What Wind Tunnels Can Tell Us About Consciousness

[Jim Cross]

Of course, if our interest only lies in having models for others to gawk at, rather than confronting the modeling activity itself, then all of the above will "make no sense", because we simply have no desire for it to make sense.

Of course, one of my points about calling this limited solipsism is that nobody can gawk at your model and, for the most part, you don't even realize you have a model. You think it is reality.

Jim,

Not a single person here has proposed any other models of reality to evaluate. I came the closest, I suppose, but didn't really speak of any dynamics I imagine are at work to make our modeling activity possible.

I think people assumed, since you wrote an article and posted it here, you were open to feedback and criticism of the model (and no model "bypasses theories and constructs", by their very definition), not only gawking and approval. I don't think Cleric or Federica assumed you would be immediately defensive and dismissive of 95% of what they are writing and asking you, which are genuine and straightforward questions. If they are difficult to understand, yet there is interest in reaching shared understanding of what is being asked, then I would suggest you pose them questions for clarification. If there is no such interest then, like I said, no amount of comments back and forth will approach anything close to a shared understanding of the words being written.

I haven't seen any criticism that addresses the article. Instead, it is mostly about spinning off some other viewpoint then asking me questions about the other viewpoint. The questions are not straightforward.

Cleric's hypothetical is the best example. It spins off an elaborate Cosmic Brain. But there is no Cosmic Brain in any sense of "brain" that I am using the term. So even imagining how it would work and all the assumptions behind it would take endless posts to flush out, providing endless opportunities for misunderstanding. Since I am talking about brains in living organisms that evolved, nothing about a Cosmic Brain could possibly have any relevance to what I wrote.

(and no model "bypasses theories and constructs", by their very definition)

What about the primary example of an model airplane in wind tunnel? No theories or abstract constructs there.

[Jim Cross]

I think the problem you guys are having is that, when you think of models, you are thinking of something conceptual and abstract.

But I am talking about the brain generating a concrete, non-abstract model, of reality that is what we call consciousness.

[Federica]

Federica,

1- I have no idea what you are asking and why it matters. Representations are representations of representations which are representations of representations.. You can spin this forever but to what point? No there isn't an infinite series. Your model of the world is your consciousness. End of story.

2- I never said your model or my model is all there is. It is all you know. Not all there is.

The model that is consciousness is a physical model. We can put an airplane in a wind tunnel and understand drag and turbulence without an infinite regress into models within models within models...

Thank you Jim, for this factual reply.

2. "I never said your model or my model is all there is. It is all you know. Not all there is."

Yes, I am aware of the world in itself in your model. No misunderstanding here. I have used the expression "the model is all there is" as a specific reference to the below sentence. I understand that, in full, you meant "There is only the model within the realm of experience."

There is no subjective experience or objective experience. Subject/object is gone. There is only the model with some parts appearing internal and some appearing external and ourselves appearing somewhere in the mix but it all the model.

1. "I have no idea what you are asking and why it matters"

Indeed, it's not at all sure that it matters. But to the same extent that it mattered to you to publish your article on this forum, a question that tries to make sense of your article should matter? And I can be wrong, not knowing your reasons to publish. So if you say that it doesn't matter, then it doesn't. But just in case a hopefully clearer question could possibly matter, let me try this one.
If your model is all you know, then the ideas in your article are no exception. Just as the sky and the room, they are contained within your model. Correct? So the question is: how can you, from within the confinement of your model of the world/your consciousness, state that something is, namely how can you state: "Your model of the world is your consciousness"?

[Cleric K]

Cleric's hypothetical is the best example. It spins off an elaborate Cosmic Brain. But there is no Cosmic Brain in any sense of "brain" that I am using the term. So even imagining how it would work and all the assumptions behind it would take endless posts to flush out, providing endless opportunities for misunderstanding. Since I am talking about brains in living organisms that evolved, nothing about a Cosmic Brain could possibly have any relevance to what I wrote.

Jim, you have completely misunderstood the Cosmic brain analogy (I guess I had to emphasize in what sense I'm giving it). The whole point was to make us more conscious about the fact that the different parts of the physical brain can be considered as far apart parts of the Cosmos that slowly propagate their influences through spacetime. Today science is so preoccupied with investigating the mechanics of the brain that it completely neglects such questions. My whole point was that we can't take for granted that consciousness is whatever happens in the spacetime volume of the brain. It is only because it is so small and we feel that we can 'fit it in our mind' with ease, that we don't often consider such questions. Thus I presented an analogy, that the brain is still a domain of spacetime and according to current science effects propagate at best with the speed of causality c. That's why I tried to show that we enter into paradoxes if we imagine that consciousness is produced by the whole volume. This means that consciousness is some strange 'bird-eye' perspective of spacetime shaped as a brain/model which experiences events in different spacetime regions of the brain independently of the ripples of causality.

And from what I reckon, you do realize that this is a problem (from what I see in the articles and comments below them). You say "The question is how/where does the complete integrated experience get produced by firings all over the brain?" And that's basically what I was asking. I only tried to emphasize the seriousness of the problem by making analogy between neurons and, say, galaxies. Not in the least to suggest that galaxies are neurons but only to emphasize that we can't neglect the causal effects travelling at limited speed. The point was to show that the integration is not a trivial problem. One is tempted to underestimate the problem by saying "Well, it's no big deal. The brain is so small and signals travel so fast that it results in a kind of 'motion blur', and this is what we experience as consciousness." But this doesn't at all address the problem, it simply smears it out. That's why I gave the analogy. It would be the same as saying "Well, what do you care that light propagates at speed c from different parts of the Cosmos. At the scale of billions of years, all this light can be pictured as motion blur and we can completely disregard any problems arising from the speed of causality. We can perfectly well think of Cosmic spacetime as simultaneous picture of events happening at different parts, albeit slightly motion blurred." But from the results of GR we know that this is not the case. There isn't a single bird-eye perspective of the whole Cosmic space. Different observers can see different events happening in different order, so there's no singular view that all can agree on.

One solution is to imagine that experience is produced in a single infinitesimal point where all the 'light' from the neurons interfere, each delayed by its corresponding spacetime interval. Yet this doesn't sound very plausible from physicalist perspective. Why should such a point within the brain spacetime volume be granted with such a special role? It sounds almost as if some metaphysical soul is placed in that point to experience the integrated effects of the brain. The 'light' from the neurons interferes also in every other point of the brain. What would make some of these points special?

From what I understand you do recognize this as a problem and that's why you propose a solution: more dimensions! In other words, the brain spacetime volume is crisscrossed with something akin to wormholes connecting almost every part to every other. Thus in certain sense within higher dimensional spacetime the spacetime intervals between parts of the brain should be zero if we are to experience simultaneous consciousness of the whole brain volume. They should be zero because even if they are very small but non-zero value, we're back at the same problem. Just because brain regions are closer together in higher dimensional spacetime, the fact still remains that certain influences of high-D spacetime regions arrive only with delay to other regions (even if it is very small delay). Thus we're back at the same question: where/how do these higher-D spacetime wave fronts integrate?

I'll return to the models in another post.

[AshvinP]

Of course, one of my points about calling this limited solipsism is that nobody can gawk at your model and, for the most part, you don't even realize you have a model. You think it is reality.

Jim,

Not a single person here has proposed any other models of reality to evaluate. I came the closest, I suppose, but didn't really speak of any dynamics I imagine are at work to make our modeling activity possible.

I think people assumed, since you wrote an article and posted it here, you were open to feedback and criticism of the model (and no model "bypasses theories and constructs", by their very definition), not only gawking and approval. I don't think Cleric or Federica assumed you would be immediately defensive and dismissive of 95% of what they are writing and asking you, which are genuine and straightforward questions. If they are difficult to understand, yet there is interest in reaching shared understanding of what is being asked, then I would suggest you pose them questions for clarification. If there is no such interest then, like I said, no amount of comments back and forth will approach anything close to a shared understanding of the words being written.

I haven't seen any criticism that addresses the article. Instead, it is mostly about spinning off some other viewpoint then asking me questions about the other viewpoint. The questions are not straightforward.

Cleric's hypothetical is the best example. It spins off an elaborate Cosmic Brain. But there is no Cosmic Brain in any sense of "brain" that I am using the term. So even imagining how it would work and all the assumptions behind it would take endless posts to flush out, providing endless opportunities for misunderstanding. Since I am talking about brains in living organisms that evolved, nothing about a Cosmic Brain could possibly have any relevance to what I wrote.

The Cosmic Brain was used as a metaphor for your argument that consciousness evolved to help living organisms "survive and thrive in a complicated world". Your argument implies that this underlying world, as a whole, is like a Cosmic Brain which generates consciousness in the course of evolution. And it just so happens we can find phenomena at the Cosmic scale which serve as great metaphors for what may be happening within the personal brain. This isn't a claim that the Cosmos is actually a brain like our personal brain, but an analogy for purpose of clarifying the issues in question. Cleric simply used your own argument to lay a foundation for clarifying his questions, and he made very clear it was moved from the 'personal brain' to the scale of 'Cosmic Brain' to aid that illustration. The rest of the questions are very straightforward and deal directly with inner experiences of consciousness, which your model purports to explain as an evolved survival and thriving mechanism of Reality itself, whatever that Reality is. So I wonder if you can now revisit those questions?

(and no model "bypasses theories and constructs", by their very definition)

What about the primary example of an model airplane in wind tunnel? No theories or abstract constructs there.

The very act of perceiving is a 'construct', as it is always interlaced with our own concepts. Modern science has established this fact beyond any reasonable doubt. And we obviously must interpret what we perceive to put the observations and models to any practical use for ourselves or for others.

Interesting attempts have been made to arrive at the relation between thinking and perceiving by imagining them actually divided from each other. You may remember Williams James's supposition of a confrontation between, on the one hand, the environment... and, on the other, a man who possessed all the organs of perception, but who had never done any thinking. He demonstrated that such a man would perceive nothing, or nothing but what James called "a blooming buzzing confusion". Well, he was only expressing in his own blunt way the conclusion which always is arrived at by all who make the same attempt, whether philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, or physicists. Unfortunately it is also a conclusion which is commonly forgotten by those same [people] almost as soon it has been arrived at; or certainly as soon as they turn their minds to other matters - such as history or evolution - but which I personally decline to forget. I mean the conclusion, the irrefragable consensus, that what we perceive is structurally inseparable from what we think.
...

The distinction between [perceiving and thinking] is... rather easy to lose sight of, once we begin to reflect or philosophize, for this reason: that the single experience we call "consciousness" - our inwardness at any given moment - is not composed either of perceiving alone or of thinking alone, but of an immemorial and inextricable combination of the two. Indeed it is better to call it an interpenetration rather than a combination. We soon learn, once we begin to reflect, that what we have been accustomed to refer to in everyday speech as "perceiving" - as for instance when we speak of perceiving a chair... or for that matter a neuron or chromosome - is in fact perception heavily laced with thinking, with habitual thought, with mental habit.

[lorenzop]

If I'm sitting in a movie theatre, and the projected 2 dimensional image and screen represent 'reality'; I understand how my experience of the movie could be described as a constructed model - the model is a participation, a the model building a process.
But the above doesn't attend to the 'being present and aware' component of consciousness - which is the 'hard' problem. The 'model' would be the easy stuff.
Secondly, isn't calling consciousness a 'model' similar to calling reality a simulation - simulation theory is essentially model building with 'supervision'.
My complaint with simulation theory is that it postpones answering any question re consciousness - just kicks the can down the road.

[Cleric K]

I think the problem you guys are having is that, when you think of models, you are thinking of something conceptual and abstract.

But I am talking about the brain generating a concrete, non-abstract model, of reality that is what we call consciousness.

Let's start with the basics.



This image is a symbol for the World process that you agree is the stuff of reality. We don't know what that reality is in itself but let's symbolize it as the mysterious field of reality. There's no spatial sense in the above image. It's just a token.

Now in the course of evolution this world process has diversified and reached a point where it became quite complex:



Let's imagine that the staircase pattern corresponds to the processes coinciding with the brain (again, no spatiality implied - this can well contain the extra dimensions you speak of). This is basically what you call 'the model'. We should be clear that the world process is only one. Thus the pattern is not something distinct from the surrounding world process, it is only a specific shape (and dynamics) that the world process has taken in that region. The theory is that this complexified world process is experienced as consciousness. Consciousness doesn't emerge as some mystic vapor from that process, consciousness is simply how the process 'feels like'.

The brain process forms as a model of the general world process (at least the part that manifests through the sense organs and their technical extensions). This is symbolized through the fact that the staircase pattern slightly resembles the larger picture. But why the staircase shape? Because quite certainly the building blocks of our intellectual cognition (which are patterns of the world process within the brain) are not exactly perfectly similar to the general process. We can say that they approximate the general process in the way we can approximate a circle through rectangles. We experience our brain patterns of the world process as concepts (rectangles) and we put them together in hope to approximate something which may not be rectangular at all, thus there will always be something left out.

All this is nothing new. It is really at the core of Schopenhauer's philosophy, where the world process is the dark world will and part of that world process complexifies to such an extent that it experiences itself as ideal model of the true reality - thus the famous "The World is my idea". In your terminology it is "The World is my model" (we can omit the "my" to avoid the problem of the "I").

All this leads to the dualism we know very well. The world process in the brain continually feeds back upon itself and this recursion of perceptions and memory leads to the model of the ego. Yet this ego feels conscious only within its rectangular patterns. The scientist feels conscious only within the sense perceptions (extended by the instruments) and his rectangular concepts of fields, energy, neurons, etc. The religious person feels conscious within perceptions, feelings and rectangular concepts of God, Angels, Heaven, etc. But you'll argue that it is still simply the shape of the world process within the brain. Both are locked within their models yet they arrange their rectangular patterns differently in hope to approximate a more faithful picture of the world process in itself. In this case I personally would too sympathize with the scientists because he shows more rigor in trying to perfect the model, while the religious person is content with ancient dogma.

I take it that you would agree that the world process within the brain is in no way more special than that elsewhere. It's only its shape and dynamics that are different (by world process I don't imply the physicalist picture of energy-matter waves. There could be other aspects. We call 'world process' whatever the true nature of the mystery of reality is). It's a common belief that it is the complexifying of these dynamics and their recursive feedback which makes them to be experienced as consciousness. This however produces also something akin to event horizon (thus the dualism) between what we can be conscious of (the rectangular patterns) and the world process in general. Just as with Schop, whoever holds this position feels that if we let go of the rectangular patterns we simply lose consciousness (thus the blind world process/will). But is this necessarily so? Could it be that we simply have never tried to look for other kinds of model patterns, which might be better suited to reflect the fuller world process? And I'm not speaking simply of more rectangles but with more polished edges.

To understand this we must hold in mind at all times that there's nothing especially magical in the world process in the region of the brain compared to the world process elsewhere (again - this statement shouldn't be mistaken for a claim that all there is are only energy-matter waves). If we are not vigilant about this we'll sooner or later end up believing in ghosts. This is the irony of today's materialism. With all the talks about scientific rigor, at the end all is turned around and we see the grossest superstition when the question of consciousness is approached. At the moment one says "consciousness emerges when ..." one already summons ghosts. Except that the scientists doesn't call it ghost but 'illusion'. Illusion or ghost - it's still there nonetheless. So we need to keep firmly in mind that there's one world process which is experienced as varying levels of consciousness. If we say that the world process can know itself only as a (rectangular) model, we're basically declaring that the world process can not be conscious of itself in any other (more intimate) way.

But let's look at something else:


(the shape within the small oval is fractally self-similar to the shape in the bigger oval)

Here, through inner effort we can develop model patterns which are self-similar to the deeper world process. It's not simply a rectangular approximation of the way the world process acts through the senses - instead it is trying to move as one with the world process. After all, our consciousness is the experienced movement of world process (in patterns called the model). In the intellectual model the world process splits against itself. It lives in the shapes of a rectangular model of itself but this remains above the event horizon. It's like the world process within the brain says to itself "What I experience as consciousness is the dynamics of the world process. When I experience thoughts they are really how the world process unfolds. Yet I'm not conscious of the depth of this process (the domain of calculation, in your terminology). When I point my sight towards these depths I see only the darkness of unconsciousness. I see death. What emerges on the surface are rectangles (concepts) which approximately model the depths from which they emerge. Yet I'm doomed to live entirely within these rectangles. There's no consciousness in the depths of the world process. Consciousness can be found only in the arrangements of rectangles. So in a sense I am the world process, yet I can be conscious only when this world process assumes the rectangular model forms which try to approximate my actual reality."

The image above suggests that this threshold below which we lose consciousness is not absolute. It's a matter of making our conscious thinking process self-similar to the world process as a whole. Then we build something akin to fractal amplifier. We begin to gain consciousness of deeper currents of the world process which are amplified to self-similar concepts at the model level. Thus the model is no longer an approximation of the sensory patterns but condenses as imaginative concepts self-similar to the general world process.

We should grasp this rightly. The general scientific thought goes like this: "Yes, my consciousness is the shape and dynamics of the world process but this consciousness can exist only above certain level of complexity. Thus the true depths of the world process are inaccessible to any conscious experience. The only thing left is to shape my region of the world process into rectangular model of the supposed greater world process as far as I know it through its manifestation in the senses."

On the other hand, what is suggested above goes like this: "Yes, my consciousness is the shape and dynamics of the world process. But consciousness is really a matter of music-like integration of the patterns of the world process. Thus there's nothing fundamentally different in the shapes of the world process in the depths compared to the shapes which I'm conscious of as the rectangular patterns of the intellect. My goal now is not so much to create rectangular models but to transform the world process such that it becomes self-similar on different levels. This means that I need to find the right shapes of my thinking (the surface of the world process), such that they can resonate with the shapes of the deeper world process. In this way consciousness deepens and lights up."

So basically we have a change of our scientific direction. Instead of approximating sense perceptions through rectangular models, we realize that the rectangles themselves are tips of the iceberg of the living world process. As such, we can modify the world process itself such that the concepts (surface patterns of the world process) are like overtones to the deeper world process. Thus our consciousness elucidates also the depths and we find that we can be consciously active there, just like we can be active at the surface.

So the first question is: is all this understood? To understand it we need nothing but unprejudiced thinking.

Second, if we understand it, we should be clear with ourselves how, where and why we place the event horizon of consciousness. Why do we feel comfortable with the world process within ourselves precipitating rectangular approximations of itself, while denying a possibility that the deeper world process can be brought to the light of consciousness? What makes the rectangular patterns so special that they are worthy of self-consciousness, while the general world process is doomed to remain dark? Why the world process within ourselves insists that it remains split against itself and only theorize about its nature through rectangular patterns? Is it simply because it doesn't know how to unite and gain fuller consciousness of itself? Or because it simply doesn't want to gain consciousness of its own depths, and it would much rather only speculate about these depths through arrangements of rectangles?

[Jim Cross]

If I'm sitting in a movie theatre, and the projected 2 dimensional image and screen represent 'reality'; I understand how my experience of the movie could be described as a constructed model - the model is a participation, a the model building a process.
But the above doesn't attend to the 'being present and aware' component of consciousness - which is the 'hard' problem. The 'model' would be the easy stuff.
Secondly, isn't calling consciousness a 'model' similar to calling reality a simulation - simulation theory is essentially model building with 'supervision'.
My complaint with simulation theory is that it postpones answering any question re consciousness - just kicks the can down the road.

Calling consciousness a model is similar to calling it a simulation but it is not the same as calling reality a simulation.

The hard problem is deriving the mental from the physical. I am saying consciousness is simultaneously both mental and physical when I say consciousness is a physical model. I don't think quite the same as dual aspect monism because I am saying the mental aspects are physical, not simply an aspect of something that is neither physical or mental.

[Jim Cross]

Cleric,

Sorry, but the Cosmic Brain is completely off-base. A few comments on your analogy.

and that's basically what I was asking. I only tried to emphasize the seriousness of the problem by making analogy between neurons and, say, galaxies.

The whole point was to make us more conscious about the fact that the different parts of the physical brain can be considered as far apart parts of the Cosmos that slowly propagate their influences through spacetime.

Actually no. Did you read the part where I make a special point about neurons being packed together? Where I speculate that possibly the physical orientations and firing patterns might carry information. The EM fields, if that is involved, are weak. They don't travel far. They don't travel out of the skull. So spreading everything to galactic scales is in no way analogous to what I am talking about.

[lorenzop]

If nature\evolution selects for bigger brains, one could predict that ultimately the cosmos selects\models to become one giant brain.
There's no reason to suspect we're not already 'there' - the model is reality and we're right back to where we started.