More on modes

Being able to make use of stimuli of more than one mode – say both sight and touch – is an important property of the nervous systems of higher animals – see, for example, reference 1 – and is thought by many to be one of the around seven defining features of consciousness. So we need to be able to do this in the context of our closed data structure, where by closed we mean without reference or appeal to some other data.

We have written, not quite in jest, of using the prime factorisation of something or other to carry the necessary information, but we now propose to use the shape of the elements of layer objects – in the jargon introduced at reference 2 – for this purpose, and in the illustration above we show seven different arrangements:

A. large array of small elements (yellow)
B. horizontal array of tall elements (pink)
C. vertical array of wide elements (blue)
D. middle sized array of middle sized elements (grey with red centre)
E. horizontal array of middle sized elements (grey with brown centre)
F. small array of large elements (light green with dark green centre)
G. vertical array of middle sized elements (yellow with blue centre)

We have supposed that distinguishing horizontal from vertical is reasonable and we have not yet exhausted the possibilities of this sort of classification. We also need to bear in mind the fact that our data structure is primarily spatial in its organisation: there is a straightforward map between many of the objects in it and their position in the essentially two dimensional visual field – with the distinction that an object standing for an elephant will have the shape and position of an elephant, whereas that standing for a smell will only give some idea of the location of the source of that smell.

The proposition is that scanning objects made of elements with these different shapes will have a different feel about them, that the subjective experiences so generated will be quite different. With the difference between one sight and another being quite different in kind from the difference between a sight and a smell.

Sight seems a good candidate for A, with only a small amount of information in each element but the arrangement with the best spatial resolution. Smell seems a good candidate for F and maybe its smaller relative D for taste. With, where appropriate, the different elements of a smell or taste layer object carrying the different parts of the mixture. All senses where time is weak – whereas in the case of sound, time is all important.

So we allocate C to sounds in general, with our being conscious of the last segment, the last second or so of sound, with the layer object made up of some number of samples, one sample for each element, with the most recent being on the top. Possibly coded in something more like musical notation than a spectral analysis.

While we allocate B to language, a very special sort of sound, including here both inner and outer thought, that is to say speech, with our being conscious of the last segment, perhaps the last sentence, or phrase in the case of a long sentence, with the elements corresponding to words and with the most recent being on the right. It seems likely that words are coded in some form closer to sounds in the ears than to letters on the page, irrespective of where they have actually come from.

We speculate – without coming to any conclusion – about what might appear in the data structure for an expert in the Morse code listening to Morse. Does the structure contain words or dots and dashes? I associate to the bit in Koestler's ‘Darkness at Noon’, where he talks of a prisoner who is expert in the wall tapping code, hearing the taps as words rather than as taps. Which seems quite plausible. Whereas a novice will hear the taps and be laboriously translating them, by hand, as it were

All of which leaves E and G for the rather complex business of touch. Complex in that it might have to cope with position of the touch on the body of the subject, the position of the touch on the object touched. It might be about temperature, rather about touch in a narrow sense. There is a time dimension in that the sensation of the hand of a human stroking the back of a cat seems likely to be temporally fat, in rather the same way as the sensation arising from a morsel of music.

We believe that these seven arrangements are different enough for confusion to be unusual. But it would clearly be possible for one shape to drift towards another, which would give rise to the rare condition of synaesthesia described at reference 3, but on this account something going wrong with the construction of layer objects.

Conclusions

Element shape seems to be a plausible way to differentiate mode in our data structure.

Footnotes

We note, without further comment, that the magic number seven has popped up, yet again in the number of arrangements.

It is also worth mentioning that the data structure, of limited if not fixed size, fits well with the common experience that it is easier to concentrate on, say, a tactile experience, if one close one’s eyes. The brain has only a limited amount of space from which to deliver subjective experience and vision is greedy in the use it makes of that space.

References

Reference 1: The Merging of the Senses - B.E. Stein, M. Alex Meredith – 1993.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/a-new-start.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia.

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