Arnold Trehub, and his Retinoid theory projects rather than the locus, a specific type of neuron, called an autaptic neuron as the seat of consciousness. Attempts to find a locus of consciousness have been unrewarding suggesting that either there isn't one, or that there are multiple loci involved. My own work the Integrated Model of Consciousness is a multiple loci model. Based on the idea of a core consciousness that has been conserved across millennia and around which many new functions have formed. This approach suggests that the higher functions which are johnny come latelies in evolution are more associated with the later consciousness functions.

Hi, Nick,

I would guess that neuropsychological theories addressing metacognition would, more or less by implication, be of the kind you're asking about. Also ones accounting for introspective processes/ activy (e.g. in meditation, martial arts)  and for other-minds related mental processes (e.g. mind-reading, moral / ethical reasoning). Then there's the literature on depression and other self-grounded, self-focusing affective disorders. I'd suggest doing some searches on NCBI for any of these topics, and go from there.

Dear Nick,

Like Graeme, I think it is important to consider that there may be many subjective selves in a brain. But first I would want to be sure what you mean by subjective self. You say:

"I am interested in ... the self-as-subject (the locus in which consciousness projects from) and how it may be connected higher cognitive functions such as attention."

Do you really mean 'consciousness projects from'? To most people consciousness is a property of some entity or being, like awareness or readiness. X has consciousness if it 'is conscious' or awareness if it 'is aware' or readiness if it 'is ready'. We do not think of awareness or readiness projecting. 

To my mind being conscious or being aware is having an input from the world - experiencing or being informed by some signals about the world. So I would see the self as subject as connected to inputs from sensory pathways. And presumably these will be pathways that carry what is called the 'content of attention', since we think of ourselves as being aware of that content. People talk of attention as if it is some sort of act but it would not be an act of a self as subject in this sense since the self as subject just gets what it is given. 

Standard neurobiology would indicate that there are likely to be tens of thousands of cellular units each receiving the 'content of attention' at any one time so maybe these are your selves as subjects. There is no reason to think there is just one. Whatever in a brain is a self as subject there would be no reason for it to know if there were others since we know more or less nothing about the insides of our brains.

If you want a theory along these lines then look at my UCL webpage.

I would agree with Johnathan, in that attention is not an action per-se.  In my own research I've come to believe that attention is a skill, and the better trained your skill of attending is, the more likely you can "act" on it by attending to something without becoming distracted.

I also tend to gravitate to theories of the "self-as-process", rather than as an object or subject.  There is no locus of the self, just as there is no locus of "attention".  If you're looking for neural correlates, then the self would be "found" somewhere in the interaction b/w several of the "Default Mode" networks that are active during self-aware brain states.

As suggested above, meditation and articles relating to it will give you some great info on attention.  Specifically, when practicing vipassana meditation, one attempts to realize the concept of "non-self".  The idea is to attend to the inner processes that give rise to the self, without clinging (in the Buddhist sense) to the belief that they have true content.  In this way, the self beings to "dissolve away" during the mediation, and yet there is research showing that attentional control networks are running quite smoothly during this state.  So, I would say this implies that the self-as-subject is actually not required for attention.

I'd also add that consciousness is The Hard Problem for a good reason - no one has a clue how it arises, although there are tons of different theories. If you want to research consciousness, there are some interesting papers published recently concerning meditation and consciousness, as well as psychedelic drugs and consciousness.  The issues here, of course, is that the results are ultimately subjective, since we have no way of measuring consciousness. A monk in deep meditation could be highly attentive, but only to the sensation of hereness/nowness - in a way, he is barely conscious, and yet if we measured his brain in an MRI, attention and other higher cognitive processes might turn out to be unaffected.

I've never tried to answer a question on this site before, and if I had time I would link you some good papers.  But what the others have said should also give you good stuff to go on. Just try to steer away from ideas that consciousness, attention, and other processes of the mind, are located in specific spots in the brain. 

One thing I can tell you for sure: vipassana meditation involves the self-as-subject, and can improve attention-processes when practiced regularly. You will find many papers to support this.  Look for meta-analyses especially. Negative rumination, of the sort found in clinical depression, involves fixation on the self-as-object and less experience of the self-as-subject. Depression decreases cognitive flexibility and attentional control, and you can easily find papers that support this, too.

Maybe those are helpful for your research?  I hope it helps a bit, because I just realized I wrote a really long answer.

Unlike Jonathon, I believe the operative sized chunks are groups of neurons not neurons themselves, thus I am looking for my correlates in tissues rather than cells. While I agree that we are not likely to find one correlate for consciousness I have found a number of candidate correlates that offer partial matches to consciousness and therefore believe that we are looking for a combination of these partial matches. Consciousness is therefore integrated from a group of these partial correlates.

Graeme

On the issue of neuronal groups/ individual neurons as "operative sized chunks", this article by Rodolfo Llinas may interest you:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fncel.2014.00320/full

Thankyou for that quotation.

While I agree that neurons are not interchangeable, I am adamant that they also operate in groups of multiple different types of neurons in a tissue. One must understand how the individual neurons work, and what they do as a tissue to fully understand what they are doing. A neuron by itself is not enough to understand how it works you must also understand the neurons around it. Part of the problem is that part of what neurons do, is learn by connection about the environment if we don't understand what the surrounding neurons are doing we don't get a full picture of the environment that the neuron is acting within. Because neurons are so connective, part of the information we need to know is what neurons that they could be hooked up to, are they ignoring. I remember this being extremely important in the Belt area of the cortex, because the 4th laminae wasn't hooked up to the thalamus as it usually is.

This suggested to me that there was a reason why it wasn't, and I checked the other belt areas and found that they too were missing connection to the thalamus, suggesting that it was a function of the type of processing being done in that tissue.

Hey,

I am very interested in the question you ask, but I have very little time to answer it. I suggest you should look at the neuropsychological literature that try to understand "what happens to the experiential subject during dream state" (Windt and Metzinger, 2006). The paper by Metzinger & Windt - quoted above - certainly is useful for starting your enquiry on this topic.

"The philosophy of dreaming and Self consciousness: what happens to the experiential subject during the dreaming state" in The New science of dreaming, edited by Barret & Mc Namara, Praeger, Vol 3

The relation between the core self and selective attention is specifically treated in the paper "Where Am I? Redux". it can be seen on my RG page. In the retinoid theory of consciousness, a neuronal mechanism which I call the heuristic self-locus is the brain's way of performing what we think of as selective attention.

In 1972, Duval & Wicklund published their influential monograph on self-awareness in which they attempted to integrate concepts regarding the self-as-subject and the self-as-object into an encompassing theory.

However, on closer examination of the book, the self-as-subject is only marginally dealt with in a merely speculative manner, most of the authors' attention going to the self-as-object. Duval and Wicklund were aware of that imbalance and consistently presented their theory as a theory of "objective" self-awareness.

The problem is that focussing attention on it, the self-as-subject vanishes becoming a self-as-object. This is the paradox of the infinite regress faced by philosophers and psychologists dealing with the self-as-subject. I too have struggled with that problem, and building further on Duval & Wicklund, I considered the possibility that reflecting on the self-as-subject may produce particular representations of the self-as-object that carry particular features marked by the original self-as-subject. Using a metaphor I called it fossilised subject-self (also fossils carry marks of an organism that no longer exists). More information, and references, can be found in the attached article;

Peeters, G. & Hendrickx, A. (2007). The dual self: First and third person categorizations of the self and the role of objective self-awareness . Psychologica Belgica,47,145-171.

Why do you think there is an infinite regress in dealing with the self as subject, Guido? A can start by saying my self as subject is on the planet earth. The I can narrow it down to my sitting room, and then to my body, and then to my brain, since all my perceptions appear to be contingent on events within my brain and the outflow from my brain seems to do other things. Then I can consider which subcomponent of the brain any selves as subjects might reside in. Descartes made the reasonable suggestion of the pineal and I see no philosophical difficulty with that. It is just that he got the wrong place. Recent neurobiologists have suggested dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex but there are inconsistencies in the evidence for that. There is presently no consensus and we need to sort it out, but I see no need for infinite regress - why do you think there is?

I think that Guido, is saying that by trying to objectify self as subject, by finding it's location, we change our viewpoint into self as object and since this is not what we are looking for, we need to objectify self-as subject again with a different target which implies an infinite regress. It is a standard category error I believe not infinite regress, but toxic for all of that.

I'd like to think that my work somehow gets around that error by not focussing on individual locations but integrating a number of locations but in the end it requires a base case, a core consciousness that is an object as well as a subject.

My first impression after reading Jonathan's questions was that we were not on the same wavelength.  On closer examination, however,  Jonathan may have a point and the wavelength argument need at least some explanation if it would be more than a mere fobbing off with a bromide.  Anyway, when using the term "regression" I did not have in mind a regression along a physical-neurological dimension as Jonathan seem to have. As Graeme has pointed out,  I referred to an observation about self-reference many philosophers have made and formulated in various ways. Knowing something about a particular realm implies that the knowing subject takes a perspective from outside that realm. Hence a subject directing attention to the self is split up into a self as object (of knowledge), and a (knowing) self-as-subject that cannot be reduced to the self-as-object. This operation can be repeated: turning attention to the self-as-subject, the initial self-as-subject becomes a higher-order self-as-object that is the object of a higher-order self-as-subject's knowledge. Turning attention to that higher-order self-as-subject results in a next split into still higher order selves "as object" and "as subject", and so forth.  A popular metaphor is the painter who wants to paint a scene showing himself painting that scene on a canvas. To complete the painting he has to repeat that scene on the canvas depicted in his painting, and again on the canvas depicted on the depicted canvas, and so forth for all eternity, unless he decides to step out of the scene, leaves the painting behind and goes for a hearty drink.                                                                                                                               

In his comment, Jonathan localizes the self in the physical world. That's where it appears, soon after the self-as-subject has started reflecting on the self as an object. It is feasible that we ultimately will  achieve understanding of the neural processes through which our consciousness is established. But the "I" who achieves the understanding is taking the perspective of the self-as-subject that cannot be fully reduced to the object of the achieved understanding. Here we enter again the interminable dead end described above. However, even if we ignore that dead end and, staying on Jonathan's wavelength, continue the physical exploration of consciousness, we may anticipate another dead end beyond neurons, molecules, atoms, particles, elementary forces. 11-dimensional oscillations of strings....    The question whether this new regress is really "infinite" may be debatable. But it may end when the next step falls beyond the capacities of our understanding and physical  measuring tools—as a woodworm may never achieve understanding of our discussion going on by internet.  Time for another drink.