A New Model

I want this model to be efficacious, that is, useful and dynamic, so that it will help ordinary people and highly trained professionals to come to better conclusions about their interests related to consciousness. The model will, accordingly, be congruent with the physical and physiological, with the biological and biochemical, but I am not going to attempt a one-to-one mapping of brain chemistry on consciousness. I will keep these views in mind as I construct the model, however. The model will also be hopefully explanatory of spiritual, religious, mystic, and other forms of inner experience, as well as outer experiences like perception, interaction with the environment and with other living things within the environment.

It occurred to me while I was reading about the failure of physical science to resolve the differences between quantum mechanics and general relativity that the problem of consciousness has some similar problems. One of these is that every sapient being now and ever living on this planet has had at least one, probably many, theories of consciousness that were partly correct and partly not. Similarly, entire cultures have been built with models of consciousness assumed somewhere in the central tenets of the culture, and all of these have been partly correct and partly incorrect. In fact, as we now see civilization, we can see that there have been several kinds of civilizations each with their own belief systems, some of which are incomprehensible to us and to others of the longer-lasting civilizations. Models of consciousness and our vocabularies about consciousness are, therefore, likely to be strewn with leftover ideas that seemed good at the time, or were coordinate with now antiquate concepts. I will try to clean some of this up.

Since I am going to be constructing this model of consciousness with language, specifically the English language—the world's most vocabulary rich tongue, but a language with enormous problems of consistency—it would be good if we agreed upon some fundamental ideas about languages. This will also begin to give you an idea of how the analysis will proceed and what problems there are just talking about consciousness.

First, language is almost always a sound system, that is, the first communications were grunts and gurgles, pictures were not initially thought of as language. There is no way to prove this, but there is strong evidence supporting the idea that sound came first then visual representations of language. There is no particular benefit to us from knowing this, but it is important to know that thousands and thousands of years downstream from the first act that could be called language each of us is immersed in a language situation that is both oral/aural and visual.

Language is both an ostensive labeling system and figurative, analogical. The words "tree," "Baum," "arbre," and "derevo," in English, German, French, and Russian, respectively, are unrelated. In that sense each is an "ostensive" or arbitrary mapping of a sound pattern onto an idea or image or other sense object, sound patterns which we have also represented alphabetically and phonetically as written words. The idea of "tree" for most sighted people is a canonical tree, that is, a mental picture of some idealized treelike object, which represents all trees in the manner of their most familiar characteristics: large size (but varying widely), having a central trunk (a stemlike feature, but much more sturdy and robust), limbs (branching off the trunk), smaller branches (branching off the limbs), and something on the small branches called leaves or needles (the sunlight gathering, energy tapping organs of the plant), and, if we think about tree more than second or two, we imagine roots (branching structures that reach out into the ground anchoring the tree to one place and providing it with moisture and chemicals).

But language is not just a collection of arbitrary mappings, it is also a marketplace of metaphors and cemetary of dead ones. Metaphor is the name we give to a broad class of analogical processes in language. Metaphor is a word that is itself a metaphor, because it is a compound word meaning "change of carrier or vessel." When we use the word, we do not think of its metaphorical beginnings, usually, but rather just say it as if it were an ostensive or arbitrary mapping of a sound system to an idea.

An important question arises at this point relating to consciousness. The question is: is there mental activity in the use of a metaphoric word that does not occur when using ostensive words. I am going to say "yes," but reserve the right to say that certain other kinds of processes different from metaphor/analogy may also come into play, among them, onomatopoeia, rhyme, assonance and the like, i.e., incidental associations to other words, sounds, images, ideas, etc.

Already you can see how this become very complicated. To scare the hell out of you I will briefly mention a few kinds of these analogical processes in language: there are metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, for instance, each with its own strategy of analogy.

Metonymy (literally change of name) is a subset of analogies between associated ideas, whereas "metaphor" used in the narrower category sense, is the analogy between unassociated ideas. A good example of metonymy is the phrase "lend me a hand." Literally this means "cut off your hand and give it to me temporarily," but this is nonsensical, so we understand it to mean "give me some help." The analogical strategy associated "help" with the "hand" that would provide the help.

The same phrase can be a synecdoche (sih NECK duh key) when one farmer asks another to "lend him a hand" he might mean that he wants to borrow a person for a day or two to work on a project, the person is "the hand" an analogical strategy of synecdoche (the whole named by the part and vice versa), i.e., we call workers "hands" because the men's hand(s) are an important and emblematic part of their ability to work.

If in either of these two examples the man asked for "help" who had no hands of their own or no workers, then the strategy of irony emerges, a very special form of analogy that almost literally resonates between the assertion and its negation, the assertion remaining in mind but a synthesis emerging from the dynamic. Irony is the linguistic process underlying dialectic.

It will become obvious later on that our understanding of the world proceeds by increments of metaphorical analogy, creeping blindfolded on hands and knees across an unknown territory, making the unfamiliar less so by equating it with things "known."

And now we know that the equation process—analogy—can be done in several different ways. There are several important lessons in this, but among them are the feelings we have about things we know. When something we know is expressed in language by very ostensive/arbitrary terms, we feel we "really know it," but feel analogical knowledge to be much more provisional. The truth is that these feelings are artifacts of language, not of wisdom.

Consciousness takes place in the brain. This is the modern view, anyway, but for millennia people had different ideas about it, based on physiological changes throughout the body, among them typically the heart, the gut, the genitals, you know, all the places where sensations are available. One does not have feelings in the liver, kidneys (well ...), pancreas, gall bladder, appendix, brain. Wait! Brain? Yep. The Russian language of the 18th and part of the 19th centuries, for instance, refers to brain as golovnova mozga which translated as head marrow (stuff). Nowadays, however, it means brain just the way we mean brain—ostensively.

The strange thing is that we have no pain, pressure, kinesthetic, or proprioceptive senses of the brain. Headaches are muscular or muscular-vascular or sinus related. The brain is the site, however, of a much more exciting kind of sensation which we call consciousness, and that is because of certain kinds of cells in the brain that act sort of like pixels in a computer or television screen. They "light up" or "sound off" or otherwise "echo" or "mirror" sensory (and other) neural "data" under certain kinds of conditions. That condition is thought to be electrically active, more charged (than before, than usual, than an adjoining neuron).

Echo and mirror are words meaning sonic or luminous reflection. Both are very close to the truth of the material substrate of consciousness, in fact, neurophysiologists believe they have identified a class of neurons, which they call "mirror neurons." We are going to take advantage of this new knowledge shortly.

We generally agree that the peripheral nervous system does not register sensation, it merely detects stimuli and transmits the stimulus to the brain where it is registered, that is, "understood" or "comprehended." The Germanic word is ill-suited to modern psycho-visualizations of the process the word stands for. Verstehen might have once meant "stand with," which gets us into a frame of thinking that might be useful, but not as good as the word "comprehend," which is "take with" in French, which is more about the process than "capire" in Italian that means "in the head."

We do not see in our eyes, we see "through" them. We do not smell in our nose, we sort out the chemical messages in our brain. Pain is a conundrum, though, for it seems to our consciousness that a fire ant bite on the leg is felt on the leg, not in our brain. This is an important clue to our theory of consciousness and mind. We will come back to this point.

The brain is not omnipotential. Since the first cases of survival after traumatic brain injuries — basically after antiseptics were invented — we have been able to observe deficits in mental functioning related to these injuries. It sometimes takes a war to produce a sufficient number of similar injuries resulting in similar deficits. Reasoning about the function of areas of the brain from singular events was interesting, but not really productive of reasonable conclusions. Thus, the New Hampshire man who had an iron rod rudely penetrate his prefrontal cortex in the 19th century, was interesting partly because he lived and partly because of the changes to his personality and ability to understand certain kinds of situations. But, this case and hundreds of similar ones over the ages were more often misinterpreted because of the salience of one striking change in behavior.

The brain is a couple of square feet of neural tissue when spread out with its well-known wrinkles and fissures smoothed out it is about half an inch thick. It is anywhere from 975cc to 1500cc. A quart of milk is 946cc. The brain also includes the cerebellum, and the limbic system bodies: the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and others. Some of the areas of the brain are known to be involved in specific functions, but other parts seem to be involved in a variety of functions the commonalities of which have eluded us so far. Because of this our theory of consciousness will have to make some assumptions that will need refinement later on and some will be discarded.

The first major concept of our model of consciousness is that consciousness takes place primarily in the gray matter of the brain, but may have, as with pain, important involvements in the peripheral nervous system, including the spinal cord, as well as in the associated parts like the cerebellum and the limbic system. The reason for "localizing" consciousness in they gray matter will become more obvious shortly. One implication of this localization notion are that for every phenomenon we understand as part of consciousness there has to be a corresponding material substrate capable of evoking the phenomenon. This does not necessarily mean a one-to-one relationship, however. It means only that there must be a causal explanation that ultimately relies on the functioning of neural material. It could be conjoint functioning that produces the effect or mass action or any of a variety of combinations.

Moreover, phenomena are not all of one type and category. What we understand as pain, for instance, may be the result of specialized nerve cells or it may be the result of several kinds of cells specialized to achieve the signal we understand as pain. Certainly we understand vision to be the result of light wave detection by the rods and cones embedded in the retina of the eyes. In fact we know that certain molecules in the retina (rods and cones) are impacted by the energy of light striking them, such that the molecule changes its "conformation," its shape and/or orientation with respect to other molecules. We do not often think about what electromagnetic radiation the eyes are not detecting. The point is that we are hostage to the evolved form and function of our sensory apparatus ... and our cognitive apparatus.

Consciousness is the activity of the gray matter, the cortex. Consciousness is activity along a scale that goes from virtual zero to normal and from moderate to very intense activity. Between zero and approaching normal are various states that we call coma and extremely deep sleep. From a little below normal to very intense activity we are either asleep or intensely processing stimuli and thinking.

You should conceive of the cortex as a very complex three-dimensional matrix with electro-chemical processes constantly and repetitively in progress in many specific areas, some where sensory-specific areas are located and then spreading out along the fibers of the matrix in what become practiced (kindled) pathways throughout the matrix. What we have been calling consciousness is the activity in the very active parts of the matrix. This is only slightly metaphoric; other images will be developed to help understand that the slightly less-active areas are also functioning in a way which we have up until now have called subconscious activity. The new metaphor does not have an up or down, an over and under. There is nothing "sub" or "under" about out-of-awareness activity; it could be right next door to something that is vividly in awareness. It all depends on the patterns and functionality of the neural tissues because of what is happening ... and because of what has happened before under like circumstances and kindled into being.

The matrix was manufactured according to specifications laid down over the ages. Some areas of the matrix are specific to certain inputs, while other areas communicate between inputs or refine them or compare them to previously received inputs or compare them to previously refined and compared sensory information. As the organism becomes more competent in its environment the brain differentiates (kindles more and more useful pathways among the neurons) itself further to accommodate additional sensory input (and comparisons and refinements) that are useful, primarily useful for survival, but eventually useful for other things like baseball and ballet and bibliography.

Kindling happens because of sense or previous sense inputs throught the eyes, ears, nose, fingers, other body parts, too. It happens when cells build up charge potentials and then are pushed one bit more into releasing the pent up charge as an electro-chemical event down a pathway, a dendrite, or other neural tissue.

So far the model is not wildly different from many that are in use today in modern science, except that already we have discarded the idea that there is "someplace" called the subconscious. Our definition is that there are areas of the brain with activity levels less than a certain amount ... perhaps a relative amount ... and these are out of our awareness, but nevertheless actively processing what brains process. The new model says that there are more active areas and less active areas, but that the system is dynamic ... and that it has patterned activities, such as sleep and vivid awareness.

When outdoors we encounter a midsized animal our matrix does not have to light up while it compares the sensory inputs to already kindled patterns to which we have attached the names: puma, mountain lion, and cougar, each of which has permanent and provisional physical associations connected matrixwise. And, so our limbic system takes the information to remind (literally re-mind) us that being cautious is good.

The next part of the model is the most difficult for it is based almost completely on a conjecture for which we have only a few thousand years of very indirect evidence. Consciousness is self-aware. This means that consciousness must have a model of the self, the body it "inhabits." How would such a model exist? Currently neurophysiologists believe that the so-called mirror neurons are implicated, so if they are, then the model of self and consciousness and of self-consciousness is a process in the matrix in which the current information about the self is repetitiously evoked by a process "designed/learned" to evoke mirror cell "imagery." The point is that within our matrix, based on the neural anatomy we inherited, a physiology of self imprints a model of self as we gestate and carry out the duties of infance, toddlerhood, childhood, tween, teen, and several more stages of adulthood, in each of which we become self-conscious of the script intended contesting with the actual events happening around us and to us. This process almost certainly involves feedback (error-checking) and feedforward (anticipation) neural loops, subject to all the hazards of neural fatigue and spurious connection and refinement and comparison, and analogy. We are fairly sure from the study of autistic persons that there is a failure of this system to evoke a complete sense of self that can be extended to model others, the similar models for other beings in the environment, which most of us learn to make whenever we encounter another person. Whew!

There is a lot going on in these last two paragraphs. Two fundamental concepts were introduced virtually at once: the creation of mental models that actually incorporate sensory and propriosensory information about self; the existence of patterned brain activity that evokes the "imagery" in mirror cells, feedback and feedforward, as well as similar modeling for beings and objects in the environments of the senses.

If this is an accurate way of conceiving the conscious, then the activity of the brain that creates the sensation of being conscious is not a simple or stable on/off switched defined array of firing neurons, but rather a cycle or patterned process spreading out from vivid inputs of sensory information, caught up quickly in the cortex's ongoing efforts to maintain a self model (!) and an environment model (!), a dynamic modeling "exercise" where the inputs are compared and refined in terms of previous experience, forced along familiar pathways until they are rejected as not fitting that certain pattern or accepted and allowed to contribute to the model as incremental information.

Before we begin to test this hypothesis against a wide array of human experience, it should be noted that we, the readers of this website have arrived at this point only after considerable education, experience, and maturation, all of which are so vastly more complicated than we imagine that the old saw that we only use 10-20% of our brain is laughable. We use the whole thing, but not all at once. We learned to differentiate ourselves from mother sometime in the womb, but did not finish the work of that until we were infants. By the time we could roll over, that is by the time we could change our orientation at our own request or "volition" we were well on the way to establishing the basics of our self-model. The accumulation of efficacious brain training during early childhood has yet to be thoroughly documented, but there are good atlases of early somatic learning and consciousness building. We arrive at our middle ages some one and a half billion seconds of sensing, processing, interpreting, and modeling later. A lot can happen in a billion and a half seconds! Children's brains contain many more neurons than they will need as older children or as adults. Jillions of kindled matrix pathways are going to not be reenforced and will lapse into disuse atrophy or will be repurposed, which is the first words of a very fraught but common situation.

Recap of the Model—

consciousness takes place in the brain, in the cortex, but receives input from the peripheral nervous system, the cerebellum, and the limbic and endocrine systems

the cortex (neocortex and prefrontal cortex) is a matrix of electrochemical circuits, some specific to certain processes, some more equipotential or pluripotential

the cortex is both self-programming and "pre-wired"

the cortex deals with incoming sensory and propriosensory inputs

the cortex refines and compares inputs

the cortex (containing mirror neuron cells) produces internal "images"

internal "images" gradually form a model of self and then models of external beings and objects

models of self and of other objects are held in consciousness by feedback and feedforward processes

consciousness takes place throughout the cortex, but at any given moment some area of the consciousness is more vividly processing "imagery" (particularly self model imagery) and that creates "awareness" and "attention" while the areas out-of-attention continue their processing. It is likely that the self-model learns how to manage the normal processes so that it can "corral" certain high priority processes into one's attention-al focus.

the feedback and feed forward processes are patterned and cyclic, producing "wave" phenomena, which are measurable as alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and other wave forms of brain activity