Why just one subjective experience

Contents

• Introduction with options
• Active and passive cases
• Various marginal cases
• LWS-N with speculations
• LWS-N with permutations
• Speculations with fields
• Conclusions
• References

For some background to LWS-N, the local or layered workspace, neural version, see reference 11.

Introduction with options

When we look at consciousness, it seems obvious that any one host can have just one subjective experience and that one host cannot share the subjective experience of another. Where by ‘host’ we mean the head and body, taken together, of a human, some other large vertebrate or a humanoid robot. Nevertheless, partly because there is clearly plenty of other stuff going on in the unconscious, and partly because it ought to be instructive, in what follows we wonder about other possibilities, expressed in a preliminary way in the two sets of block diagrams which follow. Nearly all the permutations, some more plausible than others.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Starting with option 1, two hosts and two experiences, and working our way through to option 11, one host and one experience, pretty much where we started out. On the way we have, for example, option 4, one host and two experiences, which is not so difficult to implement, at least in theory, as we will be suggesting below, but which might be difficult to operate. What happens, for example, when the two experiences come to a different answer to a difficult question of whether to stand and fight or to make a run for it? While the famous conjoined twins, Chang & Eng, of which there will be more later, might count as an example of option 10.

One answer to the original question is that if there is just one subjective experience, which can call on considerable brain resources, then this one experience is a good place in which to do important jobs, where a bit of extra control is needed, the sort of flow chart style control which computers are good at, which brains seem to be bad at, and which one suspects the unconscious can barely manage at all. With the figure that follows being taken from reference 6.

Figure 3

Another answer to the question is that most subjective, most conscious experience draws on resources which cannot be replicated, at least not in humans or other vertebrates. Things like the legs, the eyes and the ears – although some might argue that the lateral line systems of fishes are a replication of the ears, at least of a sort. And thinking particularly of the legs, some might argue that the conscious experience does not just draw on those resources, rather that the experience is a product of the whole two way flow of activation, up and down the whole chain of command, from brain down to toes, in the case that we are wriggling our toes – with the commander needing exclusive access for the duration. So if there were two experiences, they would either have to take turns at getting those resources, or one would have to be a very poor relation, without the resources of normal consciousness.

Put another way, too many cooks spoil the broth. One would not want to have two executive control suites, each able to call on peripheral resources. There has to be just the one Commander-in-Chief, even if his name begins with a ‘T’. One might want to have a back-up facility, but not one which can butt in, unasked.

Yet another answer is that the idea of two subjective experiences inhabiting the one body just seems bizarre, quite counter intuitive. But is it? Various thoughts on the matter, and on how it might play in the world of LWS-N follow.

We also give some thought to the integration involved in Tononi’s IIT, advertised at reference 4. This theory talks of the conscious experience being integrated, and now, I believe, goes so far as to propose statistical measures of same. We note in passing that IIT shares with LWS-N what some people would regard as a weakness, its lack of regard for the body. It does not seem to be very interested in Damasio’s homeostasis or in any sense of various kinds of self. Neither of the words ‘body’ or ‘self’ appear in a relevant way in the Wikipedia article at reference 4. Neither concept appears to be privileged in the theory in the way that some think it ought to be.

We do not give any thought in what follows to the large body of work on the neural correlates of consciousness. The work which looks, for example, for the tell-tale traces of consciousness in the electrical waves recorded by the electrodes of EEG machines. Work which is certainly relevant to the subject in hand – but largely beyond our ken. These correlates we suppose to be upstream of our LWS-N and its compiler – and so out of scope.

Active and passive cases

Figure 4

To illustrate option 4 (or perhaps option 7), we have first the active case, using the analogy of a jumbo jet with two pilots, an arrangement which is expensive, but one which airlines still maintain. So we have a large and complicated piece of machinery, with engines for power, flaps and rudder for steering. And some controls. No so unlike the Captain Mekon of reference 9, from which Figure 4 above is taken, with the twist that we have added a first lieutenant as a co-pilot, with his own set of controls. Let us call him Lieutenant Spock.

In normal operation, the idea is that Captain Mekon flies the plane while Lieutenant Spock looks on, getting much the same input as the Captain, but making his own take on that input. He will just keep an eye on things, occasionally making some comment or suggestion to the Captain. Sometimes the Captain will take a break, leaving his Lieutenant to fly the plane in his place. Hopefully rarely, the Lieutenant will feel that the Captain has got it wrong and will attempt to take over. This may lead to difficulties.

We do not elaborate on how exactly the dual controls work, how the large and complicated piece of machinery decides which set of instructions to take, given that it does not have a mind of its own. Nor on the well-known but still tricky question of ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’.

We were tempted, but decided against, extending the analogy to the flight engineer.

Second, given the difficulties which can arise with having two people in charge of the same piece of machinery, we have the passive case, where there is, as it were, no machinery to be in charge of. We consider the sort of consciousness one have when one is not doing anything in particular, either mental or physical. The sort of consciousness one might have when awake but lying about on a bed or on a sofa.

We start with the observation that the visual field depends on movement for one to be conscious of anything. If by mechanical trickery one arranges for the image on the retina to be stationary, one very soon ceases to be conscious of anything in the visual field. See, for example, reference 8. Furthermore, if one is attending to something in the visual field, the eyes will be skipping about that something, paying very little attention to anything else.

The sense of touch also seems to partly depend on movement and so, unless there is something wrong with it, we are not conscious of a foot unless we move it around a bit, or something moves around on it. On the other hand, one remains conscious of pressure or temperature. Or of pain.

Then there is the tendency to silently articulate the words one is thinking, to activate a good part of the chain of command down from brain to throat, mouth and tongue, which, when one is doing little else, can give rise to the sensation that the words are somewhere in the mouth, rather than in the head proper, where one might think that they ought to be.

So in all three cases, consciousness seems to depend on some kind of motor activity, albeit quite possibly unobtrusive activity.

And if all else fails, one is conscious of one’s breathing or one’s heartbeat, and, even there, there is likely to be some conscious control.

Turning to the other three senses, a lot of smelling depends on sniffing, another motor activity. Not sure about taste, but it seems quite plausible that it depends on motor activity of the tongue. Which, leaving aside orientating the head to better catch the sound, only leaves us hearing as a more or less passive activity. Furthermore, unlike the eyes which are reasonably selective about which bits of the visual scene they take in, the ears take in the whole lot. There may be selection, but it is downstream, well away from the ears themselves.

In sum, a good deal of consciousness appears to rely of some kind of motor activity, motor activity which, given that there is only one motor, one might think works best when there is only one driver. Two lots of consciousness and two drivers and it is going to get complicated, even in this passive case.

Various marginal cases

In the section which follows, we catalogue various, mostly well-known, scenarios which seem relevant, which seem to push at – or at least patrol – the margins of the straightforward subjective experience, that is to say options 1 and 11 above.

First, we look at the amount of diversity or differentiation we can cope with in any one subjective experience, with the possibility of there being too much for one providing some motivation for being able to have two.

Second, we look at the extent to which a group of people can share the same experience. Remembering here that one person having the same experience as someone else is not the same as knowing that you are having the same experience. We associate to watching ‘Coronation Street’ on the television while keeping an eye on ‘Match of the Day’ going on in a little window at the top right of the screen. All of which starts to bear on one person having two experiences.

Third and last, we look at one person having several personalities, the business of multiples. Multiples which seem to take it in turns, rather than co-existing. Which is getting closer to one person having more than one experience at the same time.

Binocular rivalry

The experience one gets when one eye is getting one stream of information, perhaps about a pigeon, while the other eye is getting another, perhaps about a donkey. The usual experience is that the two animals alternate in consciousness, in a random way, with a period of a few seconds, say less than ten. Some confused, mixed up images, but not usually very many or of very long duration.

So we have some kind of ongoing competition, with one eye capturing one frame of consciousness, the other eye capturing the next.

Evidence in the present context that there is just one processing path for attention (a concept entangled with that of consciousness), that we cannot attend to more than one thing – perhaps one image would be a better, more inclusive term – at once. So while a computer, if it is big and powerful enough, can attend to lots of things at once, we clearly cannot.

Tricky camera work

Figure 5

Cognitive scientists like to talk about what happens when one sees a tiger or a bicycle through a paling fence. How can one be sure that one really is seeing a tiger or a bicycle and that it is not some elaborate confection, contrived to look like such? How does the brain deal with this sort of thing?

Going further, one might, for example, project one scene onto the palings and some quite different scene onto the gaps between them. What happens as the width of the palings gets smaller or larger? As the width of the gaps between the palings gets smaller or larger?

We will have the much same stuff coming into the two eyes, but what will the brain make of it? Some version of binocular rivalry, with attention alternating in a random way between the two scenes? One difference would be that it seems likely that there could be more control, that one could chose to focus on one scene or the other.

We suspect that people would vary a good deal in how they coped, in the extent to which they could attend to both scenes. It would be easy enough to devise experiments to find out – so perhaps someone out there has already done some.

We also suspect that, once again, we would conclude that most people have difficulty attending to two things at once in this way. More evidence that there is just one processing path for attention.

Ambiguity

Figure 6

Here we have a famous signal which is ambiguous, which can be interpreted in one of two ways. Apart from being an illustration of the interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes, it also illustrates the fact that consciousness can only cope with, can only really handle one interpretation at a time. It may fail to see one of them at all and it may flip-flop between them – the horizontal bar as a necklet on a young lady or as a mouth on an old lady - in a rather random fashion, as in binocular rivalry.

Mode rivalry

Another variation would be to have a person see one scene through the eyes while piping in sound through the ears which clearly comes from some other scene. So perhaps a field of sun-lit flowers waving about in the wind coming into the eyes but the sound of waves on the beach coming into the ears. Or perhaps a television programme coming into the eyes while the sound of the waves is coming in through the open window.

Most people would only be able to focus on one or the other at any one time. Perhaps focus on the one while being vaguely aware of the other.

This might be about it not being possible to integrate the two modes. If we are looking at the waves, we can match the sight of the waves to the sound of the waves. In LWS-N speak we can link the layer object carrying the sights with those carrying the sounds into a coherent wave of activation. In the other case, the sight of the flowers with the sound of the waves, in IIT speak, we have too much differentiation and not enough integration.

Mode separation

On the other hand, most people are able to be aware of two or more things at once. Perhaps looking at in the trees in the garden while tapping the fingers on the window sill – two distinct modes in this example.

Some people can be aware of several streams of sound from a group of chamber musicians – both in the same mode in this example. Or the several steams of musical thought coming from one piano. Some claim to be able to track all four lines of a string quartet. But each stream must have enough internal coherence, perhaps enough autocorrelation, to enable the ears to split them out from the combined signal arriving at the ears. And enough correlation with each other not to fall foul of the difficulty with flowers and waves mentioned above. In LWS-N speak, with each stream on its own layer, but with all the streams bound together with column objects. Or as Tononi and his colleagues might have it, both differentiated and integrated. Having your cake and eating it.

Extra pipework

One could probably arrange things so that two different people received identical stimulation on their retinas, overriding the individual and different movements of the heads and the eyes. Perhaps including a joystick to control the direction of vision. Perhaps including a visible marker, perhaps a circle, of the centre of the field of vision.

But the experience would be the same only to the extent that the people were the same. Different people bring different memories and knowledge to bear, which can result in a quite different experience. One person, for example, might be terrified of bulls while another might be really good with them. More obviously, the reaction to an erotic image will vary a great deal according to the sex, orientation and tastes of the subjects.

At the same time, for more mundane images, there would be plenty of common ground and people would be able to talk about them. Provided, that is, that they came to some friendly arrangement about who was in charge of the joystick at any one time. A problem that Chang & Eng, mentioned below, solved by taking it in turns to be in charge. A problem which could be turned to advantage, given the much stronger tool one would have for pointing. In any event, the two people would be having a much more shared experience than they would otherwise.

Californian game

One might attempt to bring the subjective experiences to two people closer together using the something like interactive game outlined at reference 10.

At the cinema

Here we have a crowd of people all watching a film. To a large extent they are all getting the same visual and aural input. Their experiences might not be the same, but they will have a lot in common. Possibly the more in common the more immersive the experience is, thinking here of the IMAX cinema and the virtual reality headsets which we already have and of the feelies of Aldous Huxley which we have yet to have.

Sympathy and empathy

With sympathy being when you know and understand what someone else is feeling, empathy being actually sharing the feelings of someone else. With a related distinction being that some people talk of ‘feeling for’ someone else, other people talk of ‘feeling with’ someone else.
It seems plausible that identical and Siamese twins – see below – are going to have a lot of this with their shared backgrounds.

Other collective experiences

Given the fact that we are separate, that my subjective experience is not yours, there is a very long tradition of organising things to bring our experiences into line, one intended result of which is to forge strong social bonds. Variation devices spring to mind:

• Religious ceremonies, some involving music and movement to enhance the effect. Some involving charismatic preachers. I associate both to the services of some black evangelical churches to those of the late Billy Graham
• Political rallies, like the infamous rallies of the 1930’s in Nuremburg 
• Clubs, raves, dancing and recreational drugs, the likes of Ecstasy. Although we understand that the club scene is not what it was twenty years ago
• The bonding of small units of infantry, in training and in combat, a bonding which survives in ex-service institutions. To the extent that one sometimes reads of a second world war pilot from the RAF having more in common with a pilot from the Luftwaffe, than with the common herd of civilians, despite their having been enemies
• The bonding of the members of teams in highly competitive sports, bonding which may be actively encouraged by management. I associate to a lady who used to play serious basketball in a novel called ‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen
• Initiation rites of various sorts, for example those of Freemasons now and those of apprentices in the days when there were a lot of them.

Identical twins

If a pair of identical twins have spent their life together and now look at the same scene, it seems plausible that while there is no brain to brain connection, they are, nevertheless, having very similar experiences. The memories and knowledge which they bring to looking at this scene will be much more alike than is the case for two ordinary people, taken off the streets, as it were.

And it may well be that twin A has a very good idea what twin B is thinking about when looking at that scene, at the same time as responding in some different way himself. But in the absence of a brain connection, not really option 3 above, rather a simulation of it.

Conjoined twins

It seems that conjoined twins are always identical twins. The damage, however, is not necessarily symmetrical. And at the risk of getting a bit morbid, one can see a range of possibilities here, some of which are detailed at references 1 and 2. In a small number of cases, heads are joined.

The original Siamese twins, Chang & Eng, who lived full and productive, albeit joined-up lives, were joined by a fleshy band running between their sternums. The connection between their nervous systems was minimal. There was some connection between their livers and their vascular systems. For present purposes they were two quite separate people, albeit people with a common genetic makeup and a great deal of common experience.

But sometimes things are going to be more complicated, and reference 1 enumerates various more or less grim possibilities, fortunately rare. The number of properly documented cases which are relevant here is very small, and the interest is usually surgical rather than psychiatric. So in the case of joined heads, we would have to rely on theoretical considerations, not pursued here.

Multiple personalities (option one)

Where two or more personalities live inside the one head, with only one seeming to be active at any one time. Mutually unaware in real time, although one or more of these personalities might well be brought to understand something of what is going on. With any one personality probably only having access to memories formed during their activity, or around at the time of its birth (as it were).

A controversial business, certainly a few years ago, but the theoretical possibility seems entirely reasonable. Rather as if there were a core, common personality process qualified by a large set of parameters, perhaps like the settings of environment variables you might have on a computer. One set of values for the parameters gives one personality, another set of values give another. One such parameter might tell the computer which memory bank is to be used for this particular personality. While some sets of parameters probably do not work at all. We touch on this again in the next section.

Multiple personalities (option two)

Going beyond option one, we allow personalities some life in between their episodes of visibility, their hours or minutes of seeming to be in charge, certainly of visible behaviour like speech and movement. It seems likely they have to exist in some sense between their episodes of visibility so that they can come back to life again. So why not be doing something unobtrusive while they are at it? Maybe tidy up their memory banks?

Even so, given that would not have access to the motor apparatus, they would have a rather passive and lonely time of it, with no possibility of communication with the outside world, although possibly able to tap into sensory stimuli on a read-only basis.

Maybe these personalities could be mutually aware, there could be communication between them. Maybe the subordinate personalities could influence the subconscious processes of the dominant personality. Maybe we could think in terms of the ego, the id and the super-ego. Maybe the cerebellum has a downstairs life of its own, quite apart from the upstairs life of the cerebrum. It is certainly well equipped in the sense that it has a lots more neurons to play with than this last.

So maybe these personalities are all on the go, all generating their own subjective experiences more or less all the time, but they take it in turns to be in charge. Of, for example, the vocal apparatus. With the catch here being that we have seen no reports of alters (in the jargon of the multiple personality movement) explaining about what they had been up to since their last appearance. Or complaining about the air-time given to some other alter.

With care being needed here not to put ideas into the heads of vulnerable people.

Imaginary friends and companions

There have been many reports of children who have imaginary friends and companions, which can be an important part of their life for a year or two. Companions about which the present authors know little, but on the basis of reference 3 suggest the following.

There is some process in the host brain which brings the companion into whatever sort of existence that it has and animates it, provides it with conversation and action. But while the host child usually seems to know that the companion is imaginary, the subjective experience is very much as if the companion were real, as if the host child were interacting in the ordinary way with someone else. They hear the companion speaking (or whatever), they do not experience being the companion.

Out of body experiences

Sometimes our sense of body is disturbed. We might feel as if we are floating above our own body or as if a limb were where it was not – with the rubber hand illusion being a manifestation of this last.

So a disturbance of the ordinary workings of the conscious experience, a reminder that the subjective experience is a fabrication of the brain, perhaps relevant here to the extent that if the brain can fabricate one experience, maybe it can fabricate two.

Summary

• There are limits to the diversity of a conscious experience. Other words might be incoherence or differentiation. Reaching such a limit might result in some input simply being excluded from that experience or in that experience degenerating to a muddle, to noise
• Some people can be conscious of two or more rather different streams of subjective content. But their efficiency with dealing with either or any of them is likely to be low
• The same input to different people can result in very different experiences. And they are unlikely to be identical
• Conscious experiences can be shared, but only up to a point and only in an indirect way. There is no evidence, no channel for direct knowledge of someone else’s experience
• Having the same experience as someone is not the same as knowing that one is having the same experience. A window onto someone’s soul (to borrow a phrase from the first Elizabeth) is not the same as being that other person
• There is evidence of people having multiple personalities, with each such personality having quite different views of the self and of the world at large, but with only one of them being visible at any one time, either from the inside or the outside. No evidence of activity in-between times – although it seems quite likely that there is some.
• So no evidence of anyone having two or more or less full-function subjective experiences at the same time, mutually aware or otherwise.
  

LWS-N  with speculations

Suppose now that we can implement two instances of LWS-N in one brain, which on the face of it does not seem particularly improbable, perhaps one on each side. No doubt a tricky bit of data processing, but one which does not need extra copies of specialised or scarce resources like the aforementioned limbs and ears.

The usual subjective experience is that there is one on the go most of the time, that there is at most one on the go at any one time and that there are not many puzzling gaps or breaks between successive frames of consciousness. So maybe they both have access to the same memory resources, maybe they are in fact the same, sometimes one is up and the other is down (for maintenance or whatever), sometimes it is the other way around. If the switches happen during or immediately after a period of unconsciousness, typically sleep, they will not feature in the subjective experience. If the switches happen during consciousness, perhaps during a change in scene (in the LWS-N sense) and provided that the down time is of the order of a second or so, they will not feature in the subjective experience. Rather in the way that an epileptic is not always aware of having had an absence seizure.

Digressing, we might think of the two versions of LWS-N as two instances of the same process. A process which can be set up with starting conditions, with parameters. To use a functional notation P(p1, p2, p3 … pn), where P is the name of the process and the pi are the parameters. During deep sleep the process terminates, perhaps being restarted from time to time during the successive cycles of sleep. Being restarted definitively on waking, perhaps with a different set of parameters than we used the morning before. Perhaps one is waking up in a good mood rather than a bad mood. Perhaps one is using this copy of the process rather than that copy.

An example from computing might be starting up a complicated programme like the Internet browser Edge from Microsoft. The working of such a programme is qualified by lots of environment variables, environment variables which the average user does not have access to – while a proper geek does.

Another example might be one of the complicated programmes which are used model the detailed workings of neurons. Maybe they have all kinds of parameters specifying the environmental conditions. Temperature, pressure, axon diameters, speed of propagation of action potentials, concentration of this or that molecule or ion.

Sometimes both instances of LWS-N are up and running, perhaps alternating rather in the way of binocular rivalry, but because they are both doing the same thing it doesn’t really matter. So how would it be if they were both producing the same experience, at the same time, but at slightly different places in the brain? What does it mean to say that there are two identical experiences going on at the same time? Identical up to a bit of noise and statistical variation. There would be two identical copies of the subjective me and it would not matter which one I happened to be? They would get on pretty well, would be able to rub along together, as they would generate pretty much the same action. There would not be much squabbling about what to do with this or that bit of the body.

Reverting to the real world, if one has lived in close proximity with someone for many years, one may have some – quite possibly not much – knowledge of the thought processes of that someone. The seat of our conscious experiences might be inches apart but there is no direct communication, at least not in the absence of electronic trickery of the sort mentioned above. And one is not bothered or surprised about this. This consciousness is in this head and that consciousness is in that, quite different head.

Two consciousnesses in one head is more troubling, with each instance of LWS-N perhaps only a few millimetres apart, rather than a few centimetres. Or two consciousnesses in two heads which are more or less intimately joined together, as happens very rarely, if ever, with adult conjoined twins.

As we have already suggested, we might allow a big consciousness, that is to say one’s regular consciousness, and a little, parasitic consciousness. This last can beaver away in the background, doing whatever it does, hopefully not interfering too much with what one is really up to.

Or perhaps we go back to the multiple personalities already mentioned and have a number of entities (alters?) all beavering away, perhaps most of the time, with just the one of them making it to consciousness at any one time. Perhaps a business personality, a home personality and a golf club personality, taking care that no-one is exposed to more than one of them. Perhaps not very healthy, but much easier to cope with, much easier to understand, than having two consciousnesses going on in pretty much the same time and place.

LWS-N with permutations

A rather simple, a rather schematic presentation of various permutations follows. Hopefully enough to suggest the many varieties on offer. All built around the basic model of the successive frames of consciousness expressed in LWS-N being built by something we call the compiler - all of which is described in the successive posts of the ‘srd’ series, mostly enumerated at reference 11.

Figure 7

In permutation 1, we have what is nearly a single system, with the wrinkle that we have two copies of LWS-N, perhaps one on each side of the brain. Statistical and electrical noise apart, the same stuff is going to be delivered from the compiler to each copy. Either on a randomly alternating basis, perhaps in the way of binocular rivalry, or even in parallel. Or one copy might be a backup for the other, with the router switching from one to the other as needed and from time to time – perhaps only to be sure that both copies stay in working order.

Output, if any, from such a system, should not be confused as much the same output will be generated on each side.

Digressing, it might be that there are lots of places where LWS-N could be installed. It may have preferred places, but it can manage otherwise. Which might explain why, so far anyway, the search for the seat of consciousness has failed. All kinds of things can be missing from the brain, while consciousness, at least after a fashion, survives.

An example from computing might be the fact that one can install any given version of Windows on all kinds of different machines, with all kinds of interesting differences, albeit with a few tweaks here and there.

Figure 8

Under permutation 2, things can start to drift apart as while the two copies are fed by the same data, they each employ their own copy of the compiler. Copies which might start much the same, but which might drift apart over time. Which might be just about OK on the basis of alternation, but which might give rise to confusion in the case of parallel production.

Figure 9

Permutation 3 is the most radical, with two sets of stored data and two copies of the compiler used to generate two parallel, subjective experiences.

Experiences which might different enough to result in significantly different outputs, outputs putting rather different requirements on the periphery. An arrangement which seems unlikely to be viable.

Figure 10

So permutation 4 draws back a little, with the two lots of stored data working on an alternating basis through the same compiler and through to a single copy of LWS-N. A version of the multiple personality scenario mentioned above.

Figure 11

While permutation 5 pushes out again, allowing different versions of the same sensory data, this amounting to a variation on having two compilers.

Figure 12

The idea here is to allow some mutual awareness, some leakage between the two versions of LWS-N.

This one may not be realistic, and in any event pushes against the arrangement suggested by the word ‘compiler’. The compiler delivers a wrapped package, the function of which is to deliver the subjective experiences of the frame of consciousness in that package. Stuff does not leak out of the package in a form in which it can be usefully absorbed by some other package.

Furthermore, the two versions of LWS-N sharing some content, is not the same as being mutually aware. Which suggests that pushing any interchange up to compiler level may be more realistic. The compiler puts a packet of data into LWS-N(1), which includes a label explaining that this is part or all of what is going on in LWS-N(2). A label which works in much the same way as the label which says that this layer object is a battleship, or perhaps a battle cruiser. The label which enlarges the subjective sensory experience to include some knowledge.

However, when all is said and done, there is not much point in interchange between two copies of the same thing. There is no value add.

Figure 13

So permutation 7 goes the whole hog, with two lots of stored data, two parallel experiences, with leakage between them at the compiler level. Mutually aware, at least after a fashion. Peer experiences, with one not being subordinate to the other. Option 6 from our starting options above.

Figure 14

Under permutation 7 we have two distinct structures, LWS-N(1) and LWS-N(2), perhaps on different sides of the brain or of the brain stem. Under Permutation 8 the two structures are much closer together, perhaps different sets of layers of the same structure and under permutation 9 things are even more mixed up, with the two experiences most easily distinguished by their having separate activation processes, these being what generates the subjective experience from the ‘data’ held in the structures.

While permutation 10 gives up, and retains one lot of information in consciousness, relegating the other lot to the unconscious, probably by lowering the level of the activation processes below some important threshold.

Figure 15

Permutation 11 removes the constraints in real brains which makes it hard to deal with tigers behind fences, discussed and illustrated above. We just have the first vision processing box combine the signals from the two eyes, left and right, the second then splits out the fence from the tiger, the two versions of the third processing box then finish things off and send the results onto their own compilers, where they can be built into their own experiences.

Which is all well and good, but probably goes against the usual flow, with  the second vision processing box needing to know enough about fences and tigers to split out the two signals. A brain might not be able to pull this off, but a computer could.

Figure 16

Permutation 12 takes permutation 11 a little further, omitting senses other than sight and perhaps harking back to the ‘Coronation Street’ example, mentioned above. We use the words primary and secondary rather than conscious and unconscious as we more cohabitation than is implied by the latter. Nevertheless, primary is in charge, primary is the Commander-in-Chief. Generally speaking, the secondaries raise interrupts with the primary rather than the other way around.

Maybe we could design a super-hero along these lines.

No doubt we could come up with other permutations, some more plausible than others.

Speculations with fields

The general idea here is that the subjective experience is or arises from a field or fields generated by the electrical activities of neurons arising from the activation processes which have been built by the LWS-N compiler. These activities might just be the firing of neurons, the pulses of potential travelling up axons, or they might be something more inclusive, including other aspects of the electrical activity in and around neurons. Scalar or vector valued fields which vary in three dimensional space and in time. Fields which are more or less stable, in some sense or other, for our frames of consciousness of a second or so.

We suppose further that these fields, while varying in space, are quite confined in space, with significant values of them perhaps only occupying a few cubic centimetres, perhaps contained in a sphere with a radius of one or two centimetres.

So it is plausible that such fields could be quite close together, that we have two disjoint experiences happening within a few centimetres of each other.

What seems much less plausible is that such fields should overlap in space a non destructive way, with such destruction reducing both sets of fields to more or less random noise.

Figure 17

Maybe there is room for some sort of consciousness index to be defined across the LWS-N patch of cortical sheet, perhaps beyond, showing the peaks of conscious attention. And when there are two clear peaks of attention there are two instances of LWS-N. So one large structure, with one lot of layers supporting one instance of LWS-N, another lot of layers another instance. With the proviso that there needs to be some separation in two dimensional space of the two instances.

Noting in passing that field theories of consciousness only seem to exist on the fringes of the serious scientific world, with a slight smell of the eccentric or the crank about them. But they do exist. And while most of us fielders are content to rest vaguely in the classical, electromagnetic domain, some stray further afield into the world of quanta, perhaps into that well known phenomenon, the zero point field, a field which attracts some attention from various kinds of mystics and psychics. See reference 7.

Trivia: waves of light travelling through the spaces of space can arise from the jostlings of sub-atomic particles in quite small lumps of matter, say the filaments of light bulbs. But no-one claims that careful analysis of the waves of light will recover the motions of the originating particles. So to that extent, the migration of souls – aka our fields of consciousness – through space, in the way of the thetans of reference 5, seems a bit improbable.

Conclusions

The anecdotal evidence is much more about two people having one experience and about one person alternating between two experiences, than one person having two experiences in parallel.

While the block diagrams, in so far as they are evidence, offer no particular barrier to this last. In particular, to the scheme which I remember reading about in a science fiction novel, whereby one has two subjective experiences, more or less separate but with a certain amount of sharing between them. They are mutually aware, something along the lines of permutation 12 just above. With practise, a person who could pull it off might be able to achieve all kinds of feats; many cooks might not spoil the broth at all.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoined_twins.

Reference 2: The unspeakable history of  thoracopagus twins’ separation – Denys Montandon – 2016.

Reference 3: A friend living inside me - The forms and functions of imaginary companions - Hoff, E.V. – 2004.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-land-of-thetans.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-does-brain-do-sort-of-things-that.html. 

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy. An article with an impressive list of references at the end; the longest we have ever seen in a Wikipedia article.

Reference 8: The fading of stabilized images: Eye movements and information processing - Stanley Coren, Clare Porac – 1974.

Reference 9: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/free-will-3.html.

Reference 10: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/caflifornian-game.html.

Reference 11: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/an-update-on-seeing-red-rectangles.html.

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