Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates (Complex Adaptive Systems Series)
Can there be a science of consciousness? This issue has been the focus of three landmark conferences sponsored by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The first two conferences and books have become touchstones for the field. This volume presents a selection of invited papers from the third conference.
Can there be a science of consciousness? This issue has been the focus of three landmark conferences sponsored by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The first two conferences and books have become touchstones for the field. This volume presents a selection of invited papers from the third conference. It showcases recent progress in this maturing field by researchers from philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, phenomenology, and physics. It is divided into nine sections: the explanatory gap, color, neural correlates of consciousness, vision, emotion, the evolution and function of consciousness, physical reality, the timing of conscious experience, and phenomenology. Each section is preceded by an overview and commentary by the editors.
Contributors : Dick J. Bierman, Jeffrey Burgdorf, A. Graham Cairns-Smith, William H. Calvin, Christian de Quincey, Frank H. Durgin, Vittorio Gallese, Elizabeth L. Glisky, Melvyn A. Goodale, Richard L. Gregory, Scott Hagan, C. Larry Hardin, C. A. Heywood, Masayuki Hirafuji, Nicholas Humphrey, Harry T. Hunt, Piet Hut, Alfred W. Kaszniak, Robert W. Kentridge, Stanley A. Klein, Charles D. Laughlin, Joseph Levine, Lianggang Lou, Shimon Malin, A. David Milner, Steven Mithen, Martine Nida-Rumelin, Stephen Palmer, Jaak Panksepp, Dean Radin, Steven Z. Rapcsak, Sheryl L. Reminger, Antti Revonsuo, Gregg H. Rosenberg, Yves Rossetti, Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Jonathan Shear, Galen Strawson, Robert Van Gulick, Frances Vaughan, Franz X. Vollenweider, B. Alan Wallace, Douglas F. Watt, Larry Weiskrantz, Fred A. Wolf, Kunio Yasue, Arthur Zajonc. - Toward a Science of Consciousness III - Amazon
- Contents
- PREFACE
- I— THE EXPLANATORY GAP—INTRODUCTION David J. Chalmers
- II— COLOR—INTRODUCTION David J. Chalmers
- III— NEURAL CORRELATES—INTRODUCTION Alfred W. Kaszniak
- 9— Neural Correlates of Hallucinogen-Induced Altered States of Consciousness F. X. Vollenweider, A. Gamma, and M. F. I. Vollenweider-Scherpenhuyzen
- 10— First Steps toward a Theory of Mental Force: PET Imaging of Systematic Cerebral Changes after Psychological Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Diso
- 11— The Visual Brain in Action A. David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale
- 12— In Search of Immaculate Perception: Evidence from Motor Representations of Space Yves Rossetti
- 13— Attending, Seeing and Knowing in Blindsight Robert W. Kentridge, Charles A. Heywood, and Lawrence Weiskrantz
- 14— Insights into Blindsight A. David Milner
- 15— From Grasping to Language: Mirror Neurons and the Origin of Social Communication Vittorio Gallese
- 16— Supporting the ''Grand Illusion of Direct Perception: Implicit Learning in Eye-Movement Control Frank H. Durgin
- 17— Selective Peripheral Fading: How Attention Leads to Loss of Visual Consciousness Lianggang Lou
- V— EMOTION—INTRODUCTION Alfred W. Kaszniak
- VI— EVOLUTION AND FUNCTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS—INTRODUCTION Stuart R. Hameroff
- 22— Flagging the Present Moment with Qualia Richard L. Gregory
- 23— If Qualia Evolved . . . A. G. Cairns-Smith
- 24— Handaxes and Ice Age Carvings: Hard Evidence for the Evolution of Consciousness Steven Mithen
- 25— Ephemeral Levels of Mental Organization: Darwinian Competitions As a Basis for Consciousness William H. Calvin
- VII— PHYSICAL REALITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS—INTRODUCTION Stuart R. Hameroff
- VIII— THE TIMING OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE—INTRODUCTION Stuart Hameroff
- IX— PHENOMENOLOGY—INTRODUCTION Alfred W. Kaszniak
- 33— Intersubjectivity: Exploring Consciousness from the Second-Person Perspective Christian de Quincey
- 34— Goethe and the Phenomenological Investigation of Consciousness Arthur Zajonc
- 35— Essential Dimensions of Consciousness: Objective, Subjective, and Intersubjective Frances Vaughan
- 36— Training the Attention and Exploring Consciousness in Tibetan Buddhism B. Alan Wallace
- 37— Transpersonal and Cognitive Psychologies of Consciousness: A Necessary and Reciprocal Dialogue Harry T. Hunt
Preference for Consciousness Studies
Background:
- Emergence of interest in conscious experience in last century
- High-profile books and new experimental techniques fueled debate
- Three interdisciplinary Tucson conferences held: 1994, 1996, and 1998 (fourth scheduled for 2000)
Philosophical Battle Lines:
- Some see conscious experience as another physical process in the brain
- Others believe it's outside science or requires expansion of science
History of Psychology:
- Debate between Socrates and Democritus on consciousness originated long ago
Tucson Conferences:
- Integrative, attempting to assimilate various approaches
- Major areas: philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, math/physics/biology, experiential/cultural
- Goal: avoid tunnel vision and facilitate communication between researchers
First Conference (Tucson I):
- Small and tentative
- Success beyond expectations
- Expanded for Tucson II with more participants and attendees
Second Conference (Tucson II):
- Many central figures in consciousness studies participated
- Debate on future of field emerged after giddiness of Tucson II
Decisions for Third Conference (Tucson III):
- Incorporated cultural anthropology and aesthetics
- Higher standard for abstract reviews
- Focused on data: experimental results relevant to consciousness
Progress in Consciousness Studies:
- Much room for bold ideas and passionate debate remains
- Solid scientific progress made, especially in neural correlates of visual consciousness and unconscious processes.
Support for Consciousness Studies:
- Fetzer Institute awarded $1.4 million to establish a Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.
Tucson III Conference Highlights:
- Announcement of grant from Fetzer Institute
- Establishment of Center for Consciousness Studies
- First Consciousness Poetry Slam organized by poet Carol Ebbecke.
Explanatory Gap
Introduction:
- Natural to hope physical explanation can account for consciousness
- Some argue physical accounts cannot fully explain consciousness
- Explanatory gap: reason why consciousness exists not explained by physical theory alone
Explanatory Gap Argument:
- Physical explanations successful in accounting for various phenomena
- However, there's a gap between physical processes and conscious experience
- This gap can't be explained by current physical theories or concepts
- Some argue that consciousness is not wholly physical, while others believe it can still be accommodated within a physical view of the world.
Levine on Conceivability Argument:
- Materialism: ultimate nature of mind is physical; no sharp discontinuity between mental and non-mental
- Antimaterialists: mental phenomena different in kind from physical, based on conceivability argument
- Descartes' demonstration of distinction between mind and body through conceivability argument
- Materialist response: identity of reality is a matter for discovery, not a priori knowledge.
Explanatory Gap:
- Conceivability argument shows existence of an explanatory gap between mental and physical phenomena
- Seemingly conceivable that there could be a physically/functionally similar creature without consciousness or distinct sensory experiences
- Lack of explanation for why this isn't the case demonstrates the explanatory gap.
Explanation Sketches Comparison: ESI vs ESII
ESI: Boiling Point of Water (1):
- H2O molecules exert vapor pressure P at kinetic energy E
- At sea level, exerting vapor pressure P causes molecules to rapidly escape into air
- Rapidly escaping into air is boiling
- 212°F is the kinetic energy E of water at sea level
- Water is H2O (6)
- Water boils at 212°F at sea level
ESII: Presence of Reddish Qualia (7):
- S occupies brain state B (8)
- Occupying brain state B is to experience a reddish quale (state R) (9)
- S is experiencing a reddish quale
Explanation Sketch Differences
- Bridge Premises:
- In ESI: (5) Water = H2O (analytic, topic-neutral) serves as bridge premise
- In ESII: (8) R = S's qualitative state B (not analytic) serves as bridge premise
- Explanatory Gap:
- ESI does not leave an explanatory gap due to the analyticity and topic-neutrality of its bridge premise (5)
- ESII leaves an explanatory gap because its bridge premise (8) is not analytic
- Objections and Replies
- Some argue that statements like (i) in ESI may not be analytic or topic-neutral
- Objectors challenge the assumption that identities like (5) require explanation, claiming they can be accepted as brute facts
Objection to Identity Claims Requiring Explanation
- Argument based on idea that identity claims don't require explanation themselves
- Example of water being H2O used to illustrate point
- Objection: ESII involving qualitative character is different from ESI, and requires explanation due to distinct properties instantiated in the same substance
Gappy vs. Nongappy Identities
- Identity claim is gappy if it admits of an intelligible request for explanation
- (5) - water being H2O is nongappy, no need to explain why it's true since explanatory power is evident
- (8) - psychophysical identity involving qualitative character is gappy, request for explanation seems intelligible
- Difference between gappy and nongappy identities: explanatory gap only in case of gappy identities
Metaphysical Implications
- Distinction between explanatory gap argument and traditional antimaterialist conceivability argument
- Materialist position: mental properties can be metaphysically reducible to physical properties, despite epistemological thesis that they cannot be explained in terms of physical properties due to gappy identities like (8)
- Argument for metaphysical conclusion from epistemic premise concerning cognitive access to reality is not straightforward.
Appreciation of Explanation: Metaphysical and Epistemological Perspectives
Explanation:
- Not purely epistemological matter
- Has a metaphysical side (responsible source for phenomenon)
- Has an epistemological side (intelligibility, understanding why it obtains)
Identity vs. Explanation
- Pure identity requires no explanation:
- Metaphysically: no further source, brute fact
- Epistemologically: dealing with a brute fact, requests for explanation seem otiose
Materialist's Perspective on Gappy Psycho-Physical Identities:
- No sense of responsibility or further source for the identity's obtaining (metaphysically)
- Recognize that mental property is the same thing as physical correlate, but it's puzzling to see this (epistemologically)
Explanatory Gap Argument:
- Doesn't demonstrate a gap in nature but a gap in our understanding of nature (Jackson & Chalmers vs. materialists)
- Plausible explanation for the gap in our understanding is that there is a genuine gap in nature, but countervailing reasons must be considered (Levine)
Background and Further Reading:
- Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, Sixth Meditation (most widely known source for explanatory gap argument)
- Rosenthal (1991), p. 26; Jackson (1993); Chalmers (1996) - counterarguments to the conceivability argument and metaphysical implications
- Nagel (1974): "conscious experience, what it's like to be us"
- Levine (1983, 1993b): introduces explanatory gap and further elaborates on the argument
- Hempel (1965), Kitcher & Salmon (1989): locus classicus for treating explanations as deductions; wide range of views on nature of explanation
- Jackson, Fodor & Lepore (1992), Levine (1993a), Rey (1993) - in-depth discussion of problem; different approaches to understanding it.
Neo-Dualism and Materialism: Supervenience of Mental Properties on Physical
Key Points:
- Materialist view: All mental properties derive from underlying physical structure
- Problem for materialism: Causal supervenience is not sufficient to validate materialism
- Neo-dualists argue for property dualism and nomic connections between mental and physical properties
- Dualists use conceivability arguments based on imagined worlds (e.g., zombie cases) to challenge materialism
Arguments Against Materialism:
- Mere nomic supervenience is not sufficient for materialism
- Logical possibilities exist of a world that differs mentally from the physical structure in our world
- Dualists use conceivability arguments based on imagined worlds to challenge materialism
- Arguments may equivocate or fail to support both premises (P1 and P2)
- Familiar scientific examples illustrate that a priori conceivability does not necessarily entail distinctness
Neo-Dualist's Position:
- Mental properties are distinct from physical properties in the same way electromagnetic and gravitational forces are different
- Natural laws establish nomic connections between mental and physical properties, making it impossible for mental differences without physical ones
Materialist's Response:
- Show that imagined worlds separating mind and matter involve contradictions or violate law of identity (burden of proof is on the materialist)
- Challenge dualists' alleged possibilities by questioning their adequacy and consistency with existing knowledge.
- The focus shifts to how well the dualist can defend his/her purported possibilities.
Conceivability Arguments:
- Two premises: P1 (imagined state of affairs does not seem to involve a contradiction) and P2 (what is conceivable is logically possible)
- Problems with the argument: Equivocation on conceivable or failure to support both premises.
- Chalmers acknowledges that logical possibility does not necessarily mean metaphysical possibility and primary vs secondary intensions in scientific examples.
Chalmers' Argument Against Identifying Consciousness with Material Properties:
- Chalmers uses an analogy to argue that consciousness is distinct from material properties
- The disanalogy: anything that satisfies the primary intension of consciousness cannot be identified with materialist proposed physical referents
- Two types of worlds: those in which phenomenal aspect is satisfied without materialist's physical referent and those in which it isn't satisfied despite presence of relevant physical properties
- Materialists object to imagining disembodied consciousness, arguing that when we imagine phenomenal awareness, we implicitly assume a physical substrate
- Neodualists argue for the distinction between consciousness and material properties based on the limitations of our current understanding of both concepts.
Challenges with Analogy:
- Even if some analogies are broken, others remain that may be sufficient to undermine the zombie thought experiment
- Residual questions about adequacy of concepts used in thought experiments.
Materialist Critique:
- Materialists argue that Chalmers' concept of consciousness is not well developed enough or anchored sufficiently to support the argumentative use made of it
- They claim that when we imagine a world with phenomenal awareness, we implicitly imagine some physical substrate, whether recognized or not.
Neodualist Response:
- Neodualists argue that materialists are begging the question by assuming consciousness can only be realized in physical states
- They suggest current explanatory gaps may reflect a poverty of theories and concepts rather than metaphysical implications.
Limitations of Concepts Used:
- Critique on the adequacy of concepts used for both sides, especially the concept of phenomenal consciousness and its possible physical basis.
- Comparison with vitalist's flawed reasoning in the mid-19th century about reproduction and physical structure.
Discussing the Inadequacy of Neodualist's Concept of Consciousness for Assessing Physical Instantiation
Neodualist's Concept of Consciousness Inadequacy
- Neodualist's concept of consciousness is less plausible for assessing physical realization due to:
- Current understanding of consciousness being incomplete
- Lack of detailed concepts on the physical side (terribly nonspecific)
- Comparable to vitalist's inadequate concept of reproduction
- Vitalist Parallels:
- Both lack adequate conception of the physical basis for the phenomena they study
- Chalmers denies valid analogy between his conceivability argument and vitalist arguments against materialism
- Argues consciousness is not fundamentally functional process
- Claims functional roles can be filled in absence of phenomenal consciousness (absent qualia arguments)
- Adequacy of concepts used to reach general antifunctionalist conclusion questionable
- Argues consciousness is not fundamentally functional process
- Functionalist's embarrassments: large explanatory gap, carrying a promissory note is not the same as being refuted.
- Mid-19th century materialist's position: wide explanatory gap, needs to write a hefty IOU but not yet refuted.
Realistic Materialist Monism (RMM)
Background:
- Materialists believe that everything in the universe is physical
- Monists hold that there's only one kind of fundamental stuff in reality
- Realistic materialists grant the reality and physicality of experiential phenomena
Characteristics of RMM:
- Divides world into experiential and non-experiential phenomena
- Requires draining conception of non-experiential phenomena, not experiential ones
- Puzzlement remains regarding the connection between both types of properties
- Criticizes assumptions about matter based on limited understanding
- Physics can help by challenging features of our natural conception of the physical
- Nonmental phenomena may not be as different from mental phenomena as we assume.
Arguments for RMM:
- Experience and consciousness are real, physical phenomena (granted by realistic materialists)
- Lack of positive understanding regarding the connection between both types of properties
- Confusion in our imaginative picture of matter or the physical world
- Limited knowledge about space, time, gravity, dimensions, etc.
- Physics can provide insights to dilute or undermine features of our natural conception of the physical that make nonmental phenomena seem utterly different from mental ones.
Physics and Matter:
- Atoms once thought of as solid particles with empty space between them
- Modern physics challenges notion of solid central part in fundamental constituents of matter
- Grainy, inert matter gives way to fields of energy, an ethereal process-stuff
Relation between Nonmental and Experiential:
- Negative point: Destroys intuitive puzzlement about the existence of consciousness as a physical thing on par with phenomena of mass and extension
- No clear reason to believe consciousness is not a physical phenomenon
Philosophical Issues:
Eliminativism:
- Eliminativists question reality of experiential in favor of thoroughgoing materialism
- Demonstrates dualist thinking, which assumes understanding of nature of physical exceeds actual knowledge
The Hard Problem:
- Lack of clear definition and difficulty in understanding non-experiential reality
- Comparable to understanding peculiarities of quantum physics
Zombies:
- Argument that PPD-zombies (perfect physical duplicates with no experiential properties) could exist is invalid due to lack of evidence
- Realistic materialist monism: Registers indubitable reality of experiential phenomena and acknowledges non-experiential phenomena as concrete reality or matter.
Realistic Materialist Monism:
- Presumes current physics's best account is reality-mirroring
- Believes all things are physical, one kind of stuff or being
- Materialists call themselves monists for this reason
- Clarity issue with the term 'monist'
- Fundamental sense of oneness in reality
- Point of view privileged to make absolute claims
- Materialists hold more than one fundamental particle, which contradicts same substancehood
- Questionable justification for dualism: intuition lacks theoretical support
- Dualism faces difficulty in accounting for interaction between mind and matter
- Monist carries bad baggage but seems compelling due to the physics idea of everything being made of the same ultimate stuff.
Notes:
- Phenomenon refers to any sort of existent, abstract or concrete
- Ancient idea that everything is made of the same ultimate stuff
- Russell's contribution: compelled by its remarkable nature
- Debate on monism vs dualism throughout history
- Philosophical zombies were once plausible creatures but have lost their relevance due to being defined as physically indistinguishable from humans and having unknown insides, of interest to functionalists and behaviorists.
- A perfect physical duplicate would follow the same physical laws
- Conception of matter as essentially energy-involving present since Democritus and Epicurus' work
- Suggestion from Sebastian Gardner: call oneself a 'Q-ist' instead of monist.
- Trailer for Strawson's forthcoming work, grateful to various philosophers and audiences for their contributions.
The Intrinsic Nature of Physical Phenomena
- Gregg H. Rosenberg's perspective: Complete physics does not convey all facts about the stuff the world is made of
- The Explanatory Gap: Missing facts beyond what physical theories explain about consciousness
Two Faces of Consciousness
- Güven Güzeldere's distinction between two faces of consciousness:
- Functional face: Consciousness as it contributes to mental economy (what it does)
- Experiential face: Phenomenal qualities and the experience of these qualities
Strategies to Address the Explanatory Gap
- Argue no gap exists (illusion)
- Acknowledge a gap, but not significant (explanation vs. explanation connection)
- Radical theory: We are too stupid to understand the connection between physical and phenomenal facts
- Physical things have two faces (this strategy pursued in this chapter)
Challenges for the Fourth Strategy
- Avoid being ad hoc
- Avoid dualism dilemma: Tie new facts to physical facts without causal irrelevance or spooky interaction
- Be relevant to explanatory gap: Give reasons why further physical facts may fill the gap
Physics of Life: Cellular Automata as a Simplified Context for Physical Facts
- Life worlds: 2D grid of cells with on and off properties
- Simple rules produce complex phenomena (self-replicators, Universal Turing machine)
Assumptions for the Discussion
- Dimensional viewer accessing another reality as a Life world
- Existence of objects functioning analogously to cognitive systems in our world.
Explanatory Gap and Consciousness in a Life World
Background:
- Debate between skeptic and proponent of consciousness existence in pure Life world
- Skeptic doubts that mosaic of bare difference can support consciousness
- Question: Could there be a pure Life world?
Arguments Against Pure Life World:
- Circular Dispositional Relations: Basic properties are characterized by circular dispositional relations, leading to logical regress and difficulty in understanding bare difference between them.
- Carrier Requirement for Schemas: To instantiate a schema, carriers with intrinsic relations to other carriers are needed; these carriers may have natures external to the fundamental system of categories in the fundamental schema but not internal to any other schema.
- Nested Layers of Pattern and Being: Embedded schemas within the Life world could create a similar ladder of embedded patterns, leading to the question: what happens when we reach the bottom (i.e., Life physics)?
Implications:
- Avoiding infinite regress requires carriers with natures partially external to the fundamental system of categories in the fundamental schema but not internal to any other schema.
- The existence of consciousness in a pure Life world remains an open question due to skeptic's doubts and the complexity of the issue.
Two Faces of Causation
Background:
- Fundamental carriers' intrinsic properties need to be understood as non-reducible to relations with other properties
- Physics leaves out facts about the nature of these carriers (intrinsic natures, difference, scalar variation, lawful dispositions)
- Phenomenal qualities fit this description and address the carrier problem
Two Challenges:
- Why are these intrinsic properties experiential?
- Gap between mere intrinsicness and experiential intrinsicness
- Bridging the gap between fundamental physics and animal consciousness
Proposal:
- World's causal structure has two faces: effective and receptive
- Physics describes only effective aspect, not the nature of causal connection or structure of causal nexus
- Realist theory of causal connection needed to overcome this limitation
- Receptivity as a connection between effective sides of distinct individuals (Figure 4.2)
- Yields explanatory benefits: simple inductive definition, models levels of nature, reduces facts about spacetime to causal connection and significance, ties into hypothesis of consciousness as a carrier for causal content
- Theory increases explanatory power by endowing the world with an intricate vertical structure (Figure 4.3)
Receptivity in Natural Individuals
- Binds lower level individuals within a natural individual, making them relevant to one another
- An irreducible global property of a natural individual
- Not the sum of receptivenesses of its constituents
- A possibility filter that maps set of prior possibilities onto a proper subset
- Imposes a condition on joint instantiation of states, sundering their independence
Theory Implications
- Represents a substantial metaphysical hypothesis
- Draws empirical hypotheses from it (e.g., quantum mechanical theories, decoherence)
- Divides into effective constraints and their binding within shared receptivity
- Consciousness has a similar duality: experiencing subject and phenomenal qualities
- Promises in solving the problem of why intrinsic properties are experiential
Carrier Role and Ascent through Levels
- Carrier for effective constraints, experiences its content
- Mapping lower level effective properties to irreducible carriers at higher levels
- Qualified carrier matches constraint it must carry, mathematically describable using degrees of freedom
- Phenomenal quality instantiates dimensional structure and family relations
- Ascent through quality space using projection operators instead of combining lower-level qualities
The Carrier Hypotheses
- Phenomenal qualities carry the effective constraints in the world
- The experiencing of those qualities by a subject carries the receptivity of an individual to those constraints
The Consciousness Hypotheses
- Human consciousness carrying causal content of high-level, cognitively structured natural individual
- Human awareness is experiential acquaintance with intrinsic content that carries nature's effective side.
Color Experiences and Consciousness
- Color experience is a microcosm of consciousness, raising deep philosophical questions about subjective qualities (qualia) of red and blue experiences
- Neuroscientist with black-and-white vision may not know what it's like to have a red experience, illustrating explanatory gap between physical facts and qualia
Problem of Inverted Spectrum:
- Traditional philosophical problem questioning whether others have the same color experiences as us when looking at objects
- Undetectable if we call experiences by the same names and associate them with same objects
- Raises questions about explaining color experience in terms of physical facts
Color Processing and Philosophical Problems:
- Advancements in color processing science are relevant to philosophical debates
- Productive interaction between science and philosophy on understanding color experiences and the explanatory gap
Discussions on Inverted Spectrum:
- Stephen Palmer: Behaviorally undetectable inversion may not make sense due to asymmetries in color space, but red-green dimension holds promise for inversions
- C. L. Hardin: Color structure tells us all there is to know about color qualia; deep asymmetries rule out any possible inversion and close explanatory gap between physical processes and experiences
- Martine Nida-Rümelin: Some actual cases of spectrum inversion might exist, but philosophical consequences and arguments persist even if complete qualia inversions are impossible
Color Space:
- Knowledge about color perception allows us to understand the color question better
- Color experiences can be represented geometrically as a color space with points corresponding to colors and proximities indicating similarities
- Newton's color circle is an example of a simple representation for understanding behavioral data constraints on answering the color question.
Color Differences Unseen Through Similarity Measures
Symmetry in Color Space:
- Reflection about axes passing through opposite unique colors and their angular bisectors, plus rotations of 90°, 180°, and 270° can escape detection due to mapping of unique colors into unique colors.
Unique Hues:
- Four experientially pure colors: unique red, yellow, green, blue.
- Differences in these hues can be used to unmask individuals with rainbow reversal or other color transformations.
Three-Dimensional Color Space:
- Human color space is three-dimensional (hue, saturation, lightness).
- Breaks symmetries in the color circle, making some further transformations detectable through behavioral tests:
- Yellow is lighter than blue for normal trichromats; reversed red-green experience would result in opposite statements.
- A complete reversal of all three dimensions (red-for-green, blue-for-yellow, black-for-white) remains plausible but less likely.
Red-Green Reversed Perceivers:
- Some individuals may be red-green reversed trichromats due to certain genetic defects affecting pigments in cone types.
- They do not experience the red-green dimension of color space, but their case is more plausible than a complete reversal of all dimensions.
Behavioral Detectability of Color Transformations
Evidence for Undetectable or Difficult-to-Detect Color Transformations:
- Nobody has managed to identify one, despite claims that it could be detected by purely behavioral means
- The author argues that certain color terms (basic color terms - BCTs) are symmetrically distributed in color space and others are not
BCTs as Linguistic Universals:
- Berlin and Kay's discovery of 16 BCTs: single, frequently used, general-purpose words that refer primarily to colors
- These appear to form a universal system for linguistic description of colors
- In English, there are 11 BCTs: RED, GREEN, BLUE, YELLOW, BLACK, WHITE, GRAY, ORANGE, PURPLE, PINK, and BROWN
- The other BCTs can be glossed as LIGHT-BLUE, WARM (reds, oranges, and yellows), COOL (greens, blues, and violets), LIGHT-WARM, and DARK-COOL
Symmetries in Color Space:
- Some BCTs are symmetric with respect to the three candidate color transformations
- The distribution of other BCTs breaks all three symmetries
- If all BCTs arise from underlying asymmetries in experiential structure, any color transformation could be detected by behavioral means
Isomorphism Constraint:
- Symmetries are crucial for evaluating the "color question" behaviorally
- Two people's color experiences might be different, but if they have the same relational structure, their behavior will be indistinguishable
- The isomorphism constraint suggests that the nature of individual color experiences cannot be uniquely fixed by behavioral means, but their structural interrelations can be
Isomorphism Constraint and Color Perception
- The isomorphism constraint defines limits of what can be known about consciousness via behavior
- Behavioral measures define standard equivalence classes: normal trichromats, dichromats, monochromats (difference classes)
- Isomorphism constraint holds within each difference class but cannot specify color experiences beyond this level
Biology and Consciousness
- Biological methods may help study subisomorphic differences in color experiences by identifying relevant neurobiological differences
- However, subjectivity barrier prevents identification of subisomorphic differences between individuals' experiences
- Clone assumption: if underlying biology is the same, experiences are the same
- Potential route to detect changes in subisomorphic level: within-subject designs using biological interventions and self-reports
Color Transformations and Equivalence Classes
- Biologically defined classes do not imply equivalent color experiences for individuals within them
- True equivalence classes based on relevant biological features can be inferred, but statements about others' experiences are indirect inferences
- Chances of bringing this project off in reality are vanishingly small due to assumptions involved.
Color Quality and Color Structure: The Unintelligibility of Color Identity with Brain Processes
Levine's Argument Against Color Identity with Neural Processing
- Spectral inversion arguments purport to show that an explanatory relationship between qualitative experiences and brain processes is unintelligible.
- Even if mental processes and physical processes were identical, we cannot have scientific grounds for supposing it due to the possibility of undetectable spectral inversion.
- The reverse also seems imaginable.
Spectral Inversion: An Illusion Based on Ignorance?
- Factual evidence suggests that the possibility of an undetectable spectral inversion may be an illusion based on our ignorance.
- Further investigation into color symmetry breakers could lead to deeper reasons for believing that human experience colors are intrinsically not invertible.
Color Categories and Their Biological Component
- Color categories are equivalence classes of items that need not be identical.
- Resemblance among instances of the same color category is not necessarily a function of perceptual distance between them.
- Innate mechanisms exist for detecting resemblances amongst colors and categorizing them.
- Basic color terms have biological components as shown by human infants' eye movements and macaque color categorization experiments.
The Importance of Color Categories in Perception
- Four-month infants can categorize colors even without language, based on eye movements.
- Infant color categorization matches adult human English speakers' color categories.
- Macaque monkeys also categorize colors differently from randomized sequences of lights that humans see as similar or different.
- Color categories are not exclusively cultural phenomena but have a biological component.
Color Categories and Their Extent in Perceptual Space
- Basic color terms, such as red, yellow, green, blue, black, and white, have small sets of best examples that cluster tightly in perceptual color space.
- Some colors, like blue and green, are seen over wide regions of the color solid, while others, like red, orange, and yellow, are more restricted in extent.
Matsuzawa's Experiment with Chimpanzees (Ai)
- Ai was trained on basic color terms and then tested with Berlin and Kay chips she had not seen before.
- She named the chips similarly to human beings, suggesting that her color categorization was based on innate mechanisms rather than cultural bias or other fancy explanations.
Categorical Asymmetry in Color Perception:
- Yellow vs Brown: Brown is a blackened orange or yellow, but their differences are perceived as more significant than those between light blue and navy blue
- Blackening an orange spot transforms it into rich brown, while blackened blues and greens maintain their parental connection
- Yellow's difference from other hues, especially at high lightness levels, is explained by neural mechanisms in the cerebral cortex (Yoshioka et al., 1996)
Phenomenal Features of Yellow:
- Yellowish greens look like they should be classified as greens due to high yellow content but are not marked with distinct basic color terms in most languages
- Functional models, consistent with neurophysiology, can help understand other phenomenal features of yellow such as why it looks different from other primary colors
Warm and Cool Colors:
- Warm and cool colors have a cross-culturally robust distinction, possibly reflecting intrinsic phenomenal similarities and differences
- Katra and Wooten's study: higher ratings of warmth correspond with activation levels in opponent channels (Katra & Wooten, 2003)
- Connection between temperature association and color perception may be rooted in neural systems rather than solely based on environmental associations.
Chromatic Structural Irregularities:
- Rotations of hue circuit lead to unitary becoming binary hues
- Interchanges of warm and cool colors result in negative opponent-channel activations turning positive, vice versa
- Exchange of yellows with blues maps dark blues and cyans into browns
- Mapping small categorical region into large one and large region into small one for reds vs greens
Empirical Argument:
- Predictive consequences: pseudonormal observers' color space regions should be larger for "red" and smaller for "green"
- Possibility of testing argument with pseudonormal observers through genetic markers
Inverted Spectrum Debate:
- Functionalist account of experience questioned by possibility of inverted sensory qualities
- Logical possibility does not equate to scientific plausibility or reality
- Intuition of qualitative interchange fades upon deeper understanding of color phenomenology and functional structure
- Schematic specification of subject matter a problem for both sides of the dispute on functionalism
Addressing Challenges:
- Careful description of both sides of equation required to judge adequacy of functionalism or materialism in capturing qualitative character of experience
- Patient application of methods: phenomenology, functional models, and neural investigation necessary for understanding hard problem of consciousness.
Pseudonormal Vision and Color Qualia
Functionalism and Pseudonormal Vision:
- Functionalist perspective: To have a sensation of red is to be in a state caused by certain stimuli, lead to specific internal states, and cause specific outputs.
- Problem for functionalists: Pseudonormal vision challenges this framework as it doesn't fit the expected model.
Pseudonormal People:
- Normal behavior and application of color words
- Perception of colors reversed (red sees green, green sees red)
- Affects any color with a red or green component
Genetics of Color Vision Deficiencies:
- Three types of photoreceptors: B-cones, G-cones, R-cones
- Different photopigments in each type of cone
- Mistake of nature can result in wrong filling of cones (red-green blindness or pseudonormal vision)
Pseudonormal Vision and Red-Green Inversion:
- Both G-cones and R-cones filled with the same photopigment
- Same average stimulation for both types of cones, no perception of green or red
- Discriminative capacities not impaired, visual life not impoverished
- What appears red to a normal person is green to a pseudonormal person and vice versa.
Prima Facie Constraint:
- A philosophical theory about mind should meet the following constraint: No hypothesis accepted in color vision science that is incoherent or unstatable or false should be regarded as such by a philosopher's theory.
Supervenience Thesis (ST):
- There can be no difference between two persons with respect to their phenomenal experience unless there is also a difference in their relevant physiological properties.
Arguments Against Functionalism:
- Pseudonormal vision challenges functionalist theories as it doesn't fit the expected model. Claims (A) and (B) are not met by most versions of functionalism.
Explanatory Gap Thesis and Color Qualia Debate
Two Key Questions:
- Q1: Understanding why physical properties lead to consciousness
- Q2: Understanding the correlation between physical processes in the brain and specific qualitative experiences
Explanatory Gap Thesis (T1) and Qualia Inversion Hypothesis (T2):
- T1: Even with complete knowledge of physical properties, we cannot explain why certain correlations occur between physical processes and sensations
- T2: We can coherently conceive of scenarios where the correlation between physical processes and sensations is reversed
Hardin's Argument Against T1 and T2:
- P1: Necessary phenomenal structure of color qualities
- P2: Structure-preserving correlations between brain processes and sensations
- The material presented by Hardin supports the claim that there is only one structure-preserving way to correlate hue sensations with neural processes, undermining T2 but not T1
Closing the Explanatory Gap:
- Need an argument showing that functional structure necessarily leads to specific phenomenal experiences (R*)
- Proposed premise P3 may help, but does not close the gap fully as it only explains phenomenal structure, not specific qualities like red, green, etc.
Phenomenal Experience Explanations from Empirical Sciences
Single Case Explanations:
- Explain specific phenomenal experience occurrences, e.g., "Why do you see a rose as red?"
- Presupposes psychophysical laws
Explanations of Phenomenal Structure:
- Elucidate limitations of sensory perception, e.g., "Why is it impossible to see green and red in the same place?"
- Also presupposes psychophysical laws
Psychophysical Laws Explanation:
- Psychophysical correlations are structure-preserving
- Does not explain why specific phenomenal qualities occur
Associating Phenomenal Structure with Concrete Qualia:
- Assumption: Certain phenomenal structures can only be found in individuals with certain basic hue qualities
- Presupposes and does not explain why a specific phenomenal structure is nomologically associated with concrete phenomenal qualities
Explanatory Gap Remains Unaddressed:
- Explainations do not close the explanatory gap for concrete phenomenal qualities
- The more fundamental mystery about consciousness remains unresolved
Conclusion:
- Explanations of specific experiences, structure, and psychophysical laws all presuppose but don't explain the existence of subjective perspective or consciousness itself.
Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC)
Introduction:
- Search for NCC occupies laboratory efforts and interests philosophers
- Some focus on specific sensory qualia, e.g., visual experience; others seek commonalities across domains to develop general theories
Chapter 1: Antti Revonsuo - Toward a Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
- Conceptualizing Consciousness: Phenomenal level of organization in the brain
- Need for phenomenological description to capture this level
- Metaphors and model systems can be used to capture essential features
- Virtual Reality metaphor as a framework for empirically based phenomenology
Chapter 2: Vollenweider - The Neural Correlates of Hallucinogen-Induced Altered States of Consciousness
- PET studies on cerebral metabolism and psychometric ratings
- Distinct patterns of cerebral metabolic changes related to different aspects of altered states
Chapter 3: Jeffrey Schwartz - Cognitive Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
- OCD as a source for understanding mind-brain relations
- Basal ganglia, orbital frontal cortex, and anterior cingulate gyrus implicated in OCD
- Patients learn to observe intrusive thoughts as "false messages"
- PET studies show changes in cerebral glucose metabolism accompanying treatment effectiveness
Conclusion:
- Current neuroscience technologies offer new opportunities for examining relationships between brain and consciousness
- Yield of such technologies in revealing NCC depends on how well phenomenology can be assessed or manipulated within experimental paradigms
Consciousness and the Phenomenal Level of Organization in the Brain
Biological Theories and Consciousness
- Attempt to capture levels of organization in brain with abstract models and conceptual systems
- Correspond to levels of organization in nature
- CNC should reconceptualize consciousness as phenomenal level
Current Research on Consciousness
- Lacks focus on phenomenal level of description
- Two main levels: cognitive (information processing) mechanisms, neural mechanisms or correlates
- Need for systematic description of phenomenon
- Foundation for empirical research in biology
Problems with Current Frameworks
- Introspectionism failed historically
- Phenomenology in philosophical circles obscure and isolated from neuroscience
- Some philosophers skeptical about objective phenomenology
Developing a Better Understanding of the Phenomenal Level
- Use metaphors to capture essential features
- Metaphor must capture phenomenal level organization specifically
- Model systems provide insights into processes sufficient for producing phenomenal level
- Dreaming brain as an example: creates fully realized phenomenal world in REM sleep
Importance of Systematic Descriptive Phenomenology
- Necessary to understand consciousness as a biological phenomenon
- Empirically based descriptive phenomenology practiced in dream content analysis.
The Dreaming Brain and Consciousness Research
- The dreaming brain is an isolated system for studying consciousness
- Subjectivity of phenomenon underscores importance
- Invites questions about directly observing or imaging the phenomenal level
- Empirical research based on systematic methodology and quantitative data
- VR metaphor captures realization of subjective experience
The Virtual Reality Metaphor of Consciousness
- Brain creates Out-of-the-Brain-Experience: presence in external world
- Illusion of presence instead of brain location
- Dreaming involves both illusions: virtual and telepresence
- Phenomenal level is the brain's natural virtual reality system
- Importance in guiding behavior, especially with REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD)
Empirical Approaches in the Science of Consciousness
- Neural correlates of visual awareness a crucial question
- Studies on binocular rivalry and perceptual unity as high-frequency synchronization
- Most studies focused on animal subjects; human phenomenology is key
- Reviewing neural correlates of human visual awareness through studies by Crick and Koch.
Study Findings on Cortical Magnetic Responses and Visual Awareness:
- Researchers measured cortical magnetic responses using MEG during an object detection task (Vanni et al., 1996)
- Subjects viewed coherent and meaningful objects versus disorganized nonobjects for brief durations
- Activation in right lateral occipital cortex, possibly human V4, linked to visual awareness of objects and correct detections
Critique of Crick and Koch Hypotheses:
- Visual awareness not directly reflected at all levels of brain processing
- Right lateral occipital cortex involved in emergence of coherent object perception (Revonsuo et al., 1997)
Testing High-Frequency Neural Oscillations and Binding Theory:
- No significant differences found in 40-Hz synchronization during viewing of coherent vs. incoherent stimuli (Revonsuo et al., 1997)
- Transient event-related 40-Hz synchronization observed before reporting a coherent percept (Revonsuo et al., 1997)
Conclusions:
- Further development of consciousness science depends on taking it seriously as a biological phenomenon in the brain
- Cognitive neuroscience of consciousness deserves serious consideration and empirical basis instead of philosophical speculations.
9— Neural Correlates of Hallucinogen-Induced Altered States of Consciousness F. X. Vollenweider, A. Gamma, and M. F. I. Vollenweider-Scherpenhuyzen
Hallucinogen-Induced Altered States of Consciousness: Neural Correlates and Research Findings
Background:
- Hallucinogens studied for understanding altered states of consciousness (ASC) in humans
- Importance lies in investigating brain functions affected, such as cognition, volition, emotion, ego, and self-awareness
- Similarities to first manifestation of schizophrenic disorders
Research Strategies:
- Investigating metabolic changes with fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)
- Characterizing functional interactions using positron emission tomography (PET)
- Human model: cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) loop model to understand hallucinogen effects on brain functions
- APZ questionnaire for measuring ASC dimensions
- Ego Pathology Inventory (EPI) for assessing ego disorders and related behavior
APZ Questionnaire:
- Developed based on a large prospective study with various psychedelics, treatments, and conditions
- Measures three primary dimensions: oceanic boundlessness (OSE), anxious ego-dissolution (AIA), visionary restructuralization (VUS)
- Consistency in altering these dimensions independent of treatment, disorder or condition
Ego Pathology Inventory (EPI):
- Five dimensions describing ego pathology: identity, demarcation, consistency, activity and vitality
- Acute first-break schizophrenics differ from hallucinogen subjects in impairment of ego activity and ego vitality
CSTC Model:
- Proposed model to analyze the effects of different chemical types of hallucinogens on a system level
- Five cortico-subcortical loops: motor, oculomotor, prefrontal, association, limbic (memory, learning, self-nonself discrimination)
- Each loop mediates specific functions and involves dopaminergic, serotonergic, and GABAergic neurotransmission.
CSTC Model and Hallucinogen Research
CSTC Model:
- Thalamus acts as a filter or gating mechanism for sensory information flow to the cerebral cortex
- Deficits in thalamic gating may lead to sensory overload of the cortex, cognitive fragmentation, and ego-dissolution
- Filter capability of the thalamus is under the control of cortico-striato-thalamic (CST) feedback loops
- Striatum and pallidum exert an inhibitory influence on the thalamus, which can decrease sensory input to the cortex and reduce arousal
Striatal Activity Modulation:
- Mesostriatal and mesolimbic projections provide an inhibitory dopaminergic input to the striatum
- Glutamatergic excitatory input from cortico-striatal pathways counterbalances the influence of the dopaminergic systems on the striatum
- Increased dopaminergic tone (e.g., by amphetamine) and decreased glutamatergic neurotransmission (e.g., by ketamine) can lead to a reduction in the inhibitory influence of the striatum on the thalamus, resulting in sensory overload
Serotonergic Influence:
- Reticular formation, activated by all sensory modalities, gives rise to serotonergic projections to CST loops
- Excessive activation of the postsynaptic elements of the serotonergic projection sites (e.g., by psilocybin) can result in a reduction of thalamic gating and sensory overload
Testing the CSTC Model:
- PET studies using [18F] fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) confirmed the central hypothesis of frontocortical activation in psychedelic states
- The observed hyperfrontality supports the thalamic filter theory, the similarity to psychotic states, and the idea that psychedelics may mediate effects through a common pathway
Cortical Activity Patterns in Anxious Delusional States (ASC):
- Multivariate analysis of metabolic and psychological data is required to accurately identify the common neuroanatomical substrates of ASC
- Factor analysis revealed that the cortical-subcortical organization during ASC was similar to placebo, indicating functional integrity of interrelated brain regions
- Subjects had significantly higher scores on the frontal-parietal and striatal network and lower scores on the occipital cortex during hallucinatory states than in resting states
- OSE (oceanic boundlessness) relates to changes in metabolic activity in the fronto-parietal cortex, occipital cortex, and striatum
- VUS (visionary restructuralization including hallucinatory phenomena) is associated with activity changes in the same network as OSE, but also temporal activity
- AIA (anxious ego-dissolution) is primarily associated with metabolic changes in the thalamus and a positive correlation with ego-identity impairment
Outlook:
- Hallucinogen research can help explore the relationship between self/ego experience and neural networks, narrowing the gap between the mental and physical
- The CSTC model provides a useful starting point to approach the functional organization of the brain in drug-induced or naturally occurring ASC
10— First Steps toward a Theory of Mental Force: PET Imaging of Systematic Cerebral Changes after Psychological Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Diso
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
- Affects approximately 2% of the general population
- Characterized by bothersome intrusive thoughts and urges leading to repetitive behaviors
Studying OCD
- Brain circuitry in orbital frontal cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, and basal ganglia is involved
- Symptoms are experienced as unwanted and extraneous intrusions into consciousness (ego-dystonic)
- Effective treatments available: pharmacological and cognitive-behavioral psychological approaches
- Changes in brain metabolism observed with these treatments
Behavioral Pathophysiology of OCD
- Basal ganglia, a set of gray matter structures involved in processing and guiding behaviors, linked to OCD
- Increased activity in orbital frontal cortex (OFC) and anterior cingulate gyrus observed in symptomatic patients
- Impairment in modulation of OFC and cingulate activity by the caudate nucleus is a key aspect of OCD pathophysiology
Role of Orbital Frontal Cortex (OFC) and Anterior Cingulate Gyrus
- Processes input from brain's frontal lobe and connects with caudate nucleus in basal ganglia
- Increased metabolic activity observed in OFC and anterior cingulate gyrus using PET scans
- Neurons change firing pattern in response to visual cues associated with reward or aversive stimuli
- Sensitive to expectations concerning stimuli, can trigger error detection mechanisms underlying behavioral adaptation
Cognitive Training Approach to Treating OCD at UCLA Medical Center
- Relabel: Recognize intrusive thoughts and urges as a result of OCD
- (Not explicitly stated in the text)
- Understand: The cognitive foundation of the treatment is enhancing patients' insight into false brain messages causing their symptoms
- Adapt: Utilizing this understanding to change behavioral responses, leading to significant improvements and alterations in brain metabolism patterns in OFC, anterior cingulate, and caudate.
Cognitive-Behavioral Training for OCD Patients
Step 1: Realize that the intensity and intrusiveness of OCD thoughts is caused by a brain biochemical imbalance.
- OCD thoughts are related to false brain messages, not significant in themselves
- Patients should understand that these thoughts are not personal or meaningful
Step 2: Refocus attention on another behavior for a few minutes
- Distract from intrusive thoughts and urges
- Perform adaptive behaviors instead of compulsive responses
Step 3: Revalue OCD symptoms as false brain messages
- Mindful awareness and impartial spectator perspective
- Create distance between self and symptom
Cognitive-Biobehavioral Treatment for OCD
- Patients learn to manage intense anxiety caused by OCD symptoms
- Enhances ability to perform adaptive behaviors instead of compulsions
Impact on Cerebral Functioning
- Decreased metabolic activity in caudate nucleus (right more than left) for responders
- Significant correlations between orbital cortex, cingulate gyrus, and thalamus before and after treatment
Epiphenomenalism vs. Role of Interpretation in Inner Experience
- Valuing is emotional reaction to environment and physiological conditions (Mises, 1978)
- OCD provides an opportunity to investigate relationships between valuation of inner experience, behaviors, and brain events.
New Understanding and OCD Treatment
Understanding OCD:
- Man's fear of contamination is caused by faulty brain circuitry
- Fear not false cognition, but result of biochemical imbalance
- New knowledge does not change raw perception or anxiety
First Two Steps (Relabel and Reattribute):
- Explained OCD as a result of false error messages in the brain
- Provided emotional support, instructional materials, and time for understanding
Impact of New Knowledge:
- Changes how man understands his feelings and sensations
- Sets stage for making healthier choices about behavior responses
Brain Circuitry Change:
- New patterns of nervous system activity related to new understanding
- Epiphenomenalists cannot specify process due to constraints
Therapeutic Breakthrough:
- Active process required to surmount resistance and change behavior
- Man exerts willpower to strengthen good message signal in developing circuitry
- Generates mental force through striving and focus on new understanding
Mental Force:
- Hypothetical entity representing the power of conscious effort
- Needed for strengthening new brain circuitry's messaging capacity
Study of Visual Consciousness
- Easiest aspect of consciousness to study due to its ubiquity, structure, ease of articulation, relative ease of monitoring, and understanding of brain basis
- Recent explosion in work on visual consciousness from neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and cognitive psychology
Neurophysiology:
- Isolating neural correlates of visual consciousness: studying neural pathways and their association with consciousness
- Work on monkeys and mammals to identify structures most closely associated with consciousness
- Recent work suggests a role for inferior temporal cortex (IT) in binocular rivalry
- Ventral stream processing focusing on cognitive representations, largely conscious
- Work on monkeys and mammals to identify structures most closely associated with consciousness
Neuropsychology:
- Studying visual dissociations between conscious and unconscious processes
- Blindsight: responding accurately to stimuli without conscious awareness
- Visual agnosia and optic ataxia: intriguing dissociations between vision and action
- Insights into brain basis of consciousness from studying these syndromes
Cognitive Psychology:
- Attention and motor action: dissociations between unconscious perception and conscious reporting
- Recent research suggests more visual processing may be unconscious than we think
Milner and Goodale's Work on Visual Pathways:
- Two main streams in the visual system: ventral and dorsal
- Ventral stream for cognitive representations, largely conscious
- Dorsal stream for online control of action, largely unconscious
- Fits evidence from neuropsychology and cognitive psychology
- Guides neural basis research on visual consciousness
Rossetti's Research on Immaculate Motor Representations:
- Evidence for separate pathways for conscious identification and motor action strengthened by recent findings
Kentridge et al.'s Study on Awareness and Attention in Blindsight:
- Subject can direct attention to stimuli even without conscious awareness
- Suggests attention and consciousness may be less closely tied than previously thought
Milner's Response to Stoerig's Work:
- Discusses relationship between unconscious ventral activation during blindsight and Milner/Goodale hypothesis.
The Visual Brain in Action
Two Kinds of Vision:
- Standard accounts assume vision is to construct an internal model of the world
- However, vision evolved for distal sensory control of movements
- Different behavior patterns depend on independent pathways from visual receptors to motor nuclei
Visual Control Systems:
- Dedicated visuomotor modules
- Higher-order systems enable selection of appropriate actions based on visual input
- Separate from dedicated visuomotor modules, linked to cognitive systems
The Visual Brain: Evolution and Organization
Dual Pathways in the Visual System:
- Ventral stream: Processes object recognition and identification
- Dorsal stream: Localizes objects for action
Distinction between Perception and Action:
- Original idea was of object vs. spatial vision
- Evidence more consistent with perception vs. action distinction
- Neurons in the ventral and dorsal streams have different properties
- Neuronal enhancement: Dorsal stream neurons respond better when monkey is attending, ready for response
Behavioral Effects of Lesions to Visual Pathways:
- Inferior temporal cortex lesions: Object recognition impairments
- Posterior parietal cortex lesions: Impaired landmark task performance and inaccurate grasping
- Hand shaping impairment with microinjections in PP cortex
Dorsal Stream vs Ventral Stream in Visual Control and Guidance:
Evidence of Visual Control Roles:
- Dorsal stream: responsive cells in PP cortex and premotor areas, behavioral literature consistent with a primary role
- Lesions can disrupt visuomotor control without affecting perception
- Classic studies on bilateral temporal lobe lesions in monkeys (Klüver and Bucy 1938) showed retained visuomotor skills
- Human patients like Bálint's patient and D. F. exhibit optic ataxia, optic aphasia, and other residual visual skills
Comparisons between Monkey and Human Studies:
- Optic ataxia in both species is visuomotor rather than purely visual or motor
- Similar lesions cause difficulties in executing visually controlled saccadic eye movements
- Patients with optic ataxia have difficulty orienting their hand, forming grasp appropriately but retain some skills like hand rotation and grip scaling
- Dissociations between perceptual report and visuomotor control observed in both humans (D. F.) and monkeys
Impairments of Ventral Stream Function:
- Human patients with visual form agnosia can't recognize faces, objects or geometrical shapes but retain some visual abilities
- Patients like D. F. show normal visual control in grasping tasks like hand orientation and grip scaling during reaching
- Inaccurate perceptual reports on orientation, size, shape, and high variation from trial to trial despite intact visuomotor skills
Dorsal Stream's Role:
- Plausible assumption that residual visuomotor skills depend on dorsal stream mechanisms due to severe damage or disconnection of ventral stream in some patients.
D. F.'s Visual Processing System and Unconscious Actions
Findings:
- D.F. can govern some actions using visual information without awareness (goal-directed actions)
- Spatial and temporal limits on her ability to drive motor behavior visually
- Loss of grip scaling after a delay of even 2 seconds
- Distinction between dorsal and ventral stream systems
Dorsal Stream:
- Processes visual information for motor control
- Not deceived by geometric illusions, unlike perceptual system
- Directs eye movements and hand movements to real object locations
- Informs visually guided reaching and grasping
- Operates independently of knowledge base
Ventral Stream:
- Generates and is informed by stored abstract visual knowledge
- Rendered accessible for mental manipulations, planning action sequences
- Object-based coding with minimal egocentric particulars
Unconscious Awareness:
- Some items processed in ventral stream may reach awareness through selective attention
- Conjoint requirement: kind of coding (object-based and abstracted) and level of activation above background noise.
Limitations:
- Perception can proceed unconsciously under certain circumstances, such as degraded stimuli or outside focus of selective attention.
The Relationship Between Dorsal and Ventral Streams in Visual Processing:
Importance of Consciousness in Priming Effects:
- Subconscious stimuli may prime semantic decision tasks but cannot guide action due to lack of consciousness (D.F. case)
- Only visual processing available to conscious experience can influence thought processes and provide raw materials for mental life
Interaction Between Dorsal and Ventral Streams:
- Goal-directed behavior depends on both systems' contributions
- Selection of appropriate goal objects and actions requires perceptual machinery of ventral stream
- Integration necessary for purposive behavior
Visual Brain in Action:
- Emphasis on separation but connections between dorsal and ventral streams exist
- Successful integration required for adaptive goal-directed behavior
- Independent functioning of visuomotor modules and occipitotemporal mechanisms during visual processing
- Only perceptual system can provide suitable raw materials for thought processes.
Evidence for Immaculate Perception from Motor Representations of Space
Background:
- Perception not just bottom-up process, but result of unconscious inferences (Gregory 1987)
- Two-way description of vision and perception acknowledged by psychologists and philosophers
Ambiguous Figures:
- Alternating interpretations possible despite memorized image
- Evidence for descending influences on perception
Visual Illusions:
- Interpretation and contamination of retinal information involved in perception
Immaculate Perception Questioned:
- Kosslyn and Sussman (1995) review evidence for imagery in perception
- Possible anatomical substrate of descending feedback from higher visual centers
- Transforming internal image to match peripheral retinal image
- Fast processing of visual input during on-line action processing
Motor Representations:
- Role counterintuitive due to lack of awareness during performance
- Evidence for specific motor representations in various studies (Rossetti 1998, Milner and Goodale in this volume)
Examples of Motor Representations:
- Prablanc et al. (1986): Better pointing accuracy with target visible vs. hidden
- Pélisson et al. (1986): Subjects corrected hand movement to unexpectedly displaced target
- Fast movements reach secondary location despite prohibition, suggesting motor representation stronger than expectation
- Dissociation between fast motor representation and slower control processes
- Pure spatial representations observed in brain-damaged patients: Blindsight, Numsense, Visual Agnosia
- Patient J. A.: Complete loss of somatosensory processing on left half body but able to point at stimuli on right arm (Figure 12.1)
- Motor responses to visual illusions, e.g., longer movements for open configuration of Müller-Lyer lines (Gentilucci et al. 1996).
Müller-Lyer Illusion and Motor Performance:
Perceptual Effect of Müller-Lyer Figure (12.1):
- Patient J.A.: clinical loss of somatosensory processing on right side due to lesion in left thalamus VL and VPL nuclei
- Performance when pointing unfelt stimuli: correct responses > chance level, but dropped to chance with seen drawing of arm
- Specificity of motor representation: knowing "how" vs. "where"
Motor Performance and Müller-Lyer Illusion:
- Relatively unaffected by illusion (2-3% bias)
- Previous results: action system uses different reference frame than perception
- Strong effect on delayed pointing actions
- Delayed responses influenced by target array orientation, immediate ones not
- Rossetti and Régnier (1995), Bridgeman (1997, 1998): memory delay induces change in action system reference frame
Immediate vs Delayed Action:
- Blindfolded subjects point to proprioceptive targets along an arc array
- Immediate responses: no influence from spatial context, delayed ones strongly influenced by integration of successive target locations
Motor Representations as Immaculate Perception:
- Not innate and dependent on early childhood learning
- Learning based on direct confrontation with physical environment
- Perfect metric correspondence between space representation used for action and physical space supports this claim.
13— Attending, Seeing and Knowing in Blindsight Robert W. Kentridge, Charles A. Heywood, and Lawrence Weiskrantz
Blindsight and Visual Attention
Blindsight:
- Condition where subjects with damage to primary visual cortex can perform simple visual tasks in the blind region of their visual field
- Subjects report no visual experience in this area, but have some residual visual abilities
Experiment Findings:
- Subject GY remarked that he was trying to pay attention higher up in his blind visual field
- This challenges the assumption that attention gives rise to consciousness
- Experiments showed that attention can be automatically or voluntarily directed to target locations within GY's scotoma (blind region)
Types of Attention:
- Nature of Stimulus: Attending to a specific location vs. looking for objects with a particular property
- Control of Attention: Voluntary vs. automatic
Theories on Attention and Consciousness:
- Milner and Goodale: Attention in service of object identification gives rise to awareness, while attention in service of spatial location does not necessarily lead to awareness
- Posner: Voluntary direction of attention is associated with prefrontal cortex activity, while automatic direction of attention is linked to parietal cortex
Implications:
- The relationship between attention and consciousness is complex and multifaceted
- Experiments on blindsight allow for the investigation of the role of awareness in both voluntary and automatic attention
Stimulus Sequences Used in Each Trial
-
Panel a: Stimulus sequence for centrally presented arrow cues:
- Target absent: left frame at bottom
- Target present at indicated location: middle frame
- Target present at invalid location: right frame
-
Panel b: Stimulus sequence for peripheral cues discs
- Upper location cued:
- Target absent: left frame at bottom
- Invalidly cued target trial: middle frame
- Validly cued target trial: right frame
- Upper location cued:
GY's Attention Capabilities
- Can voluntarily direct attention with high contrast cues, reporting awareness on nearly all trials
- Automatically can direct attention regardless of cue contrast
Anatomical Bases for Blindsight
- GY's scotoma resulted from a unilateral occipital lesion limited to striate cortex (area V1)
- Possible explanations:
- Incomplete damage to striate cortex, with residual vision dependent on spared cortex within the apparent lesion
- Residual vision mediated by pathways not involving primary visual cortex (PVC)
- Direct projections from lateral geniculate nucleus to V2 and V4
- Projections through superior colliculus to pulvinar and on to MT and V4
Anatomical Bases for Attention
- Blindsight cannot be a purely subcortical phenomenon, as it does not produce detectable activation in primary visual cortex
- Residual function may be mediated by pathways reaching extrastriate cortex without PVC involvement
- Attentional filter likely acts in higher visual cortical areas to restrict availability of visual information to conscious awareness
Automatic Attention Redirection
- Posterior parietal lobe implicated in capture and redirection of attention
- Hemispatial neglect associated with unilateral damage to parietal lobe, specifically inferior parietal lobule (IPL)
- Redirection of attention may not require control by areas beyond parietal cortex
Constantinidis and Steinmetz (1996) Study:
- Area 7a of parietal cortex shows increased activity in response to cues during absence of stimulus presentation
- Automatic redirection of attention may not require control from areas beyond the parietal lobe
- Differences between automatic and voluntary attention tasks seen in frontal areas but not parietal ones
Corbetta et al. (1993) Study:
- Activation of superior frontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex observed in voluntary tasks, not automatic ones
Moran and Desimone (1985) Study:
- Selective enhancement of responses to stimuli when monkeys attended to them vs. ignored
- Enhancement reported in several visual areas like V4, MT, MST, V1, V2
- Controversy over attentional modulation in striate cortex
Awareness, Control and Qualia:
- Voluntary attention involves prefrontal areas (dorsolateral PFC and anterior cingulate cortex)
- Dorsolateral PFC associated with willed action, spatial memory, and suppression of habitual responses
- GY's aware mode in blindsight associates dorsolateral PFC activation with awareness but not visual qualia
- No conflict between understanding of attention anatomy and voluntary/automatic control bypassing striate cortex.
Blindsight: Insights from the Tucson Conference
Overview:
- Plenary session at "Toward a Science of Consciousness" focused on Blindsight
- Controversial term, but gaining acceptance as unaccompanied visual function in hemianopic patients without awareness
Presentations:
- Petra Stoerig:
- Reviewed evidence for blindsight and controlled studies
- Presented new neuroimaging data from three hemianopic patients
- Activation in occipitotemporal regions (V4, LO) but not V1 on the lesioned side
- Ipsilateral activation of motion complex (MT/V5)
- Possible interpretations: color information through extra-striate routes, form processing, or top-down construction
- Robert Kentridge:
- Reported no patchiness in blindsight for GY patient
- Failed to find preserved cortical islands within V1
- Studied selective attention and its relationship with consciousness
- GY could direct attention within his hemianopic field using cues he couldn't see
- Voluntary use of cues required conscious processing, while automatic orienting did not.
15— From Grasping to Language: Mirror Neurons and the Origin of Social Communication Vittorio Gallese
Naturalistic Approach in Neurophysiology
- Choosing appropriate stimuli or behavioral situations for testing neuron activity
- Collecting data influenced by how questions are posed
- Single neuron recording approach still powerful with proper theoretical background and integration of other disciplines
Macaque Monkey Premotor Cortex and Area F5
- Grasping a simple action, but brain addresses two phases: premovement and executive
- Discovery of multiple cortical representations for hand movements in inferior parietal lobule and ventral premotor cortex (area F5)
- Focus on area F5: rostralmost part of inferior area 6, reciprocally connected to primary motor cortex hand field, direct projections to upper cervical segments, and intracortical microstimulation evokes hand/mouth movements.
Functional Properties of Area F5 Neurons
- Grasping, holding, tearing, and manipulation neurons described based on the presence of a goal (effective motor act)
- Grasping-with-the-hand neurons form largest class, selective for different types of grip: precision grip, finger prehension, whole hand prehension.
- F5 neurons code movement in abstract terms, not just parameters like force or direction but relationship between agent and object.
- Motor vocabulary metaphor used to conceptualize function of these neurons.
Visual Properties of Grasping Neurons and Discovery of Mirror Neurons
- Relationship between visual features of graspable objects and specific words in motor vocabulary
- Approximately 20% of F5 grasping neurons respond to visual presentation of objects without movement, showing strict congruence between type of grip coded by a neuron and size of effective object.
- Mirror neurons discovered through study of visual properties of grasping neurons.
Neuron Motor Activation by Grasping
- Observed neuron activation when hand approached food tray to grasp raisin
- Initial skepticism about unexpected visual response
- After repetition, considered possibility of new class of visuo-motor neurons
- Responding to actions performed and observed
Studying Mirror Neurons
- Systematically searched for more grasping neurons
- Not responding to visual presentation of graspable objects
- Responding to observation of grasping actions
- Named "Mirror Neurons" due to matching motor and visual properties
- Recorded many mirror neurons in lab, allowing for further study
Naturalistic Approach for Recording Mirror Neurons
- Monkey seated comfortably on primate chair
- Single neuron activity recorded using microelectrode
- Objects presented: food items and objects of different sizes/shapes
- At various locations within and outside monkey's reaching distance
- Prehension movements studied by letting monkey grasp objects
- Mirror properties tested through series of actions
- Transitive (grasping, holding, manipulating) and intransitive movements with emotional content
- Distinguished from unspecific factors like food expectancy or motor preparation
Mirror Neuron Properties
- Discharged during specific goal-related motor acts
- Grasping, manipulating, and holding objects most effective actions
- About half discharged during precision grip
- Visual stimuli most effective were actions involving interaction with hand or mouth
- Clear correlation between observed action and neuron's motor response
Evidence of Mirror System in Humans
- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) study on human subjects
- Increased motor evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from hand muscles during grasping observation
- Effect present only in used muscles during observation
- Brain imaging studies using Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
- Activation of cortex in left superior temporal sulcus, inferior parietal lobule, and anterior Broca's region during grasping observation.
Mirror Matching System: Possible Functional Roles
Monkey Neurophysiological Studies:
- Complex biological visual stimuli neurons found in inferior temporal cortex and amygdala
- STS neurons respond to hand movements similar to F5 mirror neurons
- Distinctive feature of F5 mirror neurons: discharge during active movements
Possible Relationship between STS Neurons and F5 Mirror Neurons:
- Different Functional Roles: STS neurons code semantics, F5 mirror neurons engage in pragmatic coding
- Distinct Stages of the Same Analysis: STS neurons provide initial pictorial description, fed to F5 for meaning acquisition
Mirror Matching System and Language Origin:
- Mammals need to understand actions for social communication
- Mirror matching system provides neuronal basis for action understanding, a prerequisite for language emergence
- Discovery of mirror neurons may provide new neurobiological basis for language evolution
Broca's Region and Monkey Area F5 Homology:
- Broca's region is linked to speech control in humans
- Human Broca's region has cytoarchitectural similarities with monkey area F5, where mirror neurons are found
- This suggests a potential evolutionary continuity between prelanguage brachio-manual behaviors and language skill
Studies on Broca's region:
- PET studies show activation during hand movement sequences (McDonald et al., 1994) and mental imagery of hand rotations (Parsons et al., 1994).
- Part of Broca’s region activated during hand grasping tasks mental imagery (Decety et al., 1994; Grafton et al., 1996).
- Role in speech function not exclusive, important for gestures recognition (Bell, 1994).
Evidence of Broca's region and hand/mouth motor representations:
- Anatomical: area F5 and part of Broca’s region share these functions.
- Experimental: hand movement sequences and mental imagery tasks activate both areas.
- Clinical: aphasic patients exhibit difficulties in pantomime recognition (Bell, 1994).
Language origins:
- Counterintuitive to root language in gestures recognition but supported by evidence.
- Vocal calls emitted instinctually and controlled by different anatomical structures than Broca's region.
- Alternative solution: motor theory of speech perception proposes phonetic gestures as objects of perception and invariant motor commands representation in the brain (Libermann et al., 1967).
Gesture recognition and language specialization:
- Similarity between action/perception matching system for speech and mirror neurons.
- Language can be exhibited in visual domain through sign language.
- Proposal: left hemisphere language specialization independent of modality rests on gesture recognition (Broca’s region evolutionary continuity with F5 area).
16— Supporting the ''Grand Illusion of Direct Perception: Implicit Learning in Eye-Movement Control Frank H. Durgin
The Grand Illusion of Direct Perception
- Part of the Grand Illusion is the transparency of our eye movements
- Eye movements are unconscious and not part of our awareness, but important for visual information acquisition
Implicit Learning in Eye-Movement Control
- Studies investigated whether eye-movement patterns can show learned sensitivity to environmental regularities we're not consciously aware of
- Motivation: Visual consciousness often exceeds the information available to visual cognition
- Preliminary studies showed participants produced larger, sooner eye movements when target appearance was contingent on large eye movements
Experiment 1
- Participants performed a visual search task with rules intended to promote clockwise or counterclockwise search patterns
- Results:
- Performance improved across trials
- Differential frequencies of clockwise and counterclockwise saccades for the two rule groups
- Methods:
- Participants: 20 Swarthmore undergraduates
- Apparatus: Macintosh PowerPC, ViewSonic monitor, eye tracker
- Design: 150 visual search trials, random assignment to clockwise or counterclockwise rule condition
- Display: 800 randomly scattered line segments in various colors and orientations, target was a red X initially not present
- Rule for target elicitation: Large saccades treated as first leg of turn, subsequent saccades compared for direction to constitute a right or left turn
Experiment 2
- Similar to Experiment 1, but rules defined with respect to screen position instead of saccade direction
- Results: Implicit learning found in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2
- Conscious strategies better developed for world/display-relative coordinate systems than eye-centered polar coordinates
Experiment 1:
Methodology:
- Participants told they were studying eye movements during visual search
- Cover story for use of head-mounted eye tracker
- Task: find red X and press button when found or after 3 seconds
- Trials terminated upon target discovery or time limit
- Learning analyzed by block (initial, subsequent, final)
Findings:
- Participants improved at task over time, as shown by increased search success rate (F(3, 54) = 8.48, p < .001)
- Two experiments conducted to assess specificity of learning: Experiment 1 (clockwise rule) and Experiment 2 (screen-relative rule)
Experiment 1:
- Saccades analyzed based on their direction relative to display center (within 45 degrees)
- Repeated measures ANOVA revealed interaction between Rule Direction and Saccade Direction (F(1, 18) = 6.28, p < .05)
- Learned sensitivity to eye movement contingencies evident in participants' eye movements, despite lack of awareness
Experiment 2:
- Similar methods as Experiment 1 but with screen-relative rule used for analysis
- Participants performed visual search in 160 trials (120 training trials and 40 alternating rules)
- No evidence of improvement over time (difference in mean success rates not reliable)
- Some participants correctly guessed the clockwise rule after being informed.
Conclusion: Experiment 1 demonstrated learned sensitivity to eye movement contingencies, while Experiment 2 failed to show improvement with a screen-relative rule.
Experiment 2 vs. Experiment 1 Results:
- In a repeated measures ANOVA:
- No main effect of Trial Block in Experiment 2, F(3, 51) < 1
- Search success on final trials did not differ between new and old rules, F(1, 17) < 1, n.s.
- No interaction between Training Direction and Saccade Direction, F(1, 17) = 1.3, n.s.
- Seven out of 22 students articulated explicit strategies in Experiment 2 vs. one out of 20 in Experiment 1, χ² = 7.68, p < .01
Dissociation between Implicit Learning and Explicit Awareness:
- Eye-movement control systems can learn eye-centric rules more easily than display-based rules
- Explicit awareness of successful strategies is more likely in display-based coordinates
- Consistent with the idea that implicit learning occurs in localized levels insensitive to scene layout, while explicit formation occurs at higher levels
Previous Examples:
- Berry and Broadbent's (1984) sugar production experiment:
- Implicit understanding developed without instruction
- Explicit instruction failed to improve task performance
- In Experiment 2, participants were unaware of a hidden rule, unlike in the sugar production task where participants were aware of the task and its solution
Implications:
- Further research needed to determine if this finding is an artifact or an important limitation on implicit learning in eye-movement control systems.
Peripheral Vision Fading and Attention:
- Troxler fading: A phenomenon where a point in peripheral vision fades from awareness within seconds when fixating on a central point.
- Selective fading of attended stimuli (selective peripheral fading): Observation that the disks selected for attention tend to fade first, raising questions about the role of attention in this process.
- Problems with selective fading:
- Difficulty in confirming that the fading is truly selective to attended stimuli.
- Alternative explanation: Sensory adaptation may occur equally for both attended and unattended disks, making it difficult to perceive changes in unattended ones.
- Experiment:
- Formal experiment conducted to measure parameters of the fading, such as duration and proportion of attended disks involved.
- Control trials with physical extinguishing of some disks to confirm whether attention leads to earlier perception of fading.
- Measuring extent of fading at various eccentricities to ensure peripheral vision involvement.
- Methods:
- Participants: University of Hong Kong undergraduate or postgraduate students naïve to the purpose of the study.
- Display and setup: Circular array of six disks, three green and three orange; fixation on display center, attention to specific color, varying display sizes and eccentricities.
- Response method: Manual response using a two-key response box for indicating stimulus fading or disappearance and number of faded disks recalled after each trial.
- Maximum viewing time was 40 seconds, with subjects prompted to recall the number of faded disks after pressing left key.
Preliminary Observation:
- Case study shedding light on the neural substrate for attention and consciousness in vision.
- Voluntary attention to a specific area may play a role in peripheral fading, as suggested by selective fading observation.
Investigation of Selective Fading in Peripheral Vision Discusses Selective Attention and Visual Consciousness
Selective Fading of Attended Stimuli: Disks Experiment Findings
Background:
- Subjects' disks faded from awareness during attention experiments
- Mean duration: 1.55 seconds (95% CI = 0.49)
- Controlled trials: perception of disappearance for all subjects and trials
Fading vs. Fixation Drifts or Saccades:
- Unlikely explanations for the effect
- Eye movements would not bring images to peripheral retina regions
- Attention is unlikely to be directed primarily to other disks
Two Possible Explanations:
- Attentional Bias Hypothesis: Sensory adaptation occurs evenly at all disk locations but only those at attended locations are translated into fading.
- Inhibitory Effect of Attention Hypothesis: Attention triggers or precipitates the fading of attended disks.
Selective Fading as a Special Case of Troxler Fading:
- Static stimuli, low contrast, peripheral stimuli, time for occurrence: 10 seconds
- Adaptation at LGN (relay station between retina and cortical visual areas) likely triggers or accelerates the fading due to activation from cortical areas associated with selective attention.
Implications:
- Attention might involve a centrifugal influence from extra-striate cortical areas, including prefrontal areas, to lower visual centers like V1, V2, and LGN for selectively modulating cortico-LGN reverberation.
Emotion and Consciousness: Introduction
- Emotion is a ubiquitous component of consciousness, with emotional qualia interacting with other contents and processes
- Recent research suggests functional aspects of emotion can operate nonconsciously (Öhman et al., 2023; Öhman & Soares, 1994)
- Understanding emotion is crucial for consciousness studies, including thought experiments on conscious states (DeLancey, 1996)
- Identifying neural systems underlying emotional experience may provide insights into other domains of conscious perception
Kaszniak et al. Chapter: Emotion and Consciousness Relationships
- Review of interrelationships between emotion and consciousness
- Distinction of components in emotional experience (valence, arousal, action tendency)
- Evidence for dissociability of conscious and nonconscious aspects of emotion
- Discussion of proposed neural systems underlying conscious emotional experience (Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1996)
- Focus on the role of ventromedial frontal cortex in conscious body state during emotions
Watt Chapter: Emotion and Consciousness: A Proposed Role
- Emotion may have a fundamental role in providing valence tagging for consciousness (gating, feature binding)
- Connection between subcortical affective systems and extended reticular thalamic activating system (ERTAS) proposed
- Neural systems critical for the role of emotion are debatable but Watt's argument stands on its own
Panksepp & Burgdorf Chapter: Emotion in Animals
- Evidence for a primitive form of laughter in rats through ultrasonic chirping vocalizations
- Rats' chirping response occurs to tickling, varies with previous social experience, and is dependent on glutamate in the reticular nuclei of the thalamus and mesencephalon.
Emotion Components and Consciousness
- Four components: physiological arousal, cognitive appraisal, subjective experience, action tendency (including facial expressions)
- Disagreements on necessary conditions for identifying an emotion
- Emotion is often linked to feeling and consciousness but not invariably correlated with other emotional components or conscious experience
- Nonconscious autonomic physiological reactions and motoric behavior can occur without conscious recognition or attention.
Exploring Conscious Emotional Experience and its Neural Correlates through fMRI and Case Studies in Individuals with Brain Damage
Study by Whalen and Colleagues (1998)
- Employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study amygdala activation in response to emotional stimuli
- Participants: healthy adults, no conscious awareness of the emotionally salient stimulus due to backward masking
- Results: amygdala activation even with unawareness of the eliciting stimulus
Neural Systems Involved in Conscious Emotion Experience (LeDoux, 1996)
- Direct cortical inputs from the amygdala
- Inputs from the amygdala to nonspecific brainstem arousal systems
- Feedback to the amygdala and cortical areas from bodily expressions of emotion
Study by Dalby et al. (1995) on Persons with Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease (PD)
- Persons with PD exhibit masked facial expression despite intact voluntary control
- Facial feedback hypothesis posits that facial expressions provide necessary feedback for emotional experience
- Results: reduced facial expression but unaltered self-reports of emotional valence and arousal
- Possible explanation: persons with PD may alter subjective scaling of emotional experience self-reports as their illness progresses
Study on Persons with Damage to Ventromedial Frontal Area (VMF)
- Damage to anterior cingulate cortex and orbital frontal region associated with alterations in emotional experience
- Anterior cingulate cortex functions to provide conscious working memory for interoceptive emotional information, similar to role of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in cognitive working memory (Goldman-Rakic, 1992)
- Patients with VMF damage show: absent SCRs to emotionally salient stimuli and reduced conscious experience of emotions (Damasio, 1994; Adolphs et al., 1996)
- Need for more systematic study on frontally damaged patients regarding SCR and self-reports of emotional experience in response to standardized emotional stimuli
Present Study: Methods and Materials
- Seven adult patients with focal VMF damage (head trauma, stroke, ruptured ACA aneurysm) participated
- All had ventromedial frontal damage, including the anterior cingulate gyrus; one patient also had damage within bilateral orbital frontal region
- Ten healthy adults served as controls
- International Affective Picture System (IAPS) slides used as emotionally salient stimuli to ascertain conscious experience of emotion
- IAPS slides carefully selected based on valence and arousal ratings to balance sets, avoiding distressing or shocking content. Four different block-randomized presentation orders used for each slide set.
Emotional Responses in Ventromedial Frontal Lobe Damage Patients: Valence and Arousal Ratings and Skin Conductance Responses Study
IAPS Stimulus Set Evaluation
- Participants reported emotional experience using Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM)
- Minimized language effects with valence and arousal dimensions, rated 1 to 9 on each dimension
- Based on studies of affective language and psychophysiological experiments
- Valence and arousal ratings analyzed using mixed model analyses of variance (ANOVAs)
Valence Ratings:
- No group main effect or interaction between group and slide type
- Patients and controls showed expected pattern for emotional experience
Arousal Ratings:
- Significant group by slide-type interaction
- Patient group showed less differentiation between slide types in arousal
- Control group showed larger SCRs to positive and negative slides compared to neutral
Skinconductance Responses (SCRs):
- 2 × 3 (Group × Slide Type) mixed model ANOVA analysis of SCRs
- Significant Group by Slide-Type interaction effect
- Patient group showed less SCR differentiation between slide types than control group
- Correspondence between subjective arousal ratings and SCRs suggests sympathetic autonomic response and emotional arousal experience are dependent on ventromedial frontal structures.
Comparing ACA Aneurysm Patients with Circumscribed Medial Frontal versus Orbito-frontal Damage
- Interpretation of comparison must be done with caution due to small sample size and possible influence of other factors (e.g., duration since damage occurred, premorbid individual differences)
- Comparison suggests a hypothesis for future testing:
- Patients with frontal damage and anterior cingulate but not orbital frontal damage may exhibit absent or undifferentiated SCR and subjective arousal in response to neutral, positive, and negative emotional stimuli
Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) and Emotional Awareness
- Research by Lane et al. (1998) suggests specific relationship between consciously experienced emotional arousal and anterior cingulate damage:
- Greater blood flow in supracallosal region of ACC associated with higher scores on Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), correlating with ability to recognize verbal and nonverbal emotion stimuli
- Functional brain imaging studies support role of anterior cingulate gyrus activation in conscious experience of emotion
Orbital Frontal Areas and Limiting Choices Based on Emotional Factors
- Involved in (possibly both consciously and nonconsciously) limiting choices among courses of action
- Consistent with clinical descriptions of patients with orbital frontal damage:
- Obsessively develop alternative strategies for solving problems but unable to decide between them
- Orbital frontal cortex, with connections to amygdala, appears to be involved in inhibiting emotional impulses
- Connections between orbital frontal cortex and rostral anterior cingulate may allow conscious representations of emotional bodily states to influence impulse control and adaptive regulation of behavior.
19— At the Intersection of Emotion and Consciousness: Affective Neuroscience and Extended Reticular Thalamic Activating System (ERTAS) Theories of Con
At the Intersection of Emotion and Consciousness: Affective Neuroscience and Extended Reticular Thalamic Activating System (ERTAS) Theories
Consciousness and Emotion:
- Ancient topics, emerging into full respectability after decades of neglect
- Emotion is the most neglected and least understood subject in neuroscience
- Reasons for neglect:
- Reduction of rich experienced emotion to sensory feedback from autonomic/motor efferents
- Explosion of cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on independent consciousness
- Difficulty of studying emotion due to its complex, multi-dimensional nature
Emotion in Consciousness Research:
- Emotion has been relegated to the "back of the bus" as an "interesting coloration" in consciousness theory
- Affect is seen as just another qualia, competing with visual awareness
- Neural network models of consciousness focus on visual awareness rather than emotion
Challenges in Studying Emotion:
- Emotion involves integration of autonomic, endocrine, facial motor, global motor readiness, pain/pleasure valence, social signaling, and higher cortical encodings
- Research has focused largely on top-level processing rather than the integration of primitive and higher systems
Elements of Emotion:
- Precipitating event: Stressor or trigger that can be external or internal
- Appraisal/appraisal process: Cognitive assessment of precipitating event's meaning, occurring before or after affect activation
- Valence dimension: Intrinsic pain/pleasure associated with the perception of the precipitating event
- Motor changes and differential readiness activations: Reflecting approach vs. avoidance behavioral intent towards the situation
- Autonomic/physiological changes: Crucial visceral aspect of emotion, including cardiopulmonary parameters, skin conductance, muscle tonic issues, endocrine, and immune system changes
The Functional Evidence - Intrinsic Interpenetration of Three Global State Functions (GSF)
Distinction between global state functions and channel functions:
- Recent work by Crick and Koch acknowledges the need to consider global state variables, such as executive functions, in constructing a theory of consciousness.
- The distinction between global state functions and channel functions is relevant for understanding consciousness.
Three Global State Functions (GSF):
- Affective functions: Localized to a diffusely distributed limbic system that includes many areas of the brain except for idiotypic cortex.
- Attentional functions: Localized to RAS-MRF-thalamic loops, other thalamic regions, prefrontal and associated basal ganglia, paralimbic, parietal, and heteromodal right hemisphere systems.
- Executive functions: Localized to three parallel prefrontal-striatal-thalamic loops centered in dorsolateral, orbital, and medial prefrontal regions.
Interpenetration of GSF:
- The neural architecture for these three GSFs is heavily overlapping and highly distributed across the brain.
- Lesions affecting attentional functions and executive functions typically result in affective and personality changes, suggesting that they are interconnected aspects of consciousness.
- Affective, attentional, and executive functions should be conceptualized as different aspects of an integrated neural envelope supporting consciousness.
The Architectural Evidence - Neural Correlates of Emotion:
- Current schemes emphasize a division between paleocortical (amygdaloid-centered) and archicortical (hippocampal-centered) aspects of the limbic system.
- Short-term memory in the hippocampal-archicortical trend is more allied with cognitive functions, while emotional memory involves linking cortical and thalamic sensory-motor encodings to valenced activations.
- The borders of the limbic system are vague, extending beyond traditional concepts to include many systems in the basal forebrain, diencephalon, midbrain, and other subcortical regions.
- Distinguishing between primitive emotions (prototype states) and emotional learning is challenging, as emotional meaning involves value-laden activations across the brain.
- The biphasic nature of affect requires understanding how valence is processed at multiple levels of biological, social, and personal-subjective values in the brain.
Ambivalence in Human Relationships:
- Appreciated since ancient times: loves, hates, attractions, aversions (Freud's dual instinct theory)
- Neural architecture not clear but PAG may be involved
Unpacking Valence and Value:
- Jaak Panksepp's work on emotional primitives
- Attachment/bonding: oxytocin, prolactin, care nucleus of stria terminalis, preoptic hypothalamic to ventral PAG
- Sadness/separation distress: anterior cingulate, oxytocin (–/+), social bonding thalamus, prefrontal systems
- Rage/anger: medial amygdala, bed nucleus of the striaterminalis, substance P (+)
- Fear: central & lateral amygdala, glutamate, neuropeptides, preoptic hypothalamic to more dorsal PAG
- Play/joy: parafascicular/centromedian nucleus, thalamus, posterior thalamus, ?ACh (+), ventral PAG
- Each circuit heavily neuropeptide mediated and projects to periaqueductal gray (PAG)
Intersection between Value/Emotion and ERTAS Networks:
- Reticular core: important afferents from PAG to MRF and ILN/midline thalamic systems
- Nucleus reticularis thalami (nRt): dominant limbic, paralimbic, heteromodal control of nRt gating, with modulation by nucleus accumbens, paralimbic cortices, basal ganglia, and DM thalamus-prefrontal regions
- ILN: reciprocal connections to reticular core, midbrain PAG, limbic systems, BG, and many cortical systems; prefrontal projections to ILN, as part of top-down control of ERTAS
PAG's Role:
- Receives projections from all of the affective prototype systems in the basal forebrain and diencephalon
- May function as a primitive ventral nRt, computing competition between the relative activation states of the prototypes.
PAG Computations and Affect
PAG's Role in Integration of Primitive Affective States:
- Distributed results of PAG computations to reticular (including MRF) and monoamine systems, tuning their response
- Projects upward to key thalamic systems that underpin gating and binding
- Critically feeds back to hypothalamus
- May be essential for arousal or maintenance of conscious state and behavioral intentionality
Reticular Connectivities:
- Four columnar systems in PAG project with overlapping and differential efferents to ILN, MRF, and other midline thalamic systems
- PAG may integrate the most primitive features of affect that make emotion intrinsically valenced
Higher Cognitive Correlates:
- Distinction between substrates for primitive affective states vs. substrates for affective meanings
- Higher cognitive correlates depend on appraisals, correlations, and personal meanings formed in more dorsal brain regions over an organism's lifetime
- PAG is dependent on various higher systems to adaptively trigger integrated somatic-emotional responses
PAG's Role in Global State Functions:
- Critical distribution of results to core reticular and monoamine systems at the brainstem and thalamic levels, underpinning conscious states
- Influence on global resonances that may prime virtual reality generation for consciousness
- Unclear if self-world models can exist without neural connection to affective primes or basic neural prototypes for self-world relations
Consciousness Theory and Emotion:
- Midbrain-diencephalic primitives define biologically compelling prototypes for self-world relations based on affective states (fear, bonding, rage, joyous engagement)
- These prototype affective states may generate primary wetware instantiated models for basic self-world relations that can be further cognitively developed
- Rich contents of consciousness suggest the influence of these primes is pervasive and hard to separate from sensory or motor mapping correlations.
20— Laughing Rats? Playful Tickling Arouses High-Frequency Ultrasonic Chirping in Young Rodents Jaak Panksepp and Jeffrey Burgdorf
Laughter in Rats: Evidence of a Primitive Form of Laughter in Young Rodents
Introduction:
- Laughter as an indicator of joyful social affect
- Discovery of a primitive form of laughter in rats
- Importance for understanding positive emotions in mammals
Experiments:
- Studying ultrasonic chirping during bodily stimulation:
- Common during juvenile play and evoked by rapid manual stimulation (tickling)
- More chirping with anterior body area stimulation and full body stimulation
- Relationships to primate laughter:
- Tickling is a positive incentive state
- Correlated to natural playfulness and inhibited by fearful arousal
- Evidence of analogous responses in domesticated rats:
- Two types of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) in adult rats
- Long distress-USVs: low frequency range, reflect negative emotional arousal
- Short chirping-type USVs: high frequency range, index positive forms of arousal
- Two types of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) in adult rats
- Chirping during play has resemblances to human laughter
- Tickling experiments:
- Determining differences in body parts stimulated and response variations based on social experience and gender
- Monitoring objective play activities and chirps during standard dyadic play encounter
- High frequency USVs recorded during tickling tests:
- Whole-body playful tickling with a focus on the ribs and ventral surface
- Brisk and assertive stimulation without frightening the animal
- Results: Mean levels of 50 KHz chirping in young rats based on body stimulation and gender.
Findings from Tickling Study
Effects of Tickling on Chirping in Rats:
- Differentially invigorated chirping during all conditions
- Similar effects at both ages (F(1, 56) = .52)
- Full stimulation more effective than anterior, which is more effective than posterior (overall F(2, 56) = 86.8, p < .0001 for three types of tickling)
- Effects larger in males than females (F(1, 56) = 19.1, ps < .0001)
- More effective in socially isolated animals than play experienced ones [F(1, 28) = 4.39, p < .05, on day 44 but not significant on day 58]
- Levels of dorsal contacts during play sessions correlated with levels of tickling-induced USVs (r = .47, p < .01 for posterior stimulation; r = .50, p < .01 for anterior and full simulation)
- No significant correlations to recorded behaviors of the play partners at older test age
Conditionability of Chirping Response:
- Animals exhibited more chirping during tickling periods and intervening no-tickle periods compared to older animals (48.3 vs 15.1 chirps/15 sec, p < .002)
- Conditioned response evident during first training session [F's(4, 9) > 7.0, p's < .001] and sustained during subsequent sessions (figure 20.3)
- Control group without paired CS-UCS showed reliable elevation of chirping but no clear acquisition curve, indicating part of the elevation is due to sensitization
Additional Findings:
- Animals sought tickling when placed in test chamber and given 15 secs. (significantly faster running times during training session)
- Negative emotional arousal affected chirping: mild hunger marginally increased, bright light significantly reduced, and exposure to cat smell had a large suppressive effect on chirping [F(1, 18) = 71.56, p < .0001]
- Gentle touch or static forms of somatosensory stimulation did not provoke vigorous chirping; negative touch strongly inhibited chirping
- Manual tickling play for 15 mins reduced ensuing social play exhibited by pairs of young rats, but sustained artificial somatosensory stimulation had no such effect.
Rat Chirping and Human Tickling Response
Parts of the Body that are More Ticklish in Humans:
- Certain parts of the body are more ticklish than others (Ruggieri and Milizia 1983)
- In rats, chirping was intensified by anterior rather than posterior body stimulation (Siviy and Panksepp 1987)
Tickling Response in Humans vs. Rats:
- Rapidly conditions like human tickle response also occurs in rats
- Tickle-induced chirping in rats is related to playful tendencies (Knutson, Burgdorf, and Panksepp 1998)
- Positive incentive as measured by approach and conditioning tests (tickling tests)
- Comparable high frequency sex-related USVs in adult hamsters are attractive and facilitate sexual responsivity (Floody and Pfaff 1977)
Aggression vs. Play:
- No young animal has threatened or sought to aggressively bite the experimenter's bare hand during tickling sessions
- Animals that chirp the most, play the most, and exhibit highest levels of play biting
- Some animals over two months old have seriously challenged attempts to tickle them
Tickling as a Play Partner:
- Young rats regard the smell of a predator as nothing to chirp about
- Onset of puberty does not diminish responsiveness, but older animals may exhibit diminished ticklishness
- Vigorous chirpers may signal readiness for friendly social interactions
Possible Functions of Chirping:
- Signals readiness for friendly social interactions
- May index distinct affective states in rats
- Further research on neurochemistries that promote chirping and playfulness in rodents may help clarify the neural sources of human laughter and joy.
Chirping vs. Human Laughter:
- Rapid learning response (conditioned chirping) may be a better indicator for neural sources of mirth than unconditional chirping response
- Brain circuits of human laughter and rodent chirping may interconnect with brain areas that mediate positive social feelings, but locations are unknown.
Implications:
- Rodents have a sense of fun
- Evolutionary connections to comparable emotional response systems in humans
- Possibility for studying friendly cross-species social interactions in animal research laboratory
- Clinical value: additional work may yield information on depression and other bodily processes affected by emotions.
Rats exhibit joy and play behavior similar to humans; suggesting a common emotional root in mammals.
Joyful Affect in Mammals
Possibility of Joyful Affect in Other Mammals:
- Some mammals, including humans, experience joyful affect during playful social engagements
- Vocal component may have diminished in many species due to negative selection
- Ultrasonic calls used by rodents for communication and signaling joy
- Burrowing species like rats may not have experienced evolutionary weeding of this behavior
Evolutionary Perspective:
- Fundamental process of joy emerged early in brain evolution
- External signs of central state may have diversified among species
- Study of rodent brain could provide insights into human joyful affective consciousness
- Convergent evolutionary processes may limit understanding of human joy through animal studies
Provisonal Conclusion:
- Rats do laugh and enjoy the frolicking that induces it
- Differences in cognitive accompaniments, such as a sense of humor, between species are to be expected
- Scientific establishment less open to exploring these possibilities
Neural Ground for Human Consciousness:
- Raw emotional experiences and primitive self may constitute the neural ground upon which more figurative aspects of human consciousness were built. (Panksepp 1998b)
Consciousness, Evolution, and Function: An Introduction
The Evolution of Consciousness:
- Consciousness could have emerged through evolution or existed in all living systems
- If consciousness evolved, it either played a functional role or was a byproduct of other adaptive features
- The dominant view is that consciousness is an adaptive feature, but questions remain about its function and how it influences biology
The Function of Consciousness:
- The function of consciousness is crucial to understanding the evolution of the mind
- Some argue that consciousness could perform functions that nonconscious behavior can do
- However, this raises questions about why consciousness would evolve if it could be replicated by nonconscious behavior
Discussing Different Perspectives on Consciousness:
- Nicholas Humphrey: Consciousness evolved from primitive sensations to form internal representations of the world
- Richard Gregory: Qualia are useful for flagging the present moment in complex organisms
- Graham Cairns-Smith: Qualia have a physical basis and may be generated by biomolecular systems
- Steven Mithen: The onset of higher order consciousness occurred with the development of tools, art, and agriculture
- William H. Calvin: Consciousness is the result of a hierarchical process of competing ideas and sensations
Double Province of Senses: Perception vs Sensation
Introduction:
- Reid's insistence on difference between perception and sensation
- Questioning the need for both in survival
- Recent psychologists' efforts to answer why sensations exist
Possible Answers:
- Sensations flag the present: help keep perception honest
- Sensations required to maintain reality check
- Unprocessed sensation essential for on-line testing of perceptual model currency and relevance
- Summarized as: "Sensation lends a here-now-ness and me-ness to the experience of the world" (Humphrey 1992)
Issues with Privacy of Sensory Qualia:
- Private nature raises questions about selection pressure for evolution
- Wittgenstein's argument against discussing privately sensed qualities
- Daniel Dennett's argument that sensory qualia have no objective reality
- Need to recognize the privacy came after selection occurred
- Examples of stylistic inertia in biology and culture
- Clocks: evolution from sundials, hands movement as a case study (Steadman 1979)
Conclusion:
- Continue trying to explain sensory quality as a product of selection or accept its privacy as private but acknowledge that these two things occurred at different times in evolution.
The Evolution of Sensations and Clocks: A Comparative Analysis
Clock Analogy:
- Clock moves hands in a certain way (clockwise) to represent time
- Person also experiences sensations by engaging with stimuli in a particular manner
Sensation as an Active Process:
- Not passive state, but active evaluation and response to external stimuli
- Early animal responses were full-fledged behaviors in the public domain
- Wriggling saltily for salt
- Wriggling redly for red light
Inner Representation of Sensory Stimulation:
- Animals may need inner knowledge of sensory stimulation
- Developed through monitoring command signals related to responses
- First sensations evolved as corollaries of public bodily activity
Evolution and Adaptiveness:
- Natural selection determined the form of animal's mental representation (sensory experience)
- Over time, making sensory responses directly to stimuli became less relevant for biological survival
- Animal became dependent on secondary representational functions
Conclusion:
- Sensations and clocks share an analogy in their methods of representing information
- Both involve active engagement with external stimuli and the evolution of responses over time.
The Evolution of Sensory Experience: A Darwinian Approach
Background:
- The brain must continue to issue command signals for sensory responses, even though they no longer result in physical behavior
- Command signals may become virtual or "as-if" commands with no real effects
- Evolutionary change leads to privatization of the whole sensory activity within the brain
Impact of Privatization:
- Sensory responses lose biological importance and disappear from view
- Natural selection's role diminishes, as representations based on these responses become irrelevant
- Forms of sensory responses are fixed through evolution
- Potential for some drift in forms but always reflecting their evolutionary pedigree
Rewards:
- Explaining sensory quality as a product of selection while accepting its apparent privacy
- Understanding the consequences of privatization and command signals looping within the brain
- Dramatic consequences for sensory phenomenology, including self-sustaining and self-creating experiences
- Lifting sensory experiences into the time dimension of subjective present.
Additional Information:
- The author argues that we can have it both ways: explain sensory quality through selection and accept its apparent privacy
- Evolutionary change led to privatization, but forms of sensory responses remain fixed
- Privatized sensory experiences become self-sustaining and partly self-creating.
Present Moment Recognition in Human Visual Perception
Background:
- John Locke's idea of consciousness (1690, Human Understanding)
- Sir William Hamilton's emphasis on present moment consciousness (1842)
- Nicholas Humphrey: Sensations flag the present moment
Sensory Perception and Consciousness:
- Indirect relationship between perceptions and objects
- Perceptions are based on neural signals, not just sensations
- Perceptual inference goes beyond available sensory data
- Visual perception predicts non-sensed properties and future behavior
- Importance of present moment for survival
The Nature of Perception:
- Philosophy viewed perceptions as directly related to objects
- Physiology revealed complex processes involved in perception
- Helmholtz: Involves processes of inference
- Perceptual hypotheses are predictive and knowledge-based
- Overlap between perceptions and science hypotheses
Plan of Perception:
- Top-down knowledge from the past
- Filling gaps with available data
- Predicting non-sensed properties
- Bottom-up sensory signals from the present
- General processing rules introduced sideways (figure 22.1)
Key Features of Consciousness:
- Based on knowledge and inferences
- Projecting prevailing hypothesis into physical world
- Importance of present moment for survival.
Visual Processing and Consciousness: Qualia Hypothesis
Overview
- Essential questions of consciousness: generation, location, use
- Focus on third question: what is the role of qualia?
- Hypothesis: qualia flag present moment for survival
Evidence for Hypothesis
- Afterimages: vivid colors depend on real-time inputs from senses
- Dreams: no present moment significance, abnormal perception state
- Hallucinogenic Drugs: normal active processes ignored, time stops or falls to zero, enhanced sensations
- Emotional Memories: vivid qualia in memories of embarrassing situations
Exceptions to Hypothesis
- Afterimages: present afferent input from past stimuli
- Dreams: no behavioral relevance, loss of reality
- Hallucinogenic Drugs: normal system breaks free, dangerous behaviors
- Emotional Memories: vivid qualia without violating hypothesis
- James-Lange theory of emotion: emotions result from bodily changes sensed as feelings.
Implications
- Present moment recognition essential for survival against dangers
- Qualia serve to flag the present with vivid sensations
- Exceptional cases may provide insight into normal perception processes and abnormal states.
Individual Exceptions: Luria's Mr. S
- Remarkable case study by Russian neuropsychologist Alexandr Luria (1968) of a man named Mr. S
- Frequently confused memories with present reality, even without drugs or schizophrenia
- Professional memory man whose vast memory and vivid imagination became confused with real-time reality
- Experienced unusually rich synesthesia: colors associated with specific tones
- Example: Reddish-orange hue at 100 hertz, 86 decibels
- Velvet cord with fibers jutting out on all sides, tinged with a delicate pink-orange hue at 500 hertz, 64 decibels
- Synesthetic experiences repeated invariably during experiments
- Confusions of memory or imagination with reality could be dangerous or merely annoying
Qualia in Evolution
- Flagging-the-present hypothesis: qualia become more important as Top-down knowledge and cognitive processing increase
- Primitive creatures likely lack qualia, as they respond directly to present stimuli without need for complex cognitive processes
- Qualia develop through evolution as behavior becomes less tied to reflex responses and more complex
Producing Qualia
- Visual phenomena of ambiguity show qualia attached to prevailing Perceptual Hypotheses rather than evoked from sensory signals
- Example: Mach's flipping corner, where gray region changes brightness without change in sensory input
- Suggests qualia result from cognitive processing rather than the physiology of the brain
- Brain regions involved may change with cognitive processing, visible through changes in local blood flow and functional brain imaging
Limitations of the Hypothesis
- Awareness of non-emotional memories and thoughts exists beyond present perception
- Two alternatives:
- Cold thoughts are not conscious without sensed bodily changes
- Special vividness of qualia in perception flags the present.
- Two alternatives:
The Evolution of Qualia
Background:
- Current physics and chemistry don't accommodate qualia
- If qualia evolved, we should expect brain machinery for their production
- The phylogeny of qualia and the evolution of consciousness is a complex issue
Understanding Consciousness:
- No agreed scientific definition of consciousness
- Importance of choosing a challenging definition to understand its true nature
- Unconscious forms of perception, awareness, thought, intelligence are distinct from conscious ones
Two Selves:
- Dualism between the known and unknown aspects of the mind
- Greater Self: unconscious control systems
- Evanescent Self: conscious self with qualia
- Consciousness is less intricately involved in actions than imagined
The Evolutionary Argument:
- Huxley's perspective on consciousness
- Uncertainty about the nature of consciousness (1866)
- Human mind as symbolic representations of brain changes (1874)
- William James' rebuttal
- Common sense acknowledges feelings and ideas as causes
- Adaptive nature of feelings, such as hunger and lust
- Evolutionary argument for the efficacy of feelings based on Darwin's idea of natural selection.
The Physico-Chemical Consequences of Feelings
Background:
- Qualia are part of the physical world, despite not being explicitly included in physics and chemistry
- Science's understanding of matter has expanded over time to include non-traditional fabrics like light and quantum energy
The "Quala Bomb" in Science:
- A gap exists between our understanding of matter and the inclusion of qualia
- This issue was first introduced by Descartes, later exposed by William James, and ignored for much of the 20th century
Tentative Conjecture on Qualia:
- The brain produces qualia, which can be organized to create conscious states
- Qualia may be related to molecular processes involving proteins
- Similar to how different fabrics of matter are made from quantum energy, qualia could be another way of arranging this energy
Phylogeny of Qualia:
- Qualia likely evolved on the back of an unconscious nervous system
- Early forms were probably raw and coercive sensations like pleasure and pain
- Later forms included interpretative feelings, intellectual feelings, volitional feelings, and background moods/attitudes.
Implications:
- The study of qualia could potentially lead to a new understanding of matter and energy in the physical world.
Handaxes and Ice Age Carvings: Evolution of Consciousness in Prehistory
Interest of the Author:
- Archaeologist studying consciousness evolution in last 6 million years
- Focus on high level, reflective consciousness
- Belief that material culture plays a role in shaping thoughts and consciousness
Review of Human Evolution:
- Homo sapiens sapiens: closely related to great apes, evolved modern form of reflexive consciousness between 4.5 and 1 million years ago
- Australopithecine species: arboreal and terrestrial adaptation, large-brained hominids after 2 million years ago
- Homo ergaster: diverged and dispersed throughout Old World, preadaptations for linguistic abilities
- Modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens): first appeared in Africa before 100,000 years ago, unambiguous traces of art and symbols after 50,000 years ago
Importance of Handaxes:
- First appear in archaeological record 1.4 million years ago, last made by Neanderthals around 50,000 years ago
- Pervasive feature for over a million years with no chronological patterning or technical skill improvement
- Enigmatic characteristics: imposed symmetrical form, vast quantities at single sites, redundant for tasks
Explanation of Handaxes:
- Products of sexual selection
- Functioned as indicators of high intelligence and good health through the Zahavi handicap principle.
Handaxes and Consciousness:
- Provide a dilemma: why would making handaxes indicate high intelligence and good health but also require significant resources?
- Further research needed to understand the relationship between handaxes, consciousness evolution, and cognitive package development.
Handaxe Manufacturing: Four Mental Components
Sensory Motor Control:
- Requires precise angle and force for detaching flakes
- Unlikely selected for making handaxes, but a pre-requisite
- Evolved with bipedalism and increased brain size (Aiello)
Planning:
- Sequential flake removals to create artefacts
- Requires flexibility in adapting plans and reacting to contingencies
- Evident in Oldowan tool makers and chimpanzees
Symmetry:
- Unintentional by-product of bifacial knapping technique
- Attraction to symmetry likely an evolved psychological trait
- May have been used to attract attention in social interaction (Dennett)
Private Speech:
- Proposed role in pulling knowledge required for handaxe manufacture into consciousness
- A fleeting consciousness, not enduring like emotional or social consciousness
Handaxe Manufacturing and Early Human Mind:
- Four mental components evolved independently prior to first production of handaxes
- Private speech played a critical role in combining these resources to create technical intelligence (Mithen)
- This process likely began hand-in-hand with talking to each other.
Material Culture and the Disembodiment of Mind
The Evolution of Consciousness
- Co-evolved language and consciousness led to cognitively fluid minds in early humans
- Domain-specific intelligences (e.g., social, technical) existed prior
- Modern human mind overcame barriers between domains, integrating knowledge and ways of thinking
Public Language's Role
- Public language played a fundamental role in the evolution of consciousness by collapsing barriers between worlds (society, nature, artefacts)
- Allowed for integration of different types of knowledge and thinking
Material Culture as Both Product and Cause of Change
- Material culture was not just a product of cognitive change but also a cause of it
- Evolved minds could not easily accommodate new entities (like mythical beings), so material culture provided an anchor for such ideas
- Artefacts functioned as "anchors" for ideas with no natural home in the mind
- Material culture allowed humans to explore, expand, manipulate, and play with their knowledge in ways other humans couldn't
Summary
- Consciousness evolved through thought, language, material culture, and behavior
- Early humans had similar mental resources as we do today but lacked material culture tools
- First hesitant use of additional tools seen 100,000 years ago; intense use after 50,000 with art; continued with agriculture
- Material culture helped pull new ideas out of the human mind and into consciousness.
25— Ephemeral Levels of Mental Organization: Darwinian Competitions As a Basis for Consciousness William H. Calvin
Understanding Consciousness: Darwinian Competitions and Levels of Mental Organization
Levels of Mental Organization:
- Consciousness involves higher intellectual functions
- Progressive distancing from external world pays for knowing anything about it
- More consciousness means more layers of processing dividing us from the world
- Fleece is organized into yarn, woven into cloth, and arranged into clothing, each level characterized by transient stability and causal decoupling
Creating New Levels:
- Darwinian process creates new stable configurations through random encounters
- Randomness can be creative when given the right circumstances
- Intermediate stages of a high-level outcome may look like nighttime dreams or jumbled ideas
- Higher intellectual functions, such as copying competitions with playoffs, are capable of providing consciousness byproduct
Neocortex and Darwinian Process:
- Neocortex can implement a Darwinian process
- Essential components include random variations and the algorithm for creating new stable configurations
- Stabilizing intermediate levels allows tacking on even higher levels, potentially resulting in consciousness.
Neural Networks vs Real Neural Networks
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)
- Lack bi-level functionality of real neural networks
- Do not incorporate important wiring principles seen in cerebral cortex, such as patterned sideways excitation capable of temporarily organizing large areas of cortex into clones
Real Neural Networks
- In the business of producing spatiotemporal patterns to perform movements or think about something
- Spatial-only patterns can serve to categorize learned patterns from input, but spatiotemporal patterns are needed for most movements and thought
Hexagonal Modules in Cortex
- Half-mm ocular dominance columns are best-known intermediate-sized units of cortical organization
- Prediction: Half-mm hexagonal-shaped module with characteristic spatiotemporal patterns associated with its synaptic strengths
- Defining characteristic: Can make copies of its spatiotemporal pattern, cloning it into adjacent patches of cortex
- Creates temporary mosaics that can overlap and generate arbitrary concepts
- Hexagon's melody can represent an object or action, relationship, analogy, or sentence with phrases and clauses
- Expansionistic, similar to a plainchant choir recruiting more members
Darwinian Process in Brain Evolution
- Six essential ingredients: 1. Pattern, 2. Copying, 3. Variants, 4. Populations competing for workspace, 5. Multifaceted environment, and 6. More successful variants as center of further variants
- Recursive bootstrapping of quality through these steps is impressive in species evolution and immune response
- Other important factors: Stagnation, systematic recombination, fluctuating climate, patchy subdivisions, and emptied niches to refill
Hexagonal Competitions in Neocortex
- Exhibits all six Darwinian essentials in its superficial neocortical circuitry
- Copies, competes, and produces spatiotemporal patterns needed for thought and action
Neocortex and Consciousness
Competition in Neocortex:
- No central place for consciousness, distributed across neocortex
- Multiple levels of organization: objects, simple actions, relationships, analogies
- Hexagonal codes represent spatiotemporal patterns (apple, banana, cherry)
- Can be copied and superimposed to form combination codes
- Competition depends on sensory inputs, drives, synaptic connectivity
Evolutionary Processes in Neocortex:
- Population fluctuations impact evolution beyond caricature of more severe selection
- Periods of monoculture (uniform spatiotemporal firing pattern) can prevent antecedent patterns from renewing
- Allows for fresh starts afterward with novel patterns less likely to be captured
- Memories and ratchets may develop to maintain new levels of organization
Neuroscience Advancements:
- Understanding brain's weather through EEG rhythms might impact neocortical Darwinian process
- Neocortex has the potential to run recursive bootstrapping for quality, explaining consciousness
- Free from dualism and miraculous leaps across levels of organization
Limitations:
- Much detail about subpatterns beyond current microelectrode and imaging technologies
- Uncertainty about how Darwinian success can be converted into a subroutine obviating the copying competition after enough experience.
Physical Reality and Consciousness: Introduction
Democritus vs Aristotle:
- Democritus: Empty space is an absolute void
- Aristotle: Some type of background pattern or plenum
Ether vs Absolute Void:
- Maxwell proposed a luminiferous ether to explain electromagnetic waves through vacuum
- Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of ether
- Conventional wisdom reverted to absolute void
- Einstein's special relativity upheld the absolute void context
- However, Einstein's general relativity swung the pendulum back toward an underlying plenum
Quantum Theory and Phenomenology:
- Various descriptions of a fundamental quantum sea, vacuum, foam or spin network have been proposed to describe underlying spacetime geometry
- Panpsychist, pan-experiential and pan-protopsychist views suggest consciousness is fundamental and accessible at the quantum level
- Qualia may be found in basic levels of reality governed by quantum theory
- The chapters address the relationship between consciousness and the nature of space
Whitehead's Process Philosophy:
- Whitehead perceived the universe as a process of events, some imbued with mental quality
- Drew parallels with modern quantum theory
- Provides a philosophical connection between physics and consciousness
Quantum Monadology:
- Kunio Yasue's chapter expands on Penrose's ideas:
- Need for noncomputability in conscious thought
- Existence of macroscopic quantum states in the brain
- Quantum field theory enables macroscopic quantum states at physiological temperature
- Addresses the "hard problem" of conscious experience and Platonic realm
Quantum Field Theory and Consciousness:
- Scott Hagan and Masayuki Hirafuji elaborate on quantum field theory in relation to consciousness
- Differing mental states correspond to different condensates of the underlying quantum vacuum
- Quantum signals can influence mesoscale neural function, and neural information can translate into quantum encoding
The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
Fundamental Building Blocks of the Universe:
- Not enduring objects, but throbs of experience or actual entities
- Characteristics:
- Neither purely subjects nor objects; have both subjective and objective characteristics
- Endure only a short time
- Part of a collection creating the illusion of enduring objects (like frames in a movie)
- A nexus of relationships with all other actual entities
- Self-creating process involving accommodation of previous and future entities
Self-Creation:
- Phases delineated in Process and Reality
- End product: new throb of experience (satisfaction)
- Subjective existence is momentary, objective exists as settled fact
Atoms of Reality According to Quantum Mechanics:
- No actual existence until measurement
- Exist only as potentialities before measurement
- Become an elementary quantum event during measurement
- Short duration after measurement
Comparison between Whitehead and Quantum Mechanics:
- Similar concepts: throbs of experience vs. atoms of reality
- Difference: Whitehead's actual entities have subjective existence, quantum mechanical atoms do not
Implications:
- Quantum mechanics supports the idea that the universe is alive due to its close relationship with Whitehead's philosophy.
Penrose's Platonic Stance
- Roger Penrose takes unconventional positions regarding consciousness in physics
- Disputes among physicists, computer scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians over his views
Reasons for Opposition to Penrose's View:
- Understanding of Natural Numbers: Claim that understanding comes from computational rules rather than contact with a Platonic world (Gödel's theorem)
- Inaccessibility of Penrose's Platonic position: Only select few can experience it, most cannot understand
- Conventional Materialistic World View: Opponents focus on counterarguments against his claim that consciousness is non-computational
- Dispute between Turing and Gödel: Unresolved dispute on the nature of consciousness
Penrose's Claims:
- Objective reduction in the brain: Self-collapse of a superposed quantum state by a quantum gravity mechanism
- Potential solution to the binding problem: Coordination of sole mind realized through quantum coherence extended over the whole brain
- Macroscopic quantum states: Useful for quantum computing, but maintaining superposition is troublesome in highly interactive physical environment like the brain
- Fröhlich's theory and Bose-Einstein condensation as potential solutions to maintain quantum coherence over macroscopic regions in the brain are unrealistic or unacceptable by modern physics standards.
- Progressing from quantum mechanics to quantum field theory for understanding brain-wide quantum states.
Quantum Brain Dynamics (QBD)
Background:
- Umezawa's contributions to quantum field theory (QFT) and memory mechanism in the brain
- QFT applied to the brain can support Roger Penrose's claims about a unitary brain-wide quantum state
Brain as a Quantum Electric Dipole Field:
- Matter composed of atomic constituents can be described as spatial distribution of quantum electric dipoles in a region (quantum electric dipole field)
- Brain is seen as a quantum electric dipole field coupled with electromagnetic field
- Biomolecular architecture provides geometric objects emerging from the quantum electric dipole field
- Physical interaction creates or changes geometric objects, representing memory storage
Memory Retrieval:
- Umezawa and Takahashi proposed process for memory retrieval using Nambu-Goldstone bosons
- Emergence of Nambu-Goldstone bosons triggers by small incoming energy is memory retrieval
- Boson condensation of biological tunneling photons can occur at body temperature, leading to long distance quantum coherence and consciousness
Hard Problem of Consciousness:
- Modern physics framework cannot fully explain conscious experience (Chalmers)
- Penrose's proposal for a new space-time framework called spin networks may provide potential solutions
- Spin networks aim to implement both physical reality and Platonic mathematical reality in a universal way.
Conceptual Extension of Fundamental Physics
- Daily physics is focused on understanding natural phenomena
- Frontier physics involves extending fundamental physics, e.g., superstrings, blackhole evaporation, quantum teleportation
Quantum Field Theory (QFT)/Quantum Bayesian Dynamics (QBD) Approach
- Umezawa, Takahashi, Vitiello, Del Giudice, Enz, and Jibu's approach: concrete but not as sensational as Penrose's theory
- Stays within daily physics rather than penetrating into frontier physics
Penrose's Theory of Spin Networks
- May solve the hard problem of conscious experience
- Differs from Platonic world view implemented in quantum monadology
Quantum Monadology
- Philosophical framework and attractive world view developed by Leibniz in 18th century
- Aims at underlying harmonic order in the world, including God
- Modern frontier physics implementation: unifies quantum theory and relativity
- Solves measurement problem in quantum mechanics, derives time concept, mind-body problem
Monads
- Fundamental elements of the world
- Occupy center of human mind
- Leibniz's monadology was aimed at underlying order in men, society, nature, and God
- Quantum monadology implements formal structure to account for human nature and consciousness
World Description
- The world is made up of a finite number (M) of quantum algebras called monads
- World can be defined as the totality of M monads: W = { A₁, A₂, ..., Aₙ }
- No other elements exist in the fundamental level; space-time emerges from mutual relations among monads
- The world (W) is an algebraically structured set of quantum algebras called tensor product of M monads
Mathematical Representation
- Each monad represented by a C algebra* A identical with each other: A = A₁ = A₂ = ... = Aₙ
- World can be seen as the Mth power of C* algebra A: W ≈ A²ⁱ
- World state and individual states defined using positive linear functional (state) and expectation value
- Each monad has an image of the world state belonging to itself, which is a world state
Mutual Relation Among Monads' World States
- World states belong to any two monads are mutually related through unitary representation of Lorentz or Poincaré group
- Derives conventional representation of the world as four-dimensional space-time manifold from mutual relation
Freedom and Time Flow
- Each monad has a synchronized clock counting a common clock period
- Monad's freedom (free will) to choose new group element g of Lorentz or Poincaré group after a single clock period induces time flow
- Change in world states of all monads results from the choice of new group elements
Conclusion
- To develop a science of consciousness, we need an understanding of Platonic world's existence in frontier physics and a concrete formulation of brain states interacting with it.
- Quantum monadology may bridge philosophical explanations for consciousness, Penrose's predictions, and the brain.
28— The Interface in a Mixed Quantum/Classical Model of Brain Function Scott Hagan and Masayuki Hirafuji
Interface in Mixed Quantum/Classical Model of Brain Function
Traditional Models of Brain Function:
- Attempt to provide a dynamical account of conscious aspects of memory
- Cannot be admitted to a causal picture in a classical context without global criteria
Limitations of Traditional Models:
- Cannot adequately explain features like serial character and lack of neurophysiological modularity in certain memories
Quantum Theoretical Models:
- Critically depend on stability of the quantum mechanism and nature/efficacy of interface with classical mechanisms
- Interface possible in theory of macroscopic quantum ordered states
- Quantum signals can influence meso-scale neural function
- Discriminated information in neuronal networks can be translated into quantum encoding
- Stability in vacuum encoding can be ensured and conditions met under biological stresses
Common Language for Quantum and Classical Systems:
- Vacuum parameter coding memory in quantum system can be determined in terms of physical parameters
- Basis for common language between the two systems, allowing information flow
Why Look Beyond Classical Mechanisms?:
- Connectionist models successful in simulating unconscious cognitive processing
- Conscious recall is serial and serial expression cannot be explained classically
- Emergentist theories lack criterion to determine what becomes property of conscious memory
- Dynamical criteria involve global discriminations, disguised by phase space description
Modularity of Connectionism:
- Successfully accounted for many forms of unconscious memory
- However, some memories involved in conscious recall are not neurophysiologically modular
- Distributed representation until final output allows meaningful interpretation only from outside the system
- Conscious interpretation requires intrinsic mode, which is problematic in classical context
Locality Constraint:
- Prevents simultaneous availability of explicit relationships for interpretation
- Solutions like local expression have limits on complexity
- Requirement to extend intrinsic description to extrinsic mode must apply at all levels of consciousness
Binding Problem:
- Encountered at fine level of psychological structure, not admitted in traditional reading
- No adequate solution found in classical context where locality constraint is enforced
Proposed Quantum Component for Memory
- Connectionism cannot fully explain experiential memory
- Suggestion of a quantum component of memory proposed by Stuart, Takahashi, and Umezawa (1978, 1979) and elaborated by Jibu and Yasue (Jibu and Yasue 1993; Hagan et al. 1994; Jibu and Yasue 1994, 1995)
- Quantum systems allow for information about global properties to inherent in the system itself
- Potential difficulties: long-term stability of memory and bi-directional flow of information between systems
Quantum Memory Model
- Subcellular quantum component of memory located in neurons
- Individual memories stored by carrying them into ground state or vacuum
- Vacuum states allow for a vast multiplicity to code different memories
- Quantum field theory allows treatment of inhomogeneous media with spontaneously broken symmetries, enforcing choice of particular vacuum through long-range correlations
- Nambu-Goldstone theorem guarantees spontaneous symmetry breaking vacua and gapless excitations maintaining ordered states.
Polariton Basis and Memory Storage
- Two kinds of vacua arise when system coupling electromagnetic field and water dipole is diagonalized in polariton basis: standard vacuum and spontaneous symmetry breaking type labeled by continuous parameter
- Spontaneously broken phase maintains long-range correlations, allowing for discrimination between classical and quantum encoding systems.
Superradiance and Information Flow
- Superradiance phenomenon allows quantum effects to propagate up to macroscopic levels in large systems involving many participating molecular sites
- Neural system orchestrates changes to synaptic weights, suggesting information needed for orchestration inheres momentarily in parts of the cytoskeletal network.
Biological Systems and Quantum Dynamics in Memory
Classical Models of Memory:
- Cannot account for seriality and nonlocality of conscious aspects of memory
- Involve extrinsic elements (not inherent in the system)
- Forbidden in causal accounts given at the classical level
Quantum Dynamics Framework:
- Establishes a collateral system of memory based on quantum dynamics
- Allows assimilation of extrinsic elements into an intrinsic description without violating locality constraint
- Provides a framework to relate vacuum parameters as codes in a quantum field theoretic treatment of memory
- Enables communication between classical and quantum levels of encoding
- Microtubules and dendritic network dynamics appear most strategically placed to effect transfer between systems
- The physical variable implicated in mediating this transfer is the number density of dipoles in the coherent phase
Microtubules:
- Potentially vast increases in processing power make microtubular involvement an attractive evolutionary option
- Transition to a spin-glass phase occurs at biological temperatures, suggesting quantum dynamics possibilities
Phase Transitions:
- Can be effected by polariton condensation into the ordinary vacuum
- Indicates moving into an inequivalent Fock space and coherent state of gapless polariton
- Two categories of phase transitions:
- Bose-Einstein condensation (controlled by temperature)
- Energy supply above a threshold to maintain coherence, like in laser phenomena
Biological Systems and Coherent States:
- Continuous provision of energy is ubiquitous in the biological world
Introduction:
- Discussion on understanding consciousness and timely experience of it
- Unresolved issue: brain synchronizes various sensory inputs into coherent experiences with potential delay in neural conduction time
- Example of Ping-Pong game or rapid conversation where actions seem to occur before conscious awareness
- Physics perspective questions the existence of forward flow of time
- Libet's experiments on subjective awareness and neuronal adequacy time (NA)
Libet's Experiments:
- Neuronal Adequacy Time (NA)
- Cortical or thalamic stimulus requires longer duration than skin stimulus to be felt as NA
- Difference between perceived time of feeling and neuronal adequacy time
- Suppression of Skin Response
- Overlapping location of cortical stimulus can suppress skin response if it occurs within 250ms after skin stimulation
- Synchronization of Stimuli
- Delay in feeling skin or thalamic stimulus synchronously with brain stimulus
- Evoked Cortical Potential (E)
- Skin and thalamic stimulations generate an evoked cortical potential shortly after stimulus onset
- Misquoting of NA
- Libet himself quoted a 500ms delay in some contexts but his original data shows a shorter NA < 300ms for strong stimuli
- Backward Referral Argument
- Libet argues that backward referral is needed to account for the combination of items (ii) and (iii) regarding cortical or thalamic stimulation.
Non-Quantum Explanations:
- Time Delay Following Stimulus
- Glynn's explanation: simple suggestion of a time delay following the 250ms cortical stimulation before it is felt
- Alternative Accounts
- Churchland's and Honderich's accounts for Libet's data should also be considered by interested persons.
- Discussion by Dennett
- Easy to recall due to picturesque language
Conclusion:
- Debate on quantum mechanics as an explanation for backward referral in consciousness continues from Libet's experiments
- Multiple non-quantum explanations proposed, including time delay following the 250ms cortical stimulation.
Libet's Temporal Perception Study Reanalyzed, Highlighting Psychometric Functions and Optical Illusions
Dennett's Perspective on Brain Tricks for Processing Neural Activity
- Dennett highlights the brain's tricks to make sense of neural activity, including:
- Stalinesque account: Hallucinating and misperceiving input information (similar to Stalin's staged trials)
- Orwellian account: Rewriting history, leading to false memories (e.g., item (ii) above)
- Dennett spends time discussing Libet's experiments in chapter 6 of his book "Time and Experience"
- Stalinesque vs. Orwellian mechanisms explained further through discussions by philosophers in Libet's article in CIBA Foundation Symposium volume
- Three possible explanations for the subjective data, using the notion of a time marker:
- Backward causation explanation: The perception is referred back to the time of the evoked potential (E) if an evoked potential is present
- Stalinesque explanation: A fixed delay from the time marker exists for the sensation
- Orwellian explanation: Qualia are delayed but their timing is not recorded; memories are based on time marker information
- Dennett argues that there's no difference between Stalinesque and Orwellian accounts, claiming qualia are illusory
- Physicists find these explanations ad hoc, while psychologists and biologists are more familiar with inelegant contrivances evolution creates
- Wolf questions why evolution would allow such confusing temporal ordering of conscious experiences
- Time anomalies occur when an evoked potential time marker is missing (e.g., cortical stimulation)
- Illusions can be a byproduct of sensory mechanisms used in unusual contexts
Reanalysis of Libet's Raw Data
- Possible dataset for comparing arrowhead lengths shown in Table 29.1 and Figure 29.2A
- Psychometric function plots frequency of seeing as a function of stimulus strength (asterisks)
- PSE shift due to response bias (Panel A) or Muller-Lyer illusion (Panel B) can be observed in psychometric functions
- Threshold and PSE defined as the range needed for 10% to 90% correct responses, and the difference corresponding to the 50% point respectively.
- Figure 29.2B shows a psychometric function with an increased PSE due to the Muller-Lyer illusion (an optical illusion)
Libet's Raw Data Insights
Background:
- Response bias vs illusion distinction
- Two psychometric functions with three response categories: upper is shorter, equal, longer
- Inspiration from Wolf's (1998) article
- Plotting and refitting Libet's raw data in figure 29.3
Findings:
- Three response categories: skin first, tie, thalamus first
- Lower curve (diamonds): probability of skin being first
- Upper curve (asterisks): combined equal votes with skin first results
- Optimal parameter values obtained by minimizing chi-square
- Best fits using standard cumulative normal distribution function
Table 29.4: Reorganized data for lower right panel of figure 29.3
| Thalamic onset time relative to skin onset (msec) | Number of observations/total number |
|---|---|
| –200 | 4/20 |
| –100 | 7/17 |
| 0 | 13/19 |
| 100 | 18/18 |
| 200 | 18/18 |
Table 29.5: Optimal parameter values for psychometric function fits in figure 29.3
| Subject | PSE (with i = 1 or 2) | threshold | chi-square |
|---|---|---|---|
| HS, skin-skin | –69 ± 18 | 87 ± 26 | 8.9 |
| HS, skin-thalamus | –139 ± 13 | 68 ± 30 | 16.6 |
| GS, skin-skin | –60 ± 13 | 115 ± 12 | 2.9 |
| GS, skin-thalamus | –78 ± 47 | 395 ± 127 | 17.9 |
Problems with Libet's Data:
- PSE shifts in cortical data not larger than thresholds
- Backward referral enterprise based on belief of substantial shift between cortex and skin awareness may be flawed due to small differences when compared to threshold.
Comparison of Skin Stimulus and Reference
- Lefthand panels compare skin stimulus to same reference for three observers (JW, CJ, MT)
- Results for cortical stimulation: large gap between two criteria curves, shallow slopes indicate shift in PSE is not significant
- Parameter estimates and standard errors for psychometric function fits
- Observer, Subjective Sensory Threshold (PSE), Chi-square, JW skin-skin vs. cortex, CJ skin-skin vs. cortex, MT flash-skin vs. cortex
- JW: -11 ± ?, 144 ± ?, 91 ± 60, 338 ± 22
- CJ: -11 ± ?, 75 ± ?, 213 ± 246, 154 ± 74
- MT: -58 ± 17, 25 ± 17, 89 ± 29, 208 ± 31
- Observer, Subjective Sensory Threshold (PSE), Chi-square, JW skin-skin vs. cortex, CJ skin-skin vs. cortex, MT flash-skin vs. cortex
- Threshold for backward referral to be taken seriously as a real illusion: JW (154 msec), CJ (639 ± 452), MT (249 msec)
Problems with Data Analysis
- Issues with heavy use of tie category: undermines any claim of substantial shift, makes synchrony decision difficult and unreliable
- Average cortex to skin shift not large when compared to uncertainty in shift measurement
Comparison of Thalamic vs. Skin Stimulation
- Results for thalamic data more robust than cortical data
- Separation between PSEs is large due to heavy use of tie condition, making it prudent not to develop exotic explanations
- Summary: Libet's supposed time anomalies provide a weak basis for building a case that quantum mechanics is needed for brain operation.
Additional Notes:
- All responses in Libet's data occur after stimulus onset
- Two reasonable explanations for Libet's time anomaly data: fixed delay between stimulus and conscious awareness or placing qualia in memory at time of marker
- PSE timing shifts due to brain stimulation are relatively small compared to threshold and uncertainty in criterion placement.
Quantum Physics Model of Conscious Experience: TTOTIM
Delay and Antedating Paradox
- Libet's delay-and-antedating hypothesis/paradox refers to a lag in measurable cerebral electrical activity associated with conscious sensory experience following a peripheral sensation
- Subjects report being aware of the sensation within a few msec after stimulation, yet neuronal adequacy (critical neural activity) isn't achieved for several hundred milliseconds
Two-Time Observable Transactional Interpretation Model (TTOTIM)
- Based on Aharonov's two-time observables (TTO) and Cramer's transactional interpretation (TI)
- A future event and a present event are involved in a quantum transaction:
- Offer wave: real (complex-valued retarded) quantum state vector issued from the present event travels forward in time to the future event
- Echo state vector: complex-conjugated advanced wave sent back through time from the future event towards the present event
- Probability distribution for transaction equals positive real probability, arising as a probability field around the initial event
- Depends on values acquired at the echo site and values obtained from initiating site
TTOTIM and Consciousness
- Links mental and neural events: awareness (mental) results from projection of brain events into space and time to physical event locations
- Neuronal adequacy and subjective experience are not one and the same; both stimulation and neuronal adequacy are needed for conscious experience
- Time of experience is retro-referred close to time of sensory signal elicitation
Quantum Mechanics of Passive Mind
- Offer and echo state vectors involved in typical peripheral stimulus response actions
- Difference between phantom sensation from cortical stimulation and real sensation from skin stimulation: impetus for sensation is quite different
- Skin stimulus elicits time marker signal, while cortical stimulus doesn't
- Neuronal adequacy achieved later for thalamus or medulla stimuli compared to cortical stimuli
- TTOTIM explains difference in timings of awareness for passive stimuli events and predicts that brain-based phantom experiences appear later than time marker events, while peripheral sensory experiences become conscious earlier than their time markers.
Cortical Cycle and Consciousness Theory
Time Reversed Echo State Vector:
- < pS|> goes back to t = D where it initiates backward-through-time state vector, < Na C|>
- Returns to the onset site of original cortical stimulus at t = 0 completing the cortical cycle
Backward-Through-Time State Vector:
- < Na SS|> goes back in time to t = fD+ where it initiates backward-through-time state vector, < S|>
- Returns to the site of skin stimulus, completing the cycle
Subjective Awareness Timing:
- Phantom awareness of cortical signal: t » D+
- Event for conscious awareness of skin stimulus: t » fD
- When fraction f = 1 (skin stimulus applied D later): stimuli sensed to be simultaneous
Conclusion:
- There is no 'actual time' for conscious experience, but awareness of peripheral input must occur before cortex achieves neuronal adequacy. Phantom/fill-in experiences must occur after.
- Thalamic and medial lemniscus stimuli lie on the borderline between peripheral and direct cortical stimuli
- Time marker signals play a role as referents for temporal and spatial projection
- Passive sensory inputs perceived slightly before time marker arrival at somatosensory cortex (SI), direct thalamic or lemniscal stimuli: slightly after
Experimental Evidence:
- Temporally close overlap between perceived and projected experiences, potentially explaining early evolution of specific projection system
- Electrical stimulation in Parkinson's disease patients may provide artificial time marker signals, minimizing jitter.
31— Conscious and Anomalous Nonconscious Emotional Processes: A Reversal of the Arrow of Time? Dick J. Bierman and Dean Radin
Experiments Exploring Nonconscious Emotional Processes
Previous Experiments:
- Two experiments explored physiological indicators of "precognitive information" where subjects responded before presented stimuli (Hartwell, 1978; Radin, 1996)
- Hartwell used Contingent Negative Variation (CNV), a brain potential associated with anticipatory processes and response preparation
- Subjects responded based on gender of face in warning signal trials
- Mean CNV differed for stimulus categories, suggesting nonconscious knowledge of future
Radin's Experiments:
- Used physiological measures: Skin Conductance, Heart Rate, Plethysmography (1996)
- Highly emotional pictures presented 5 seconds after button press
- Significant differences in physiology preceding calm versus extreme pictures termed "presponse"
- Could not be explained by classical explanations
- Effects may have been due to anticipatory strategies or gambler's fallacy
Bierman's Replication:
- Decided to replicate Radin's experiments with different hardware, software, and randomization procedure (DJB)
- Study 1: Similar procedure as Radin but organized picture sets randomly and introduced exposure time as a within subject variable
- Study 2: Uninformed subjects told about control pictures before single extreme picture presentation
- Study 3: Subjects fully informed about extreme picture possibility, one ratio of extremes to calms, and fewer total pictures used.
Study Findings: Emotional Picture Response Study
Background:
- Three studies validating Radin's earlier results on anticipatory physiology before exposure to calm and extreme pictures
- Hypotheses: anomalous difference in anticipatory physiology, emotional picture classes, effect of exposure time, normal sequential effects
Study 1 (October 4 - November 14, 1996):
- Subjects: 16 (3 male, 13 female), age range 22 to 57
- Calm vs. Extreme Effect: significant difference in presponse P between calm and extreme stimuli (z-score: 2.4, p = 0.016)
- Violent vs. Erotic Effect: slight difference between mean presponse patterns for erotic and violent pictures (z-score: 1.65, p = 0.09)
- Exposure Time Effect: weak effect of longer exposure times on the presponse (z-value: 1.72, p = 0.085)
- Sequential explanations: no evidence for sequential strategies
Study 2 (February 17 - March 4, 1997):
- Subjects: 32 (16 male and 16 female), age range 19 to 36
- Calm vs. Extreme Effect: smaller effect size compared to Study 1 (z-score: 0.43)
- Violent vs. Erotic Effect: similar mean physiological records for erotic and violent pictures (z-score: 0.57, n.s.)
- Exposure Time Effect: no presponse observed for short exposure time (400 msec), difference in longer exposures insignificant (z-score: 0.67, n.s.)
Study 3 (Identical to Study 2):
- Calm vs. Extreme Effect: no significant difference in presponse between calm and extreme stimuli (z = 0.9, n.s.)
- Violent vs. Erotic Effect: inconsistent results across studies due to dependent variable choice and different subject populations
- Exposure Time Effect: insignificant difference in mean GSR for short (400 msec) and long exposure times (z-score: 0.55, n.s.)
Conclusion:
- Consistent findings of larger presponse for succeeding extreme pictures than calm ones across three studies
- Effect sizes may differ due to subject population or dependent variable choice
- Potential normal explanations, such as anticipatory strategies, ruled out by previous research and replication.
Exploring Macroscopic Time Symmetry in Emotional Response Studies, finding no support for anticipation strategies or conventional physics explanations; suggesting consciousness as coherent absorbing system and possible meditation experiment for further investigation.
Presponse Effect: Alternative Explanations
- Current results do not support the notion of a Gambler's Fallacy based on ratio between calm and extremes
- Three arguments against an explanation through normal anticipatory strategies:
- Internal effects like difference between erotic and violent stimuli cannot be easily explained by these strategies
- Sequential history analysis gives identical results, but doesn't correct for doublets of extremes
- Computer simulations of anticipatory strategies do not show the expected main calm vs. extreme effects
- Previous reasoning about sequential strategy models has limitations and may not account for all findings
Macroscopic Time Symmetry Argument:
- Results suggest precognitive response, potentially indicating backward time referral
- Laws of physics are time-symmetric, but practical observations show asymmetry in classical mechanics vs thermodynamics
- Price's analysis on lost time symmetry suggests coherent absorbing systems may not exhibit back-action and consciousness could be one such system
- Experiments with experienced meditators in altered states might help clarify the phenomenon's relationship to time symmetry.
Acknowledgments:
- Dagmar van der Neut for experimental contributions and discussions
- Rens Wezelman for stimulating insights
- Parapsychological Institute for hospitality during study 1
Notes:
- Adapted version of a paper presented at the Parapsychological Convention (1997, Brighton UK) by the first author
- Hartwell's results were disappointing due to low sensitivity and low emotional value in stimuli used.
- Radin originally used a 5 seconds foreperiod; new theoretical insights suggest shifting critical interval to one second earlier.
First Person Experience: Introduction to Consciousness Studies
Importance of First-Person Experience:
- Necessary role in developing a science of consciousness
- Serious consideration of introspective data for theories and investigations
Disagreement on Obtaining First-Person Data:
- Failed attempts with early structuralist psychologists (Tichner) due to:
- Mistaken assumptions about perceptual experience building
- Inability to replicate across observers
- Limited acceptance of European phenomenology within North American philosophy
- Meditative and contemplative disciplines use rigorous training and prolonged practice in introspective methodologies but often embedded in religious contexts
- Growing interest in comparing different approaches for obtaining first-person experience
Comparison of Three Approaches:
- Modern Science, Husserlian Phenomenology, Tibetan Buddhist Dzog Chen:
- Emphasis on experiment as the ultimate arbiter of truth
- Theoretical foundations in dynamic change
- Attempts to find a form of deep truth independent of culture
- Goethe's Method for Phenomenological Investigation:
- Experience as an irreducible and essential component of future science of consciousness
- Commitment to first-person experience rather than hypotheses about the world
- Subject-object dualism resolves through recognition that science only concerns subjective world
- Objective, Subjective, Intersubjective Dimensions of Consciousness:
- Importance of epistemological pluralism
- Equal attention given to dimensions (objective, subjective, intersubjective)
- Attention Training and Exploring Consciousness in Tibetan Buddhism:
- Introspective study requires clarity and sustainability of voluntary attention
- Hindu and Buddhist contemplatives have developed methods for enhancing attentional vividness and stability
- Challenge to modern researchers in consciousness studies to broaden the scope of legitimate methods
- Necessary Dialogue between Transpersonal and Cognitive Psychologies:
- Reciprocal dialogue for understanding consciousness
- Biogenetic Structural Theory of Consciousness (Laughlin):
- Grounded in experience, phenomenology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, physics
- Incorporates all approaches to studying consciousness
- Ethnographic and neurophenomenological approaches emphasized.
Understanding Self: A Comparative Analysis
Three Approaches to Understanding Actuality:
- Modern Science
- Husserlian Phenomenology
- Tibetan Buddhist Dzog Chen
Comparing Approaches:
- Modern Science: Experiment is central, objectivity assumed. Consciousness seen as an emergent property of objective processes.
- Husserlian Phenomenology: Subjectivity given equal importance to objectivity through experiential first-person perspective (phenomenology).
- Tibetan Buddhist Dzog Chen: Both subject and object are latecomers; pure experience as the more basic aspect of actuality.
Objectivity vs. Subjectivity:
- Objectivity: The world of objects, grounding everything else (realm O).
- Subjectivity: Subjects' experiences and interpretations (realms S and O¢).
- Scientific Perspective: Objective third-person description vs. experiential first-person point of view in understanding consciousness.
Three Worldviews:
- Scientific: Focus on the unknown properties and structure of consciousness as an object, assuming a subjective experience as an emergent property.
- Phenomenological (Husserl): Both subjectivity and objectivity are important, focusing on subjective experiences to understand consciousness.
- Tibetan Buddhist Dzog Chen: Subject and object are latecomers; pure experience is the more basic aspect of actuality.
Figure 32.1: Objectivity and Subjectivity in a naive interpretation of one person's experience: S denotes total realm of experience, O the objective world, O¢ objective experiences corresponding to the objective world, S¢ consciousness that we study scientifically (realm of psychology), and S the universe of experience containing all experiences.
Science and Understanding: Three Approaches to What Is Actual
Introduction:
- Discussion of three world views: natural science, phenomenology, and Tibetan Buddhist Dzog Chen
- Focus on understanding what is actual
- No particular order or nesting relation between the approaches
Natural Science:
- Object of study: objective realm O (given to us in experience)
- Realms not addressed: S (subjective) and O (imputed foundation)
- Schematic picture: top-down ordering of disciplines, with each higher discipline using entities and interactions from lower ones
- Arrow of explanation proceeds from bottom to top
- Accurate when taking a snapshot of the state of science at any given time
- Limited perspective as it does not consider subjective experiences or the imputed foundation
Phenomenology:
- Object of study: subjective realm S (focus on consciousness)
- Enlarges world by adding third realm S, reduces by leaving out O
- Shift in focus from object to subject pole of polarization
- Epoche method designed for this shift
- Different role in science compared to Dzog Chen due to roles of S and O
- Internal structure: hermeneutic character as a living and evolving approach to the study of actuality (feedback loops)
Tibetan Buddhist Dzog Chen:
- Object of study: investigation of what is actual, beyond subject-object split
- Shift in focus from S' to S minus O' (larger realm S)
- Polarization of subject and object poles arises from this focus
- Different perspective as it circumvents analyzing reality in terms of objects and subjects
- Rich range of reasonable world views, with internal structure yet to be detailed.
Science's Historical Development and Limitations
- Discoveries in higher fields can necessitate fundamental changes in lower ones, e.g., quantum mechanics
- Determinism gave way to chance or spontaneity, affecting causality and repeatability
- Science has a more circular explanatory structure, with hermeneutic circles between different disciplines
- Modern science started with limited topics for investigation (primary vs. secondary properties)
- Expansion of framework allowed for widening the filter in later years
- Complete understanding may take centuries to achieve or might not be possible
Husserlian Phenomenology as an Alternative Approach
- Replaces the filter with a prism, focusing on detailed description of all observable phenomena
- Requires extensive training to see beyond prejudices and overlook the unexpected
- Can lead to unexpected insights in various scientific fields (Einstein's relativity theories)
- Contrasts with natural science's method of analysis: breakdown into elementary processes versus fullness of experience.
Comparison of World Views: Art, Religion, Science, Phenomenology, and Dzog Chen
Commonalities:
- Three experimental approaches to understanding what is actual
- Science: based on experiment as ultimate arbitrator of truth
- Phenomenology: rooted in experience, focusing on direct contact with the world
- Dzog Chen: radical focus on appreciation without transformation or selection
- Strive for deep, universal truths independent of culture
- Similar process of investigation: stepping out to better understand what is actual (lab environment in science, epoche in phenomenology, meditation and contemplation in Dzog Chen)
Differences:
- Originated in specific cultures but aim for universality
- Different results: scientific laws vs. phenomenological experience vs. Dzog Chen appreciation
Challenges:
- Academic research structure does not naturally support world view comparisons
- Traditional boundaries and lack of focus on direct experience
Conclusion:
- Exciting to discover new ways of exploring actuality, offering freedom from identification
- Future goal: comparing the roots (structure of inquiry) of various world views, focusing on common soil
Additional Information:
- Husserl's phenomenology: focused on experience through epoche, published works available in Husserliana series
- Dzog Chen: a radical contemplative practice, similar to Japanese Zen and Chinese Chan, with living traditions among Tibetans. Books include The Practice of Dzogchen, Time, Space, and Knowledge by Tarthang Tulku.
33— Intersubjectivity: Exploring Consciousness from the Second-Person Perspective Christian de Quincey
Second-Person Perspective and Intersubjectivity: Christian de Quincey's Argument for Expanding Consciousness Studies
Purpose: A shift in perspective towards relationship as fundamental in understanding consciousness
Key Terms: consciousness, subjectivity, intersubjectivity
Clarifying Our Terms:
- Consciousness: Psychological (contents and mode of access) vs. Philosophical (context or being)
- Subjectivity: Experienced interiority with felt or experienced relations
- Subjectivity-1: Interior but not necessarily independent/isolated
- Subjectivity-2: Private, self-contained, and independent
- Intersubjectivity: Standard vs. Experiential meaning
- Intersubjectivity-1 (standard): Consensual validation between independent subjects via signals
- Intersubjectivity-2 (weak): Mutual engagement and participation between independent subjects, affecting experience
- Weak intersubjectivity refers to changes in the form of consciousness of participating subjects, not to the fact of such consciousness. It still posits subjectivity as ontologically prior to intersubjectivity.
- Intersubjectivity-3 (strong): Co-arising and engagement of interdependent subjects or 'intersubjects,' creating their experience
Argument:
- Overlooked aspect of consciousness in philosophy of mind and consciousness studies is relationship or intersubjectivity
- Proposed expansion to include second-person methodology and epistemology for a holistic science of consciousness
- Shift from looking at the world as objects/subjects to recognizing relationship as fundamental
- Clarification of terms: consciousness, subjectivity, intersubjectivity
- Distinction between weak and strong intersubjectivity
- Weak intersubjectivity affects the form of consciousness of participating subjects without changing the fact of their consciousness
- Strong intersubjectivity brings distinct subjects into being through cocreative nonphysical presence.
Intersubjectivity: Understanding Multiple Meanings and Implications for Philosophy of Mind
Three Meanings of Intersubjectivity
- Standard: Consensual agreement via exchange of signals
- Experiential Forms: Rapport, empathy, love between subjects
- Cannot be fully explained in terms of signal exchange
Distinction Between Interacting Subjects and Signals
- Valid distinction based on phenomenological data and logic
- People influence each other's experience and consciousness
- Implications for philosophy of mind and consciousness studies
Epistemological Questions Raised by Intersubjectivity
- Can one subject have direct access to another's experience?
- Undermines Enlightenment epistemological tradition
- Solves problem of other minds
- Does knowledge of others influence self-knowledge?
- Indicates dialogic interaction for exploring consciousness
- Suggests mutual constitutiveness instead of mere reflection
Ontological Questions Raised by Intersubjectivity
- Is intersubjectivity primary or does it precede subjectivity?
- Challenges conventional philosophy and science
- Alternative ontologies present process as fundamental (Whitehead, Buddhism)
Proposal for a Second-Person Perspective in Consciousness Studies:
- Complement to third-person objective and first-person subjective methodologies
- Potential implications: dialogic interaction for exploring consciousness.
Objections Against the Proposed Second-Person Perspective:
- Logical, epistemological, or ontological meaning of intersubjectivity/second-person perspective?
- Eliminativist position (performatively contradictory) rejected
- Reduction to first-person subject or third-person object debated (solipsism vs. denying experiential reality for others)
- Differences between second-person methodology and other perspectives.
Chapter Thesis:
- Need to include second-person perspective in consciousness studies beyond first and third person argument
- First and third approaches risk missing essential aspects of consciousness
- Consciousness involves interpersonal relations, requiring examination of second-person I-you experiences (intersubjectivity)
Epistemological Question:
- Second-person knowing is mirror-like but not completely trustworthy due to human beings' flexibility and potential distortion
- No definitive way to eliminate all epistemological error, especially regarding consciousness issues
- Precautions against epistemological distortion involve some form of intersubjectivity: student-master relationship in spiritual disciplines or scientific experiments with peer review and consensus (intersubjectivity-l).
First vs. Third Perspective Limitations:
- Not sufficient to explain all aspects of consciousness
- Examination of objective third-person correlates or subjective first-person experiences alone is insufficient.
Husserl's Phenomenological Method:
- Accessing own personal subjectivity (interiority) necessary for engaging another subject's presence
- Introspection conditioned by the Other simultaneously introspecting us
- Mutual engaged presence, not a lone act of exploration of private experience.
Second-Person Methodology:
- Engaged presence in an I-thou relationship
- Possible intertheoretic reduction: first-person experience derived from second-person intersubjective formations.
Goethe and Phenomenological Investigation of Consciousness
Physics vs. Consciousness Studies:
- Physics reduces color to wavelength, no impact on human experience
- In contrast, consciousness studies center around conscious experience phenomena
- Cannot replace or reduce conscious experience without doing violence to the subject
Need for a Science of Consciousness:
- Neuroscience can study neural correlates, but not consciousness itself
- Developing a science of consciousness requires studying conscious experience
- Phenomenology is necessary, as no photodetector or MRI can replace the experiencing subject
Goethe's Scientific Method:
- Known for his Theory of Color, but more notable for his scientific method
- Emphasized the role of phenomena at every level of inquiry
- Opposed naive scientific realism, focusing on lived experience
- Goethe's method foreshadowed later philosophical positions like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty
Goethe's Approach to Science:
- Cautious about reducing observation to mere notion
- Hypotheses should be provisional, not established as truths
- Seek to maintain a living connection to experience, rather than abstracting from phenomena to models
Three Stages of Goethe's Method:
- Empirical Phenomena: Ordinary observations any attentive observer might make
- Scientific Phenomena: Arise through systematic experimentation and variation of external conditions
- Pure or Archetypal Phenomena: Highest form, permit a perceptual encounter with the laws of nature/consciousness
Implications for the Hard Problem:
- Goethe's method stays close to phenomena from first naive observations to deepest theoretical insights
- A novel perspective that may help resolve the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness
Understanding Perceptual Discovery and Goethe's Approach to Science
The Importance of Perceptual Discovery
- Seeing patterns in phenomena is central to their explicability (Hanson)
- Galileo saw archetype for pendulum motion despite others being empirical
Goethe's Method: Phenomenology vs. Theory
- Uncompromising theory as perception, not formal language or mathematics
- Ultimate goal: grasping everything in the realm of fact is already theory
- Delicate empiricism: becoming identical with object to see law of nature (Goethe)
The Scientist's Role and Mindset
- Patience and intimacy with object of study required for transformation of self
- Molding of ego essential for scientific discovery
Neuroscience in Consciousness Studies
- Limited perspective if only explained through neuroscience (Churchland)
- Mechanistic models have fundamental limitations, as seen in physics
Physics: Relativity and Quantum Theory
- Overturned nineteenth-century mechanical thinking
- Constancy of phenomena more important than specific theories or explanations.
Phenomenology and Neuroscience: Understanding Consciousness
Introduction:
- Neuroscientific community's optimism similar to late 19th century physics before relativity and quantum theory
- Caution against mechanistic theories of consciousness, dismissing non-accommodated states
- Importance of first-person phenomenology in consciousness research
First-Person Phenomenology:
- Distinct from third-person objective reality (subjective experience vs. public perspective)
- Subjective experience accessible only through introspection
- Scientific approach to subjective experience questioned due to its uniqueness and inaccessibility for public scrutiny
Hard Problem of Consciousness:
- First-person, third-person dichotomy:
- Unique first-person perspective vs. public third-person perspective in science
- Arguments against studying subjective experience due to lack of objectivity and scientific method
- Subject-object dualism:
- Phenomenal world perceived as artifact of human consciousness
- Physical entities inferred from sense data, but impossible to fully know unexperienced reality
- Resolving the Hard Problem:
- Subjective experience forms foundation of all sciences, including modern physics and neuroscience
- Science concerned with subjective properties, rigor lies in experimentation and theoretical analysis
- First-person perspective cannot be escaped but holds potential for transformation through consciousness development.
Conclusion:
- Two forms of hard problem: subject-object dualism and first-person, third-person dichotomy
- Different approaches to resolution: recognizing the relevance of subjective experience in science and transforming consciousness structure.
35— Essential Dimensions of Consciousness: Objective, Subjective, and Intersubjective Frances Vaughan
Consciousness: Objective, Subjective, and Intersubjective Approaches
Three Stages of Evolution and Growth:
- Differentiating stages of consciousness research: objective, subjective, intersubjective
- Importance of giving attention to all three approaches in a truly integral vision
Common Ground:
- Interested in knowledge and truth discovery
- Demands integrity and honesty from investigators
- Each approach has its own methods of validation
- Rational, emotional, intuitive modes of knowing are used across disciplines
Epistemological Pluralism:
- Three basic modes of knowing: sensory (body), rational (mind), contemplative (spirit)
- Each mode subject to injunction, verification, and confirmation by trained observers
- Scientists may misunderstand introspection and spiritual practices
- Difficulties in communication across disciplines and expertise levels
- Integrative approach calls for dialogue with diverse perspectives and mutual respect.
Objective Approach:
- Studies the observable, material universe
- Science provides information about an objective reality
- Objectivity sought to gain credibility in social sciences
Subjective Approach:
- Explores inner world of psyche through introspection
- Relevant for understanding cultural diversity and deepening intersubjective dialogue
- Validity depends on authentic expression of subjective reality rather than objective descriptions.
Intersubjective Approach:
- Focuses on shared values, meaning, and interpersonal relationships
- I-thou vs I-it relationships
- Relevant to understanding cultural diversity and deepening dialogue between researchers.
Exploring Integral Consciousness: Subjective, Objective, and Intersubjective Domains in Psychotherapy
Interview with Albert Hoffmann: Spiritual Basis for Lives vs. Dogma or Belief
Spirituality:
- People seek deep spiritual experiences, not just happiness or material satisfaction
- When there are no sanctioned paths for exploration, they may pursue nonordinary states irresponsibly
Scientific Investigation of Altered States:
- Hampered by illicit drug use and resulting legislation
- Work on holotropic breathing has opened awareness to inaccessible psyche realms
- Popularity of shamanic practices, yoga, meditation attests to interest in nonordinary states
Integral View of Consciousness Studies:
- Cognitive science, neuropsychology, phenomenology, depth psychology, developmental psychology, psychosomatic medicine, nonordinary states, contemplative disciplines, subtle energies and quantum theories
- Each approach offers a partial perception of the whole
Distinctions Between Science and Religion:
- Science describes what is; religion tells us what should be and provides values and community
- Distinction between spirituality (subjective experience) and religion (tradition and organized institutions)
- Meaning eludes objective approaches like science
Postmodern Constructivist View:
- Perceptions of reality are constructed and context dependent
- Experience reinforces beliefs; beliefs shape experience
Subjective Domain in Consciousness Studies:
- Focuses on inner, intersubjective domain often overlooked by objective approaches
- Transpersonal psychology integrates physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions for wellbeing
- Psychotherapy facilitates experiential learning, healing old emotional wounds, and developing potentials
Intelligence Types:
- Physical, emotional, cognitive, moral development may proceed at different rates
- Emotional intelligence important for psychological health and wellbeing
- Moral development is a foundation for spiritual development
Stages of Self-Psychology and Spiritual Development
Ego Stage:
- Identified exclusively with ego
- Seeking personal, social, and spiritual empowerment
- Intention turns to developing consciousness rather than external goals
Soul Stage:
- Identified with soul
- Recognizing interconnectedness of all beings
- Importance of love, creativity, and inner peace
- Transcending time and space in consciousness
Spirit Stage:
- Identified with Spirit or God
- One with all being
- World-centric spirituality
- Nondual mysticism domain
Stages of Faith:
- Quest for deeper meaning
- Inner realities leading to identity beyond body-ego
- Recognition of another's being in I-Thou relationships
Interpersonal Relationships:
- I-Thou vs. I-it relationships
- Mutual respect and deep connection enables healing
- Importance of intersubjective consciousness for psychotherapy
Cultural Conditioning:
- Culturally determined contents of consciousness (images, inner visions)
- Beliefs shape experiences and can lead to self-deception
- Community testing essential for nonmaterial realities
Interpersonal Dialogues:
- Holding aperspectival view in intersubjective consciousness domain
- Multiple relationships affecting individuals' lives
- Impact of ideas on spirituality, interpersonal relationships, self-concept.
Importance of Epistemological Pluralism:
- Recognizing and validating neglected dimensions of consciousness (subjective, internal states)
- Deepening dialogue between different approaches to support healing the inner life with outer work.
Training the Attention and Exploring Consciousness in Tibetan Buddhism
Background:
- No scientific evidence for consciousness existence, introspection is crucial
- Limited progress in refining mind as a tool for exploring states of consciousness
- Psychometers detect neural correlates but not conscious processes
- Importance of clear attention and sustained voluntary focus
- William James recognized this issue but lacked methods to enhance attention*
Problems with Attention:
- Attentional excitation: mind incapable of focusing, compulsively shifts to other objects
- Attentional laxity: vividness or clarity of awareness fades, leads to lethargy, drowsiness, and sleep
- Oscillation between excitation and laxity hinders rigorous examination of mental states
Attentional Qualities:
- Stability: proportion of ascertaining moments of cognition focused on intended object increases
- Homogeneity of moments of ascertaining perception*
- Vividness: ratio of ascertaining to nonascertaining cognition, higher frequency leads to clearer awareness
Faculties for Cultivating Attentional Qualities:
- Mindfulness: repeatedly direct attention on familiar object without disengaging from it
- Introspection: attend to quality of attention itself, detect excitation or laxity and decrease lapses in focused attention.
Mindfulness vs Object:
- No conflation of subject and object, distinction persists
- Agitated (excitation) and slack (laxity) modes of cognition defined Single cognition cannot be aware of two dissimilar objects
Early Phases of Attentional Training:
- Focus on mental image of object with mindfulness
- Short duration of continuous attention, astounding for some due to chaotic minds.
- Introspection used to detect occurrence of excitation and decrease lapses in focused attention.
Introspective Awareness and Attention Training:
- Introspection is a form of retrospection, focusing on the quality of attention rather than an object
- Can impair sustained voluntary attention if overused, requiring balance with focus on attentional object
- Tibetan Buddhist contemplatives claim they can train attention to stay focused for several hours without excitation or laxity (meditative quiescence)
- In this state, the mind is still with no thoughts, imbued with clear consciousness and vivid perception
- Useful in studying consciousness as it allows disengagement from appearances
- Three methods of attention training: focusing on a mental image, silencing thoughts, and focusing on consciousness amidst thoughts
- Focusing on a mental image inhibits range of mental events
- Silencing thoughts limits use for observing other mental states
- Attending to consciousness amidst thoughts allows awareness of various mental processes without intervention
- Techniques have been used across diverse religious and philosophical traditions, often claimed to lead to paranormal abilities
- Despite skepticism, these techniques present an opportunity for scientific exploration in consciousness studies.
Historical Background:
- The Buddha drew from Indian contemplative experience
- Traditions introduced into Chinese Taoist tradition, further developed in Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, and other Asian countries
- Wide variety of techniques designed for different personality types
- Relevance to exploring consciousness, achieving soteriological goals, enhancing attention capacity, treating attentional disorders.
37— Transpersonal and Cognitive Psychologies of Consciousness: A Necessary and Reciprocal Dialogue Harry T. Hunt
Cognitive Psychology and Transpersonal Consciousness: A Necessary Dialogue
Background:
- Cognitive psychology faces issues with the transparency of conscious awareness system
- Lack of empirical features needed for empirical science
- Transpersonal states provide detailed phenomenologies, revealing consciousness development
Transpersonal States as a Microscope for Consciousness:
- Reveal inner cognitive processes invisible in ordinary consciousness
- Possible nonreductionistic account recognizable by modern cognitive science
Status of Qualia:
- Dennett denies qualia as irrelevant to functional perception
- Peirce suggests they are potentials within ongoing awareness
- Gibson: Sensations not present in ordinary experience but developed from primary perception
Contribution of Transpersonal Development to Cognitive Science:
- Reveals inner forms and processes of consciousness
- Meditative traditions best reflect development of consciousness
- Qualia can be consensual and shared, contrary to private nature
Ordinary Consciousness and Transpersonal Development:
- Immediate consciousness: whole of life in a moment, difficult to observe
- James' observations on the streaming of consciousness
- Not we who do it but it has us
- No central self or identity
- Pure experience: sheer presence or being (suchness)
Similarities Between Meditative States and Experimental Introspection:
- Nafe's study on affective pleasure: momentary experiences with features of prolonged ecstasies in meditation.
Transpersonal Psychology: Understanding Transpersonal States Through a Cognitive Lens
Thesis 1: Transpersonal states are based on the unfolding of latent qualia in immediate consciousness
- Recognizable surfaces as memory illusions
- T-scope studies of bare experience of light
- Shift from awareness's object to its isness
Cognitive Theory and Transpersonal States
- Human mind's creativity: turning around on and recombining structures of perception
- Immediate consciousness as unnoticed thatness or sheer beingness
- Contains forms for more specific functional expressions of consciousness (deep forms or archetypes)
- Perception itself and transpersonal states: basic forms realized and developed into metaphors and metaphysics
Thesis 2: Transpersonal psychology needs a cognitive science of consciousness
- Understanding why immediate consciousness contains transpersonal forms
- Prolonged into focal consciousness: different qualities and flavors of spiritual experience (Plato's sense, Almaas)
- Relation between perception itself and transpersonal states: basic forms of living creature realized and developed
- Witnessing attitude and detached observation for development as such
- Inter-modal synesthesias in complex form (Geschwind theory)
- Full dissolving of body image into light: sense of dying and disappearing, metaphors fully felt
- Nonreductionistic approach: recognizes and amplifies abstract synesthetic processes
- Metaphysical claims of spiritual traditions: consciousness as fundamental category.
Implications:
- Balanced dialogue between transpersonal and cognitive perspectives necessary
- False reductionism not an issue if phenomenology is of objective, unmediated transcendence
- Recognition and amplification of abstract synesthetic processes in understanding transpersonal states.
Transpersonal Experience vs. Metaphysics/Metaphor
- For cognitivists, mystical experiences of light are seen as metaphors for understanding the source of all existence
- Crossing line between metaphysics and metaphor: Both systems hide primary being experiences that can be accessed experientially
- Transpersonal states evoke same "sheer isness" or "thatness" of Being as scientifically factual approach to reality
- Debate on the point of emergence of consciousness in nature
- Some see it as only emergent through complex neural networks
- Others seek primary consciousness in immediate perception and behavioral manifestations (single cell organisms)
- Primacy of experience perspective challenges reductionistic explanations for consciousness
- Behavioral reflections of Gibson's ambient array may be plausible place to begin understanding consciousness
- Quantum field models offer potential explanations but do not explain the felt inner side of movement within an ambient array
Primacy of Phenomenology and Its Consequences
- Contextualizes all purported explanations for consciousness' existence
- Reminds us that all knowledge about consciousness comes through personal experience (William James)
- Speculations on conceptual primitives like space, time, and consciousness can be traced without being fully explained
- Psychologists have been more cautious than physicists and mathematicians regarding such speculations
- Conclusion: Addressing questions of meaning, purpose, and existence requires starting from personal experience and following where it leads individually and collectively.