INTRODUCTION

 

Consciousness

Consciousness could be defined as that first-hand unique (one only) and individual (indivisible) self experience of vivid awareness (knowledge, perception) of reality anyone can have. Consciousness without knowledge has not been proved to exist; for instance: Several investigations on vision (see: “Zeki, S., Bartels, A., 1998, The asynchrony of consciousness, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 265, pp. 1583-85”) permitted the corroboration that, in fact, to be conscious it is mandatory to be conscious of something. The thought process constitutes the mind, the abstract (representative) information the brain computes (computing is thinking). Consciousness is a property of the mind when it becomes characterized, at some point, during the process of perception, by uniqueness and individuality, when perception becomes conscious and it has the emergent subjective appearance, at first sight, of a conscious individual in charge of doing the thinking. The content of thought changes, but the conscious self remains continuously unique and individual during the conscious perception of a changing reality. Perception is the interpretation of the mental information, the objective identification of reality (the identification of objects); it is based on sensory information (visual, auditory, etc.). If there is a red snooker ball in front of us, our eyes will gain sensory information about it, visual information in their case, and the brain will process that information to rebuild an objective mental image of it, in the form of an object, but an abstract mental object (not a solid ball, but a representation of it, a substitute to be used in the thought process with an abstract character), so that a congruent motor response, a behaviour, can be integrated (The human brain is so big that not all thoughts finally derive in a motor behaviour; there seems to be much to ponder). Consciousness, the perception of the reality within reach of our senses with uniqueness and indivisibility, in the form of a conscious individual, takes place in a living brain, a multicellular organ, and in an environment propitious for metazoan (multicellular) life: A world not too big, not too small, not hot, not too cold, not too irradiated and not too dry.

The percept

Conscious perception is the objective mental identification of reality, or, in other words, the identification of real objects through the formation of “percepts”, the mental (abstract) objects of conscious perception, specific substitutes, in our minds, for computing (thinking) purposes; for instance: If someone is watching a pool game on television and hence congruently perceiving a red snooker ball, the integration (addition) of all the simultaneous but separate incoming information about the ball that enters the brain, round shape, red colour, smoothness, bright, movement, etcetera, results in a whole mental object, “red ball”, a percept. The brain forms a percept rebuilding an objective, congruent (not contradictory), isomorphic (same shape), specific (that one and not another), mnesic (memoristic, determined) and continuous mental image of anything by means of integrating (adding) diverse information. This information will be simultaneously processed along parallel neural ways. The mental image of a red ball as a whole, when the perception process goes far enough, constitutes a fusion of the information pertaining shape, colour, etc., in a sole emergent mental object, the “red ball” percept, whose parts, shape and colour, will seem to form a unique and indivisible whole (A hint of things to come: Like the conscious self). Shape and colour will be by then inseparable inside the actual percept, they will not be consciously perceived separately, as two distinct objects: Colourless roundness and shapeless redness. The ball will be consciously perceived as one thing only, although inhomogeneous, round and red, but all at once, with shape and colour strangely merged in our minds (However strange, we are used to it), with both characteristics, even though merged in a whole, still recognizable at the same time in this individual but nevertheless heterogeneous chimera, the percept. The distinct mental information about round shape and red colour would merge and be able to become indivisible as a function of time (Not as a function of space, because roundness and redness are coded in different spatial regions of the brain), through such a precise synchronization as to be unable to perceive roundness and redness separately at first sight. The information about roundness and redness gets integrated somehow as a function of time then, and the brain, the neurons, have to make it up somehow.

Unconsciousness

Anesthetics block the synaptic activity and produce a loss of consciousness. The synapse is the place of connection between neurons. The neurons are the microscopic cells forming the nervous system. The neurons transmit between them, across the synapses, the electric discharges they generate, the so called “action potentials”. That is how they produce the mental information, through codes generated by the distinct patterns of discharge they transmit. When unconsciousness is reverted, as in coming out of deep sleep, or out of a coma, or out of deep anesthesia, upward neural impulses from the neurons of the so called “ascending reticular system”, in the brainstem, reach the brain, “wake it up” and start the thought process again. Once active, loops of interactive neural activity upwards, downwards and sidewards take place, keeping the neural impulses coming and going inside the organ, with multiple functions, like behaviour. Once the neurons are dead, unconsciousness cannot be reverted (Like it says in Ecclesiastes 9:5: “… the dead know nothing…”).

Neural codes and computing

A symbol is an organized shape with which a code can be established. A code is a set of symbols able to emit a message. How would microscopic unaware neurons accomplish it? How would they accomplish intelligent things? They do not try to, the same as each ant of a colony does not consciously try to build up an anthill with temperature wise ventilation tunnels in particular; each ant simply stays active, following its genetic programming and instinctive automatic behaviour; the result emerges for itself from the teamwork; if the result is good for survival, the way it just so happens to emerge, it will have a chance to prevail that way, and the genetic codes involved too. The mental information is transmitted and coded inside the brain across the synapses, the connections between neurons. Coding in the brain is based on spatial and temporal patterns. The patterns of discharge of the neuronal action potentials have concrete shapes in space, forming different brain maps, and also have concrete shapes in time, forming different sequences of patterns of discharge, with different frequencies and stereotyped or fixed (specific) successions of trains of action potentials. These patterns code the mental information in an abstract, specific, isomorphic, mnesic and congruent manner. Each neuron connected with the next neuron are the sender and receiver of said message, while transmitting those heterogeneous patterns of electric discharges between them, across the synapses and along the neural circuits. A discharge transmitted through a synapse, already forming an abstract, isomorphic and specific code, does not have a complex meaning, like: “Those fragant roses are red”; complex emergent meanings need complex integration of codes, and that occurs through complex networking, involving millions of synapses. There happen to be thousands of millions of neurons in the brain, with nothing less than thousands of synapses each neuron. As the circuits are sufficiently stable, specific and congruent, the codes driven by them, although heterogeneous, are also specific and congruent and therefore isomorphic, abstract and meaningful to the point that it makes it possible to understand reality to some extent; consciousness and the anthill somehow manage to emerge from the automatic teamwork. Computing is the treatment of symbols. Computing is thinking. The solution of problems is one of the applications of computing and that is what the nervous system does too, through its ability to predict (to compute assumptions) and to implement (to do something about it, basically integrating responses in the form of behaviours). The nervous system processes information, like any other computing system: Information enters the system, it is processed and a response comes out. The entry of information through the sensory organs occurs by a physical transduction, a transformation of one type of energy into another, like in a telephone, that transducts sound mechanical waves into an electric current, or like it happens with the photons that reach the retina in the back of the eye and then the eye responds to the luminous stimulus with bioelectric discharges of its sensory cells, directed towards the brain along the optic nerve.

The mind

Consciousness is inseparable from the phenomenon of the mind. As far as we know there cannot be consciousness without a mind. There can be mind procesess in the absence of consciousness though, outside the control of the conscious self, like all which seems automatic and instantaneous to us in our mind, for example, the instantaneous numerical calculations we can perform in no time and without apparent effort: How much is 2+2? the answer, 4, emerges instantaneously before us, evident, without any seeming waste of time or energy, and without any seeming conscius intervention on our part; we wish it and the brain automatically and instantaneously computes a response in no time. Therefore consciousness does not need to use all the available active neurons of the brain involved in the thought process in every moment to be effective. The brain can compute meaningful, congruent, abstract and isomorphic information, mental information, outside the conscious self to some extent (outside that mental objective information characterized by its continuous and emergent uniqueness and individuality). For instance: Beatrice Gelder, in her article: “Ciegos con visión”, published in the “Investigación y ciencia” magazine in july, 2010, explained how patients with what is called “blindsight disorder”, due to brain damage, were actually blind individuals, but a region of their brains, outside their consciousness, was still able to see, to recognize (to perceive) and to avoid obstacles (to integrate quite a congruent behaviour as a response), and even to react quite congruently to colours and facial expressions as well. There are other examples of this, for instance: The diameter of the pupil is automatically adjusted in several manners; one of them is done depending on the distance to the object under contemplation. This particular response, in which concrete distances must be abstracted and understood properly, is integrated in the brain cortex (That is why it is called an automatic response instead of a reflex, because reflex responses are subcortical), but this occurs outside the control (figuratively, the will) of the conscious self. There is a correct automatic interpretation of distances here though, and without any chance of the conscious individual to willingly interfere. Guyton mentioned, in his “Tratado de fisiología médica”, that we are automatons. It may be not that reassuring to learn this. In any case, conscious control of behaviour seems to be capable of a more complex thought process and better results in comparison in some instances; for example: It took billions of ants for millions of years to be able to finally build anthills with temperature wise ventilation tunnels, through their automatic interactions, while it took the sumerians one generation to start building their groundbreaking irrigation channels, in Lagash, through the conscious ideas of some forgotten particular individual.

The emergence of consciousness

As several authors and scholars have been mentioning for decades, consciousness probably is an emergent phenomenon. Consciousness would be the heterogeneous and abstract mental information of some peculiar systematic neural activity with the emergent properties of uniqueness and individuality of that information, and with the emergent objective appearance of a conscious individual, what the scholastic philosophers referred to as a “mental atom”, one and indivisible, as Aldous Huxley recalled in his essay: “The devils of Loudun”. Given that our brain is made of neurons, the neurons are microscopic objects and also the functional units of the brain, but, on the other hand, conscious perception is a seemingly macroscopic phenomenon, let us propose, as a first approach, that consciousness, if emergent, should emerge through a change of the scale of perception then, changing from microscopic to macroscopic during the process of perception.

The association areas in the brain cortex connect diverse parts of the brain. Gerhard Roth has considered that the integration of extensive association areas with the limbic system, the hipoccampus, the reticular formation, etc., in a nutshell: An encephalon awake and networking, probably constitutes a system complex enough to cross the usual threshold of complexity supposed to be necessary for the emergence of properties and objects in a system and, in this particular case, for the emergence of consciousness in the nervous system.

Measure, scale, reference units and interactions

When perception occurs, neurons achieve a given measurable magnitude of their electrical activity, for instance, a duration in time of a given discharge of a stereotyped sequence of action potentials. As that amount of neural activity is able to specifically, congruently and isomorphically represent reality to a certain extent, with some success from a convenient for survival point of view, perception is nothing far from a succession of imperfect but fortunate measurements of the reality within reach of our limited senses. Those measurements are imperfect, because we wrongly, but fortunately, perceive a macroscopic red ball, that we happen to be watching, as a macroscopic red ball, where we should be perceiving what truly entered our eyes, some individual microscopic photons that reflected on that ball and reached us. Nevertheless that imprecision, the fact that we perceive relatively big red balls, or crocodiles in the river in the case of wildebeests, instead of extremely tiny individual photons, has become more convenient for survival than perceiving photons. A measuring scale, macroscopic or microscopic, is established with a reference measure unit. A scale is an amount of some parameter, length, for instance, arranged forming a scale, like a ladder, like in a measuring tape, with a number of steps, or equal divisions, each minimal division measuring as much as the chosen reference unit of measurement. For instance: A one meter measuring tape can be divided in one hundred equal parts, and each of the one hundred divisions will be one centimeter long, the reference unit in this case of the scale of measurement of space in centimeters. A magnitude is the level reached on a measurement scale, it is the number of units the phenomenon has reached on the given scale for some parameter. Quantities of any measurable phenomenon using (for instance) length as a spatial parameter, with a size below the size of the minimal division (the reference unit) of the scale in use (the centimeter, for instance) cannot be measured on that scale (a scale of centimeters). For instance: If the distance between two red balls to be measured is less than a centimeter long it cannot be measured in centimeters. Another smaller scale should be used, and therefore a change of scale would be necessary to perform that measurement now, a new scale with a reference unit smaller than the magnitude to be measured in this case, for example, in tenths of a centimeter (milimeters), or in thousandths of a centimeter, or whatever reference unit smaller than the magnitude to be measured. In other words: Any magnitude to be measured has to be compatible with the scale under use, so: In order to quantify a scalar magnitude reached by a phenomenon to be measured on a scale with a given reference unit, the unit must be smaller than the magnitude to be measured on that scale. This simple idea will be crucial to understand the change of scale, the forming of percepts, the emergence of consciousness and the hypothetical neural mechanism involved, which will be presented in the final chapter.

Reality is that which has measure. As professor Díaz Calavia used to say, the aim of physics is to measure. For any phenomenon, for any change in a system, to have a quantifiable measure and, in general, to be a part of reality, there has to be an objective systematic interaction of some kind, a verifiable one, between the elements of that system (A system consists of a number of elements and their interactions). For instance: In order to objectively determine, at first sight, if someone is taller than another one, there has to be an interaction between the visual information about the two people involved in their height estimation and the visual system of the observer in charge of this process of perception. It is obvious that, at first sight, with the naked eye, the available to the human eye spatial resolution will not make it possible to adjust the measurement of both heights to a factor of a thousandth of a milimeter, but this would not mean that the resulting measurement, whichever, would not be objective; it would, only not as precise as to adjust the measurement to that unit of reference of a thousandth of a milimeter, but it would be objective (as professor José María Fraga clarified me during the preparation of my doctoral thesis on myopathies). If an interaction occurs between whatever objects A and B, for instance, between the light that reaches the retina of the eye (B) reflected on an object (A), a red ball, for example, the change produced in B, the eye, will be a measure of A, the red ball. To have an objective knowledge about A from the point of view of B, the interaction must change B in some certain amount, a magnitude, which will be a measure of A. For instance: If A is a foot and B is beach sand, after stepping A on B the change in B, the foot print, will be a particular measure of A, like that foot’s shoe size, according to the length of the foot print. That quantity will not reveal something like “the true essence” of whatever left the print on the sand, but it will permit the identification of it as an object which to reasonably name “foot” eventually, as soon as it can be determined objectively that A caused in B a change in a certain amount according to some parameters and in proportion to some of the objective characteristics of A. The foot print on the sand will not be conscious of the shoe size, it will not realize or account for the facts, but it will provide facts. This makes sense whether A and B are a foot and sand, two neurons interacting inside the brain, or a thermometer under the armpit of someone with fever. Besides, every measurement will ultimately change both, A and B, because it will require an interaction between them. In classical mechanics, given that observer and observation do not coincide, like in quantum physics, measurement is not that accurate and it only consists in comparing one quantity with another quantity taken as the reference unit by a third party; measurement is the ascertainment of the magnitude of a change of state in a physical system according to some parameter and using some scale with some reference unit, like the meter, the centimeter, the second, the milisecond (the thousandth of a second), etc. The mental objects of perception, a result of certain quantifiable neural activity, act as an objective measurement of reality, within reach of our senses, but with their own reference units of measure. It will be important to understand this concepts and keep them in mind when we reach the final chapter.

Paradoxes

Consciousness is a paradoxical phenomenon. At first sight the conscious individual seems to be installed in the continuity of the present timeline in zero time, while the involved neural activity takes time to develop, a few miliseconds at least (Time itself is a mistery too, as it seems an illusory emergent phenomenon too, not an elementary component of reality, like the elementary particles, but a dimension, a measurable extent, and beginning with the “big bang”; anyway, dimensions emerge spontaneously in some Fourier series, so time should have an explanation but, overall it does not look like an essential component of the very existence of everything possible, for instance, it should not be eternal, infinite from beginning to end of everything, because if time were eternal we would not have reached the present time yet). Consciousness is also paradoxical because the brain is made up of a multiplicity of thousands of millions of heterogeneously active microscopic neurons, with a bioelectric activity in the range of thousandths of a second, while perception seems to be macroscopic and with a temporal resolution not in that range; for instance: At a movie projection, at only twenty four frames per second, we cannot perceive the single frames one by one, but some of them at a time, as a blurred whole that illusorily seems to be composed of moving actors. Actors do not actually move in the still frames, it is an illusion, an error of perception, an error of the interpretation of the visual information, due in this case to the lack of temporal resolution to perceive the succesive frames individually, one by one; several frames are perceived as one, and, as there are differences between them, that is wrongly, but fortunately for some purposes, interpreted as a moving figure when the mental sensory information is integrated in wholes. Besides, the neurons in anyone’s head are not a unique and individual entity, like consciousness seems to be at first sight in the form of a conscious individual, as they are thousands of millions, another paradoxe. And yet another paradoxe: Consciousness appears at first sight as a continuous experience, while the connections between neurons are discontinuous in the synapses, as they do not get in physical contact: There is a spatial gap between neurons in the synapse, where they connect; even more: The neuronal activity is not continuous either, it is periodical, alternating in miliseconds between charge and discharge of the single signals, the transient single action potentials each neuron fires (Neurons have electric activity, they alternate between resting state and discharge). Although the brain is just another organ, like the lungs, or the kidney, and due to these paradoxes, brain, mind and consciousness introduce themselves in a mysterious and intriguing way, compared to other body organs.