1. A telencephalon must contain preparatory neurons that predict a future motor response, whether or not a response follows the activity (Darlington and Lisberger 2020). This activity can be thought of as a fragment of thinking which is consistent with the surmise of William James (1890), who believed that a consequence of consciousness is that all thoughts are eventually expressed as some form of movement.
2. The energy consumption per telencephalic neuron is at least one order of magnitude greater than that of a subcortical neuron as in the cerebellum, and the difference between the energy expended during thinking vs. thinking to move is minimally different. In short, consciousness is energy expensive, so an animal that has been endowed with maximal consciousness must also feed the neurons that support this endowment (Herculano-Houzel 2011).
3. If sensory input to the telencephalon is minimized, the number of neurons devoted to telencephalic consciousness does not change, since the other senses take over the vacant real estate thereby preserving aggregate consciousness (Jaggard, Keene et al. 2020; Kupers et al. 2006).
4. The ultimate purpose of consciousness, which comes in two forms—sensory and contemplative—is to promote learning by establishing the storage of declarative, conscious information for future use (Hess 1949, 1961, 1968). All learning is stored in two forms: a declarative form as mediated by the telencephalon and in an executable form as subserved by the cerebellum. More storage is devoted to the latter, perhaps because actualizing consciousness depends on driving the oculomotor and skeletomotor musculature in realtime (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024).
5. Declarative consciousness, after much overtraining, is finalized as an efference copy code as mediated by cerebellar Purkinje neurons (Bell et al. 1997; De Zeeuw 2021; Loyola et al. 2019; Shadmehr 2020; Tehovnik et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2023).
6. The same neurons in the telencephalon mediate both conscious behavior and unconscious, automatic behavior (Sacks 1976, 2012; Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024). Once one becomes automated on a task, a minimal number of neurons and synapses are used to execute a response. This reduction in deployed neural tissue occurs in both the telencephalon and cerebellum (Schiller and Tehovnik 2015; Tehovnik 2024; Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024).
7. Individuality/uniqueness between individuals (e.g., as between Einstein, Kasparov, and Pelé) is based not only on the genetic characteristics of a vertebrate, but also on the type of information stored in the association areas of the telencephalon and the cerebellum. What this means is that two individuals can agree on identifying the same stimulus, e.g., a red apple, but their appreciation for a red apple (the hard-problem) will always be different and based on the information stored in the brain. Nevertheless, two individuals with identical genes (e.g., twins) and with a common upbringing would be expected to have a comparable ‘conscious’ impression of a red apple, but an identical impression can never be guaranteed because each will harbor different types of information based on their unique experience of the world. It is for this reason that Chomsky (2008, @ a MIT seminar) correctly observed that there is no uniformity between the fMRI scans of two individuals performing the same language task. This is because the storage of linguistic information between all individuals is different (Ojemann 1983, 1991).
8. Conscious empathy between two species will vary as a function of the genetic differences between the species, e.g., a fish and a human have minimal conscious empathy, whereas an elephant and a human have much conscious empathy, and twins raised together have maximal conscious empathy.
9. Consciousness is a property of all animals (Hebb 1962; Koch 2013; Morgan 1900), and it can be quantified according to the number of neurons and synapses contained within the telencephalon or its equivalent in invertebrates (Hebb 1949, 1961, 1968; Huang 2008; Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024), and body size is irrelevant in ascertaining an animal’s level of consciousness. But body size is often related to longevity, since the larger the body the longer the growth period (e.g., bowhead whales can live over 200 years, Maloney 2022). Information theory (Shannon 1948) as applied to the number of neurons and synapses, can be used to assist in the quantification process of consciousness to make cross-species comparisons (Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024).
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