Evolving Brain 3.

The nature of consciousness.

I was stumbling, surely each neuron can’t hold specific complex data, assign itself some even insignificantly small element of meaning because how would it encode a million different meanings?

This is breathtaking!

All objects that we create are process based, i.e. we embed in them a process designed to provide a certain function, be it a chair, car or computer. When it doesn’t provide its function, ‘it’s broken.’ As we have become surrounded by these process-based things we have a tendency to think we are also process based, but I suggest we’re fundamentally different; we are outcome based. We are essentially an experiential learning system rather than a predefined process system. The difference is profound and essential to the following hypothesis of how the brain works.

In a process-based computer a pixel on the screen might be 233 down, 516 across, linking its geographical position with its process position. Now take a single receptor in an eye. It receives varying levels of light and transmits a signal, but how does the overall (brain) system ‘know’ where it is in the picture? Though the retina is an array it’s unlikely that it’s strictly geometric like the sensor in a video camera or that each receptor has a matched response to all other receptors.

If the brain is a ‘learning’ system it may, in response to its relationship with its environment, ‘learn’ the places of all the receptors so as to cause a recognisable picture to form, and creates a meta awareness of each receptors ‘place’ in the received picture. Similarly it learns to attenuate different receptor responses to give an even picture. This is totally different from a ‘process-based system’ that pre defines the position of receptors in an array and relies on the fixed geometry and even response of it.

Imagine for simplicity a screen of say 10 x 10 pixels, non of which are positionally defined, and a computer is programmed to run through all the permutations of assigning a100 picture elements to them until the user sees a recognisable picture. When the user recognises the picture and presses ‘stop’ that particular set of assignments is logged and ‘wired in’ as ‘the usable set’.

The learning relationship does not define the receptor positions in any geographical positional sense but in a ‘does it provide a good picture?’ sense, and ‘if it does use it there’. In this way a meta awareness is created of each individual receptor’s relative position and sensitivity. (This has been tested in a simple way with up-side-down glasses but could be tested further by more complex mixing up of an image.)

The systems learning relationship with its environment creates the ‘wired’ connection that becomes the system’s meta awareness of the receptor. The receptor then has two qualities, 1/ its response to brightness, and 2/ its meta position.

Though vision is a special case it provides an understandable example of the triggering and action of all neurons. Each neuron is switched on when some new element of experience is added to some existing experience and placed in the chain of previously activated neurons relating to that existing experience. As such its cognitive ‘position’ is defined by these preceding relationships. In the same way that a meta awareness gives every receptor its position in the picture by learning from the environment, each neuron acquires a meta position in the overall cognitive process by the neurons associated with it. It then goes on to trigger and be associated with other neurons, wiring them in turn into their meta positions.

In this way each neuron has an element of ‘meaning’ associated with its meta position; it is in effect assigned its meta position ‘in the picture’ of overall consciousness. It functions like the eye receptor in taking the signal level it receives ‘in its meta position’ and branches to associated neurons in accordance with how that level relates to their meta positions. Simplistically, ‘more than x go that way, less than x, go this way.’ The individual neuron thus has only a relatively simple task of comparison just like the eye receptor, but because it has a ‘wired in’ meta position in cognition it appears to hold a meaning specific to itself. The actual process though is a much simpler choice of ‘with respect to the meaning associated with its meta position’ what comes next in the systems relationship with its environment? Where in a process-based system ‘what comes next’ is fixed and preordained by the initial designer, here in an outcome based system “What might come next?” is the fundamental element of system behaviour, a sort of gravitational imperative, driving it towards an outcome. Where a process-based system is limited to the outcome of its fixed process an outcome-based system is limited by its ‘learnt’ capacity to provide a quality outcome. Where a process-based system is fragile, in that it can break if any element ceases to function, an outcome-based system is robust, in that it will always continue to an outcome even if that outcome is flawed by faulty elements along the way. Where a process-based system has one, for want of a better term, methodology, an outcome-based system is free to adopt any methodology in its imperative to achieve its best outcome.

Here then memory, that we might perceive as the brain’s data storage, is not fixed or held data, nor is it held ‘in’ the individual neurons but is formed by each neuron’s meta position in the overall cognitive meta framework. Memory is a meta construct created in real time, simply a slight variant of the same process as perception.  Similarly imagination is a real time construct of the same meta framework. Consciousness therefore is created in the brain by ongoing experience ‘wiring in’ each neuron into a meta position in the meta structure; in effect forming a meta brain, or what we may refer to as the mind. When these structures are revisited or re-cogn-ised for the purposes of perception, memory, imagination or dreaming the exact same process is used to create what we perceive as these different functions.

Our perception, memory, imagination and creativity are all held in and created in real time by the meta structure connecting up very simple functioning neurons.

A silly example: “If I’m in the pub, it must be Tuesday.” The meta element is that “Tuesday is 2 for 1 night down my local”, the positional element connecting the two that ‘makes sense’ of seemingly disassociated events.

As there is a high level of consistency in our environment, if our system maps that consistency onto our meta brain, then wherever our brain finds itself, momentarily at a certain neuron, the next neuron and the next will flow from and mirror the structure of that environmental consistency.

It might be likened to written language. As I type one letter, C, from only 26 choices, then another, A, from the same limited choices, then another, T, by a combination of the character and position I make the concept, CAT. Only by sequentially choosing the next character to occupy the next place does the sequence begin to hold our meta meaning of it. The neurons, originally blank spaces _ _ _ _ _ _ , are initially triggered by experience to hold a meta meaning and subsequently perform a simple choice at each particular stage in some real-time ongoing sequence being created in the meta structure. As the sequence unfolds each choice, though meaningless on its own, contributes, because of its position in this meta language structure, towards an understandable outcome, i.e.

N  O  T      A  L  L   _  C  A T  S  _  A  R  E  _  B  L  A  C  K   

Because environmental experience wires each neuron to a particular position in the meta structure the neuron’s simple choice ‘in that position’ contributes immeasurably more to the outcome than its individual functionality. It’s clear from this text example that 22 simple choices between a small number of relatively meaningless symbols, when taken as a sequence based on a meta structure, can produce any number of complex outcomes.

As the brain continues to make these meta connections it creates a meta structure and embeds new elements of experience into this growing structural mirror of its environment. It acts always as a complete cognitive entity whatever it contains or lacks, and produces all its cognitive outcomes in real time

What I find breathtaking is the conclusion that all cognitive processes are derived from one single ‘real-time’ process and that all cognitive ‘meaning’ is derived from the meta mapping of neurons ‘experientially added’ to mirror the environment in the moment of experiencing and reacting to it.

Recent brain scans have shown that activity in a particular area of neurons associated with a particular movement is observed not only when the movement is made but also when it is observed in others and when the movement is imagined or dreamed of. Though this seems to have come as a surprise to neuroscientists it is totally predicted by this hypothesis. It suggests that ongoing experience lays down a neural map or meta structure that is subsequently used for all cognitive processes; that all forms of cognition, be they perception, action, memory, imagination or dreams are all real time traverses across the same meta structure.

I have here for simplicity described a quite linear one-dimensional process as if one neuron leads to another and another and so on. In reality the brain is 3 dimensional with a high level of cross-linking placing each neuron on multiple paths. Never the less the option chosen is governed by the ongoing process towards finding a solution. As mentioned elsewhere the neuron doesn’t ‘choose’ an option, it simply surrenders to the flow of the overall brain activity towards a new equilibrium state that it defines as the best outcome or solution. The brain produces electrical energy that is dispersed through the network producing a perceived solution, rather like a capacitor discharging through a filigree of filaments.