DRET/DCE 16 bis, ave Prieur de la Côte d'Or 94114 Arcueil Cedex France.
(email: ransford@etca.fr )
Published in the Proceedings of ANPA 19 (Cambridge, September 1998)
ABSTRACT
Brain awareness doesn't come out of thin air. There is evidence aplenty that it critically depends on a set of neural activities. What is more, recent findings compellingly suggest that consciousness is a function of an identifiable neural architecture. This, to be sure, affords an invaluable insight into the inner workings of our awareness-begetting brain. However, this descriptive account falls woefully short, explanation -wise, of providing any telling clue. This being so, can we go any further towards unlocking the neural underpinnings of consciousness, and get an inkling as to what physical processes yield some awareness - and above all, why they do so? This raises the so-called hard problem of consciousness.
In a bid to unfold it, I put forward a panpsychic approach based on the psychomatter hypothesis. According to it, what we are wont to take for plain matter would actually shroud an oft-latent - and hence hidden, unseen - "psychic" or 'psi' content. The 'psi' parts of elementary particles would be the raw building blocks of higher-level, macropsychic conscious experience. This tentative outlook leads to the cognitive iceberg model of perceptual awareness.
This iceberg is made of an underwater - or rather, "underaware" - part, where incoming sensory stimuli are coded in the shape of what I call the suprels . Visual suprel s, for instance, are typically made in the visual cortical areas, where they remain unconscious. (This is meant to account for preconscious brain processing, on the one hand.) Then they dash into the "tip", where they target specific microstructures (dubbed the paralgens) that readily turn them into the variegated subjective contents of experience, known as qualia . (This is to deal with conscious brain processing - on the other hand.)
(It turns out that we are far from clueless as to the putative nature of both the suprels and the paralgens . Indeed, some of these paralgens are likely to be tucked inside the postsynaptic NMDA receptors found on the dendritic synapses of large pyramidal cells in the neocortical fifth layer...)
It will be argued that the above model sheds new, if provisional, light on such conundrums as: the binding problem (which deals with the uncanny, seamless unity of conscious experience); the nature of our conscious recalls; the parallel (and unconscious) versus serial (and conscious) processing problem; and the 'upshot problem', whereby what we are conscious of appears to be the result, or upshot, of neural computations rather than the computations themselves.
Finally, I shall touch on the tantalizing possibility, in keeping with the foregoing, to think up and carry out full-blown exo-biological brains endowed with genuine awareness. (This perspective is implicit to the panpsychic idea.)
If we peer inside a living skull, straight into the shifty privacy of a feeling, sensing, thinking brain, we are bound to find matter, matter anew, and matter again. And nothing else, ever! What then about the mind - to say nothing of the soul? No hint, no inkling, no whiff of it. Not the flimsiest shred of evidence. To all outwards appearances, the mind doesn't exist.
However, seeing is believing. And this is preciely the point: when we see through the private, inner eye of consciousness, we realize that there may be more to reality than meets the... biological eye. This throws open the intriguing prospect of panpsychism, which posits that the seeds of mind are at once truly nonmaterial, tightly knit to matter, and all-pervasive in our 'mineral' world. (Or is the mind just an emergent property, pulled off by some eery trick of plain matter?)
Panpsychism, as I take it to be, rests on the tentative insight that there is something, in the raw substance we call matter, that could occasionally be kindled into yielding awareness (in much a similar fashion as chunks of matter can be ignited into giving off light). On this account, our universe would be richer than we tend to think. And matter would qualify as psychomatter .
If so, the living brain is to consciousness what a lamp is to light: a catalyzer of sorts. Brains and lightbulbs alike make a potential property of "matter" come forth - whether it be light or awareness. (This property, in both cases, is overwhelmingly hidden: here's the catch!)
Let me make one thing clear at the outset. In this paper I shall make no attempt at defining consciousness. I shall restrict my focus to the conscious brain, and shall only seek to address the following question: Why and how it is that the brain is the organ of awareness? To that end, I don't need to define consciousness. (For simplicity's sake, I take the two words of awareness and consciousness as synonymous, without further ado.) I only need to characterize it operationally in a way that disambiguates it from matter.
Needless to say, the conscious brain is a dreadfully tough nut to crack. Indeed, a number of people believe that "it will always be impossible to demonstrate unequivocally and empirically how brain cells cause consciousness" (Greenfield 1995). I hope that my attempt, for right or wrong, will convince a few that this impossibility... is only in the mind!
A whole wealth of data is available, today, as regards the neural correlates of arousal, wakefulness, alertness, consciousness, and the multifarious facets of subjective experience. It lends strong support to the thesis, recently upheld by Baars and Newman, that "consciousness is a function of an identifiable neural architecture" - which would be "the extended reticular-thalamic activating system (ERTAS)" (Newman, 1997).
That consciousness is somehow a "product" of the living brain is further evidenced e.g. by the so-called focal disturbances of consciousness (Sacks 1986, Flohr 1992) where, following partial lesions of the reticular formation in the brain, a person exhibits specific, and well documented, deficits in his/her conscious experience. (A larger lesion of the same brain structure, on the other hand, elicits no less than a global loss of consciousness: it leads to coma.) A striking example of brain-based deficit is hemi-neglect, where patients consistently ignore whatever relates to one side of their body.
Thanks in no mean part to our sophisticated non-invasive scanning techniques (e.g. PET, positron emission tomography, and MRI, magnetic resonance imaging), the brain is no longer the totally uncharted territory it once was. By and large, we can boast to know a hefty lot about its inner workings, even though much remains to be found. However, for all our hard-won knowledge, impressive as it is, we still fall woefully short of addressing the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995, 1996). (It deals, roughly speaking, with explaining the occurrence - as opposed to merely nailing down the neural underpinnings - of brain awareness.)
As things stand, no truly winning, operative idea concerning the conditions under which physical processes give rise to consciousness is anywhere near in sight. There are words and talks galore - but very little to really go for, at the end of the day. (Were it not so, one can safely bet that artificial consciouness wouldn't be a long way off....)
Could it be that present-day science bites off rather more than it can chew, given its current framework? Perhaps. When it comes to consciousness, we are faced with a choice. Either we decide to hollow it out so that science, as we know and are used to it, is not called into question. We may then assume, somewhat squarely, that "consciousness is not only caused by neurobiological states but actually is these neurobiological states" (Damasio 1997).
(Incidentally, this reductionist stance is the loose consensus of the day, within the neuroscience community. However, and as emphasized by Velmans (e.g. Velmans 1990, 1996), reductionist arguments typically confound correlation, causation, and ontological identity; or they rely on false analogies; or both.)
Or we may contrariwise seek to broaden science - and thus change it, perhaps in a deep way - so that it can allow for consciousness (deemed non-material). This admittedly entails something of a sea-change in our outlook. But science is no absolute; it is not cast in a timeless, definitive, 'stiff-as-dead' mold. Like any human-made artefact, it is a living, evolving, ever-shifting entity. It is even prone to sweeping paradigm shifts (Kuhn 1970).
Should we then stick to a hard-nosed, fuss-free but perhaps inadequate materialism? Or should we take on board some additional axiom, some new hypothesis or ingredient, if we are to grasp and grab more of the world? Should we go for Ockham (a.k.a. Occam, of razor fame) or Gödel (forever undecided)?
It appears that a disconcerting number of people would invoke, when pressed to buttress the reductionist option, Ockham's razor. This 'razor' refers to the sound principle that, upon explaining something, you must dispense with any assumption that is not strictly necessary.
In the present context however, any claim based on this heuristic principle has no real bite. It only begs the question at issue; for it is very unclear, in the first place, whether materialism can be up to the job at all. It is interesting in this respect to note that physics, according to authors such as Nagel (1986, p.7), is incomplete and "bound to leave undescribed the irreducibly subjective character of conscious mental processes, whatever may be their intimate relation to the physical operation of the brain."
As Chalmers would have it, the hard problem of consciousness is hard indeed!
If we go for the second horn of the alternative - for Gödel instead of Ockham - we acknowledge or suspect that the elusive and baffling phenomenon of awareness confronts us with a genuine unknown, which flies all too glaringly in the face of materialism. This brings us to a situation akin to stumbling on one of Gödel's undecidable statements... that science is demonstrably unable, in its current state, to handle (Gödel 1981, Smullyan 1987).
The way out is to award consciousness some of the wiggle room it deserves, within and on a par with matter itself. It is therefore to broaden our framework. The right thing to do - as we learnt from Gödel, too - is to enrich science with some new (and hopefully relevant) axiom or hypothesis. Psychomatter or panspychism , we'll soon find out, is just such a tentative axiom.
My homespun brand of panspychism qualifies as proto-panpsychism - or, even better, as "pan-crypto-protopsychism"! It rests on the assumption that matter is actually psycho -matter; and that the conscious brain is an effect, viz. a causal outcome, of psychomatter . (The linchpin is that the "psycho" or 'psi' side evades scrutiny for it is overwhelmingly latent - and hence inert, utterly inobservable.)
This view is in line with speculations made by David Chalmers (Chalmers 1995, 1996), who pondered that an ontology that includes consciousness requires a new physics. (Incidentally, I touched on the broader issue of consciousness - as seen from the wilder shores of an ontological, meta-physical perspective - in (Ransford 1997).)
(The scope of this short Section is to familiarize the reader with some of the nuts and bolts of my panpsychic approach. It just anticipates what will be developed in the next Section. It can therefore easily be skipped at first, and read after this next Section.)
As a rule, new entities request new labels, if a host of unnecessary confusions are to be eschewed. Thus, even though I am loath to do so, I shall coin a few neologisms to tag the new (but intuitively straightforward) features that go with the psychomatter hypothesis. I shall do my best to keep it as clear and as simple as possible.
We gather from its very name that psycho-matter is bi-dimensional, and contains a "psycho" (or 'psi', for short) part. The fact that this 'psi' shuns detection is a strong hint that it is overwhelmingly latent. Accordingly, psychomatter takes on two alternative guises, depending on whether its content is active or latent: this Janus-like substance - "one stuff, two faces" - breaks down into what I propose to christen matter (i.e. matter proper ) and paral . (Simple enough: it is like water, that can also be ice.)
This being so, a paralling or paral phase labels this particular state psychomatter is in, when its 'psi' is off-latent - and thereby becomes fully active. When a speck of psychomatter undergoes a paralling, its 'psi' is set alight, as it were. It is made to glow, like a tiny spark.
Next, there is the concept of supralness . Supralness is about binding, blending or aggregating the 'psi' parts of several chunks of psychomatter. A supral link is a kind of 'psi' thread, running through sundry specks of psychomatter. It is noteworthy that it cannot be seen either, any more than the 'psi' itself.
Now, two additional concepts can be drawn from the foregoing. The first one is that of suprel . A suprel is an elementary bit, or unit, of a brand-new type of information; which is embedded in supralness. It is encoded in supral patterns, that (quite simply) are webs or tangles of 'psi' threads. What stands out is that these patterns bring structure, and hence information , at the 'psi' level. (This structure is combinatorial and topological in essence.)
The complexity and variety of this supral information is virtually boundless. (Think of all the patterns that can be wrought by linking a basketful of beads with threads!) We should again take heed that these (nonlocal) supral patterns do not, as a rule, show at the material level. They are not anchored in the physical side of psychomatter. It is little wonder that we failed to spot them in the brain....
Lastly, there is the concept of paralgen . Neural or brain paralgens are alleged microdevices in our brains that turn or kindle matter into paral. (Crudely put: they "wake up" the 'psi' contents of psychomatter).
One can summarize all of the above in a short-hand way:
Matter = psychomatter whose 'psi' content is latent
Paral = psychomatter whose 'psi' is "off-latent" (i.e. it is astir, or akindle)
Paralling, paral phase = 'psi' spark ; Supral link = 'psi' thread
Suprel = basic 'psi' pattern (a suprel encodes data that we may become aware of)
Paralgen = microdevice poised to turn matter into paral (a paralgen arouses or kindles the 'psi' in psychomatter)
All these words and phrases link either with the paral interaction (viz. the 'psi' spark) or with the supral interaction (viz. the 'psi' thread), which will soon take on an immediate visual meaning. (See the M-P-S diagram underneath.) The "paral" bit underscores the low-level, microphysical, roots of awareness; whilst the "supral" bit underpins its wider, distributed or holistic nature.
As with light, so with awareness: there is a threshold below which awareness is just too dim to be worth the name. Due to its supral side, consciousness is a truly emergent property that is not available at the raw level of the unsupralled (or poorly supralled) paral. It takes a whole slew of suprally bound 'psi' sparks to make a full-blown macropsychic entity, such as human consciousness. Likewise, it takes many dewdrops to make a puddle!
In line with this, the wakeful brain can be thought of as a 'psi'-triggering machine, bent on turning an ever sufficient amount of matter into paral. We can therefore write, in a nutshell:
Stream of consciousness = stream of supralled paral
Awakened brain = wide-scale 'psi' catalyzer (that brings about an ongoing, above-threshold flow of supralled paral - this flow comes down to a trickle during sleep)
And, last but not least:
By way of partial and provisional conclusion, the understanding of the conscious brain which goes with my strain of panpsychism can be encapsulated in the following statement:
The brain is the organ of awareness because it is able to yield, on wide enough a scale, an ongoing stream of supralled paral. (It owes this stunning ability to its paralgens.)
This spells out my panspychic answer to the riddle of the conscious brain. Interestingly, it basically agrees with the by now widespread opinion that "consciousness is generated when vast groups of neurons work together collectively under specific conditions" (Greenfield 1995, p. 191). Were it on target, it could pave the way for an exciting new era. That of artificial consciousness....
(This Section can be read independently of the previous one.)
For a start and as already said, matter (call it 66;, or 'phi' - for physical) may turn out to harbour within itself an unseen spare content, or dimension (call it 68;, or 'psi' - for psychic). The two, 'phi' and 'psi', would be qualitatively different (i.e. their respective features would sharply differ).
The psychomatter hypothesis takes this insight at face value. It posits that what we call matter is really twofold, or bi-dimensional; that it shelters, along with the physical part, a psychic, or 'psi', one. As I already pointed out, this view is akin to that of panpsychism or panprotopsychism, as proposed e.g. by Seager and Rosenberg (see Chalmers, 1997).
To get this idea off the ground, three ingredients are needed. They are:
Now, it should be stressed that the 'psi' needs not be a spooky stuff of sorts. Indeed, the main difference between 68; and 66; is that the former is endo-causal whereas the latter is exo-causal. (These notions have been discussed at some length in (Ransford 1997); endo-causation comes down as an element of indeterminacy while exo-causation is deterministic.)
A good picture being worth over one thousand words, the M-P-S diagram below provides a concise (and uneschewably, exceedingly sketchy!) summary of my approach.
If q 1 = ( 68; 1 , 66; 1 ) and q 2 = ( 68; 2 , 66; 2 ) represent two elementary particles, or quantons - which both allegedly own a 'psi' ( 68;) and a 'phi' ( 66;) parts - then one gets:
q 1 = ( 68; 1 , 66; 1 ) q 2 = ( 68; 2 , 66; 2 ).
One has:
- M : material interaction (between 66; 1 and 66; 2 )
- P : paral phase or interaction; or else, paralling (between 68; i , 66; i ) [i = 1, 2]
- S : supral link or interaction (between 68; 1 and 68; 2 )
The M-P-S diagram raises an immediate question. It is: How can we tell M, P and S apart? This really is no big deal. Given that these interactions put either 68; or 66; (or both) into play, telling them apart amounts to find out - or rather, to surmise - what diffentiates 68; and 66;. So the question becomes: How can we tell the 'psycho' and the 'matter' (that is, the 'psi' and 'phi') contents of psychomatter apart? This is a key issue, that I take up now.
The psychomatter hypothesis rubs off on two domains of human knowledge, which are physics and neuroscience. This is fairly obvious. Indeed there are - very briefly, and to start with physics (neuroscience will be broached in the next Section) - three a priori possibilities regarding their mutual relationship, namely:
I believe that, with quantum physics, we are in the last case. If so it be, expect supralness and paral phases to raise a sprinkling of unwieldy problems and paradoxes of their own, wherever they hit (and rock) materialism. (Doesn't this ring a bell - or rather two?...)
Now, in order to proceed meaningfully, I must be able to draw a sharp and watertight line between 68; ('psi') and 66; ('phi'), as well as between matter and paral. This in turn requires that I lay down some clear-cut criteria. With an eye on contemporary physics, I propose that:
The principle of least action governs 66; alone, it holds its sway for matter only. Where it applies, a system evolves or behaves so as to minimize the 'action'. (The physical 'action' equals an energy times a duration.) The (wavelike) behavior of least action is fully deterministic, and is therefore inherently uncreative: it doesn't spawn any new element of reality. I express this by saying that it is 'deedless' (Ransford 1997).
Conversely, the 'psi' part, 68;, is endowed with a degree of self-determinacy, that shows as nondeterminism. The processes during which it becomes 'off-latent' or active are thereby 'deedful', i.e. they are genuinely creative. This (partial) self-determinacy can roughly be likened to an extremely low and raw measure of "free-will".
Free will? Free will is and has always been a highly controversial notion. Can we still believe in it, when some neuropsychologists (e.g. Christopher Frith in London) carry out experiments which show that the nervous system initiates an action before we consciously decide to do something? Granted, free will could be less than what it's cracked up to be.
Arguably, though, there is still room for a genuine, if limited, free will. (Were it not so, it is unclear why nature would have bothered to create something as mammothly complicated as perceptual awareness, with the attendant 'free will-bending' pain/pleasure polarities.) As William James once quipped: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." The logic thereof is nearly unassailable, and I make it mine!
In light of the foregoing, let me recap this Section with three items:
Therefore: A paralling is, for one , irreducibly nondeterministic; it, for two , breaches the least action principle and, for that matter, any " 66;-determinism". It likewise breaks free, for three , of relativity. This consistently pins the paral phases down as what is known as quantum jumps and wavefunction collapses. (The idea is that all which is not strictly least action, or wavelike, micro-evolution involves one paralling or more.)
A paral phase, as I wrote in (Ransford 1995), "jolts a subatomic particle out of its smooth and steady wavelike motion (of 'least action')." For instance, the emission and absorption of a photon are run-of-the-mill paral phases. Similarly, a particle that decays or disintegrates - sometimes in the merest fraction of a second, without ever bothering to wait for someone to observe - does so through paral phases.
(Incidentally, the 'relativity-blindness' of these events is backed by faster-than-light tunnelling, observed by Chiao and coworkers in Berkeley. What is called tunnelling really spans two realities. It is a pure wavelike phenomenon as long as it remains reversible; as with the ammonia molecule. However, it is paralling-driven when it becomes irreversible.)
No paral phase, no decay. That simple! Were it enforced throughout, the principle of least action would stand in the way of all events of that ilk, and starkly preclude their happening. Indeed, any discrete, sudden, irreversible microphysical event bears the hallmark of a paralling: it is "paral-driven" (or paralling-driven). Any microphysical event that displays either discreteness, irreversibility or nondeterminism - and of course, expect to find all of them together - stems from a paralling. (Technically, it is a "nonunitary" event.)
These telltale features are in marked contrast to the smooth, reversible, fully deterministic least action motion. How might we fail to spot the difference? Besides, paral phases breach conservation laws (Burgos 1993).
Therefore: Supralness, for one , binds hence correlates various 'psi' parts within psychomatter - this (for two) being on display only when a paral phase comes off. For three , it is relativity-blind. All of the above pins supralness down as what is known as quantum entanglement, a.k.a. nonseparability.
Quantumhood , in short, is a all-or-nothing affair. It is epitomized by the fact that only integer numbers make sense at the microlevel (e.g. we may find 2 or 17 electrons, but never 2.3 or 16.362 of them). It is a 'straitjacket' forced upon micro-objects. As such, quantumhood is occasionally challenged and threatened - by the paralling conditions precisely. (Technically, they relate to the fact that some microsystem is not in a pure, or eigen, state of its energy operator.)
If, under some paralling condition, things were left to themselves (that is, to the least action motion) they would eventually run foul of quantumhood. (An example of it is when, through an appropriate setup, we insist on splitting an electron into two separate, not-mutually-interfering bits; e.g. 0.38 of it here, 0.62 there.) So a paralling is in order, and may swiftly arise. It saves the day because the 'psi', on becoming active and 'deedful', makes a fitting 'choice' as it were, that overcomes the hurdle: it is specifically designed to remove the quantumhood-threatening situation. (See (Ransford 1996, 1998) for a more detailed account.)
The drift here is that quantumhood would be all but untenable without parallings! (Were it not for them, physics - and worse still, nature herself - would be inconsistent. Here is why another evolution law was badly needed, further to that of the least action.) I believe that this state of affairs - which has no counterpart in the macroworld - unwraps much of the weirdness and mysteries surrounding microphysics.
As an aside, let me mention in passing that my approach bears some loose resemblance to that of Hameroff and Penrose (1996), which singles the microtubules out as something remotely akin to the paralgens. Apparently the microtubule idea was first formulated by Ezio Insinna (Insinna 1992).
Does (crypto-)panpsychism, as sketched out so far, bring any novel inkling as regards the underpinnings of the higher cognitive functions (which are our higher-level mental faculties by another name)? This is the question I now seek to answer. For the sake of specificity, I narrow my focus to our sensory abilities (e.g. vision).
(This Section dwells on some aspects of conscious perception, of which I shall give the skimpiest of outlines. Its meat is the cognitive iceberg model of sensory awareness.)
Sight is perhaps the most important of our senses. Much depends on it, as far as our ability to cope with the world 'out there' is concerned. Indeed, we know a great deal about how the 'wetware' of our brain deals with sight. We can accurately say where the visual information goes, and (up to a point) how it is processed (Crick 1994, Shepherd 1994, Zeki 1983).
Very roughly, the brain visual processing goes from the retina on to the optic nerve, through to the lateral geniculate nuclei and the visual cortex. This cortex includes a number (say, 20-odd) of functionally specialized cortical areas; each of which undergoes separate but parallel "submodalities" processing (e.g. area V4 for color, area V5 for motion). The abstract visual "image" is therefore distributed over many different zones in the brain.
This comes as a surprise; all the more so that there seems to be no conclusive mechanism - apart from the 40-Hertz oscillations highlighted by Crick and Koch (1990), of which more later: but, if anything, are they a cause or a consequence? - for combining all the operations of this separate and parallel processing into the coherent representation of what is felt as a mental image. This lack of acknowledged mechanism is known as the binding problem . As we read in Crick (Crick 1994, p. 159):
Although there are many different visual regions, each of which analyzes visual input in different and complex ways, so far we can locate no single region in which the neural activity corresponds exactly to the vivid picture of the world we see in front of our eyes. ... In short, we can see how the brain takes the picture apart, but we do not yet understand how it puts it together .
It turns out that this problem does not stand in isolation, but has many siblings. Like, to name a few, the following ones: the bewildering existence of qualia (e.g. of the felt redness of red); the poorly understood origin and nature of declarative memory (i.e. of our conscious, reportable recalls); the upshot problem (it refers to the tantalizing fact that visual awareness only knows of the outcomes, or upshots, of neural computations); the parallel/serial problem (see hereafter).
What I dub the "parallel/serial problem" revolves around the intriguing fact that, whereas preconscious processing is massively parallel, the conscious processing appears to be sequential: "Seeing is both a constructive and a complicated process. Psychological tests suggest that it is highly parallel but with a serial, "attentional" mechanism on top of the parallel one." (Crick 1994, p. 203)
Can we, from the vantage point of psychomatter, hope to piece together some of these puzzles? I think we can, with a helping nudge from the cognitive iceberg . (Again, this model is no more than a schematic sketch, highly simplified for purposes of illustration.) Let me, before I present it, recall two ideas that come forth as paramount. They are:
The guess, in short, is that awareness stems from supralled paral . On this ground, the conscious brain needs swaths and throngs of these specific paral-triggering micro-biological structures that are the paralgens . Herein would lie its utmost secret. By the same token, proto-experiential properties (Chalmers, 1997) are prompted by isolated (i.e. "unsupralled") paral phases; whereas full-blown experience, or consciousness proper, requires a huge amount of simultaneous parallings, seamlessly linked together by their overall supral binding.
The origin and tremendous diversity of qualia is explained by this presumed mapping between the objective structural properties of the suprels and their subjective information contents. Supralness would thus address Seager's combinatorial problem (Seager, 1995).
Now, these notions of suprel and paralgen are the cornerstones of the cognitive iceberg model of sensory awareness (Ransford 1995). (Alternative models - of which I'll say nothing here - will cater for other cognitive skills, such as spoken language use, 'pure' thinking and willed motor control.)
The cognitive iceberg, unsurprisingly enough, is made of two parts, namely: the "underwater" (or rather, as we shall see: the "underaware") part, and the "tip". (Again, what follows is a very sketchy account that cannot do justice to the skein of issues at stake.) Each corresponds to a particular stage of neural 'calculations', typified by their respective input and output:
A- In the "underaware" part: input: sensory stimuli ; output: suprels
B- In the "tip": input: suprels ; output: qualia, conscious recalls
In the underaware part, afferent sensory stimuli are encoded in the shape of suprels . (For instance, visual suprel s arise in the relevant cortical areas, like V4 for the 'color' sub-modality.) Here, for want of paralgens, they remain unconscious: this former stage belongs to the preconscious brain processing. Once made, the suprels are sent to the "tip", through specific neural pathways embedded in the brain's hard-wired architecture that project to it.
Here the inflows of successive suprels gush through the paralgens , which readily turn them into qualia. This latter stage is therefore that of the felt, or conscious, brain processing. The tip, in short, is teeming with paralgens. They collectively enparal the flows of suprels pouring in from the underaware part, whereupon these suprels enter the mind. (They typically encode present sensory stimuli or past memories.)
In summary, the proposal is that our vivid, "technicolor" mental images are arrived at by means of the following two-stage process:
This, by the way, settles the aforementioned parallel/serial problem. Now, what happens next? The next stage is the reverse of what occurs in the tip, where the 'psi' was kindled or awakened. No sooner do the suprels spurt out of the paralgens, their 'psi' becomes latent anew. They accordingly turn nonconscious all over again, and the matching qualia all but vanish. This is straightforward enough. However, inasmuch as these suprels have not been shattered along the way, they end up stashed-in-waiting somewhere in the brain (in a nonlocal, distributed way - we deal with supral entities). Their information load lives on, unheeded.
In short, the qualia are (unconsciously) memorized . Yet they are recalled whenever, for some reason, they are sent back on to paralgens, to be enparalled afresh. (The weight of empirical evidence points to an involvement of the hippocampus in the neurophysiological underpinnings of the recall.) We thus reap a potential explanation of the declarative, a.k.a. explicit, memory (which is that of our conscious recalls). In a nutshell: Our mental memory is supral in essence. (This insight is a far cry from the commonly accepted Hebb or Hebb-Hopfield model of memory - which arguably concerns learning rather than declarative memory. I'll come back to this important question later on.)
This brief outline of how sensory awareness could be achieved in the brain is, at best, a mere scratching of the surface. (What goes on in the living brain is breathtakingly more intricate and complicated!) I nevertheless believe that, for all its yawning shortcomings, this analysis throws some fresh and fruitful light on the conundrums already hinted at, to wit:
Furthermore, the 'causal paradox' surrounding the interactions between consciousness and brain seems all but wiped out. This 'paradox' sets in when considering the first-person versus the third-person accounts (Velmans, 1997). Briefly stated: subjective mental causation is necessary, in the former case, to explain behaviour (e.g. I go to the grocer's shop because I am hungry); whereas it can be blithely ignored in the latter case (e.g. Bob goes to the grocer's because of all the purely biochemical processes that crop up in his central nervous system).
The panpsychic solution to this paradox is obvious: the (third-person) biochemical processes enshroud within themselves the (first-person) psychic causation that goes with the unacknowledged production of supralled paral....
I conclude this Section on two points. The first one has to do with the paral threshold. We recall that there should be a threshold below which awareness is just too dim to be worth the name. So how does the brain manage to beget enough supralled paral? There is a strong empirical suggestion that it does so putting swarms of paralgens to work together through synchronous neuron firing. This phenomenon, whose detailed underpinnings are still far from clear, has been widely reported in the literature. For example (Flohr 1992):
If focused arousal in a specific sensory or multisensory circuitry is induced in human or animal experiments it is accompanied by characterisitc event-related EEG changes ... Typically, the arousing signal gives rise to a so-called 40 Hz EEG ... [that is a shorthand for a] high frequency gamma range (35-85 Hz). These large-amplitude, highly synchronous bursts have been observed in different focused arousal paradigms, different species, and different sensory modalities, such as the olfactory, visual, and auditory systems.
The second issue I'd like to (quickly) bring up is that of declarative memory (I shall yet come back to it later). Are we beginning to uncover the roots of memory, as it is oft trumpeted? Really, the truth of the matter is that this phenomenon is still poorly (if at all) understood. However, we know (and learnt from the pioneering works of Karl Lashley, back in the 1940's) that memories are distributed throughout the brain. They somehow reside everywhere and nowhere in the brain (Rose 1994).
This really is just what one must expect if it is supral in essence! (A similar remark applies to the acknowledged associativity of our recollections.)
My goal here is to figure out whether it is possible to say something definite and tangible about paralgens, with a view to come nearer to an experimental assessment of the panpsychic approach. The question is twofold. It breaks down into: Where in the brain are the paralgens? and: What is their nature, what are they like? The hunt for putative paralgens is doubtlessly a tall order. Nevertheless, neuroscience gives off many a pithy clue; and I have much to feed on and get started with. Besides, I know from the outset that:
Actually, I only need to pinpoint some paralgens, not all of them. The first order of my business is thus to narrow the search down to a few auspicious loci in the brain. If, within the panspychic framework, it clearly makes sense to look for the detailed neural correlates of consciousness, a few caveats are however in order, since (Greenfield 1995, p.152):
... consciousness must be generated somewhere in the brain, but at the same time there seems to be no obvious single area, no Cartesian theater. Undoubtedly we cannot treat all areas of the brain the same.
Accordingly we can press ahead and garner promising leads (Ransford 1995):
As William James once observed, attention depends on consciousness. By the same token, consciousness involves very short term memory (this type of memory, which surrounds or 'frames' our ever-fleeting perceptual moments, is also called the working memory) . And then ... what we are conscious of are the results or upshots of neural computations held in the cortex. So [we] have three pointers (attention, working memory and the processing upshots) to get on and elaborate from!
Thus,
... the weight of evidence consistently points to the cerebral cortex as the neural substrate of consciousness. ... Most interestingly, the frontal lobe is ... "involved in circuits which construct an internal representation of the visual information about the place of an object, and then read out that information to control a motor response at an appropriate later time" (Shepherd 1994).
This 'reading-out-and-delayed-motor-control' bears the hallmarks of conscious decision-making. This unambiguously brands this region as a prime location for the higher mental functions. In fact, modern research indicates that the operations of working memory are carried out in the prefrontal part of the cortical frontal lobe. ... we can be fairly confident that the prefrontal (and parietal) associative areas loom large in the brain production of awareness: these are places where paralgens should eagerly be sought after.
(The so-called 'associative areas' in the cortex are not directly related to a specific sensory or motor function. They are polysensory and multimodal, and deal with the outcomes of the sensory information processing. On the whole, the association cortex is where the brain's most abstract and integrated analysis of the sensory environment takes place (Chuchland 1993). This keenly smacks of the tip of the cognitive iceberg!)
Finally,
... most brain neurons fit into two classes: principal neurons and interneurons. It turns out that the cortical information is first processed by the interneurons, which project to the principal neurons - which then "decide" what kind of message they will send out to other regions.
In short, it means that the processing upshots (and the possible responses thereof, by way of neural - and mental? - "decisions" or initiatives) are the business of principal neurons, not of interneurons. This is yet another telling and clearcut lead in my search for paralgens.
The principal neurons of the neocortex are the pyramidal cells, which are excitatory (I expect most paralgens to be on fast excitatory rather than of inhibitory pathways). It appears (Shepherd 1994) that they are involved in the highest levels of processing sensory and motor systems, in memory mechanisms and in higher cognitive (i.e. mental) functions - such as intentional and willed attention.
Moreover, and given that the cortex reveals six distinct layers (Crick 1994, p. 251):
Consciousness is associated with certain neural activities. A plausible model could start with the idea that this activity is largely in the lower cortical layer (layers 5 and 6). This activity expresses the local (transient) results of "computations" taking place mainly in other cortical layers.
Not all cortical neurons in the lower cortical layers can express consciousness. The most likely types are some of the large "bursty" pyramidal cells in layer 5, such as those that project right out of the cortical system.
Venturing still farther afield, down to subcellular level (Ransford 1995):
It is fitting ... that the organization of the pyramidal cells has been found to favor a great deal of computational complexity in their dendrites ( esp . the distal ones), and that the dendritic spines are semi-independent metabolic subunits. (Shepherd 1994)
Chances are that many paralgens are tucked inside these distal dendrites; whose 'computational complexity' would then account for much of our higher mental capabilities. The very fact that dendritic spines play a prominent role in the after-birth brain development (and are affected in certain kinds of diseases that produce mental retardation) further substantiates this.
To cut a long story short, here is where I propose that we eventually land, at the molecular level:
[Post-synaptic] receptors (and what goes with them: effectors and channels) make a very compelling target for speculation about paralgenic microsites [i.e. paralgens]. ... Of particular interest is the so-called NMDA receptor found on the dendritic synapses of pyramidal cells. It is excitatory, and has several critical properties suggesting that it may be involved in a wide range of neurophysical and pathological processes ... In addition, the NMDA channel is highly nonlinear, is a prime candidate to explain the synchronous oscillatory behavior in the cortex ... The conclusion I draw is that at least some NMDA channels in the dendritic spine synapses of the large bursty pyramidal cells of the cortical fifth layer do function as paralgens .
The above chimes in with other converging clues that make me keep placing my bets, today, on the very same postsynaptic NMDA receptors found on the dendritic synapses of large glutamatergic pyramidal cells in the fifth layer of the neocortex. (NMDA stands for N-methyl-D-aspartate. It is customary, by the way, to name a receptor/channel compound after the substance that activates it.)
What are they, what makes these receptors likely candidates (according to me) to play host to some paralgens? Most of the many compelling reasons for this choice cannot be properly grasped unless we get at least a rough idea of what a paralgen should be like. To that end, as I again wrote - admittedly, a tad jejunely - in (Ransford 1995):
We can think of the paralgen as a sort of biological device - e.g. an allosteric protein molecule? - that would be akin to a channel endowed with a snare; into which, say, ions and molecules are sent by the relevant assemblies of neurons ... whence they undergo a paral phase before being released and 'unparalled' again...
The rationale here is that paralgens, in order to enparal the flows of incoming suprels, must somehow stand in the way of these flows. As for the suprels they can, for all practical purposes, be thought of as (invisible) threads that bind together clusters of ions, molecules and the like, as they roam about in the brain. So, a fitting and hence likely locus for paralgens is near, across or inside certain synaptic pores and channels. They make perfect spots to latch on to - and enparal - the successive ions and perhaps also molecules, as they flood through.
Talking about ions, of particular interest are the calcium ones (Ca ++ ). Calcium is one of the key substances driving nerve signalling. (The NMDA receptor-linked channel, it turns out, is a calcium channel; generally speaking, it is permeable to Na + , K + and Ca 2+ ions.) It is an ubiquitous intracellular second messenger, is released as a wave (Cooper et al. 1991) and plays a role in the 40 Hz oscillations. Moreover (Levitan & Kaczmarek 1997, p.124):
Calcium channels are of particular interest because calcium is far more than simply a charge carrier across the plasma membrane. ... intracellular calcium ion regulates the gating of several types of ion channel, and can even feed back and participate in the inactivation of its own channels. In addition, an essential characteristic of neuronal signaling, the release of chemical neurotransmitters at synapses, is controlled directly by intracellular calcium. In this sense calcium can be thought of as the transducer of an electrical signal, depolarization, into chemical signals inside the cell. All of these features set calcium apart.
On the face of it, I deeply suspect that at least a fair share of these ions, in the relevant pathways and brain areas, are part and parcel of the suspected information-laden suprels. (I shall label them, for short, the "sub-suprel" ions.) If so, these bits of suprels, on simultaneously whisking through the relevant calcium channels, would be collectively enparalled - thereby becoming aware, or consciously felt. We already know this story.
Another point is that a "paralgenic" channel ought to exhibit a high degree of selectivity. It should emphatically let in the "sub-suprel" ions only, as they reach either from the underaware part or from the memory hoard. (Were it not so, the psychic information, sensory and otherwise, would be unredeemably blurred, swamped in a wasteland of meaningless noises.)
Indeed, the NMDA receptor channel, as both ligand-gated and voltage-dependent, seems expressly designed to display such a sharp selectivity (Levitan & Kaczmarek 1997, p. 258):
... an interesting property of the NMDA receptor channels [is] that they are blocked by extracellular magnesium ions [Mg ++ ] in a voltage-dependent manner. ... When a neuron is near its resting potential, magnesium ions bind to the outside of the [NMDA receptor channel] and effectively prevent the movement of other ions through the pore. ... when the cell is depolarized in the presence of glutamate, calcium (as well as sodium) flows into the cell through the NMDA receptor channels. ... A moderate stimulus produces only a small depolarization, and no calcium entry ... . With more intense stimulation the depolarization becomes sufficient to relieve the magnesium block of the NMDA receptor channels, resulting in further depolarization and calcium entry.
This "more intense stimulation" might be a cue that the sub-suprel ions are pouring in from the underaware part, and that the paralgenic channel must swing open to let them flood through....
Various data strengthen my 'NMDA' claim, but I shall limit myself to point to a handful of particularly engaging clues (adapted form Ransford 1995):
As concerns mood-altering substances, glutamate is - by far - not the only neurotransmitter involved. Dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, to name but a very few, play an outstanding role (Cooper et al. 1991, Ryall 1989). (Is could be a clue that some paralgens are to be found along certain of the matching, e.g. dopaminergic, pathways.)
Yet it is worth noting that "data are being accumulated that suggest a role for NMDA receptors in anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, psychomotor stimulation, psychomimetic behavioral and subjective effects" (Witkin 1995). In a similar vein, the NMDA system has a well-researched role in mental retardation and in degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, where scientists have observed a "decreased population of the receptor for glutamic acid of the ... NMDA type" (Ryall 1989).
Finally, anæsthesiology appears to bring an interesting insight of its own (Flohr 1992, 1995, 1996). For instance, we read in (Flohr 1996) that "General anæsthetics have a common operative mechanism: they directly or indirectly affect the function of the NMDA system."
As regards the non-linearity issue, the reasoning goes roughly as follows. Paralgens yield an ongoing production of supralled paral in some (distributed) areas of the brain. Paral being, as I surmise, endo-causal, it is bent on wielding a kind of 'decision-making' power. The hallmark of 'decisions' being made is a high non-linearity. It goes with a 'willful' and 'deedful' mode of functioning, which rules out sheer randomness. This criterion seems to pinpoint just these cells where the NMDA channels are (Crick 1994, p. 235):
... some of the pyramidal cells in layer 5 [of the cortex] ... can fire in a special way. A number of neuroscientists have found that such neurons tend to be "bursty". (These neurons do not produce axonal spikes in a completely regular way, nor at random time intervals; instead, they tend to produce short bursts of several spikes at a time, with longer intervals having only a few or no spikes between the bursts.)
The notions of paralgen and suprel are putative but factual. They hold out the promise that, one day, we might put the M-P-S model of psychomatter to the test. But can we realistically move forward on the broader issue of falsification?
The conscious brain is so intricate and elusive that no one should expect any theoretical explanation to lend itself to hard and fast experimental checks. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that our scientific knowledge encompasses what was comparatively easier to arrive at. What is still left out is the hardest part ever! There is a kind of incremental law at work. To give an example of the growing difficulties that are met on our way to scientific discoveries, let me recall in a few words the saga of supralness (a.k.a. of quantum nonseparability, or entanglement).
It got under way in 1935, due to a seminal paper co-signed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen. Then, after a slight reformulation by David Bohm, a breakthrough takes place in 1964, with Bell's theorem. (With it, supralness lends itself to experimental appraisal. It can no longer dismissed as "just philosophy".) The last episode takes us to 1986 with the (nearly) conclusive experiments carried out by Alain Aspect and coworkers.
The whole saga spans a full 51 years! This illustrates the emblematic difficulties that theoreticians and experimentalists alike encountered. (In 1997, a new experiment involving microparticles flying a few miles apart has been made on supralness, by N. Gisin in Geneva.)
Now, when it comes to the conscious brain, the difficulty is all too obvious and all too wrenching. The trouble is, what we are after (viz. supralled paral) is a most wayward aspect of reality. Suprels and supralness, for instance, are outright invisible! The upshot is that no direct evidence will ever be within reach. One has only indirect probing to fall back on - whatever that means.
Talking about experimental tests, a few ideas readily spring to mind. They target either suprels and paralgens, or paral and supralness as such. Here are several possible ideas.
First and foremeost, the reality of paral could be fathomed through one or another of its outlandish properties, such as its 'relativity-blindness'. This feature, which bears on both special and general relativities, entails that paral does not contribute to the gravity field. The presumed "gravitylessness" of paral should be amenable to experimental assessment.
Another idea is to check if the NMDA receptor channels yield, as I claim, some of the brain's supralled paral. One can imagine this being done by means of watching the selective impact, on global awareness, of some high affinity molecule (or ligand) specifically geared to them. (Such an impact would begin to bear witness to the 'paralgenic' nature of these channels.) This is much in the spirit of monitoring the detailed effects of psychotropic drugs and anæsthetics.
Another tack would be to undertake an in-depth survey of the role of the NMDA system in the 40 Hz oscillations observed in attentional tasks (linked to short-term memory), for which there is as yet no known neural mechanism (Black 1994, Crick 1994, Levitan & Kaczmarek 1997, Shepherd 1994).
Can we tease out the mysteries behind these oscillations? My hunch is that this 40 Hz correlated firing is both the consequence and the cause of the overall supral binding that relates the untold paral sparks that are spawned by the brain. It is rooted in supralness, and at the same time bolsters it. Supralness is what keeps the neurons firing in synchrony - across several cortical zones and even between the two halves of the cortex (Crick 1994). If so, one should not find any straight neural mechanism that would explain it all.
Going back to the suprels, a number of promising leads can be weighed. One could take advantage of their absolute disregard for distance and geometry to check it and play tricks with it. (Suprels are topological, not geometrical, patterns.) Incidentally, the mapping between qualia and suprels is worth investigating. I propose to name suprology the study of this alleged correspondence between suprels and qualia.
We could tamper with the topological structure of suprels, as they arise from the brain, to see whether we can induce a kind of artificially engineered synesthesia. (Synesthesia is a rare condition where different senses mingle. Synesthetes will typically experience 'colored hearing', where a perceived sound is also a perceived color, and vice-versa.) We can also think of transfering suprels, of grafting them onto someone else's brain. (A cross-species grafting would be most interesting and revealing.)
There is no shortage of suchlike ideas, but they don't by themselves carry us very far: designing and implementing actual experiments is an entirely different story....
To conclude this Section, I want, for the last time round, to delve somewhat into the question of our declarative memory; which is that of our conscious recalls. Understanding the essence of memory will speak volumes about the true nature of the mind. (There are many sides to it, that I cannot mention. For the record, its main stages are: coding, storage, and retrieval. There is a short-term memory and a long-term one; the passage from the former to the latter entails a procedure known as of consolidation.)
A great deal of empirical data are available on memory. For example the hippocampus - a brain structure that belongs to the limbic system - appears to play a well-documented role: "Damage to the hippocampus, it emerges, blocks the transfer of information from short-term into long-term memory." (Chuchland 1993)
As of today, the prevailing theory on memory is that of Hebb (Hebb 1949). This author assumed that synapses on a neuron that are active whilst the neuron discharge will be strengthened, whereas inactive synapses will be weakened. Synapses that are active at the same time on the same neuron will tend to be reinforced and selected over others. In short, they will keep a trace of their past track record of joint pre- and post-synaptic firings.
The Hebbian phenomenon of long-lasting increase in synaptic strength has been observed in the excitatory afferents to hippocampal neurons (Black 1994), and elsewhere in the cortex - but by no means everywhere (including in places where we'd like to find it).
So, should we deem the memory issue thoroughly settled in view of Hebb's thesis, once for all? This is unfortunately far from sure, and the evidence at hand is to say the least not exceedingly supportive (Levitan & Kaczmarek 1997, pp.499 & 505):
Donald Hebb suggested that synaptic strength might be enhanced by concurrent activity in the pre- and postsynaptic neurons. He postulated further that this might provide a mechanism for associative learning. .... There is widespread agreement that the onset of LTP ... is triggered by events occurring in the postsynaptic neuron. What about strength and expression? Is there a long-lasting change in the release of the neurotransmitter glutamate from the presynaptic cell, or a change in the responsiveness of the postsynaptic target, or perhaps both? In spite of extensive work, this issue remains unresolved and contentious ....
A first hint that Hebb's rule does not add up to fact is that the hippocampal LTP is no memory trace indeed (Levitan & Kaczmarek 1997, p. 481):
It is believed that the long-term memory traces themselves are not stored [in the hippocampus], but rather that the hippocampus participates in memory acquisition, and in establishing an enduring and retrievable memory elsewhere.
Besides, Hebb's learning rule, if anything, deals with... learning. It is not geared, to put it bluntly, to be relevant for memory proper. The long term strengthening or weakening of the synaptic activity that would result from past track record is assuredly not a one-off affair - as can be our recollections. (At times we remember a single event decades afterwards!)
What is more, the Hebbian theory goes with the hidden assumption that mental states are identical with purely neurological brain states. It ties-in with a computational approach to mental realities. And this materialist approach, further enriched by Hopfield and others, requires a means to back-propagate the errors (in order for the learning to be effective). This requisite is fine with artificial networks, but it doesn't sit well with living brains (Chuchland 1993, p.164-5):
With artificial networks, we can build in appropriate systems for calculating output errors and for modifying the weights accordingly. ... But what pathways, in a real brain, is the output propagated back to the relevant set of synaptic connections, so their weights can be modified and learning can take place? ... we do not yet understand how [target cells] might be doing this. Nor are we really sure that they do anything remotely like this. ... neuroscientific data may show that an appealing theory of learning ... (back propagation of errors) cannot possibly be right.
So, where are we now? (Some hope for brain back-propagation have lately been pinned on NO molecules, but no proof thereof is forthcoming.) It looks like we are very nearly back to where we started. The arresting logic of Hebb's rule doesn't seem to hold water in the real world of real nervous systems. Hippocampal LTP, for one thing, "is not clearly associated with any known behavioral modification" (Levitan & Kaczmarek 1997). And, generally speaking (Greenfield 1995, p.47):
... LTP can occur rather promiscuously in a variety of totally different situations. For example, LTP can take place before a learning task, thereby facilitating it, rather than being the learning event itself. ... The physiologist Rodolfo Llinás has further demonstrated that the physical events of LTP do not match up exactly with the phenomenological process of memory, since they can be generated under conditions totally different from those associated with memory.
On the whole, we are forced to the conclusion that "LTP is not the essence of memory but a possible requirement for it" (Greenfield 1995). Isn't this more or less a flat refutation of the Hebbian theory - and of the connectionist approach that goes with it?
Reverting to my proposed panpsychic theory of memory, let me end up this Section by airing my lingering suspicion - which could perhaps be mathematically validated - that the nonphysical data storage capacity inherent in supralness could be hugely superior to the matter-rooted one that goes with the Hebb-Hopfield scheme. (That too could set the stage for some experimental tests.) As I mused in (Ransford 1995),
... there is every reason to suspect that a vast (and virtually unlimited) number of suprels can be stored in the brain. Supralness would offer much more room and flexibility than plain neural storage .
Indeed, the staggering and immeasurable capacity of our visual memory bears this out. Moreover, as Crick [Crick 1994] points out, "There are not enough neurons in the brain to code the almost infinite number of conceivable objects. The same is true of language. Each language has a large but limited number of words, but the number of possible well-formed senstences is almost infinite." Still, our brain manages to cope with objects and sentences almost flawlessly!
Supralness comes in handy, to free our mental selves from these materials limits. Thanks to supralled paral, our minds ... can go way beyond the restrictive shackles of sheer biochemistry.
The ultimate, nearly clinching corroboration of panpsychism (if it not hopelessly wide of the mark) would of course come from evolving the technical know-how of artificial consciousness along its lines. The proof, as the saying goes, is in the pudding....
What is at stake, with panpsychism, is no less than the eventual feasilibity of exo-biological awareness . Its prospect lurks at the very heart of the psychomatter idea, since within its framework, the seeds of awareness are sown in all things ( psycho )material. Therefore awareness might glow from virtually all things material; not just from the biological brains. Of course one should expect, before a man-made artificial mind can spring to existence at all, many hurdles and pitfalls to arise, and need to be patched up or smoothed out.
Such a technological feat would - assuming it is a real possibility - rest heavily on the twin abilities to carry out artificial paralgens and to cope with the pivotal issue of supral binding and patterning. Learning to handle and harness supralness is a critical aspect. Remember: supralness is the hidden gateway to the inner contents of subjective experience!
A sound starting point is to fathom what nature has so successfully achieved, to study it at close quarters with a view to mimick it. We can avail ourselves of the wealth of empirical data that can be plucked from the animal kingdom's central nervous systems. We should manage to wring out of them deep and fruitful insights about both natural paralgens and the suprel-qualia relationship.
As seen from the window of psychomatter, exo-biological awareness might be arrived at by plodding through the following broad-brush 7-step program:
This "modular brain" idea fits in with current findings (Black 1994, pp. 101 & 134):
Extensive work in neurology, psychology, and neuroscience suggests that brain structure and function are organized into discrete modules. ... Observations based on many different clinical disorders and experimental paradigms support the contention that behavior and underlying brain function are organized in a modular fashion.
As regards the (long-term) memory module, let me quickly point out that physics teaches that supralness is lessened by the onset of paral phases (to the point of being all but wiped out if a series of parallings corresponding to a complete set of communting observables is undertaken...). Against this untoward backdrop looms the necessity of memory-shielding processes - known as consolidation. Without it, newly hatched suprels would be very short-lived, killed off in less than a jiffy by the detrimental paral activity that goes with awareness.
As for the "motor module", we may find guidance and draw inspiration from the brain's "cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop". It is a massive reverberatory circuit, modulating all motor inputs. A growing body of evidence suggests that portions of this circuit may provide the essential substrate for conscious volition (Newman 1997).
Leaving the wry question of technological hubris aside, the intellectual and human challenge of exo-biological awareness is enormous. Exo-biological awareness is no plaything. It has the potential to spawn an exciting new world of boundless opportunities, a brave new world that would change our world view and lives beyond recognition. This outlook is truly staggering and enthralling!
References
Black, I.B. (1994), Information in the Brain (Cambridge MA: MIT Press)
Burgos, M.E. (1993), 'Conservation Laws versus the Orthodox Version of Quantum Mechanics', April 1993, SLAC-PUB-6091 (Was to be submitted to Physical Review A)
Chalmers, D.J. (1995), 'Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness', J. of Consciousness Studies , 2 (3), 200-19.
Chalmers, D.J. (1996), The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press)
Chalmers, D.J. (1997), 'Moving forward on the Problem of Consciousness', J. of Consciousness Stu. , 4 (1), 3-46.
Churchland, P.M. (1993), Matter and Consciousness (revised edit.) (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. press)
Cooper, J.R., Bloom, F.E. & Roth, R.H. (1991), The Biochemical Basis of Neuropharamcology (6th edit.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Crick, F. (1994), The Astonishing Hypothesis (London: Simon & Schuster)
Damasio, A. (1994), Descartes' Error (London: Picador)
Damasio, A. (1997), 'A Clear Consciousness', Time Magazine Special Issue , Winter 1997/98
Denett, D. (1991), Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown)
Flohr, H. (1992), 'Qualia and Brain Processes', in Beckman et al. (eds.), Emergence of Reduction? (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter)
Flohr, H. (1995), 'Sensations and Brain Processes', Behavioural Brain Research , 71 , 157-161. (1996), 'An Information Processing Theory of Anaesthesia', Consciousness Research Abstracts, "Tuscon II" , 70.
Gödel, K. (1981), Obras Completas (Reprints) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial)
Greenfield, S. (1995), Journey to the Centers of the Mind (New York: Freeman and Co.)
Hameroff, S.R. & Penrose, R. (1996), 'Conscious Events as Orchestrated Space-Time Selections', J. of Consciousness Studies , 3 (1), 36-53.
Hebb, D.O. (1949), The 0rganization of Behavior (New York: Wiley)
Insinna, E.M. (1992), 'Synchronicity and Coherent Excitations in Microtubules', in Nanobiology , 1 , 191-208.
Kuhn, T.S. (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd edit.) (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press)
Levitan, I.B. & Kaczmarek, L.K. (1997), The Neuron. Cell and Molecular Biology. (2nd edit.) (New York: Oxford University Press)
Nagel, T. (1986), The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Newman, J. (1997), 'Putting the Puzzle Together', Part I & Part II, J. of Consciousness Studies , 4 (1), 47-66 & 4 (2), 100-21.
Ransford, E. (1995), 'Peeking at the Conscious Brain: New Clues, New Challenges', J. of the Western Chapter of the Alternat. Natural Philos. Assoc. (ANPA) , 5 (2), 6-26.
Ransford, E. (1996), 'Elementary Particle or 'Wavicle'? Seeing through the Quantum Fog', Philosophy, Proc. of ANPA 17 , 217-42.
Ransford, E. (1997), 'From Naught to Aught: a Conceptual Inquiry', Mereologies, Proc. of ANPA 18 , 112-33.
Ransford, E. (1998), 'Measurements and Quantum Jumps: Bowing Down to Quantumhood' (Preprint. Publication forthcoming.)
Rose, S. (1994), The Making of Memory (reprint) (Toronto: Bantam Books)
Rosenberg, G.H. (1996), 'Rethinking Nature: a Hard Problem within the Hard Problem', J. of Consciousness Studies , 3 (1), 76-88.
Ryall, R.W. (1989), Mechanisms of Drug Action on the Nervous System. (2nd edit.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Sacks, O. (1986), The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. (Reprint) (London: Picador)
Scully, M.O. & Zubairy, M.S. (1997), Quantum Optics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Seager, W. (1996), 'Consciousness, Information and Panpsychism', J.of Consciousness Studies , 2 (3), 272-88.
Shepherd, G.M. (1994), Neurobiology (3rd edit.) (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Smullyan, R. (1987), Forever Undecided (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Sudbery, A. (1989), Quantum Mechanics and the Particles of Nature. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Thompson, R.F. (1993) The Brain. A Neuroscience Primer (2nd edit.) (New York: Freeman and Co.)
Velmans, M. (1990), 'Consciousness, Brain, and the Physical World', Philosophical Psychology 3 (1), 77-99.
Velmans, M. (1996), 'What and Where are Conscious Experiences', in M. Velmans (ed.), The Science of Consciousness (London: Routledge)
Velmans, M. (1997), 'Perception, Attention, and Consciousness', preprint .
Witkin, J.M. (1995), 'Role of NMDA Receptors in Behavior and Behavioral Effects of Drugs', in T.W. Stone (ed.), CNS Neurotransmitters and Neuromodulators: Glutamate , chapter 19 (p.323) (Boston: CRC Press)
Zeki, S. (1983), A Vision of the Brain (Oxford: Blackwell)