Back to a Single Approach

6/23/19

As has happened frequently in these musings, there has been a considerable gap of time since my last musing. In that interim, my thinking about my objectives have changed. As my title suggests, one tine of the bifurcation fork has been dropped. I no longer plan to develop another essay as I promised. But I do plan to continue these musings, as you can see.

As I explained earlier in these musings, I have been sorely disappointed in the slow progress of science in the project of explaining conscious experience. Consequently, I have come up with my own explanation. As I have said, my objective was to try to contribute some of my ideas to the community of scientists who are working on the problem thinking that it might help. That has changed over the past three months for several reasons.

The main reason became clear to me when I tried to figure out who the targeted audience for my new essay should be. And, in order to make a contribution to the scientific effort, the audience should be the scientists working in the areas of cognition, brain science, psychology, etc. With my experience with Max Tegmark's essay contest, and from other indicators from my reading and from listening to YouTube conversations, I have concluded that it would be futile to attempt to be taken seriously by them.

That realization has caused me some disappointment, but that has been more than offset by the realization that what I had hoped would happen, that science would begin making progress toward understanding consciousness, is actually taking place. They are little by little beginning to accept the very proposals that I have been trying to offer.

One example from mathematics really got my attention within the past couple weeks. I have been suggesting that consciousness resides in higher dimensions, and to avoid infinite regress, I have concluded that the aspects of consciousness that are "smeared" up and down Rosenberg's hierarchy of Natural Individuals, must diminish and finally vanish as you ascend to the highest level. I also knew that mathematicians have learned a lot about the mathematical properties of higher-dimensional space, even though they couldn't even be visualized, much less accessed if they existed. Two weeks ago, I learned a fact about higher dimensions that fits right in with my theory of diminution of consciousness as you increase dimensionality.

What I learned was that the volume of a unit hypersphere increases, as you might expect, as the dimensions go up from zero to five dimensions. But then, surprisingly, the volume then begins to diminish beyond six dimensions and tends to zero in the limit. This fact can even be made sensible by a couple of different demonstrations which I won't go into here. The point is that it is not unreasonable to suppose that consciousness also "goes to zero" as the dimensionality increases.

But the main influence on my change in attitude toward my publication project was what I have been learning by reading Susan Blackmore's fascinating book, Conversations on Consciousness. I have not yet finished reading the book, but I have already come to realize that the people who are actually working on the problem of consciousness are heading in the right direction and I have confidence that they will eventually pick up on my suggestions without my help.

I suppose it is still possible that I might have something to offer and that I should not give up. So, I just might make some effort. As a result of reading Susan Blackmore's conversations with Stuart Hameroff and with Stephen LaBerge, I have drafted letters to each of them offering my suggestions. At the time of this writing I have not sent the letters and they are still in draft form. I am not sure if I will ever send them, or if I do, what the final letters will say, but in the interest of you who are reading this musing, I am going to copy both drafts here so that you can know what I am talking about. Here they are:

Seattle, WA

6/2/19

Stuart Hameroff,

I am a great fan of yours. I just finished reading your conversation with Susan Blackmore in her book, Conversations on Consciousness, and I feel compelled to write this letter.

I think you and Roger Penrose are on the right track, but I would like to offer some suggestions that might help.

In her book, you said to Sue, "This [fundamental proto-consciousness] is the view that Dave Chalmers took in his book, which followed the talk I mentioned. He said that consciousness must involve something fundamental, something that's intrinsic to the universe, and I agree with that."

I agree with that too, but I think it is a parochial view. It's like saying a carrier EM wave is fundamental to the operation of a radio. Well, yes, it is. But only in the parochial sense of our modern environment of radio stations, electronic circuits, and our 4D universe expressing Maxwell's equations.

In a bigger context, the EM carrier is contrived to be used by invented and deliberately fabricated systems. In a similar way, in a much larger and expanded paradigm, consciousness could be an artifact of a contrived system which is used to transmit and receive information between living organisms and whomever, or whatever, contrived them.

You also said to Sue, "The boundary between the quantum world and the everyday world—quantum state reduction, or the so-called collapse of the wave function—is a big question in physics and seems to have something to do with consciousness."

I agree completely. Here's my suggestion of how it might be: Our 4D universe seems to be causally closed until you get down to the Planck scale. There, indeterminacy "emerges". The outcomes of quantum interactions seem to be probabilistic, just as the modulation of our EM carrier waves would seem to be probabilistic or even random to an observer who was oblivious to how a radio works. In an expanded paradigm, there could be a place for consciousness in hyperspace-time and the information traffic between structures in higher-D could be carried in the patterns of quantum outcomes. You have provided explanations for how those patterns could be encoded on output and decoded on input for information exchanged between brain and mind.

You also said, "I became interested in the mystical Kabbalah which describes a world of materialistic strife and chaos, and another world of wisdom and enlightenment. According to the Kabbalah, consciousness 'dances on the edge' between the two worlds. I think this is exactly what is happening, consciousness 'dances on the edge between the quantum world and the classical world'. And the more we are influenced and in touch with the quantum subconscious world of enlightenment, the happier we can be."

It seems that it would make more sense if this "world of wisdom and enlightenment" were more robust, don't you think? Instead of a flurry of pico-scope particles and their interactions, how about a "real" world of big structures and sentient beings?

We needn't jump into the land of woo-woo at this point. We just need to open our minds to some more robust, and I think promising, ideas.

I have begun developing my own theory along these lines and I would like to hear your opinions about it. I currently call it TDB/SG theory. The name is intended to capture what I consider to be the essential elements of reality: I think reality is the result of a Transcendent Designer/Builder. Here 'transcendent' has its standard definition of being inaccessible and beyond the scope of ordinary experience. 'Designer' has its ordinary meaning, as does 'Builder'. They are both included to emphasize that it is one thing to design something, e.g. Leonardo designed a helicopter, but it is something else again to build the thing so that it actually works. Our universe seems to work.

So those three elements could explain the existence of our universe. But, as some of us acknowledge, there is "something more" going on. That is the subjective experience. As I see it, the most interesting feature of subjective experience is its extremely narrow scope. The scope is narrow not only in space and time, but also in scale.

Our conscious experience happens in just a single point in space, i.e. in a tiny spot on this rather inauspicious planet somewhere in the vastness of intergalactic space.

Similarly, our consciousness occurs at this singular point in time we call "now", with a vast expanse of past time, which is only indirectly accessible to us, and a similarly vast expanse of future time, also almost completely inaccessible.

And finally, our conscious experience is situated near the center of a huge range of scales running from the Planck scale to at least the outer reaches of the observable universe. Our subjective experience is confined to roughly the scale of a meter.

So, in my TDB/SG theory, I include Stylus Guy (SG) (credit for this goes to my brother John), which is like the stylus on a phonograph, (or like the projector for of a movie) which singles out the momentary conscious experience evoked by local features (differences) of the physical world as the locus of conscious experience "passes by" in both the spatial and temporal dimensions.

The question of how many SGs there are, is an interesting one. Erwin Schrödinger, Kurt Gödel, most Buddhists, and I would say there is exactly one. René Descartes would say that there are 7 billion, one for each living human. Francis Crick, and other pan-psychists would say quadrillions, or more, to count each nematode, bacterium, and maybe even inorganic particles.

Now, to merge my theory with yours, Roger's, and even Descartes', here's how they fit together. The mind resides outside the skull and is made of some non-physical stuff. I say it is still physical, but it is higher-dimensional so it behaves very differently. The mind/body problem is solved, first by providing a place for the mind, and then by explaining how communication between mind and body can take place, and then how each can influence the other without violating the laws of physics.

The key is to realize that our 4D space-time, the one described by Einstein and which confines us all, is a 4D manifold embedded in higher-dimensional space-time. Since it is a manifold, mathematics tells us that we are strictly confined to this manifold, right along with all of our instruments, all of our observations, and all of the forces we are able to detect. Edwin Abbott in Flatland has eloquently described the psychological problem this makes for all of us.

So, for example, there could be new, unknown, forces which act in a direction normal to our manifold which could be used just like the electric and magnetic forces are used to generate EM waves that provide a communication link between JPL and a Mars rover. Since the new, unknown force, acts normal to our manifold, it can't interact with any of our 4D structures so it can't be detected by our instruments. But just as in the case of the coupling of the electric and magnetic forces in order to propagate waves, the unknown force could be similarly coupled to one of our known forces in order to modulate the signal. Gravity comes to mind as that candidate force.

With a communication link explained between mind and brain, the next question is, Where is the transponder in the brain? Descartes guessed that it was the pineal gland, but a more modern guess would be the claustrum. Francis Crick has pointed out that the claustrum gathers all the information that seems to be present in conscious activity even though it is not in the functional train of neurons which are involved in brain activity correlated with the conscious experience. It seems to neuro-scientists that it serves no purpose, but to me it is exactly what you would expect for a transponder. It also provides an opportunity to experiment by first understanding the encoding scheme of brain activity and then theorizing about how modulated EM-like waves could be generated.

That is where I think micro-tubules could come into play. If we think of microtubules as analogous to conductors in an electronic circuit, connecting active elements, or even as active elements themselves, and then think about what makes an antenna circuit special in a transponder, there may be similar clues in the microtubules in the claustrum.

This is just a brief sketch which I won't belabor further, but I think a comprehensive explanation for consciousness could be built around it.

The problem with my theory is that it requires the acceptance of two vigorously rejected ideas. It requires the acceptance of not only Cartesian Dualism, but of Interactionist Cartesian Dualism. In addition, it requires the acceptance of the real existence of large, extra spatial and temporal dimensions.

I am convinced that the reason these ideas have been so systematically rejected, is that the knock-offs were articulated long before science and mathematics had been developed sufficiently to answer them. The rejection was set in stone, and nobody has re-examined the questions in light of new discoveries.

In modern times, we have discovered that our universe seems to conform to some non-Euclidean geometry. We have learned that our space-time continuum is curved. We have learned about the mathematical properties of embedded manifolds which clearly explain why we may not be able to see or access higher spatial, or temporal dimensions. The brute force, and awkward—and unnecessary—remedy given to us by Oskar Klein, that the higher dimensions must be "curled up", is, in my opinion, specious and has deceived even Roger Penrose, to my great dismay.

This knowledge was simply unavailable to Plato, Descartes, or even Newton, and even more to the philosophers who built such a bulwark against Dualism. It's time we modernized our philosophy and built our theories on the much-improved knowledge that we have.

This letter is getting too long, so instead of continuing, I would like you to Please let me know what you think and ask me any questions you might have. If you are interested in a little more detail, you can read a short essay in which I tried to squeeze the essence of my ideas down into 8 pages. This essay was written as an FQXi contest entry to answer a question posed by Max Tegmark. His question was "How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intentions?". If this is not enough and you want to know more about me and my ideas, please visit my website. If you do, be sure to follow the Ideas link.

With greatest respect and admiration,

Paul R. Martin

_________________________

Seattle, WA

6/7/19

Stephen LaBerge,

In my opinion, you have done great work in shedding new light on the question of consciousness. It is evident that in spite of much significant work on the question in the past few decades, there is still no comprehensive theory of consciousness that explains how it works. I think that we are at a point in history at which we have developed a sufficient understanding of mathematics, physics, contemplative religion, and psychology that we may synthesize what we know and put together a common-sense, plausible, and comprehensive theory of consciousness.

With your open mind and with what you have accomplished so far along these lines, you seem to be in a good position to put this theory together. Here's the basic plan:

In a video, you said something like, "What we can't talk about is "the given"--what we can't doubt." You also said, "We can talk about what can't be talked about by using metaphor." Let's use that tool.

Plato first introduced the metaphor of consciousness being like the music of the lyre. The problem is that no matter how you examine the lyre, you can't find the music. And, the experience of music does not occur in the lyre but in the mind of the listener some distance away. Plato had the disadvantage of not knowing what we know about compression waves, cochlear hairs, etc.

Bringing the metaphor more up to date, you could compare consciousness to the music coming from a radio. Knowing what he knew then, Plato would be completely mystified by experiencing music from a radio. In order to explain to him how it works, he would have to understand principles that we have known for less than 200 years. Applying the metaphor to current brain research, it would be like trying to understand how a radio produces music strictly from an examination of the radio itself. If the researchers didn't know about, or ignored, the part played by the radio station transmitter, some distance away, and the EM radiation between them, they would likewise be unable to explain the music.

But to bring the metaphor current, let's compare consciousness to the experience of a Mars rover. In this metaphor, the JPL scientists are analogous to the mind and the computer in the rover is analogous to the brain. The rover itself is analogous to a human body.

This analogy captures the notion that the mind is somehow outside the brain, just as JPL is in a different world from the rover. The other analogs are straightforward: the human body is analogous to the wheels, arms, etc. on the rover, the cerebellum is analogous to the hard-coded programs in the rover that can control routine functions of the rover without any interaction with JPL, visual perception in the human is analogous to the capture and transmission of images from the rover's cameras to JPL displays, and so on.

Even though this analogy would have seemed preposterous and implausible to, say, Isaac Newton knowing only what he knew while he was alive, it is not preposterous to us because we are past the point in human history where such rovers have actually been deployed. So too, the analogy with the mind/brain might seem preposterous and implausible to us, but we have the advantage of knowing that such a system is in fact real.

What this analogy tells us is that the experience of consciousness does not occur in the brain, but instead in a completely different world. And that is where most consciousness researchers would abandon the analogy. So, let's modernize it further by applying some fairly recent mathematical development.

In the mid nineteenth century, Riemann applied non-Euclidean geometry to higher dimensions. But the resulting Differential Geometry was not widely known outside the mathematics community until the physicists picked up on it after Einstein's discoveries. But I doubt that many philosophers, or brain scientists have considered the implications of the theorems of Differential Geometry. I think those theorems offer profound insight into the possibilities for how consciousness might actually work.

But to accept these ideas, we will have to get past the enormous psychological roadblock that will keep researchers from even looking at them. In order to understand the implications, we need to acknowledge the existence of large, extra dimensions as natural constituents of reality. We could even call them "physical" if only the physicists would enlarge the domain of their inquiries to include the consequent, vastly enlarged space.

Even though this idea has been considered, it has either been dismissed, or distorted by physicists and even though it has found its way into the ideas of the New Agers, it is not taken seriously by most consciousness researchers. (The distortion was made by Oskar Klein who, in a well-meaning attempt to explain why we can't "see" higher dimensions, insisted that the extra dimensions of the perfectly reasonable proposal made by Theodor Kaluza to Einstein, must be tightly "curled up". I believe this has confounded the String Theorists in their search for the right Calabi-Yau space, and I believe it convinced Einstein to abandon the idea, even though it still appears in his equations. No less a thinker than Sir Roger Penrose still rejects the idea.)

In my opinion, the theorems of Differential Geometry remove all the difficulties in understanding consciousness by defining manifolds and deducing their properties. Manifolds are sub-spaces embedded in a higher-dimensional space. A simple example is a 2D sheet of paper embedded in your 3D room. Einstein's equations show that our "universe", that is the 4D space-time continuum which science considers to be all there is in reality, is really a 4D manifold embedded in a higher-dimensional space-time. That's all we need to establish the reality of extra dimensions.

The notion of a manifold also explains why we can't "see" the higher dimensions. It is because everything involved in seeing is 3-dimensional with the processes occurring in an additional dimension of time. It is in principle not possible for 4D structures and processes to project outside the manifold, just as it is not possible for a square drawn on a sheet of paper to leave the paper, or even to stand up on one edge on the paper. It is confined to its manifold, just like we are.

What that gives us is a completely separate place, or "world", in which the seat of consciousness could be resident, and which is completely inaccessible to us with our 4D instruments and organs.

It also provides possible explanations for other parts of the mind/body problem, e.g. a communication link between mind and brain. This explanation will require an extension of physics, but it is completely plausible when considered in the context of an embedded manifold. In physics, the four known forces act as vectors in 3D space. They have interesting orthogonal relationships, such as the coupling of the electric force to the magnetic force to form the EM force. The resulting EM force can propagate disturbances in the respective fields to form light, radio waves, etc. These waves are used extensively by our communication artifacts.

In a similar fashion, there could be unknown forces acting normal to our manifold, which would make all component vectors in our manifold zero, and thus make the forces undetectable. Nonetheless, such a force could be coupled with another force, which does act in our manifold, like gravity, or the EM force, and this coupled force, with a component normal to our manifold, could propagate signals into and out of our manifold and be connected to transponders in higher-dimensional space. This seems far out, but so did the ideas of Copernicus, Hubble, and Einstein.

Since the idea is plausible, it shouldn't be dismissed without good reason.

Now, if there is a transponder associated with the seat of consciousness in higher dimensions, then there is the problem of how it could interact with 3D matter without breaking the laws of physics. Here we use the rover analogy. Willful commands sent to the rover from JPL cause physical changes and actions in the rover without breaking the laws of physics. It is done by encoding the commands into patterns in the electro-magnetic field and which are detected by exquisitely sensitive antenna circuits in the rover's radio. Those signals are then amplified and decoded and interpreted by the computers connected to physical actuators. A similar process may be at work in the brain. (Hameroff and Penrose have described how this may occur.)

Sir Francis Crick has identified a structure in the brain, the claustrum, which seems to be exactly what you would expect to be a transponder/antenna system for communicating with the seat of consciousness. This would seem to be a good candidate for brain researchers to study. (It is a much better guess than Descartes' Pineal Gland.)

Building a theory of consciousness on this foundation remains a formidable challenge but I think it presents some promising opportunities. I think that your work in lucid dreaming offers you a unique opportunity to explore some of the details of these ideas and to contrive some experiments that might shed light on some of the questions. If the lucid dreamers were conversant in the ideas of higher dimensions, they could check them out and report back and possibly fill in some details.

I could go on, but this letter is probably long enough. I think you are open-minded enough, and motivated by the right questions, so that you might be interested in pursuing these ideas further. If so, I would love to hear from you so we can discuss them further. In case you are interested, I have worked out a theory which I have summarized in an 8-page essay. You can find it here.

With utmost respect and best wishes,

Paul R. Martin

__________________________

It is time for me to gently get the cat off my lap and go have some lunch. So that's it for now. Thanks for reading.



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