Shopping lists

A look at the presently elusive purpose of human consciousness in the light of building shopping lists.

In what follows there will be reference to LWS-N, the local or layered workspace, neural version, material about which can be found at reference 4.

Let us suppose that we go shopping once a week, say Monday morning.

Let us suppose we have a groceries cupboard.

Let us suppose that all the groceries come in small, distinctive boxes. Maybe there are few enough different sorts of grocery that the boxes can be colour coded.

The idea is that, the regular weekly shop completed, there should be a suitable number of boxes of all the groceries, where this number reflects the average consumption during the weeks past and, perhaps, any plans we might having for the weeks coming. We might have a menu for the coming week, from which one derives the shopping requirement. Perhaps allowing a margin for error, loss or change.

So on Sunday evening we peer into the groceries cupboard. We take in the then current stock of all the different groceries and compute the list. This will take a little time with the eyes moving around the cupboard to take in the stocks of all those different groceries.

This task will be harder as our cupboard is muddled up. If we keep all the different groceries in nice tidy heaps, one heap for each sort of grocery, there is much less to compute. Beyond perhaps raising an interrupt in the case that we come across a second heap of corn flakes, when there should only be the one heap – a task which requires memory, short term or otherwise.

Figure 1

On Monday morning, we drive down to Sainsbury’s Kiln Lane and execute that list, snapped by Google above and with the all important trolley park taking pride of place (on which see reference 6). The memory of this list needs to be long term, at least relative to the short term just mentioned. The list needs to be retained for 24 hours or so, rather than the 24 seconds or so needed to scan the cupboard. Maybe best to write it down.

A robot could have a fair stab at all of this without bothering with consciousness, while we probably could not. So what are the relevant differences?

Breaking the task down

At simplest, we loop through all the groceries, make a shopping decision for each one, committing groceries to the list accordingly.

So how do we loop through the groceries? If we can rely on the cupboard being tidy, we can just scan the cupboard in some orderly way. Maybe the cupboard can be assumed to be a shelf and all we have to do is to scan the shelf from left to right, pausing at each heap in turn? A task which requires the ability to maintain a pointer (sometimes called a cursor) so that we keep our place on the shelf.

It may be necessary to call on memory to check for items which are not just low but missing. Not enough just to look for the small heaps. Unless we know, for example, that every square marked on the floor of the cupboard should be occupied by a heap. And then we would need to know what should occupy that square. Perhaps a label or a colour code in the square?

There is a certain amount of error checking going on. We have a good idea what the stock was and what the consumption has been. So some part of the brain is checking current stock against what it knows of the past. For which purpose, just gazing rather blankly at the heap, but holding that heap in mind, in attention, gives the brain the space it needs for these background tasks. Space which would be denied by carrying on a conversation at the same time (see below). We associate to global workspace theories of consciousness which are partly built around requirements of this sort.

And looking ahead to the work to be done at Kiln Lane, it might also be that the shop is organised in the same way, making things easier still. And if one had a good memory for images, in particular for the image of the grocery cupboard from the evening before, there might be no need for a list at all.

But suppose for the present that we have, or have already computed, the desired stock level for each item of grocery that should be in our grocery cupboard. So all we need to do is compare the desired stock with the actual stock, and where the one is greater than the other, write the name of that item and an amount to buy to the list.

With practise, one can probably do this more or less unconsciously. One needs to be awake, but one can write the list without paying either it or the cupboard much conscious attention; one could be listening to the radio or carrying on a conversation of sorts at the same time.

This might not work so well with a child, with children often having fairly short attention spans and minds that are apt to wander if there are distractions, as there often are. The child needs to be told to attend to the task in hand, that is to say to the cupboard and to the list. Maybe some of this is unconscious, having been drummed into the child by appropriate punishment.

But while we are learning, while we still need to pay attention, is the best way to proceed to empty the conscious mind of thought, for there to be no inner thought but plenty of attention? One just looks at each heap in turn and writes something down, if appropriate, on the list. Or would one allow a bit of conscious inner thought about the number of boxes in the heap in question before actually committing pen to paper?

We suspect that for most people, writing the list down is necessary, even though they may well remember chunks of it anyway, even without trying to commit it to memory. That said, some people find that writing the list down is a useful aid to memory formation, just as some find that reciting it out loud is a useful to aid to memory formation.

Which suggests that a  housewife who can neither read nor write might have difficulty. Lists may not have been important while we were in the jungle, but they would have become more important by the time that we had people living in towns and life had become more complicated – a time which would have predated universal literacy.

Would she have made a mental list by attaching groceries and amounts to the successive numbers, starting at one? And doing the shopping by ticking off the list in a strictly serial, starting at the beginning and working forwards fashion? But this is a topic for another day and we turn now to our literate housewife.

One scenario

Figure 2

We suppose we have an open, roughly eye-level cupboard along the lines illustrated above, with a number of colour coded pigeon holes, so arranged that we can tell at a glance how many boxes – perhaps shaped like the boxes that tubes of toothpaste come in and stacked up opening end forward – there are in each pigeon hole, perhaps along the lines shown for indigo, third from the right on the top row.

We suppose that the long term goal, after we have been shopping, is to have between nine and twelve boxes in each of the pigeon holes, which gives us a certain amount of latitude, a certain amount of choice. The short term goal is to inspect the cupboard and to prepare a written shopping list. This is the task with which we are concerned in what follows.

We do not worry here about most people’s difficulty with naming more than a handful of colours, related to the difficulties noticed at reference 1.

The provision of choice could make the task easier, in that the person concerned could just skip quickly over the pigeon holes with nine or more boxes already present, a conveniently whole number of pigeon hole rows. Or not, if they liked to exercise some choice. For now we suppose that our person is into speed rather than choice. So we also suppose that where topping up is needed, our person chooses to top right up, rather than to choose some level between nine and twelve. An alternative, possibly more economical, rule might be to always buy some multiple of three. A complication we do not go into, might be the need to constrain the total number of boxes to be bought on the list. Either, perhaps, because of shortage of funds or because of shortage of space in the shopping basket.

One strategy would be to first quickly check the whole cupboard to work out whether or not there was some shopping to be done, and then, on the assumption that there was, to work more carefully across the top row, from left to right, adding items to the shopping list as appropriate, then the middle row and, lastly, the bottom row.

Which would go something like opening scan, scan, write, scan, write, scan etc. Where second and subsequent scans would only stop at those pigeon holes which were low, below nine boxes.
Which does assume that one could keep one’s place between successive scans.

Noting here that a random scan, that is to say a scan in which the conscious experience would seem random, would remove the need to keep one’s place but would probably be slower and the result would be much less reliable. One would be much more likely to miss things. Where by ‘seem random’ I mean that the unconscious might well be up to something behind the scenes, that there might be some organising principle to the seemingly random movement of the eyes around the cupboard.

Both eyes and hands would be reasonably fully occupied during such a scan, just about enough action left in them to smoke at the same time, or perhaps to hold a conversation of sorts, but nothing too testing.

Now, a fairly bottom of the range robot could manage this task, with no need for anything remotely like consciousness. So what is consciousness bringing to the party?

High level scan

To which end, we turn to the business of scanning in more detail, sketched in Figure 2 below.

Figure 3

Figure 3 takes the form of the sort of diagram used by computer programmers and while we do not claim that this is how the average brain does things, the brain does have to do these things, in one way or another, if it is to build a shopping list. With full knowledge, one must be able to map from what it actually does to this diagram.

Let us suppose we have reached the middle of the diagram, the box getting the state of the current pigeon hole. That is to say to count the number of boxes in the current pigeon hole. We then need to recover or otherwise retrieve the shopping rule, the refresh condition, and apply it to that state, implying at least two items in working memory, with the result being a small integer. If that number is zero, we simply go to the next pigeon hole and carry on. Otherwise, we combine the number with the name of the pigeon hole, that is to say its colour, into an item for the shopping list and append it to that list, coloured yellow in the figure because we are leaving the world of the head and sending the complicated instructions out to the eyes, the body and the limbs needed to actually write the instruction down. Again implying at least two items in working memory, the name of a colour and a number of boxes to be bought.

There is also a sort of pause, with the subjective experience being mainly the suspended image of the current pigeon hole. A pause during which the unconscious scurries around checking that the state of that pigeon hole is something reasonably plausible, what might be expected given our prior knowledge and expectations. A frame of consciousness in the parlance of LWS-N. In computer speak, the dominant process suspends itself for a few hundred milliseconds, giving subordinate processes a chance to do their stuff, raising an interrupt with the dominant process, should that be necessary.

A further item in working memory is some kind of marker or label for the current pigeon hole, it not being enough to keep the eyes on the right place in the cupboard because the eyes are needed to help with writing the shopping list. There has to be something in working memory – perhaps amounting to row and column number – to tell them where to go back to, a something which might need to be there for some small number of seconds, say two or three.

Sometimes during such a scan, one pauses, drifts off somewhere else. Then pause again, realise one has drifted but is able to recover the place from which one drifted. Sometimes one loses one’s place and cannot so recover; presumably the relevant bits of working memory have been recycled.

Low level scan

Figure 4

Sometimes, particularly with very young people, or with people who are not good at counting, it is not enough just to gaze at a pigeon hole to be able to bring the count into consciousness.

In such cases a more conscious effort is needed. The task of counting the boxes in a pigeon hole needs to be broken down, perhaps into a low level scan of the heap of boxes. An orderly scan from left to right, from top to bottom. A scan which requires the ability to fix on a box, to increment a count and then to move the fix, the cursor, along a bit. Or perhaps to go back to the beginning of the row above.

All of which is apt to give us another diagram along the lines of Figure 3 above.

Alternatively, in this particular case, the brain might simply memorise the count corresponding to each shape of heap, only resorting to an actual count in extremis. Providing we have a tidy housekeeper, the number of shapes will be quite small – and perhaps the odd untidy heap will be the occasion for a bit of counting.

Usually, with a bit of practise, this counting of the boxes in a pigeon hole can slip into the unconscious, and one can rely on the right number popping up, perhaps just dipping down into the detail of the process from time to time, when a gear slips. Or something.

Another scenario

This might be like the first scenario, but making a mental rather than a written list. We believe this to be a more testing task – but do not go further into it here.

The function of consciousness in all this?

So on the one hand it is clear that an unconscious person could not make a shopping list and reasonably clear that most people could not make a shopping list while being continuously engaged on some other demanding task, like listening to a string quartet or watching a football match. One might hear the quartet but could not really listen to it while making a list. Ditto football match. It is also clear that a robot, without any pretensions to consciousness at all, might manage perfectly well.

So what is it that is important about consciousness here?

Maybe the answer lies in the robot being much better at working memory. A robot, being a computer, is awash with working memory. Working memory which we might encapsulate as one of the expressions introduced at reference 2, expressions which are quite like the XML which powers much of the Internet, in function if not appearance – with the introduction to which at reference 3 being a little more accessible than that offered by Wikipedia.

An expression which consists of an ordered list of phrases, with each phrase consisting of an optional label and a data item (which might be a simple token, a bit of text, but which might be an expression in its own right or something more complicated still). And working memory offering functions like:

• Get the first (unlabelled) data item
• Get the last data item
• Get the next data item (with the system remembering whether we were working from left to right (normal, default) or from right to left)
• Get the data item with such and such a label
• Delete such and such a data item.

Stuff which would provide a shopping list algorithm with the working data that it needed. Stuff which, in the case of a computer, ought to include provision for errors. For, for example, there not being a phrase with the nominated label.

So the hypothesis is that a human can only do this sort of thing at all well when he is conscious. Which is not quite the same as saying that consciousness is needed for decent working memory, just that working memory seems to work much better when the host is conscious.

We speculate that working memory is actually stored in one of the layers of LWS-N, layers which are not available unless LWS-N is up and running, suggesting that the host is conscious, or at least near conscious, also that working data is apt to be cleared in the passage from one frame of consciousness to the next, unless something takes a bit of care.

The catch with this is that it is a bit of a bolt-on. One is not usually conscious of the contents of working memory in the way that one is conscious of the boxes in the cupboard. A catch which is not necessarily fatal as without knowing, it seems quite plausible that lots of evolutionary engineering is very ad-hoc. Evolution just grabs and adapts whatever is available, without much regard for the niceties of design. So, for example, we believe that the jaws of vertebrates are derived from the gill arches of fishes, structures which had and still have a quite different purpose, breathing rather than eating, with just the need for an orifice in common.

We look now at another scenario.

Tall building

We are standing in the street, looking at the apartment tower in Vauxhall called Vauxhall Tower, aka St. George’s Wharf Tower, all forty something floors of it and we are trying to count them, perhaps for the purposes of the computation of business rates.

Figure 5

We leave aside needing to decide what to do about the untidy bits top and bottom, to concentrate on the main business.

We suppose that there are no distinguishing features to help us distinguish one floor from another and the clouds are no help because they move about. If one loses one place, one simply has to start over.

What we do is concentrate our attention on a floor of the tower and then, maintaining that attention, ease it up one floor. At the same time, some other bit of the brain increments the number. If you click to enlarge, you can try this with the snap above – without using any kind of a pointer to mark your position – which would be cheating.

Part of what seems to happen is that one’s attention is on a floor. Then one attends to both that floor and the next floor, the floor above it. Then quickly moves one’s eyes up to that next floor and let the first floor go. An important part of this is having bright, clear markers between the floors. Another part is keeping the head and eyes as still as possible, this being helped by a bit of local variation in the visual texture which helps detect and so inhibit movement. Although not enough variation to help with identification – not a distinguishing feature of the sort just mentioned.

Fixation point is a useful concept here, something that humans, along with some other animals, seems to be able to manage: to hold attention – more precisely the fovea – to a more or less fixed point in the visual field. In this case the ability to do this is supported by the presence of clear boundaries. One is holding attention inside a clearly delineated patch of visual field. One’s brain seems to know about and to be able to control crossing that boundary on the cardinal points – north, east, south and west, otherwise up, right, down and left.

Figure 6

So in the figure above, one holds one attention on the place marked with the red spot. This needs to wobble about a bit – microsaccades and ocular drift in the jargon – to maintain the visual stimulus, but manages to stay well inside the boundary of the chosen rectangle. One then allows attention to drift to the right until it jumps across that boundary and locks onto the place marked with the green spot. Spots which do not actually exist on the windows of the tower, virtual spots brought into being by the position of the fovea. A wheeze which is not going to work when the windows get too small to be differentiated in this way.

Sometimes one is not sure that one has got it right, perhaps one has eased up two floors or no floor. This is usually fatal to maintaining the necessary attention.

In any event, something for which one certainly needs to be conscious and to concentrate on. Watching the football match with part of one’s attention is not going to do.

Something also that one does not need to do in the case of scenario one, at Figure 2 above. In that scenario, one might well maintain attention on a pigeon hole, but that attention can be supplemented by knowing that the pigeon hole in question is top row, third from the right, and because the number of pigeon holes is small none of the numbers involved need be more than about five, a small enough number to be managed without having to count. Equally important, information which can be coded as text and carried from one frame of consciousness to another, unlike the position of the fovea, a point to which we return below.

And digressing, one might go so far as to speculate that the act of visual fixation is the foundation on which visual consciousness is built. In which connection, we shall be reading reference 5 with interest.

Figure 7

Returning to our computer, we suppose that it cannot take a suitable picture of the tower all in one go and that it needs to do it in a sequence of overlapping chunks, working up the tower.
First, we would train the computer to pick out the strong horizontals and verticals which mark out the grid of windows. We would get it to do a bit of checking that these horizontals and verticals were reasonably regular, reasonably evenly spaced, which would help deal with the inevitable noise in the image of a chunk. For a chunk, that would then give us something like Figure 7 above.

Figure 8

It then works up the tower, producing a sequence something like Figure 8 above, aligning the successive chunks by matching the images of individual windows. It would not particularly matter which particular window was matched, within reason, once again allowing for a bit of noise in the otherwise stable light conditions. As we have already suggested, there should be enough local variation in visual texture to support this identification of individual windows.

The key to all this is that the computer can get an image into its memory banks and overlap organising information onto that image. Working up each chunk, incrementing the count of floors at each horizontal bar is then straightforward. An essentially offline task; the computer only needs to be online when it is photographing its successive chunks, a succession which it can manage with camera angles.

This, we suggest, the human brain cannot manage at all and it has to work in real time, relying on the rather unstable ocular system to maintain its position, rather than just keeping a few numbers in working memory.

If the human had been given a series of numbered photographs (numbering making things a lot easier), he might do something comparable to what the computer did, ruling lines on photographs and matching windows across photographs. But this does not seem to be an algorithm which we are able to internalise – at least not without a good deal of practise.

If, as suggested above, working memory is part of LWS-N, we  might have a working memory label amounting to current position in one layer linked by a column object to that position in a layer object representing the current chunk of the tower. A linkage which is destroyed when the compiler builds the next frame. So part of the difficulty of the count is maintaining the frame for far longer than its average duration of a second or so. Or in visual processing terms, the difficulty of maintaining inhibition of normal saccades for more than a second or so.

We speculate that what consciousness is bringing to this party is maintaining concentration and attention. The conscious brain knows what it is supposed to be doing and can suppress interrupts and quite a lot of noise. It gives the labile, unstable ocular system space in which it can lock onto floors. Something else that suggests that consciousness is not just a display-only device, as suggested by LWS-N. There is at least something in the consciousness system (whether or not that happens to be in some particular place) which interacts with other brain systems.

Figure 9

Maybe states of consciousness, our frames of consciousness in LWS-N, require energy to get there – and then more energy to get away. LWS-N locks a good chunk of the brain onto the current object of attention, onto the current goal; it stops most of other stimuli floating around in the subconscious from reaching a critical level. Not like climbing to the top of a hill and the least knock and we are off down again like Jack and Jill of the nursery rhyme, more like the volcano of Figure 9 above: once you get past the lip of the crater, the critical point, you are caught in the crater. We associate first to a planet moving through a space containing the occasional star. Sometimes the planet goes into orbit around one, eventually getting knocked out of that orbit by something or other, eventually arriving in some other orbit. Second to the escapement mechanism of mechanical clocks; the delicate two way interaction between the bit of machinery giving time (the pendulum or the hair spring) and the bit of machinery giving power (the weights or the main spring).

All of which gives us another behavioural correlate of consciousness, rather than an explanation.

Odds and ends

Pre-school children will sometimes learn to recite their numbers, say up to twenty or so, before they learn to count things. A neat illustration of the fact that counting things – as opposed to just counting – is a reasonably complicated activity.

One could offer the Vauxhall task to a group of technical colleges as a robot challenge, making it into one of those TV contest shows.

Weekly variations to include counting the number of courses in a brick wall, the number of books in a uniform edition on a library shelf and the number of spikes on a length of barbed wire.

We understand that a sloping version – that is to say not simply horizontal or vertical – would be harder for humans if not robots, but it would be interesting to know whether horizontal versions of the game were harder than vertical versions.

It would also be interesting to know about the saccades which were going on during the Vauxhall task, with there presumably having been a large number of them, maybe up to a hundred at a guess, by the time the task was completed.

We note that while a computer would not have trouble with either the shopping list or the apartment tower, programming a computer to do such a thing is a long way from just telling a general purpose computer what do in natural language, in the way that you might ask your telephone about the nearest Indian restaurant – the sort of task it can cope with.

We have commented here and elsewhere on the brain not being very good at sequences. Which does not sit very well with it – or at least the cerebellum – doing very well at the sequences of commands to the muscles needed to move us around the world in good order.

Conclusions

All of which suggests that consciousness is bound up with attention, goals and working memory, without going so far as to claim a causal link in either direction. Stuff which is maybe included in some layer of LWS-N, but without necessarily being projected into the subjective experience.

With maintaining attention on one object or goal including keeping other objects and goals well in the background. Keeping somewhere in mind some notion of what the current goal is and knowing when one is straying off-message. That if my eyes stray to passers by on the street outside, some supervisory process chips in to stop that straying, pull them back to the matter in hand.

We also suggest that the concept of ‘next’ is important, perhaps part of working memory. A concept which says give me the thing – whatever sort of thing that might be – that comes after the current thing.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/old-sevens.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/expressions-and-their-orders.html.

Reference 3: https://www.w3schools.com/xml/.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/an-update-on-seeing-red-rectangles.html.

Reference 5: Temporal Encoding of Spatial Information during Active Visual Fixation - Xutao Kuang, Martina Poletti, Jonathan D. Victor, and Michele Rucci – 2012. A reference from Wikipedia.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/trolleys-126-to-130.html.

Luke one

Last week to my first St. Luke of the season.

Started off well with three highly dressed young women on the town platform at Epsom. Possibly Japanese, possible creationists from the university up the road.

Better still when I noticed the new improved train indicator boards. Same sort of thing as before but better - although I would not like to have to say whether it was worth what must have been the considerable expense, given that what we had before did well enough. The work noticed the week before at reference 1.

Pulled the first Bullingdon to do Waterloo Station 2, Waterloo to Roscoe Street, St. Luke's in 19 minutes 25 seconds.

Had a chat on the way with a Champagne Brompton, that is to say a smartly turned out older man, perhaps a bit younger than me, who ran to two Bromptons. A summer one which he was riding on this occasion plus a winter one, fully equipped with lights and dynamo. He thought that the new cycleway up Farringdon Road was the business - while I have not yet got quite used to it. One feature being the sometimes long waits at lights - with cyclists having their own lights with their own sequences - but the with the upside of the sometimes long runs between red lights. Plus I think that cyclist manners are slowly improving: some contraventions, but not that many and not that blatant.

Bacon sandwich shop alive and well. Manager the same, one waitress the same and one new waitress. Sandwich good. While I ate, I wondered about the premises opposite, 61 Banner Street, described as a room club, an operation which Bing suggests might be nothing more interesting than a letting agency; an operation which says that it puts the tenant before profits. Well they would, wouldn't they? See reference 2.

Fullish house at St. Luke's, with some locals rather than workers. I had what turned out to be programme fiddlers both right and left and only just restrained from making some acid comment left as I left after the concert.

Fliter, whom I do not appear to have heard since 2016 and noticed at reference 3, was in fine form and turned out in something like an old fashioned frock coat. A truly excellent performance, every bit as good as the last.

My only complaint was that while she managed to suppress the clapping between the relatively short pieces, which I like, she rather ran some of them together, which I don't like. The lovely Fiona T (from Radio 3) had, I think, explained that we were not to clap, so I think Fliter could have had more of a pause between pieces.

The encore was also very good, I think the posthumous 21st nocturne, in C minor. But a nocturne which does not count at all in my Paderewski edition, which stops at 19, Op.72 No.1, also described as posthumous. From which we deduce that the last two must have been considered non-canonical for some other reason. And why do you call 19 No.1 when there is no No.2? Perhaps I need to read the words more carefully.

Pulled the second Bullingdon from Finsbury Leisure Centre behind the church, but took an extra 27 seconds to make it back to the pole position at the top of the ramp at Waterloo. Passed a young lady on a cycle from Condor Cycles, having passed a Claude Butler ladies cycle outside the school at Pound Lane the day before.

Condor Cycles used to be a serious place in Gray's Inn Road, in the days when cycling was a less middle class, white collar sport than it is these days. While I used to ride a Claude Butler, a striking bright yellow, back in the late 1970's. At a time when our landlord was called Major General Butler, one of a long line of military Butlers, and his son went on to be a Brigadier at the very least, in Afghanistan. A son, as I recall, keen enough that when he failed to get into Sandhurst at his first attempt, joined up as a private and got in at the second attempt. One presumes that his determination went down well.

While Bromptons have done well too. A brand which was invented a few decades ago now and which has survived the great bike revival, has ridden the wave of enthusiasm. The Nescafé of folding bikes? Not that I was ever tempted myself, thinking that it would not be a great ride and that it would be a great bother on the tube and train.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-search-for-soames.html.

Reference 2: https://roomclub.com/room-finder-service/.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/04/fliter.html.

Reference 4: https://www.condorcycles.com/.

Must have feature

I have been very pleased with my new bread proving bin, noticed, for example at reference 1. But BH took me down a peg or two today by remarking that in celebrity bake-offs on day-time television, the drawers in the tents in which the celebrities do their stuff are equipped with proving drawers.

An idea which I found very attractive. So islands in kitchens are yesterday's must-have feature in a respectable suburban kitchen. Today's must-have feature is a couple of proving drawers - two because respectable bakers like myself economise on global warming by baking two loaves at a time.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/07/bread-proving-bin.html.

More Maigret

To round things out, we watched the episode of Gambon's Maigret which figured in the last post yesterday evening. A genial adaptation, true to the spirit of the original. And we thought that an Atkinson version would be less true, would be much noisier and busier. The director would probably say that he was being truer to the gritty and rough low-life Paris of the thirties and forties, tearing away the Simenon comfort blanket - which may be true, but which does not make for better pensioner viewing in consequence.

Not for the first time, slightly surprised at how much of the detail gets left out. Sixty minutes nothing like enough for 150 pages. Perhaps also a question of attention span, in that if the director packs too much in, the viewer gets a bit tired and congested.

At the same time, I noticed that the director had popped in lots of references or allusions to this or that which would have little if any meaning to someone who had not read the story, even if one tried watching it again to make sure one had not missed anything. Perhaps the thing in question does not lift very readily from the page to the screen, cannot be readily captured in a neat verbal or visual image; the point of its inclusion is to please the cognoscenti among the viewers, not to round out the story.

Maybe another episode will follow this evening.

Reference 1: Maigret et la Grande Perche - Simenon - 1951 - Vol.XVI of the collected works.

Reference 2: Maigret and the Burglar's Wife - Gambon & Ratcliff respectively - 1992.

Poles and perches

Just finished my first reading 'Maigret et la Grande Perche', one leading figure of which is a lady no longer young, once of the street and known as 'La Grande Perche'. So what's all this about perches?

Larousse explains that meaning one is the fish, as in the English, said to be good to eat, while meaning two is various kinds of pole. Scaffold pole, the pole for a pole vault, the pole for an overhead microphone in a television studio, a hunting term for the trunk part of the antlers of a deer, the pole which connects a tram to the overhead power cable, what we in England might call the pantograph. Also an old unit of measurement, as in the poles and perches of Olde England, which older readers may remember from their days of arithmetical swatting for the 11-plus.

So is the lady a plump perch, ripe for the eating, or a pole of some sort?

Maybe Littré will settle the matter. It tells me that a perche is a timber trade term for a long straight trunk, presumably typically of a pine tree, of three to four metres in length. By extension, a grande perche is vernacular for a tall lady, straight up and down, not much in the way of bulges. Not, one might have thought, an ideal build for a lady of the street. Along the way I am reminded about taille, a word with various meanings, from tailler, originally to prune, from the Latin, but by extension to cut more generally. Including, as in the English, 'I don't like the cut of his jib'. Also where our own 'tall',  'tailor', 'tally' and 'tally stick' come from. Also reminded, I think via the antlers, about fût, the main part of a trunk of a tree, a wine barrel, the main part of a column (of a building). And futaie, an unnatural or planted forest intended to produce big, tall trees, suitable for telegraph poles and masts.

Now fully awake, closer reading of Larousse reveals the tall lady meaning, while closer reading of the original text reveals that the lady in question is both tall and thin, so the pole interpretation is clearly the right one and the fish interpretation is the wrong one.

And just to be different we talk of people being like a string bean or as being as thin as a rake. But not as thin or as tall as a pole.

Reference 1: Maigret et la Grande Perche - Simenon - 1951 - Vol.XVI of the collected works.

Reference 2: Maigret and the Burglar's Wife - Gambon & Ratcliff respectively - 1992.

Wigmore one

A week ago to our first concert of the autumn at the Wigmore Hall, a Sunday lunchtime affair at which the Doric Quartet gave us Haydn Op.33 No.5 and Beethoven Op.130 - this last with, as it turned out, the Große Fuge.

For some reason, the ticket hall at Epsom was busy when we arrived, with one ticket window down (out of two) and one ticket machine down (out of five). While we waited, a lady entertained with tales of skirmishing and police underneath her bedroom window the night before. Something which only happens very rarely in our road, and then without the police.

Vauxhall was busy when we arrive there. We learned later that this was something to do with India at the Oval.

Tube also busy, including a tall young man offering us a view of his steadily masticating jaw. At least it was chewing gum rather than large and messy sandwich. Plus, two young men offered us their seats, an offer which, on this occasion, we both accepted.

Oxford Circus making preparation for the arrival of a bicycle race, preparations which included various barriers across roads.

The change of railway timetables meant that we were a little later, which meant that All-Bar-one was a little more crowded. We almost gave up, but we hung in there and got served. But no smarties on this occasion, peanut flavoured from Mr. Reese or otherwise, despite the supply jar being visible behind the counter. Given that it was a little more crowded, we thought it a bit mean to complain.

Into a crowded hall, where the Dorics were in very fine form, with a light Haydn plus a heavy Beethoven making a very good hour's worth.

Viola and cello both quite physical about it, the two violins more restrained. On the other hand, there was a slight breeze, which cost the first violin his score at one point. And also resulted in a smell of dinner at another point.

Out to inspect the shirt scene at the House of Fraser, with the sort of white shirt which was normal in my days at work there being called 'formal business wear'. Most of it seemed to be sold by fancy brand names in concessions and most of it was either the wrong size or the wrong fit. And some of it was very expensive. An older shop walker, a touch scruffy for such a prestige shop, explained that normally shaped people (like himself and myself) went to John Lewis for their shirts. Although my recollection was that we did not do that well there last time we tried it. Perhaps the answer is for BH to do it solo, without bad tempered appendage.

Onto Ponti's, which we have not visited for a while, not being very happy with the amount of musak on the last visit. Meal fine, except I was a but unsure about the tiramisu: flavour good, but involving a great deal of whipping cream or some such. Tables not fine, being quite old and there was something wrong with the varnish which made them feel oddly sticky despite being reasonably carefully wiped.

We admired the portrait of the founder of the restaurant, sadly now deceased. We admired the way that the décor of the bar downstairs retained some features from the car park it once was, illustrated above. While the only people we have ever seen in the bar were staff on a break, the place was smart enough with no musty smell, so it must do business when we are not there. State of the art basins in the washrooms, all very smart.

Back at Oxford Circus, we decided not to wait for the cycles, due in about half an hour, so proceeded to Vauxhall where we came across the first and only Muslim lady in full dress.

Paused at Raynes Park to pick up a nicely illustrated little guide to the Escorial, published in Madrid in 1966, Editorial 'Patrimonio Nacional'. Printed in Barcelona rather than China. Binding falling apart but the book is still quite usable at home. A monastery-palace which appears to be roughly the same size as our Hampton Court Palace, but of rather more severe appearance and containing vastly deal more premier division art. Perhaps more Buckingham Palace as far as that goes. Perhaps we will get there on a coach when we are old enough to do coach holidays.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/more-haydn.html. It seems that we last heard this quartet about six months ago. Haydn only on that occasion.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/03/rodney-graham.html. While the last visit to Ponti's appears to have been near eighteen months ago. No mention of noise, despite the foregoing.

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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