and imaginings in a Cartesian Theatre?

The detractors from the notion of mind describe this Cartesian Theatre, which they know that all their readers experience, then mock even the possibility of such a thing. The reason they mock such a possibility is that they believe in the pre-twentieth century idea that everything is due to lumps of matter moving from place to place. If the world were like this pre-twentieth century description and only due to flows of matter then the mind would indeed be inexplicable. However, even though this archaic description of the world is attractive in its simplicity it would be absurd to abandon our observation to accommodate it. Instead we should change our theory of the world, moving on from the sort of theories that were current in science at the end of the nineteenth century so that the mind might be explained.

Lumps of stuff flowing from place to place will obviously be inadequate to explain the mind. Lumps of matter are different from the space and time of our Cartesian Theatre, the Theatre is a geometrical structure that requires an explanation in terms of geometrical theory rather than the dynamics of flowing lumps of stuff. If we have an observation point in our dreams then lumps of matter do not flow into this point. Any such point would be a geometrical phenomenon, not a simple flow of stuff and any explanation will require advanced geometrical theories, not nineteenth century dynamics. As a geometrical phenomenon conscious experience will not have a materialist function but is more likely to be involved with more subtle phenomena such as selecting the state of the brain.

Lets return to the arguments reported above. The proposal that everything that we believe to be done by a human might be done by a machine would leave us with a problem of a superfluous mind, or ghost in the machine. So the argument reduces to a statement of belief, the materialist believes that simple machines operating on materialist principles can do everything that a person can do. This belief is now known to be incorrect because in the twenty first century we know that simple materialism cannot really do anything. Hard though it may be to believe, we don't really fully understand the quantum mechanical and relativistic basis of how even simple machines operate so the argument that the mind is superfluous to the operation of human beings is "folk physics" (See Time and conscious experience). It is extraordinary the way that most people have no idea that mechanistic, nineteenth century physics cannot actually explain anything. For instance, can you explain the difference between a moving ball and a stationary ball? What is it about the moving ball compared with the stationary ball, at this instant, that makes it move to a different location in the next instant? If you were moving alongside the "moving" ball would you consider the "stationary" ball to be moving?

So the "modern" argument is really a nineteenth century argument that is no longer applicable; but what of the historical argument? In the historical argument the observation of ourselves observing our actions leads to an infinite cycle of observations. This argument relies upon the pre-twentieth century idea of time. In pre-twentieth century physics time was mysterious, thought to be universal and people questioned whether it existed (See McTaggart's unreality of time). In the twentieth century it became possible to propose that (dimensional) time exists and in the twenty first century there is even experimental evidence for the existence of time. If time exists then people extend through time so a past observation can still be available without replaying it in the present instant. You can check this argument by saying "Now!". Every part of your experience that contains the word "Now" is in the past yet it is still in your experience.

So, we have minds and can only wonder at the impetus that drives various philosophers to deny this obvious truth. We do not need to look very far, the causes are Marxism and Augustinian Theology. Marxists need people to be cogs in the machine of society and Augustinians (western Christian theologians) need God to be eternal and people to be instantaneous. Indeed it is probable that the Augustinian idea of time was the ultimate origin of the Marxist interpretation of the world, as Marx and Engels (1845) put it "Just as Cartesian materialism passes into natural science proper, the other trend of French materialism leads directly to socialism and communism."

Marxism and certain western theologies are powerful forces opposed to the truth about you and I. They and their inheritance dominate philosophy and sociology on a global scale. Their influence is so widespread that even the mention of the "extended present" or "specious present" might sound cranky to the average reader even though their reality is an extended present moment that they can confirm whenever they see movement, hear a sound or think a thought. However, despite this antagonism there is a considerable amount of literature on the subject and few authors support the conventional view once they have considered the problem of time in our conscious experience (see references on time in conscious experience below).

One of the most telling comments about the experience of time is made by Kelly (2004), who realises that the understanding of physics amongst philosophers is not compatible with the problem. He says: "The Specious Present Theory, I will argue, simply makes no sense. It is committed to claims about experience that have no sensible interpretation." The response to this "no sensible interpretation" should, of course, be to find a sensible interpretation. To explain time in experience we must begin by understanding time in physics rather than pathetically declare that because of our limited knowledge of time we must reject our experience.

References:

Huxley, Thomas. (1874) "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History", The Fortnightly Review, n.s. 16, pp. 555-580. Reprinted in Method and Results: Essays by Thomas H. Huxley (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898).

Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. The University of Chicago Press, 1949

Marx, K. and Engels (1845). The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company. Chapter VI 3. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/index.htm

Time

Durgin, F.H & Sternberg, S. (2002) The Time of Consciousness and Vice Versa. Consciousness and Cognition 11, 284–290 (2002) doi:10.1006/ccog.2002.0566 http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/fdurgin1/publications/CC_DurginSternberg2002.pdf

Kelly, S.D. (2004). The Puzzle of Temporal Experience. Philosophy and Neuroscience, eds. Andy Brook and Kathleen Akins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/188_s05/pdf/Kelly-Time_and_Experience.pdf

Varela, F.J. (1999) The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness.
Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science
Edited by Jean, Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud abd Jean-Michel Roy
Stanford University Press, Stanford
Chapter 9, pp.266-329 http://www.as220.org/~neal/docs/RobertSpeciousPresent.pdf

Why Direct Realism and Naive Realism are unscientific

2009-01-17T04:44:00.000-08:00

Image courtesy Wikibooks: Consciousness Studies

Direct Realism is the notion that what we touch and see are directly things in the world. When he looks at an object the Direct Realist does not believe that he is seeing an image on his retina or some activity in his brain, he believes he is seeing the thing itself, directly.

We know from physics that sight is mediated by the light that is reflected from the objects in the world around us and that these objects are separate from other things as a result of the short range electrical forces that they exert. In proposing direct perception the Direct Realists are implying that their experience is directly the interaction between photons and the close range electric forces that make these photons change direction and that touch is the short range forces acting on their finger etc.

Direct Realism implies that somehow perception extends along the path of the photon to the electrical field that made the photon turn in the general direction of the viewer. Similarly, when a Direct Realist hears a sound they believe that this sound is directly connected to the vocal chords of the speaker, this implies that some mysterious influence travels between the molecules of air to extend their perception directly into contact with the inside of someone's larynx.

Now, these implied beliefs would be hilarious if it were not for the fact that many modern philosophers, psychologists and even some neuroscientists are Direct Realists.

The science of perception shows that there is no advantage whatever in assuming that we perceive objects directly. There is no evidence of any sort for the extension of the human mind into the vocal chords of other people. There are no documented, causal effects of a person's mind or thoughts on the point where light rays are bent, out there in the world. Furthermore, there is strong evidence for perception being based on a representation of the world in the brain. This evidence ranges from the neurophysiology of perceptual "filling in", through the neural basis of dreams to the cerebral cortical modelling of motion.

The neural location of perception can even be observed without neurophysiological experiments. For example, when we rapidly shift our gaze the whole view does not change chaotically like the image from a crazed amateur's movie camera, the update of the data in the brain is suspended during the shift of gaze to avoid this problem. When we look at ourselves in a mirror we can never see our eyes move. So where are the steady, reflected eyes that appear to be in the mirror when we shift our gaze? It is obvious that we have a stable interior view that is updated by the senses, not a direct connection with objects beyond our body. Why not try it, look in a mirror and ask yourself what you are seeing whilst your eyes move, do you really see the world itself or a representation of a reflection, a model in your brain?

Direct Realists seem to be trying to explain our apparent separation from the things that we observe in terms of the actual space between our sense organs and the things that give rise to the disturbances that excite these organs. But we do not see the world like this, we see it like an image that is separated from us, not as 3D objects in a space. That's why television and photos are so comprehensible - they offer the world in a form that is like our retinal images. We do not perceive sounds as coming from the depths of a speaker's vocal chords, we perceive them as coming from the direction of their heads and, furthermore, we perceive sounds to come from people's heads even if we hear the sounds through headphones and even if the speaker is merely an image on a screen. Some piece of physics in our brain binds the sense of sound to a geometrical form that hosts the image.

What disturbs me about the direct/indirect realism debate is the assumption from the outset that the "real world" is like our experience. The direct realists make the assumption that what is real is what we see. It isn't, measurements tell us that the world itself is mainly space and organised in at least 3+1 dimensions. If our experience is "like" anything at all it is like the two dimensional images that occur if the tiny component of the world called light is projected onto a surface using a lens system, not like the world itself.

Direct Realists should make it clear that they believe that the contents of experience are directly out there in the world. The direct realist/indirect realist debate should always begin with "see these things that are in your conscious experience, as a Direct Realist I believe these are actually a type of electrical force right out there in that street". It would then be obvious that Direct Realism still has an Explanatory Gap - how are some short range forces the colour "red" and others the texture "rough" given that the short range forces are similar in both cases? It would also be obvious that there is still a problem with Aristotle's regress - OK there is a set of forces out there but how do these become seen without recursion or regress? However, most importantly, it would be obvious that the idea is absurd from the outset, of course your mind does not stretch into the street.

Direct Realism is particularly disingenuous because it offers no explanation of how a pattern of electrical activity that bends light rays could become a view containing the world around us. It does not explain Aristotle's regress but just shifts the problem to another location with the contents of mind placed out in the world instead of in the brain. Even if Direct Realism were true it would provide no answers to the problems that confront us in the neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

So Direct Realism is absurd and explains nothing, it does not ask how our perception might arise but instead begins with the prejudice that our perception is directly the things in the world and attempts to fit perception to this model, simply denying any features that contradict Direct Realism as non-physical. Why would anyone take such an unscientific approach? The reasons are multiple from a mistaken impression that Direct Realism is more compatible with theology than other ideas (Reid) to a desire to justify the claims of "strong AI" (Dennett). Although Dennett also makes the mystical suggestion that what we experience is in some sort of "logical space" (See There is no information without representation). This would all be rather amusing if it were not for the fact that Direct Realists are evangelical and seem to believe it is their duty to suppress all other ideas.

Perhaps, when Direct Realists lie down and shut their eyes, they sense a dark space, if so they might ask how such a thing occurs. How does this volume of simultaneous darkness surrounding a point occur? They might consider this whilst watching this non-existent green dot race around the ring without moving:

Green afterimage courtesy Wikimedia Commons.Stare at the cross in the picture and you will see a (non-existent) green dot racing round the image.

Or perhaps the Direct Realist could explain reverse causality - see SENSORIMOTOR ADAPTATION TO VIOLATIONS OF
TEMPORAL CONTIGUITY

.Further Reading

Alex Holcombes web page http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/staff/alexh/

Perceiving perception and seeing seeing

2009-01-17T04:35:00.000-08:00

I saw a crowd stand talking
I just came up in time
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
That a man ain't nothing but his mind
Blind Willie Johnson

Way back about two thousand three hundred years ago Aristotle wrote a book called "On the Soul". This book is hard to read nowadays and some of the allusions within it are now unclear but it is still the definitive work on philosophy of mind.

It is definitive because it describes two key concepts of the philosophy of mind. The first key concept is the "regress":

"Since it is through sense that we are aware that we are seeing or hearing, it must be either by sight that we are aware of seeing, or by some sense other than sight. But the sense that gives us this new sensation must perceive both sight and its object, viz. colour: so that either (1) there will be two senses both percipient of the same sensible object, or (2) the sense must be percipient of itself. Further, even if the sense which perceives sight were different from sight, we must either fall into an infinite regress, or we must somewhere assume a sense which is aware of itself. If so, we ought to do this in the first case. " (Book 3, part 2

When budding materialists come across this concept they think "you cant see yourself seeing or you will get in an endless cycle so what we call consciousness or mind cant exist!". Every Direct/Naive Realist from la Mettrie to Dennett has this argument in mind. But notice how Aristotle deals with the problem: "we must either fall into an infinite regress, or we must somewhere assume a sense which is aware of itself". Aristotle does not fall straight into the trap of assuming that the infinite regress argument is the only possibility, it could also be assumed that a sense might be self aware. (See The symbol grounding problem and Chinese Room for a modern insight into the regress).

Aristotle considers self awareness in depth in "On the Soul" and ultimately discovers that it is linked to our idea of time. This leads Aristotle to consider the second key concept: how time is involved in mind. The text describing this second concept has probably been obscured over the ages because most medieval copyists would have found it incomprehensible. Despite this, Aristotle's idea of time and mind is still worth considering:

"The answer is that just as what is called a 'point' is, as being at once one and two, properly said to be divisible, so here, that which discriminates is qua undivided one, and active in a single moment of time, while so far forth as it is divisible it twice over uses the same dot at one and the same time. So far forth then as it takes the limit as two' it discriminates two separate objects with what in a sense is divided: while so far as it takes it as one, it does so with what is one and occupies in its activity a single moment of time."

This is complicated unless you realise that he is saying that in the same way as two spatially separated objects can project geometrically at a point so can two temporally separated objects. In this analysis he is envisaging time as a dimension with events laid out as they are in space.

Aristotle clarifies this:

"But that which mind thinks and the time in which it thinks are in this case divisible only incidentally and not as such. For in them too there is something indivisible (though, it may be, not isolable) which gives unity to the time and the whole of length; and this is found equally in every continuum whether temporal or spatial."

Materialists generally oppose this, relativistic, concept of time to preserve their interpretation of the regress argument. But in truth the dimensionality of time is well established (see Special Relativity ebook). In modern terminology Aristotle is arguing that for mind a space-time interval can truly be a zero distance (cf: this happens for photons).

Those who are irked by the idea of time as an existent direction for arranging things might care to look at the latest work on attosecond laser pulses. Using these pulses it is possible to get an electron to interfere with its own, historical self, creating a double slit experiment in time. (See Lindner et al. (2005). Attosecond double slit experiment. and Horwitz's analysis of these experiments).

So why do materialists continue with the assertion that you cant possibly perceive a perception because this would cause a regress when Aristotle told them millennia ago that extension in time would resolve the problem? Whitehead has the answer in his Concept of Nature: Time:

"The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries accepted as their natural philosophy a certain circle of concepts which were as rigid and definite as those of the philosophy of the middle ages, and were accepted with as little critical research. I will call this natural philosophy 'materialism.' Not only were men of science materialists, but also adherents of all schools of philosophy. The idealists only differed from the philosophic materialists on question of the alignment of nature in reference to mind. But no one had any doubt that the philosophy of nature considered in itself was of the type which I have called materialism. It is the philosophy which I have already examined in my two lectures of this course preceding the present one. It can be summarised as the belief that nature is an aggregate of material and that this material exists in some sense at each successive member of a one-dimensional series of extensionless instants of time. Furthermore the mutual relations of the material entities at each instant formed these entities into a spatial configuration in an unbounded space. It would seem that space---on this theory-would be as instantaneous as the instants, and that some explanation is required of the relations between the successive instantaneous spaces. The materialistic theory is however silent on this point; and the succession of instantaneous spaces is tacitly combined into one persistent space. This theory is a purely intellectual rendering of experience which has had the luck to get itself formulated at the dawn of scientific thought. It has dominated the language and the imagination of science since science flourished in Alexandria, with the result that it is now hardly possible to speak without appearing to assume its immediate obviousness."

And still, a century after Whitehead, the materialists are dominant in philosophy, and yes, to their shame, in science. In the twenty first century it is known that Alexandrian cosmology is incorrect and it has even been experimentally demonstrated that dimensional time exists. It is crucial that philosophers and scientists re-evaluate their theories in the context of modern cosmology and do not take the lazy option of believing that a "Newtonian approximation" is a valid approach to how events are arranged in space and time. In fact the entire story of the philosophy of mind is a tale of how Alexandrian cosmology cannot explain our experience. Our experience, like the world itself, is not composed of isolated, frozen 3D structures that succeed each other in time and the philosophy of mind in the last hundred years amounts to little more than twenty different ways of stating this fact. In a feat of jaw-dropping hubris and contrary to the spirit of scientific endeavour, the conclusion that is drawn from this failure is often that Alexandrian cosmology must be correct and the mind does not exist!

Incidently, Aristotle, by a quirk of the fate of ideas, was probably partly responsible for the rise in materialism because he portrayed time as the same everywhere in his "Physics" .

What is the soul of a man?

2009-01-17T04:26:00.000-08:00

Click here to see the song on Youtube

These are the lyrics for Blind Willie Johnson's song

"Soul of a Man"

I'm going to ask the question
Please answer if you can
Is there anybody's children can tell me
What is the soul of a man?

(CHORUS:)
Won't somebody tell me
Answer if you can
Won't somebody tell me
Tell me what is the soul of a man?

I've travelled different countries
Travelled to the furthest lands
Couldn't find nobody could tell me
What is the soul of a man

(Chorus)

I saw a crowd stand talking
I just came up in time
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
That a man ain't nothing but his mind

(Chorus)

I read the Bible often
I try to read it right
As far as I can understand
It's nothing but a burning light

(Chorus)

When Christ taught in the temple
The people all stood amazed
Was teaching the lawyers and the doctors
How to raise a man from the grave