Jo: "Individual modes of excitation can occupy large structures but cannot involve determinate event chains. Thus, accounts of experience based on groups of nerves related by signalling (‘networks’) are non-local."

Suppose: A --> B --> C --> (ABC)

Time ------------------------------->

Because events A, B, and C have *short-term memory* and compose (ABC) after the event C.

Wouldn't this make (ABC) *local* after the event chain A --> B --> C ?

If not, then I don't think I understand your claim.

But chains of physical events do not have short term memory, Arnold. And in what we call short term memory it is not the events that are stored by some signs for those events that are themselves new events.

And if A and B and C are events then ABC cannot be an event. If A is a white ball hitting a red ball and B is a white ball hitting a yellow ball, or a red ball hitting a yellow ball, and so on, what can ABC be, as a single physical event?

I don't think I understand your query!

Jo

Forget balls. Think of an array of three leaky capacitors, A, B, C, each charged by a different voltage pulse source with a delay between each successive pulse. If the charge in A has not decayed to some threshold value before B and C are charged, then we have three active capacitors (neurons?) *concurrently* composing the spatio-temporal excitation pattern (ABC). Why is this not a single physical event that can be decomposed into its constituents A, B, and C?

Very interesting question. There are many possible different approaches.

One approach, I think, would be describing any mind 'experience' as contained within a quantum mechanical description of the mind - i.e., in short, in the mind's wave function. (Several authors have described the QM operation of the mind/brain collective.) The absorption of experience then leads to a change in the brain/mind collective's wave function. This wave function evolves through time via coherence (through the take-up of new experiences i.e. variables) as well as, possibly, forgetting (aka decoherence from past experiences and hence variables)

The locality of experience is then embedded in the timelike evolution of the wave function: it is this timelike evolution that gave and gives rise to the constantly evolving multi-D 'shape' of the wavefunction.

Interestingly, a mind can decohere from itself , leading the mind to split : a decoherence of the mind's wavefunction then occurs (which gives rise to several wave functions, partly or wholly separate from the earlier unique wave function)

Simple deliberate volition can cause 'internal brain decoherence' to happen, and, as the psychiatrist Dr. Mark Salter of the Homerton Hospital in London once put it to William Storr, 'it will scare you'.

This following conversation with Mark Salter is cited by William Storr who was interviewing Dr. Salter in the context of people who seemed to change personalities when performing on stage:

Quote

Dr Salter: Call it Multiple Personality. We can all have them

William Storr: I don't have multiple personalities

Dr Salter: Well, try a little trick for me:

Just imagine a version A and a version B of yourself and have a conversation in your head between them as you drive home from this interview. You know, like,

"What are you doing tonight ?

Well, I thought I'd write up this interview

Well you could, but there's some great TV on

I know, but I have a lot of backlog work to deal with ..."

Carry on like that for one hour and I promise you, you'll scare yourself. Before long, the first voice will become, say, more outgoing and develop a liking for art and German techno music; the second one will be introvert and prefer science and South American heavy metal.

Unquote

The DID disorder (formerly MPS) is also a consequence of the wave function split - which thus can occur either through volition or involuntarily, when the brain seemingly takes over and attempts to protect itself

Dear Arnold and Chris,

I think you are both talking about states, not events. Locality is not a property of states. You can choose any collection of dynamic dispositional patterns and call it a state - like the health of the male population of Alaska. States are demarcated arbitrarily by the describer and are no use as an explanation of experience since they do not indicate why my experience is separate from yours. Three capacitors may be a state but so would adding a fourth. The state of 100 neurons in a brain is as arbitrary as that of one neuron in 100 brains. Without an INTERACTION or event we have no way to explain why all the features of one of my experiences belong to that experience and all the features of yours belong to yours. A wave function of a brain is to my mind a very dubious concept since a wave function is a mathematical tool for describing ensembles of states, not even a state. The state it might describe (but cannot because initial conditions cannot be ascertained) is also arbitrarily defined so cannot explain what belongs to one experience and what to another. If experiencs are states and you can add microstates to make macrostates then why are our experiences tied to a very tiny proportion of goings on in one brain rather than all the brains in the Isle of Wight? We cannot answer that question by invoking messages being sent inside brains because they are not states, but events, and, anyway, the people of the Isle of Wight often send each other messages.

I am aware that 'brain states' have been invoked in theories of consciousness by people like Churchland but they fail on this simple count.

What we know about experiences is that as far as we can ascertain they are always totally local. In other words scientists never find their observations subject to telepathy. They are always dependent on the speed of light or sound and some sort of interaction. That is why observations are the read out of the dynamic laws of physics that describe interactions. If experiences show the locality of events whenever we can ascertain that in terms of what happens outside the cutis, and indeed inside, at least as far in as V4, then to say that at some unascertainable inner point they suddenly become non-local is effectively to say that they are not described by physics after all. We have a dualism worse than Descartes, who at least was up front about an interface between two types of dynamic law where nerves pulled on the soul.

But isn't the only way an experience can be perceived is through a new state brought about by the experience ?

It's how observation works in QM, to wit via the entanglement of the observer with the observed. Memories are then kept through the establishment of a resonance pattern inside the observer's brain. An experience does not exist per se, what exists is its observation and then the memory thereof by one observer. Or am I missing something ?

Jo: "The state of 100 neurons in a brain is as arbitrary as that of one neuron in 100 brains. Without an INTERACTION or event we have no way to explain why all the features of one of my experiences belong to that experience and all the features of yours belong to yours."

You seems to completely disregard the role of local *mechanisms*. The neurons A, B, C are an integral part if a particular local mechanism in a particular brain. My brain and your brain occupy separate locations in the physical universe. Therefore the activity of A, B, C in my brain is a feature separate from the feature given by the activity of A', B', C' in your brain.

Consider this modification of the A, B, C capacitor example. Suppose that the discharge in each capacitor turned on a colored bulb: A --> Red, B --> Green, C --> Blue. In this case we would have a complex interaction of the EM wavelengths emitted by each bulb. The EM interactions would create a wide range of composite color features depending on the energy output of each discharging capacitor and the location of the R, G, B bulbs. Now substitute neurons for capacitors and bulbs and you will see that arrays of neurons can exhibit local effects in the mechanisms of individual brains.

Many years ago, as an avocation, I developed a new kind of art medium that I called *helio-kinetic collage*. It utilized polarized light and birefringent materials to create patterns and colors that changed dramatically depending on the viewers position relative to the collage. None of the critical materials were colored. The perceived color and shape were created from a white light source by the complex interaction of component EM wavelengths within the space occupied by the observer. I suggest that the local field potential activity of tightly-packed neurons in the cognitive mechanisms of the brain interact this way.

Under a pseudonym, I created and exhibited many collages of this kind. An example can be seen here:

http://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?museum=all&t=objects&type=ext&f=&s=&record=2&id_number=1973.5

It is important to understand that you will see no color patterns at the surface of the collage. It is only in the space beyond the surface that the interaction of EM waves create the colors and forms that can be perceived and photographed.

Dear Chris,

I might have thought you were missing something, but I like to do my due diligence and checked out your RG page.

What you are worried you are missing may perhaps be your own sharp insight into 'bubbles of time'. I think what I am trying to argue, from a priori necessity, is that an experience is one of your bubbles of time.

I have called these 'spacetime sequins' (our models may differ slightly but maybe not much). They are domains of time in the sense that they form a directional sequence - what we call cause. So the sequins are connected by hook and eye with a direction. But within the sequin the measurements are in spacetime, in accordance with SR/GR, such that there is no 'quantity' of time separate from a quantity of space.

We still need to be careful about reifying this in a naive way and both bubbles and sequins can be misunderstood, I think you will agree. But I think there is idea here we can grasp, which, as you say, resolves the difficulty of EPR. I actually think that the human conflation of sequence with metric time and failure to intuit spacetime stems directly from H. sapiens-specific connection patterns in the temporoparietal region. Other animals cannot even extract pure sequence so they will not have a sense of time even quite like ours, but although we can extract sequence, so far our culture has conflated it with one dimension of the metric because that is how the unconscious processing does it. The good news is that with deliberate thought we can redress this.

The problem I see with virtually all QM 'interpretations' is that they are designed to explain to people who want a static or kinematic analysis of the universe - what 99% of humans feel comfy with. But right at the start of the founding of physics Leibniz worked out that such analysis of 'states' will always be a mirage. The only 'underlying' reality we can ever know about is purely dynamic - it is just events. Leibniz had a hang up about enduring substances so the real power of his analysis did not become apparent until Whitehead got rid of these (to my mind).

So an experience is a new event in its own time bubble that if you like brings itself about, but it is not a state because any attempt to describe it will be in terms of what measurements you can then make and these will be new events ... The jargon of QM is totally confusing and bogus in this regard. Bohr himself got some way towards getting it right I think but he made mistakes and von Neumann then screwed up badly and all the other people like Everett and Bohm and Zurek have been digging holes for themselves. 'States' are just placeholders in mathematical tools.

So maybe in terms of your analysis an experience is the most proximal event in what you call an observation. Bohr's framework treats the observer as 'classical' or determinate and the 'quantum system' (roughly) as indeterminate. But if we are interested in the event of experience I think it only makes sense to consider this the other way around. We are now considering the dynamics of the observing, not the observed. It is the experiencing unit that is indeterminate and what is being experienced is determinate. 'Quantum' always refers to the 'present' which is the progression of Psi in its own time bubble and 'classical' always refers to the 'past' which is the field of potentials V that the progression of Psi is modified by.

So the the fact that QM equations are linear and can be added to make 'composite wave functions' is, I think, a sources of a metaphysical disaster promulgated by von Neumann and culminating in Wheeler - de Witt. I think there are real separate dynamic units, which to a first approximation are quantised modes, but to be rigorous may be something that seems even more abstract than that - there are issues of identity of indiscernibles and things to worry about.

We have to have time bubbles to have separate experiences. And there is nothing arbitrary about proposing these bubbles. They are simply the well established limits of locality defined by QM. Leibniz was right. All we can ever know about are interactions or events. And the only thing that can know about them is an event. 'States' with 'intrinsic properties' are the myths of naive realism, which still permeates almost all of the contemporary physics literature. (I think.)

Sorry, Arnold, but whether you call it a mechanism or a system or whatever, a collection of events is an arbitrary concept to which causal locality need not apply.

It may be a deep irony that the locality of experience is the one thing that is often denied. One hears the suggestion that experiences exist at a time but not a place. Yet, in fact, the locality of experience is the perhaps the single most essential part of physics. If observers are not local then there can be no physical equations of the sort we have. If Eddington had been in Peru as well as Africa when measuring the perihelion of mercury the equations would have been useless. The mechanism we call the internet can be in Peru and Africa at the same time but only as something observed, not as an observer.

You and I will never agree on this one, Arnold. Maybe we should be content with agreeing on other things and maybe that we have learnt a good deal from each other!

Jo, I want to assure you that, like you, I believe that conscious experience happens locally. Our dispute hinges on what counts as a the biophysical boundary of a local conscious event. As I recall, you claim that the global conscious experience of the world must be contained within single neurons in a single brain, whereas I clam that the global conscious experience of the world must be contained within a particular multi-neuronal mechanism (retinoid space) in a single brain. I think this dispute will be settled in time by the weight of empirical evidence.

Thanks for your answer Jonathan, and apologies for responding a bit late (other duties having called in their chips)

I have to agree with your take here.

One of the issues we keep coming across is that we attempt to solve conundrums through ever-complexifying theoretical constructs which end up throwing off more questions - see for instance the exhaustive & grand but so far failed attempts at explaining *physically* Bell's inequality (Huw Price has done a good job reviewing those attempts).

Within this context, Max Tegmark's view of an ultimate mathematical structure to the Universe looks very appealing (although I have to modestly but firmly disagree with some of his derivations, which IMMO stem from a misapprehension of some calculations involving infinities.)

A lot of rather obvious questions give a hint to where we should be heading, which is what I'm beginning to address in my current book (e.g.: how does relativistic simultaneity between you and, say, a far away star work out when you spin around your body axis? Under relativity, you'd then be simultaneously simultaneous with events that are materially, say, a couple of days apart. How can that be ? There's something not quite complete in our current views.)

Jon, I gave the example of the heliokinetic collage because it demonstrates that electromagnetic events really do interact systematically in the space beyond their source. This means that the bioelectric activity of arrays of autaptic neurons (Z-planes) in retinoid space is not simply the activity of N individual cells, but is also a global spatio-temporal *unit* of their interacting EM properties.

Arnold, I am puzzled by your description of the collage. If your electromagnetic events are photons then they do not interact with each other. I think it was Dirac who said that a photon only ever interferes with itself. Things get a bit more complex with LASERs but for them individual photons can be replaced by coherent modes. The colours you get with birefringent materials, like the quartz plates I used to use for identifying urate crystals as blue one way and yellow the other, are due to differential extinction of photons of different wavelengths in the context of crossed polars. Each photon can interact with several media. That interaction is over a quite large domain but each photon has its own domain of interaction, independent of any other. I tend to think of the whole life of a photon as one local event - confined to the domain of non-trivial 'superposition'.

Jo, regardless of what Dirac said about photons, you could not get the the various colors and shapes in the space beyond the colorless surface of the collage if it were not for EM-wave frequency-phase interactions in the space occupied by the observer. Moreover, there are dramatic color-shape changes in the perception of the collage as you move through the space in front of it. Of course, you cannot see this in the static picture from the museum.

Sorry, Arnold, but I do not understand what you are suggesting. Interactions between waves on the basis of phase create beats - which in this case would be outside visible range, whether 700-450nm or 700+450nm. Being bosons, photons show no destructive interference with each other. Light quanta cannot increase or decrease in 'amplitude' in the way that a classical wave can. I simply don't understand what you can be referring to. Can you give me a reference to the mechanism you are describing?

Jo: "Can you give me a reference to the mechanism you are describing? [For my heliokinetic collages]

I'm not a physicist, but as I understand it, birefringent materials separate light into two paths, a direct path which allows light waves to pass through as through a plate of glass, the other path *retards* the light waves with respect to the direct path. This creates phase differences between the EM wave frequencies composing a white light source from the direct path and the EM wave frequencies emitted from the longer (retarding) path. The complex interference/interaction patterns of the light waves in the space beyond the birefringent material, when using polarized light, results in the production of colored patterns from a white light source. It took me a couple of years of experimentation to learn how to use the birefringent materials to produce the desired visual effects in my collages.

Here is a link that gives a brief description of birefringence:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/polint.html#c1

Dear Arnold,

Birefringence is not an easy topic, as I discovered when I found myself responsible for teaching it to medical students in the context of diagnostic microscopy. The link you give is quite nice but I would take issue with the claim of destructive interference. Any extinction is due to absorption in a subsequent polar plate, I believe.

This may seem rather far from my original topic, but I agree that we want to play devil's advocate with some specific examples, so it is worth getting this clear. As I understand it the two 'paths' that light takes through a birefringent crystal are equivalent to the two slits in Young's experiment. What Dirac was pointing out is that in Young's experiment each photon goes through both slits and 'interferes' with itself and only itself. The same applies in birefringence. Physics jargon is actually sloppy. This is not actually destructive or constructive interference, since the amplitude of a photon is fixed. It just gives the same pattern as for destructive interference for classical waves in terms of where photons are most likely to hit a screen. With Young's slits the 'interference' means that photons only tend to arrive at the screen in certain bands. For birefringence the 'interference' of a photon with itself results in the photon precessing, or shifting its plane of polarity. That means that although all the photons entering a birefringent crystal should have, say, vertical polarisation, if we put a vertical polar plate in front of it, and should be extinguished by placing a horizontal polar after the crystal, the shift in polarisation in the crystal allows some photons to get through the second plate after all and the crystal looks bright. If you put your polars parallel then the crystal twists the photons out of this plane and they look dark.

The crystals we used to look at are very tiny and only shift polarity a little bit. For such a small shift the effect of the relation to the crossed polars is not much different for all wavelengths of light so they look white. However, someone had the clever idea of putting a thick standard birefringent quartz plate between the polars as well. The precession from this is so gross that it is importantly different for blue and red photons. One twists on itself more than the other. The thickness is chosen so that with crossed polars a tiny crystal that adds a tiny bit of positive precession will let blue photons get through the second polar but a tiny crystal with a tiny bit of negative precession will let red and green photons through and look yellow. Green to turquoise photons don't do well either way and with no crystal everything looks white minus turquoise=magenta. So with a variety of thickish crystals you can create whatever colours you like by preferentially allowing through photons of different colours.

In all this no two photons of different wavelengths ever interfere. In fact no two photons interfere. Photons cannot interact with each other because interaction must involve force and photons have neither charge nor mass, nor indeed nuclear force properties. They can only mediate force between two charges.

Jo: "Photons cannot interact with each other because interaction must involve force and photons have neither charge nor mass ..."

It is my understanding that the energy and momentum of a photon depends on its frequency and is inversely related to its wavelength. If this is the case, why should we say that the complementary wave property of a photon can *not* interact (constructively or destructively) with the wave properties of other photons. The color effects in my heliokinetic collages suggest that such interactions occur. Incidentally, I have also constructed kaleidoscopes that give striking varieties of visual display using the same birefringent materials as in the collages.

I think you had better ask a physicist Arnold, but I have read Feynman's lectures from start to finish recently, not to mention Aitchison and Hey's Gauge Theories book and I think you will find I am describing certain basic properties of photons correctly!

Jo,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY

As observers' angle and distance from the surface of a heliokinetic collage changes, there are striking changes in the color and shapes seen on the collage (an experiment?). This can be explained on the basis of interference/interaction of light waves. I don't know how to explain these systematic effects otherwise.

That's because the differential transmission of different colours I described above depends on the relative orientations of all the components of the system. With the coloured crystals I described they change from blue to yellow and back to blue if you rotate the microscope slide carrying the crystals. Precession of polarisation with birefringent materials is dependent on the relation of the two axes of refraction to the light path. It cannot be explained on the basis of interference of light waves of different frequencies because there is no such thing! As I indicated before, if two waves of frequencies X and Y interfere then you get beat frequencies, which would be outside the visible range if they existed. Because photons are complex harmonic oscillations in Hilbert space rather than simple harmonic oscillations in Euclidean space they do not actually interfere in the classical sense. There is no situation in physics in which light rays of 'colour' A and rays of 'colour' B interact to give rays of 'colour' C. 'Colour mixing' is a function of the occipital cortex. Ask a physicist Arnold.

Jo: "Because photons are complex harmonic oscillations in Hilbert space rather than simple harmonic oscillations in Euclidean space they do not actually interfere in the classical sense."

You have me here! But to get back to the problem of locality, Does locality have a physical boarder in Euclidian space?

Sorry, typo: "boarder"should read "border". Gets worse with age.

So, Jo, does locality have a physical border in Euclidean space?

In practical terms, yes, locality implies a border, or perhaps limit is a better term, in Euclidean space, or at least in Minkowski spacetime. The most obvious aspect of this is a light cone. Locality is incompatible with causal contributions that would have to interact supraluminally. The more precise limits of an event involve some issues of indeterminacy but one can propose something a bit like a light cone which one could call a 'non-trivial histories-bundle ellipsoid' in a Feynman approach, and this would define a complete limit in spacetime. In terms of a photon from a known source reaching a known point on a screen the ellipsoid would include all slits it could have gone through to make that connection but not slits too far out to the side to contribute non-trivially to the connection. There is this problem with quantum theory that mnothing is quite certain, but you can still define limits beyond which probabilities are vanishingly small.

Thanks, Jo. Now my question is: How does the membrane of a dendrite relate to the locality limit of its single neuron?

A good question Arnold. A single neuron is an arbitrarily defined biological domain within which locality limits will vary widely for different events. The locality limits for a phosphorylation event may be considered to be confined to a domain of a few Angstrom units adjacent to a kinase enzyme molecule. On the other hand, electron transfer events in mitochondria may involve modes that cross molecular boundaries, rather as electron modes in metals can occupy the entire length of a wire. When it comes to membrane excitation events the domains involved are not well understood.

Until recently it was thought likely that integration of post synaptic potentials could be considered as a single electrodynamic event within a dendritic tree, that was separate from the subsequent propagation in soma and axon because it did not involve significant propagation of voltage dependent ion channel changes along the membrane. That has changed, so that since 2010 it looks as if individual dendritic branches support separate electrodynamic events that interact at junctions.

Either way, there are some very serious methodological and ascertainment problems involved in trying to figure out at what level these events should be regarded as truly indivisible and what domains are involved. Most of the electrical current is mediated by ions in solution and these should be very local indeed (Angstroms). For there to be any 'binding' of PSP effects my conclusion has been that these would have to interact indivisibly with modes in the membrane and since these don't look likely to be electron modes it seems more likely that they are modes of ordered structure - i.e. phononic. A dendritic tree will be occupied by complex families of such modes but I think it is reasonable to expect that some of these will occupy the whole tree but not the soma, because there is a sharp shift in structural parameters when you meet the soma. If we think of it is simple acoustic terms it seems reasonable to think that the dendritic tree can have its own independent 'ring' in the way that the reeds of a harmonica do. If this is the right analysis then the locality limit is very simply the extent of membrane that supports the phononic mode of interest. One of the nice things about phononic modes is that because they are modes that arise by dint of the existence of ordered solid structures their domains are very neatly defined by the extent of those structures. There is simply no meaning to the amplitude of a phononic mode outside the domain of material that it arises from. The ring of a bell is the paradigmatic case.

A key point is that in this analysis the domain of an event is defined by that of some mode partaking in the event and in the sense of 'being influenced'. This raises some peculiar metaphysical problems but both Leibniz and Whitehead have addressed these and provided a basis for further analysis in the context of quantum field theory. The equations provide an indication of how it should go, but not many people have looked at the implications quite in the terms I am exploring.

Jo, let's suppose that individual neurons function in a phononic (piezoelectric?) mode. How does the distribution of the phononic waves on the dendrite account for the hallucination of a triangle in motion that occurs in the SMTT experiment?

The distribution of the phononic mode does not determine the image. It is the input of the post synaptic potentials to the mode that encodes the image in this model. Fortunately, those inputs come from precisely the sort of cells you propose in your retinoid system, so if the retinoid system represents a hallucination of a triangle in motion the phononic mode gets it from the horse's mouth!

Jo: "Fortunately, those inputs come from precisely the sort of cells you propose in your retinoid system, so if the retinoid system represents a hallucination of a triangle in motion the phononic mode gets it from the horse's mouth!"

Interesting. So if I understand properly, the retinoid image causes a corresponding preconscious pattern of PSP input to a neuron that transforms these PSP patterns into a phononic mode in the dendrite of the neuron, at which point they become conscious experiences. Like this: [retinoid-space activation pattern] (preconscious) --> [phononic-mode neuron] (conscious). And the reason for the extra step is that the retinoid image, as such, is not local and therefore unconscious, whereas the phononic wave it induces is local and therefore conscious. Have I got this right?

Very nearly but there is a subtlety worth working through. The nature of the phononic mode is determined by a relation between two things. One is a set of parameters that belong to the ordered structure of the dendritic tree. This might equate to the length of the barrel of an oboe, the degree of flair of the bell and the velocity of sound in air. The other is the pattern of PSPs that a mode with these parameters 'encounters' or perhaps 'negotiates or navigates'. This pattern is a bit like the pattern of keys the fingers press down to produce the second F natural above middle C (quite a complicated pattern). In quantum field theory, as indeed in classical acoustics, the mode that is actually set up depends indivisibly on all these features. The air going through the reed is not like a ball thrown in the air that will describe a parabola dependent only on its velocity. It takes part in a complex dynamic relation (effectively resonance) that is as dependent on where it ends up as where it begins. Moreover, for the F note, the parameters of the resulting mode (not those of the oboe) in terms of wavelength and harmonics bear a very indirect relation to the position of any one finger. (Conveniently, all this has an equivalent in the structure of quantum field theory equations for spin zero massless bosons if we want to underpin it at that level.)

I think the significance of this is that it would be misleading to think that the pattern of a moving triangle is encoded in the mode's pattern. I prefer to think of the mode as 'reading' the PSP pattern exactly in the way that an x-ray beam 'reads' the crystal structure of a protein. The computational function of the neuron will then arise from the ability of a mode with those particular parameters to trigger axon hillock firing, and maybe to do it quicker than any other and be the 'winner to take all'. What I like about your complete model is that it calls for the sort of range of computational styles in different sorts of neurons that I think modes would handle better than integrate and fire. Mike Hausser's stuff on non-linear behaviour of dendritic domains to my mind is beginning to justify this sort of speculation, although it is still very speculative.

Jo: " I prefer to think of the mode as 'reading' the PSP pattern exactly in the way that an x-ray beam 'reads' the crystal structure of a protein. The computational function of the neuron will then arise from the ability of a mode with those particular parameters to trigger axon hillock firing, and maybe to do it quicker than any other and be the 'winner to take all'"

But this puzzles me. Reading the PSP pattern and triggering a 'winner take all' is what my synaptic matrices do *after* the current *conscious* content/pattern of our global retinoid space has been parsed and processed by a filter-cell. Put another way, we must be conscious *before* the readout/perception occurs. The moving triangle is consciously experienced before it is *perceived and identified* as a moving triangle.

Anyone interested..... I make the following observations realizing that they may have no relevance whatever to the amazing avant-garde inquiries that Arnold and Jo et alii are so diligently, competently and boldly pursuing. But since I think I speak for existentialist informed common sense maybe what I have to say will have some relevance to what you all are doing.

Right now my computer is in my visual field. My computer is about two feet way in objective, measurable space. But .... and this is bizarre but rigorously true I think: .the computer's being-seen is is literally the same event as my seeing it. Its being-seen and my seeing it are mutually implicated in being. This is something astonishing, and seems incredible because we assume a priori that vision "has to be" inside our head. So surprise! Visual consciousness is nothing more nor less than what it seems to be: access to the surrounding world. Visual consciousness is not an event in the physical world. Visual consciousness is not in measurable space. In fact it is not in any kind of space, though it is necessarily spatial. It is inconceivable what an interval of visual consciousness would be that was not spatial. Even dreams are intervals of consciousness and they are also spatial. But their spaciality is not measurable. I posted an entire essay on existential spatiality on research gate some time ago.

I will not be put off if you laugh and think I am a crank. I will be intrigued no end by someone who can tell me what I have said that is not confirmed by your own experience. Also I think I can hear someone say. "You you may have something here Mr. Springer, but it has no relevance to the serious investigations we are concerned with."

Yes, Arnold, I oversimplified. The difficulty here is that we hit intrinsic ascertainment problems in the nature of our reporting of experiences, and the verification of those reports, not just to the world but to our own brains. The integration of information in dendrites will of course occur at every level of inference. At one stage what is integrated may not include the concept of triangle, just the necessary data, with the concept of triangle being triggered by the resulting output. At a further stage the concept of triangle will be part of the information being integrated. When we report having experienced a moving triangle there may be no fact of the matter which of these levels our brain is 'referring to'. 'Reference' is a very troublesome non-physical relation that I suspect does have a basis in physical causal relations but not in such a way that there is a ever a fact of the matter about what refers to what. We all assume that there is only one instance of an 'experience event' in our head at one time but I think that is exceedingly unlikely. I think there are differences in our approaches to the way information is encoded in space in brains but I hope that these do not create too great issues for this particular question. Perhaps I could say that wherever you feel that the idea of a moving triangle is encoded for phenomenal experience in a cellular array my model would put the phenomenality in the dendrites of a cell receiving axonal branches from your array.

On the contrary, WIlliam, your comments are very relevant. They neatly express the confusion we have over our definitions of 'events' that pervade not just ordinary talk but what claims to be rigorous neurological biophysics. If you are making an error you are in very good company - with many of the most eminent neurobiologists.

I think John Heil, following Charles Martin, has something useful to say here. He points out that the 'objects' we talk about in ordinary conversation are rag bag concepts that can very easily give rise to invalid arguments. We say an apple is red when we mean its skin is red, we say it is sweet when we mean the juice is sweet. As Martin said, if we want to do careful and rigorous metaphysics we cannot get away with 'holus-bolus' object terms. So I think when you talk of a person seeing a computer and want to relate it to a rigorous metaphysical treatment of space I think we have to step back and consider what aggregates we are loosely including in 'computer' and 'person'.

Leibniz gives the rules for this. He says that the only real relations are direct relations between indivisible dynamic units and the universe. It is worth noting that this is precisely the structure of modern physics equations even if people still loosely talk of objects. There is no event of a person seeing a computer, any more than there is an event of the annual migration of birds. These are arbitrary aggregates of events that work in ordinary conversation but not if we want to analyse rigorously. Within each real event there is the sort of 'both ways around' aspect that you describe, although strictly speaking it is not symmetrical, the two ways are not the same. For what we think of as A relating to B there is in fact, in physics, only A relating indivisibly to a part of the universe that includes B and B relating indivisibly to a part of the universe that includes A. We cannot do metaphysics with everyday talk about interactions.

The importance of the distinction between measurable space and the spatiousness of experiences and dreams is noted by Newton right at the beginning of his Principia. These are two different usages of the same word that should not be conflated. What I would argue against is the idea that an event of human conscious experience that seems to be of 'a computer on my desk' is not in dynamic physical space. I think we have every reason to think that this event occupies some small domain in a brain. The fact that our experiences seem to occur in time but not in space, as is often alluded to in philosophy, is, I think, a very predictable consequence of the way the brain can ascertain its own internal events. Because nothing moves about in a brain, a brain cannot track its own events in space. However, it can track its own events in time, using an internal biological clock as reference. So we know when we had a thought but not which bit of our brain it was in. This is not an issue of whether or not the event is in space, just our ability to infer exactly where.

Jo: "Perhaps I could say that wherever you feel that the idea of a moving triangle is encoded for phenomenal experience in a cellular array [retinoid space] my model would put the phenomenality in the dendrites of a cell receiving axonal branches from your array."

Consider the example of the *pendulum illusion* which was predicted by the neuronal structure and dynamics of the retinoid model. In this illusion, if a circle is moved back and forth at about 2 cycles/sec behind an opaque screen and viewed through a triangular aperture in the screen, it will be seen as an egg-shaped object *swinging like a pendulum* that is pivoting at the vertex of the triangular aperture instead of moving in lateral motion. A neuronal activation pattern that is strictly analogous to this conscious experience is naturally evoked in retinoid space by the functional properties of the retinoid system. So a spatio-temporal biophysical analog of what we see exists in the multicellular retinoid mechanism. Can you say that the same spatio-temporal pendulum pattern (the phenomenality) also exists in the phononic waves that are induced in your target dendrite? If so, can you explain how?

No, Arnold, I would not expect an analogue of the spatial pattern of the pendulum in the dendritic tree. This is where I think William has made an important point. The 'space' of phenomenality is not a measurable space. It is a sensed space that must be incommensurable with measured dynamic space. We have no reason to think that the pattern of an event in dynamic metric space will have any direct similarity to the pattern of sensed spatiousness that arises as the experience that is that event from the point of view of a specific protagonist dynamic unit.

Jo: "No, Arnold, I would not expect an analogue of the spatial pattern of the pendulum in the dendritic tree. ..... We have no reason to think that the pattern of an event in dynamic metric space will have any direct similarity to the pattern of sensed spatiousness that arises as the experience that is that event from the point of view of a specific protagonist dynamic unit."

If what you claim is true, then how is the subject in the SMTT experiment able to correctly adjust the base of the hallucinated triangle to match its measured height? According to the single-cell phononic model, "the pattern of sensed spatiousness" must be incommensurable with measured dynamic space.

I enter this somewhat technical debate with some trepidation and hope that my comments do not sound naive. My understanding (along with William's) is that experience is not a locatable category. I may be able to locate the neuro-physiological mechanisms that are necessary to the occurrence of an experience but however long I look at the conditions that relate to the experience of e.g. red, I cannot say what that experience is. Redness does not appear in my brain. In order to know if someone is experiencing red then I have to ask them. I might make an inference that every time neural event 'x' occurred a person reports seeing red but there is no way of getting from the one to the other without at some point a shared experience and language in which to report it. In this sense, experiences are shared, not in heads but rather out there to be had as we train/develop our neuro-physiological system to make them a part of our consciousness.

I have got a bit behind wit this thread but first I should answer Arnold. When I say that the pattern of sensed spaciousness is incommensurable with measured dynamic space I am not suggesting that it is incommensurate. That is to say that there is no 'ill-fitting'. The sense of spaciousness simply does not figure in the dynamic analysis that will determine the ability to compute appropriately. It is the first person account, not the third person account. I agree with Descartes that experience and the dynamics which cause it are incommensurable, in the sense that we still no language in which to describe rules of relation, and that we should expect this to be the case.

Dear Mike,

We have the problem that all these words mean different things in different contexts. My interest is in experience in the sense of some event that 'cashes out' the laws of physics. As Russell pointed out all physics has experience (often under the euphemism of 'observation') as its gold standard. And whenever the laws of physics are invoked it is in order to make a prediction about the content of an experience under rigorously defined conditions of place and time. So the experiences that legitimise physics must be in a place and at a time. Unless they were locatable physics would be pure nonsense.

You say that redness does not appear in your brain, but experienced redness is definitely not a feature of an outside world unobserved by a brain. There are other meanings of redness to do with reflection or transmission or emission of long wavelength light but they are only all called redness because they tend to engender experienced redness, which has to be in a brain. Newton's optics would be empty otherwise - and he makes this point himself in the letter to Henry Oldenburg. The fact that somebody else looking at a brain does not see it to be red is clearly irrelevant.

The problems of language you mention affect all physics equally. We have to have calibrating devices and physics lessons to standardise our talk - however we apply physics.

And I do not really understand what a 'shared experience' is other than a turn of phrase use in social chat. My wife and I may share the experience of going to the opera but that is like sharing a pizza. In fact I eat one half of the pizza and she eats the other half. I get some of the photons and phonons from the stage and orchestra pit and she gets some others. We both infer certain dynamic dispositional properties of voices and acting prowess from this and often agree on appropriate descriptions, but often not. We understand all that perfectly well and I do not see how introducing an idea of 'shared experience' in a research context leads to any useful testable theory. (It tends to make me think of Jung's mystical speculations.) It may do in another context but I cannot see that it is relevant to the place of experience in physics and the clear formulation of locality in that context.

Clearly the experience has to take place in a spatial and temporal location, but that does not mean that the experience itself has location. If the conditions were repeated in another location then presumably the experience would similarly be repeated. If a researcher in the second location observed the phenomenon under the same conditions them we might argue that she was enjoying the same experience. Two peoples experience may not be identical. Conditions are infinitely variable at their most subtle levels but there would be sufficient commonality and the macro level to sat that the experiences were the same.

In a world of colour blind researchers they may understand the concept of redness by virtue of their understanding of light and wavelengths but I doubt that we could say that anybody actually had the experience of red. If we did it would be a different experience to that of the sighted person. The neuro-physiological descriptions are necessary but insufficient to explain the concept of red as a human experience.

It is unlikely that any individual's experience of an opera and a pizza are identical with any others - each experiences the events under subtly different conditions. The question is that of how we know this without at least having a concept of having the same experience. You will only know that your wife's experiences are different from your own if you can at least share the generality of the experienced event. I would regard this as a logical necessity rather than a mystical insight. It is connected with how our experience relates to our public language and the concepts that they enable us to have, without which Kant tells us experiences are blind.

Dear Jonathan

I find most of your comments on Research gate to be exceptionally attuned to metaphysical questions. I often have self doubt and think I must be a pedestrian thinker after all. Other times I think I am ahead of the game. As I did when you commented on some of what I have written in these pages.

Now, if I am not quite mistaken you seem to hold with me that there is a fundamental difference between first personal visually experienced spaciality, and measureable space. But then I find you saying “And whenever the laws of physics are invoked it is in order to make a prediction about the content of an experience under rigorously defined conditions of place and time. So the experiences [italics mine]that legitimize physics must be in a place and at a time. Unless they were locatable physics would be pure nonsense.”

Does it make any sense to say that experiences, which can exist only if they are first person, must be in a place and at a time? Every physicist bases his or her work on “observations” and every observation that he or she makes is a first person observation. There are no other kinds of observation! Let me focus on John the physicist. And let me focus on his visual experience of what is going on in a petri dish under a compound microscope. His visual experience is of the mitochondria of a frog’s cell. Where is his experience? The fact that this sentence does not make any sense is to me a wake up call of the highest order. Why does it not make any sense? Maybe you can tell me. I have what I think is at least the beginning of an understanding of why it does not make any sense. I hope you are interested.

If you tell me that his experience is inside his brain then I can to ask 1) How do you know that ? 2) Where is the mitochondria he is looking at. Etc.

Jo: "I agree with Descartes that experience and the dynamics which cause it are incommensurable, in the sense that we still [have] no language in which to describe rules of relation, and that we should expect this to be the case."

I disagree. I have proposed a bridging principle for describing the relation between conscious experience (1st-person descriptions) and what you call "dynamics" (3rd-person descriptions). In a nutshell it is this:

*For every instance of conscious content there is a corresponding analog in the biophysical state of the brain*

It is this bridging principle that enabled me to successfully predict the controlled evocation of vivid hallucinations in the SMTT experiments on the basis of the neuronal structure and dynamics of the retinoid mechanisms.

For more about the bridging principle see "A Foundation for the Scientific Study of Consciousness" on my RG page.

Dear Mike,

As far as I can see you are interested in types of experience whereas I am interested in tokens. In relation to the locality of physics it is tokens that are relevant. I see no reason to doubt that these tokens have locations. I agree that types have no locations but is that very interesting? Types of fruit have no locations.

And as you say, it is a bit doubtful as to whether or not one can really talk of types of experience when it comes to phenomenal aspects. In my view the logical positivists would be right to say that there is no meaning to the question of whether my red is the same as yours. We construct makeshift types by comparing notes about word usage when agreeing that we probably have access to similar sensory inputs. But like Chomsky I do not think there are any public languages. We each have our own language, which usefully correlates with that of others quite a lot of the time. I don't find Kant very helpful here to be honest. I think he got things quite badly wrong. I am doubtful that language itself enables us to have concepts. We clearly often develop concepts as a result of debate and reading literature that we might not have done otherwise but I suspect many of them could be triggered by a nice visual demonstration like one of Arnold's special effects. In my years in science I almost invariably developed new concepts from thinking about non-verbal ideas and then looked for words that would help to communicate them to others.

Thanks Jonathan.

I am not sure what you mean by tokens in this context.

One might empirically verify whether you, when looking at a post box, were seeing the colour red. One could examine the neuro-physiological conditions under which the experience of red happens to see if they were present, but perhaps more simply one could ask you if you were seeing the colour red. If the neuro physiological conditions were all present but you denied that you could see red the most likely possibility would be that you did not understand the word. If you did understand the word (were able to identify other red objects) then the situation would be strange. If you insisted that you were not experiencing the redness of the post box, then we should have to accept what you were saying. We could not say, 'he is seeing red but he doesn't know he is'. The question is open to verification and is thus logically possible within logical positivism (notwithstanding issues in relation to verification) .

Chomsky defined the conditions for the emergence of language but as far as I can recall he did not say that language was not a social or public event. The LAD was, as the term suggests a device for acquiring language, not one for building it.

I would agree that concepts are not necessarily tied to language (I would acknowledge that animals and pre linguistic children have concepts) , but it is difficult to understand what we should make of an experience if we have no way of conceptualising what we were looking at. We might talk of sensations but I would remain reluctant to say that sensations were located. Could we say that somebody was having a sensation purely on the basis of our examination of his internal neuro-physiological conditions? Even if we did say that this was a sufficient condition for the ascription of sensation, one could not say that it constituted a definition.

I am not familiar with Arnold's special effects.

Is the non verbal idea from which you develop a concept logically private ? I seem to recall accounts of people constructing private mathematical notations but they were not logically private, merely contingently so. A private language is logically translatable into a public one. A private mathematical language could result in new conceptualisations - this is perhaps what we mean by creativity - but the criterion for the sense of this conceptualisation must be its communicability to others.

Hope I am on the right track here.

Dear William,

I think you are creating an unnecessary difficulty. Experiences only exist if they have a first person aspect, I agree. But that does not stop us also describing them in the third person. In fact that is what you have done when talking of the experiences of John the physicists. We accept that, for instance, when John experienced something he took to be a mitochondrion down his microscope it was Thursday at 3.45pm and in the microscope room. We accept that the experience was part of the dynamic unit we call John, which has a domain that does not overlap with Bob drinking coffee on the opposite bench. So we are all quite happy about experiences being events that have a place and time. My point is simply that we cannot say - ah but this no longer applies once we consider the smaller domains in side John's nervous system. We cannot propose a magic boundary at the skin of John within which events are allowed to have no location. We can reasonably infer that the experience is inside the brain because we know that visual experiences disappear under various conditions like standing up too fast or having a transient occlusion of an occipital artery in which function of the visual cortex is selectively impaired. The mitochondrion John is looking at is on the microscope. The collated signals that give him the sense of a mitochondrion are occurring in one or more places in his brain distal to the primary occipital cortex. None of that alters the important insight that his sense of the shape of the mitochondrion is not the shape of the signals and indeed is 'shape' in a sense quite disanalogous to shape as meant in physical dynamics. But we can apply both first person shape and third person shape terminology to the same event as long as we are aware that they cannot be used in the other account in the same way.

Dear Arnold,

You say: *For every instance of conscious content there is a corresponding analog in the biophysical state of the brain*

I do not find I can get this to work. Let us say I have a sense that there is a yellow and black bird in a tree. Then half a second later I have a sense that this is a black-naped oriole. Then two seconds later I have a sense that it is not in fact Oriolus chinensis but the Indian race of Oriolus oriolus, realising that I have been looking at a black stripe that does not meet at the nape. What could be an 'analogue' of all these sensory ideas? How would a different pattern or rate of cell firing be analogous to a sense that I had been wrong about my species allocation? I simply do not see how these can be made commensurable.

Dear Mike,

I was using 'token' in the standard philosophical sense of a single concrete instance rather than a type.

I don't think you can verify whether anyone is 'seeing the colour red', other than in the sense that they are seeing what they call red or that their brains are functioning in a way that we can expect from predominant excitation of long wavelength sensitive cones. The problem is that we do not know 'which (sensed) colour red' is being referred to, and there is no means of knowing. This relates to the hare raised by Saul Kripke over pain, C fibres and octopuses. It is argued that pain must be determined 'functionally' because octopuses seem to feel pain but do not have the same sorts of nerves as us, so pain must be something that can be felt in systems made of different materials but doing the same job. The flaw in the argument is that nobody knowns 'which sort of pain' octopuses feel. There is no reason to think that their feeling of pain is 'the same as' ours (or different). It is a meaningless issue. So there is no argument against feelings being determined by the detail of the materials/events giving rise to them. This reveals a worrying gap in the grounding of our terms but it is better to be aware of it than ignore it, I think

Chomsky takes an internalist view of language and my understanding is that he sees each of us as having what he calls an I-language (internal language). Public languages are tendencies to happy functional harmony between many I-languages but depend for their existence entirely on I-languages. Language is used socially but one of Chomsky's main contentions (maybe wrong) is that the primary biological advantage that led to persistence of a faculty of language was not communication.

I think a good reason for being reluctant about giving a sensation a location is that nobody has pinned down quite what they think they mean by sensation. We get side tracked by ideas of mechanisms to do with pathways through sense organs. But the evidence is clear that what we think of as the rawest sensations do not come into being until signals have passed way beyond the primary sensory cortices. We do not intuitively give these sensations locations because our brains have no internal space-calibrating resources. They do have internal time-calibrating resources so we are clearer about when the sensation was.

I would not wish to define sensations by the most closely ascertainably associated dynamic events we can infer, because ultimately a sensations is defined in phenomenal terms, but my objective is to force biophysicists to be honest about the rules of physics if they want to give a physical account of experience. At the moment everyone is cheating (except maybe Arnold).

Jonathan "Let us say I have a sense that there is a yellow and black bird in a tree. Then half a second later I have a sense that this is a black-naped oriole. Then two seconds later I have a sense that it is not in fact Oriolus chinensis but the Indian race of Oriolus oriolus, realising that I have been looking at a black stripe that does not meet at the nape. What could be an 'analogue' of all these sensory ideas?[1] How would a different pattern or rate of cell firing be analogous to a sense that I had been wrong about my species allocation?"[2]

1. You first have a *perception* of a yellow and black bird in a tree. Then you have a sequence of *thoughts* (inner speech/image) about the bird's identity. The *preconscious* source of these thoughts would be the discharge of word tokens in your semantic network. Your *conscious content* re these thoughts would be the spatio-temporal pattern of subvocal neuronal excitation (the biophysical analog) that originates in your vocal-motor system and is then projected into the retinoid space that represents your head. Recurrent excitation loops between these neuronal excitation patterns and the imaging matrices that are part of your semantic mechanisms give the sense of meaning to your subvocal thoughts.

2. The thought that you were wrong (a false recognition) would again be an inner speech/image neuronal analog generated in your vocal-motor system after the preconscious cognitive determination that your recognition token was false.

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for explaining your use of the term token. What I have been saying applies to specific experiences such as the one outlined by Arnold.

To have any understanding of the 'pain' of the octopus must be as a result of making an analogy to all those events that I associate with pain in myself and others, to my concept of pain. If I speculate on the 'kind of pain' that the octopus is experiencing it can only be because, by analogy, I recognise the different possibilities.

I might find that there was no stimulation of the appropriate fibres at all and this would be very puzzling, but if the octopus was thrashing about and emitting pain like behaviours then we might agree that he was in pain. The ontological status of pain is different to that of the stimulation of c fibres. The fact that the two are invariably associated does not make them the same thing.

Survival advantage may well relate to the ways in which we can use language to self regulate our thought, to detach from the moment, etc., but I have a recollection of Chomsky suggesting that if the neurological structures for language were not 'fired' within the appropriate period of child development by social use, children's linguistic capacities might be impaired for life. Language use is a social product, depending on my ability to calibrate my articulate sounds with those of another, even if I do not do this self consciously.

Hi Arnold,

When you say 'the *preconscious* source of these thoughts would be the discharge of word tokens in your semantic network', do you mean the process of conceptualising the experienced event, seeing these experiences as a recognisable object? We can talk about sensation without reference to concepts, but not experience.

It is the case that we do not need language in order to have a concept, but concepts are learned and have a different ontological status to that of the conditions under which they may be applied. The relationship between concepts and the experiences that are made possible is complex and potentially unpredictable, so I would agree that we can be mistaken about what we are looking at.

Mike.

Hi Jonathan, You say

“But Bob is not present to John in the sense of being part of John considered by us as a dynamic dispositional relational pattern (i.e. a physical entity). What are part of the John pattern, or John domain, are various signals caused by the presence of Bob that together are sufficient for John to infer an idea of Bob drinking coffee nearby. 'Seeing' is a strange vernacular verb that gives no hint of the complexity of dynamic relations involved. It has no business in a rigorous argument about how things work.”

Let say in passing that this description of "the John domain" reminds me of a homunculus. But lets leave that issue alone intriguing though it might be.

I agree that the usual use of the term “seeing” and what it refers to gives no hint of what is required to examine in depth what I am doing when I see. But it is precisely what I must examine if I am going to wonder about what is happening when John sees Bob.

I do all of my thinking about these matters by relying on abilities provided me by nature. Seeing is not a verb. An instance of seeing is what I would be doing if I looked up from my writing this sentence to see the painting hanging on my wall. I can say a great deal about this interval of my consciousness and I can have only pseudo philosophical doubts that you would not see the same picture on the wall.

But the most relevant instance in your and my conversation is an examination of how to speak systematically intelligently about what is really happening when John sees Bob. By “speaking systematically intelligently” I have no intention whatsoever to “do language analysis” except in the sense that sensible language is always about some subject matter, some intended subject matter.( I am an existentialist a la Merleau-Ponty, not a Wittgensteinian though I also learned a lot from the latter.)

My contention is that we should not have recourse to science or even philosophy in order to speak systematically and intelligently about seeing.

The most reliable and in a sense the only reliable source for me is my own visual consciousness which is a consciousness of everything I can see, and remember seeing whether directly or on TV or in the movies. Etc. So it has nothing to do with privacy. I can let you in on what I am seeing by telling you about it. I can speak quite easily and naturally about a real John seeing a real Bob. And I think it is a mistake to think that an explanation of what makes this psychic event happen can be provided by science. Though I think that Arnold and company are doing some marvelous studies of the brain, I grave doubts that they are making any progress toward explaining why physiological events produce, give rise to, cause, psychic events. That is the hard question. Primitive men new that alcohol and drugs produced altered states of consciousness, though they may not have been able to say that.

Is our conversation over the internet real? Does it exist somewhere? I would say that it is real and it occurs only in the minds of those who read it and only when they are reading it. It is not private except in the sense that it is available only to those reading the relevant passages on research gate.

My and your visual experiences, are normally of the surrounding world, and not of signals, or sense data, or ideas of sense, or anything else mediating our visual involvement in the world as provided, rather mysteriously I submit, by nature. I say “mysterious” because my seeing, and I can say the same about yours: a) is not a thing, b) is not an “event” in the usual meaning of that term, though it is temporal i.e., it takes time to occur c) does not seem to be a property, d) is not made of anything, d) it makes no sense to say that it is somewhere in physical space e) it makes no sense to say it is nowhere, it provides me with everything I have I ever seen or will see, f) it bedevils earnest and even very able philosophers. Etc. etc.etc.

Mike: "When you say 'the *preconscious* source of these thoughts would be the discharge of word tokens in your semantic network', do you mean the process of conceptualising the experienced event, seeing these experiences as a recognisable object?"

I'm referring to the preconscious process of organizing and evoking strings of words that will serve as inner-speech thoughts (conscious) about an experienced event. You can think about this preconscious process as a way of conceptualizing events.

Thanks Arnold.

O.K. How do these inner speech thoughts relate to the public language that shares their content and grammar ?

Dear William,

With respect, I think you have science upside down, as most people do. You ask why physiological events give rise to psychic events, suggesting that is a hard question. But physiological events, like all events, are defined in terms of giving rise to psychic events in the sense of experiences. Experiences are the only thing we have to explain and science is the business of explaining them in the sense of working out the regularities in connections between them. So there is no 'Hard Question' about why experiences are connected by 'physical events' because we define physical events as the regular connections that determine experiences. Lots of people seem to think physical events have some independent status but if so science has never been about that. As Newton said 'as to what light is, that is not so easie' (not something he was intending to address).

I find it hard to see what sort of account of experience is any use to us other than one that establishes regularities in connections that we could test for. People like Merleau-Ponty pretend to give some sort of alternative, but by deliberately keeping the account vague enough for it not to be possible to judge whether or not it provides any useful insight. The hope is to have an account that does not stray into the territory of science but in as much as there is a dynamic account at all of John seeing a mitochondrion I think in reality it is attempting to tread the same road - just making sure nobody knows where the footprints are. To say that there are no sense data is to imply an absence of a certain sort of footprint, where science tells us there ought to be some and shows conclusively that there have to be some, unless you are invoking a magic carpet. I think you may be riding a magic Merleau-Ponty carpet I guess.

And yes, John is full of homunculi - no problem there. There was never anything wrong with the idea of a homunculus, other than how many there are. Another straw man I fear.

I suspect I will not induce you to shift positions but to me real carpets are more wonderful than magic ones. The Herez we have in the sitting room never ceases to fill me with wonder, as a way of connecting the most exquisite experiences of maker and owner across a hundred years.

Mike: "O.K. How do these inner speech thoughts relate to the public language that shares their content and grammar ?"

These inner speech thoughts in retinoid space are patterns of autaptic-cell excitation, internal stimuli that regulate the composition of motor routines for producing the public language of overt speech, writing, internet posting, etc.

Thanks Arnold - So when I engage in internal monologue, these internal events are occurring and when I engage in overt speech, etc, my motor routines are similarly governed by these mechanisms - no problem - but does this constitute a private language ?

I can go along with the Chomskyan deep structure, the transformational grammar, that is a condition of my ability to articulate in propositional form but is not meaning dependent on the public surface form of particular languages, and if so are not the internal monologues not dependent upon this surface form ?

Are we talking about the same things here ?

We seem to have got caught up in interesting but quite irrelevant issues about words and language. When I had a sense I was wrong about the identity of a bird species the sense of being wrong occurred far too quickly to be associated with any inner speech. I doubt I voiced anything except maybe 'Uh!'. And that Uh did not give me the sense of being wrong about Oriolus chinensis, it was the sense of being wrong about Oriolus chinensis that was followed, possibly, by the inner-voiced Uh!.

To be honest I do not buy this idea that thoughts are inner voices. I have just done a little experiment. I have sung, at full volume 'Jesu, joy of man's desiring' while simultaneously inner voicing the words 'I was wrong about Oriolus chinensis' and having a sense, not that I was wrong, but that I was in the middle of acting out this particular experiment that showed I was right about something else. If I can create an inner voice of one sentence while my vocal motor apparatus is producing a completely unrelated sung sentence, unmodulated, then I think we should be sceptical about this idea that our thoughts are generated by subvocal motor routines. I have no doubt that there are submotor tweaks sometimes but I think somebody has gorssly overinterpreted this idea. Moreover, having an inner voice quite clearly need bear no relation to what is being sensed.

I just cannot get my head around any sort of idea that the sense of being wrong is commensurable with some spatial array of signals, or indeed the sense of the smell of freesias is commensurable with any causal dynamic pattern that causes me to have such a sense. Being wrong has no size or shape or position. I am very keen on the retinoid model as an explicit local causal dynamic theory of how signals are collated for experiencing and I think it solves a number of problems admirably but I don't think it can possibly address the incommensurability of dynamics and experience and should not try to. To my mind if it DID seem to cover this there would then be a paradox because all the inventors of physics - Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, wrote to warn us that before we started doing physics we needed to remember that dynamics and experience are incommensurable - they are not of the same, or even similar, category. For experience to be an analog of what it is about would deny the very foundations of physics. This is where I think William has it absolutely right. But that does not mean that two incommensurable features cannot belong to the same element of reality. Presentness and pastness are incommensurable but things present will also be things past.

Jo: "For experience to be an analog of what it is about would deny the very foundations of physics."

It seems to me that the "very foundations of physics" depends on the content of conscious experience, not that conscious experience depends on the foundation of physics.

Jo: "I just cannot get my head around any sort of idea that the sense of being wrong is commensurable with some spatial array of signals, or indeed the sense of the smell of freesias is commensurable with any causal dynamic pattern that causes me to have such a sense."

I assume that you are referring to the *conscious* sense of being wrong. If feeling wrong or experiencing the fragrance of a flower is not caused by particular excitatory patterns of neuronal activity projecting from emotional and olfactory sensory mechanisms into your personal phenomenal world (retinoid space), then what causes these feelings? It seems to me that our best guess is that they are analogs of arrays of neuronal signals (from limbic and olfactory centers) just like other kinds of sensory content.

Jo: "If I can create an inner voice of one sentence while my vocal motor apparatus is producing a completely unrelated sung sentence, unmodulated, then I think we should be sceptical about this idea that our thoughts are generated by subvocal motor routines."

Good trick! You are obviously a skilled juggler of inner voices.

Mike: "... is not meaning dependent on the public surface form of particular languages, and if so are not the internal monologues not dependent upon this surface form ?"

I struggle with double negatives. Can you rephrase your question in more direct form?

Dear Arnold,

I entirely agree that a conscious sense of being wrong, like any aspect of a phenomenal world, will be encoded in neuronal electrical activity. For me the excitatory pattern of a retinoid type system would be the penultimate step prior to an experience based on resulting PSPs in a dendritic tree but I am happy to discuss the retinoid stage, since the same arguments are relevant.

My problem is with the word analog. My thought is that for both your model and mine many people will have trouble with plausibility if the coding has to be analog. What could an encoding for a sense of silveryness at a certain point be an analog of, for instance – it gets tricky. My reading is that the semanticists have really not to grips with this problem. In reviewing the monograph on Millikan and Her Critics for the current issue of JCS I came across some of the difficulties. People talk of isomorphism, but as Nick Rea points out, isomorphism is too broad to imply ‘analog’. And even isomorphism does not look as if it can hold for our encoding of the world because we extract invariances – which entails a one-to-many coding (i.e. not isomorphic). Analog seems to imply what people tend to call homomorphism, where the encoding medium has a continuous variable that can be mapped to a continuous variable of the referent. If the excitation of a cell in a retinoid system has the function of making me sense I am wrong, what continuous variable of the excitation matches what continuous variable of ‘being wrong’? I do not think this can be the right approach.

I think the problem is that the real world is not in itself composed of ‘objects’ in space. It is composed of a network of dynamic causal relations at all sorts of levels far too complex for us to encode. What we encode is not ‘roughly the main things there’ even. What we encode are patterns that our brains are set up to extract. Teleologists would say these are patterns with survival significance but I think that can lead to false conclusions. The patterns our brains extract may tend to help survival but they are also likely to be determined by stochastic processes in evolution based on random mutations that will make them significantly arbitrary. As an example, the fact that we tend to think of the ‘main colours’ as blue, red, green, yellow and brown, and then maybe turquoise and purple, probably reflects both usefulness and what just happened to be the way the brain got set up. I suspect yellow may be an anachronistic sign for ‘less blue’ with no specific usefulness once red and green evolved.

So my guess is that signals that encode what we sense are not analogs of the world. If anything they are more likely to be analogs of ‘sectors of inference space’ with that inference space belonging to the inference machine that is the brain’s sensory apparatus. Put another way, what they ‘match’ are ideas of things rather than dynamic elements of the real world. But I think the whole concept of analog is shaky here and is probably best done away with.

To my mind the ‘meaning’ of a sign refers to two different things. One is the invariant features of those complex causal cones within inference machines likely to have given rise to the sign. The other is the invariant features of the likely causal cones to be caused by the sign. Philosophers make two mistakes. They think they can bundle these together to have one sense of meaning and they think that there should be a simple story to tell. Considering the complexity of the human brain’s inference machine I think this is gross naivety. The causal paths that determine meaning are of huge complexity and depend on all the idiosyncrasies of our biology. (I do not think ‘public language’ has anything interesting to contribute here because the causal paths that make meaning what it is are inside individual brains. The sending of messages from one person to another is easily understood physically but the ‘conservation of meaning’ involved is entirely contingent on internal events.)

I hope that makes some sense. I have a suspicion that this topic is so complicated that it is actually near impossible to set up an academic dialogue through the normal means. As I have said, I think the professional semanticists in linguistics and philosophy have little idea of the nature of what they are tackling because they do not consider the detail of how it actually works. But what I think may be encouraging is the fact that if we posit specific local physical models for encoding – like retinoid or dendritic tree – at least we have a framework to be right or wrong in. With the sort of non-local model that most neurobiologists espouse I cannot see how you could know.

BW

Jo

Jo: "So my guess is that signals that encode what we sense are not analogs of the [real] world.[1] If anything they are more likely to be analogs of ‘sectors of inference space’ with that inference space belonging to the inference machine that is the brain’s sensory apparatus.[2] Put another way, what they ‘match’ are ideas of things rather than dynamic elements of the real world.[3] But I think the whole concept of analog is shaky here and is probably best done away with.[4]"

1. I take a brain analog representation of X to be a relationship of *similarity* on relevant features between biophysical patterns in the brain and the target X. So if the relationship of our phenomenal world (retinoid space) were not an analog of the real world (similar to the real world on relevant features), our adaptive behavior would be haphazard and the likelyhood of our survival would be dim at best.

2. Inferences about aspects of our phenomenal world are made in the synaptic matrices of our sensory mechanisms and in our semantic networks. These are the pre-conscious cognitive operations that inform us about the world and provide grist for our conscious thoughts.

3. It seems to me that these inferences *must* match both the ideas of things and relevant dynamic aspects of the real world if our survival is to be promoted. The alternative would seem to be maladaptive behavior.

4. Given the above considerations based on the notion of similarity-matching, I wonder why we should do away with the concept of analog.

I agree with you, Jo, that our common concepts of *analog* and *inference* are murky and need closer examination. I find it helpful to point to the operational properties of particular theoretical brain mechanisms as exemplars of these concepts. For example, in the SMTT experiment the similarity between the horizontally oscillating autaptic-cell triangle which is endogenously constructed in retinoid space, and the hallucination of a triangle moving back and forth is easily understood as an analogous relationship. But what about the conscious experience of a particular color or mood? Here the similarity between the brain's neuronal patterns that determine color or mood and the quality of the conscious experience is more difficult to describe. But we do know what it is like to see red instead of blue and what it is like to feel happy instead of sad. In these cases the sensory stimuli have no extension in the outside world even though they are systematically related to events in the outside world. The weight of evidence also tells us that differences in color and differences in mood must be caused by differences in the pattern of neuronal activity in the associated sensory mechanisms of the brain. If this is the case, then we should be able to describe particular patterns of sensory activity in the brain as distributed over a color space, and the same for a mood space. Theoretical models built on this foundation might allow us to identify neuronal analogs of color and mood.

Sorry for the double negs Arnold - meaning is a public feature of language. I order to check the meanings of my words I must communicate with others. The only measure of consistency is continued usage.

Internal monologues may be private, but they are dependent on the public form. I think that what I am writing is making sense but I don't know until I press Add. Is teh problem one of definition of 'private' or 'inner' language?

Dear Mike,

I think your thesis is unsustainable. Arnold and I both know exactly what we want to say and know what our own words mean to ourselves but we are struggling bravely to find common meaning and not making it. We are divided by the simple fact that words do not have any public meaning - unless you are lucky. The best illustration I know is Tyler Burge's claim that 'arthritis' means what an expert on arthritis says it means - that public meaning is determined by experts and others defer to them. Until I retired I was a leading world expert on arthritis, as it happens, and the more I learnt the more it became clear to me that 'arthritis' has no coherent meaning. It is just a rag-bag mostly used by non-experts who think there must be a public meaning although in fact there is none. Over the years it became clear to me that my job in reassuring patients was to talk to them in a way that made use of their own private meaning of arthritis as best I could.

Public meaning just doesn't make any sense in a biological account of language. Meaning is about what happens as words go in and out of individual brains. In between there is just buzzing air or paper with marks. The marks in the dictionary that are supposed to give meanings are just triggers for events in individual heads and what is triggered depends on the personal neurological history of that individual. The concept of public language produces no useful predictions because there is nothing to study. All the linguists I know take an internalist biological view of language now - and that leads to theories that can be tested, in terms of evolution or neurological disease or whatever.

Dear Arnold,

I think the problem of representation is more complicated. I agree that we want to have a different encoding for each usefully different feature of the world. That sounds a bit like an isomorphism but 'usefully different' entails extracting invariant features so we want some one-to-many encodings which rules out isomorphism. What you call the result I do not know but I think we both see what it would imply.

Having one encoding for each usefully different feature does not, however, in any way imply similarity. Words are not similar to their referents. The encoding is arbitrary. For encoding in experience it seems we do not want this arbitrariness because we want there to be internal compositionality. The word dog has no internal structure of legs and muzzle but the experience of dog does. So we want correspondence not just of the whole idea but of its components. That is OK but we still do not need to have any 'similarity'. This is tricky and my reading of the literature is that it is not widely understood, but I think it is crucial.

Let me try an analogy. The key point I think is that these 'usefully different features of the world' we want to encode are not in fact just categories of dynamic pattern in the world. They are categories of relation of the world to our interests and requirements. Consider for instance the category TUMNB7.45SE, which might be assigned a quale like red. The acronym stands for things useful to Many but not Bob at 7.45 on a Sunday evening. These will include a small stool with rubber feet and a shower cap. The small stool is useful because Mary is short and cannot reach the spice shelf without it and the rubber feet are important because she has a new wooden kitchen floor. Bob does not, nor does he need a shower cap since he shaves his head.

This may seem an absurd analogy but my contention would be that the things we assign qualia to are in fact even more convoluted in their functional structure than this. I suspect yellow is an anachronistic colour implying non-blue that got wired into the brain before red and green came along and never got reallocated - or something like that. As a result we cannot work out what dark yellow is because brown is now interpreted separately, maybe due to some chance flip in occipital lobe wiring.

The basic point is that our sensory systems are not designed to categorise things the way they are in the outside world but rather to categorise them by implications in relation to us as complex inference machines. 'Similarity' of things will be similarity of relation to a vastly complex set of inference pathways 'built for survival' (if you like that account). Maybe it would be a bit like similarity of Gabor transforms, but instead of one transform you have a network of transforms more complex than the inside of my laptop.

So there is an alternative to direct similarity of encoding and outside referent that will actually do the survival behaviour job much better - an encoding that is in terms of survival dynamics rather than world dynamics. Another analogy might be the transferases in ribosomes. These encode both bases and amino acids and the representation in the ribosome is compositional but the transferases are a mile away from being similar in dynamic properties (or shape or whatever) to the proteins they generate. My belief is that the constraint on the encoding in experience is NOT 'similarity' to some outside world dynamic but an appropriateness to some internal computational routine that preserves adequate internal compositionality. Looking at it this way releases us from all the implausibilities that critics might raise about direct similarity.

Jo: "My belief is that the constraint on the encoding in experience is NOT 'similarity' to some outside world dynamic but an appropriateness to some internal computational routine that preserves adequate internal compositionality."

Look at the visual maze shown below. How could you possibly find your way out of this maze without a brain representation that is similar to the structure of the maze? In the retinoid model, you trace the path that leads to an exit by moving your heuristic self-locus (I!*) along the path that is not blocked by barrier lines.

Mike: "I[n] order to check the meanings of my words I must communicate with others."

I think it would be better to say that in order to convey *your* meaning of your words to others you must communicate with others. See the last paragraph in *The Pragmatics of Cognition* on page 301 in "Overview and Reflections" on my RG page.

Arnold, you ask:

'Look at the visual maze shown below. How could you possibly find your way out of this maze without a brain representation that is similar to the structure of the maze? In the retinoid model, you trace the path that leads to an exit by moving your heuristic self-locus (I!*) along the path that is not blocked by barrier lines.'

You could do the same in twistor space, in which every possible pathway is a point in a possibility space or a Gabor transform or a million other types of coding that preserve internal combinatoriality. And all of these will have extracted something like Gibson's 'affordances' from the external dynamic pattern. You are constructing a representation which is analogous to 'would I could do in this maze' not the maze. It is a representation of an idea, not an external reality per se.

Jo: " You are constructing a representation which is analogous to 'would [what?] I could do in this maze' not the maze[1]. It is a representation of an idea, not an external reality per se[2].

1. This seems to me to be incoherent. If the brain representation is not a representation of "this maze" (i.e, the maze projected from your computer screen to your retinas), then what maze is it? I agree that you would *also* construct a representation of what to do to exit the maze.

2. The brain representation of the maze displayed on your computer screen *is* a representation of an external reality per se (the image on your computer screen). Your following brain representation of what you do to exit your brain-represented maze, however, is a representation of an idea -- a propositional structure for the regulation of subsequent cognitive behavior.