A lot – but not all – of this turns out to come in threes: three aspects, three qualities and three sub-qualities. A change from the sevens which I usually major on.
First, we organise the world of the consciousness of an individual into three aspects: time, threads and quality. We avoid the term ‘dimension’ as this has an overly mathematical and organised flavour; a precision which is not there.
In what follows, I use the word ‘action’ to refer to something happening in the nervous system, central or otherwise, something which might or might not amount to or make it to consciousness. Something which might take more or less time.
Time
Time is important because consciousness is not instantaneous, it takes time to work – and the view that one takes of any particular bit of consciousness, any particular bit of action, can depend on how much time, on its duration. So for present purposes, I am supposing that we can break a stream of consciousness down into a series of takes, with the duration of a take varying, but typically in the order of a few seconds, with the rest of the description which follows making sense at that sort of granularity. We also allow flashes of action, of the order of tens of milliseconds, available to the brain in general but not usually to consciousness. Flashes are sparse and do not, unlike frames, usually span or add up to the whole of the subjective experience. Frames start at half a second or so and are the smallest bits of action which reliably make it to consciousness. Takes are made up some whole number of frames, sometimes just one, while scenes are some larger grouping of takes. In sum: flashes, then frames, then takes, then scenes – with the whole being lifted from the world of films, based as that is on the workings of human sight, an important element of our consciousness. Wikipedia knows all about it.
It is unlikely that a sampling procedure like DES is going to hit something like a flash, but, in any event, I think that DES is targeting frames, while I am more interested, at least presently, in takes.
A note of qualification: put simply, we mostly experience consciousness as a continuous stream, the famous stream of consciousness. However, for some purposes it may be necessary to consider the gaps between frames, gaps which might arise in brains in the same way as they do in films: the jump from one frame to the next is not instantaneous. And while I do not see frames as photographic stills, I do see them as being fixed for their duration in some sense. A frame is assembled and then delivered to consciousness where it sits until the next frame comes off the assembly line to displace it. Or pushing the analogy a little harder, we might have a number of assembly lines, all pushing to get their frame into consciousness.
Threads
We have threads because the action in the brain can often be conveniently thought of in those terms, broken down in that way. So if, for example, I am walking along a road, my walking along the road might be one thread, while my thinking about where to go for lunch might be another. Sometimes the breaking down of action into threads will seem a little arbitrary, with there being more than one way of doing things – but the present thought is that that does not matter. There is usually more than one way to skin a cat – or to do something in MS Word – and we do not need to make a fuss about it.
Note that for our present purposes, we do not need the threads to exhaust the action in the brain. We are only interested in that action which has a bearing on consciousness – which consideration excludes plenty. We are not, for example, interested in the detail of the regulation of blood pressure or the regulation of glucose levels in the blood, important though these are for the maintenance of life. Such matters are, perforce, delegated – and most of the time that is fine. We don’t need to know.
In the future, it may be possible to tease out that part of the signal generated by the brain which represents, which encodes, some particular thread. For the moment this is not possible.
Threads are not all equally conscious. In the walking example, one of the two threads will usually be dominant, with dominance perhaps flip-flopping between the two threads in a seemingly random way. We might try to capture this by giving threads a weight, a positive or negative real number, that is to say a real valued function defined on time. Positive for conscious, and the more positive the more conscious, perhaps rather like alertness, a term used by others in a similar context. Zero for on the threshold of consciousness and negative for unconsciousness. I associate to those perspex columns of water containing brightly coloured plastic fishes with near neutral buoyancy, drifting up and down the column. You used to be able to buy them from a fancy-goods bazaar in Kingston but, unusually, I can’t turn anything up in google.
What such a weight does not capture is the idea that one thread might partially or totally occlude another. A notion which is better captured in MS Powerpoint with its ordering of picture shapes (exemplified by the ‘bring to the front’ command) and with its transparency property for shapes. See reference 6.
We might have a second weight, a non-negative real number which tells us something about how much is going on, how complicated the thread is, how much information it carries. So, unlike Tononi (see reference 1), I would give a black spot on a white ground a low weight, but a picture, say ‘The Fight between Carnival and Lent’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (see reference 2), a high weight.
We might even have a third weight, a non-negative real number which tells us something about how much of the thread action is going on in consciousness. In which we are allowing a thread to be part conscious. Going back to the fishes in the column, the top of a fish might be in consciousness while the bottom was not, or rather in the way that fishes in a murky pond might seem from above; tops visible, bottoms invisible. More relevant, a visual thread supporting a verbal thread might be on the edge of consciousness: the broad outline of say, a cow, is available to consciousness but the rest of the cow, perhaps the details of the horns and of the tail, while readily available, are not in consciousness at that particular time, for that particular frame or take.
Going further, one might ascribe all kinds of other properties to threads. To start, one might have dominant mode – is this thread about vision, smell, taste, touch or hearing? And then one might have subject matter – is this thread about cows or tripods? One could go on.
Some threads will persist in the brain for some time, perhaps for the order of minutes or even hours, and being conscious for only some of that time. Others, perhaps corresponding to significant others, might be more or less permanent, but only being activated, or perhaps instantiated, from time to time. Some threads will push out other threads: we can, for example, only have one active speech thread. So we have a natural history of threads.
Summing the first of these weights across threads does not make much sense, but we might sum the second and third to give us person totals. The sum of the second weights tells us how much action we have captured in threads. We note in passing Herculano-Houzel’s observation in her recent book (see reference 5) that the waking brain’s glucose consumption does not seem to depend very much on what the brain is doing, that glucose consumption will only be weakly correlated with this last sum, even if we assume that the action not so captured just runs along at a steady state, not changing much from take to take.
When the sum of the third weights is close to zero, then that person is close to being unconscious – which is not to say that the brain is idle, an idle brain being a dead brain, just that, roughly speaking, there is no subjective experience, no consciousness.
Better than a column of fishes, one might picture the different threads arranged up the page, perhaps in different colours, with each one running in time across the page, something that is easy enough to work up in Excel. Maybe with the threads shown with time-varying fatness, with fatness indicating consciousness or importance. In some future world, one might even be able to wire oneself up to see something of the sort on your computer display, rather as you can wire yourself up and watch your brain waves now. For yet another metaphor, a musical metaphor, see reference 1 again.
I note in passing that some people think that the synchronisation, the bringing together of all the bits and pieces, fragments even, which make up conscious experience is achieved by some sort of carrier wave or circuit, some sort of entrainment – so perhaps the musical metaphor of reference 1, with the various threads held together, in part, by the beat of the music, ties in there as well.
Quality
I turn now to quality, a property which hovers, for the present, between being a property of takes and being a property of frames. Flashes are certainly too small and scenes are certainly too big. Perhaps this will become clearer going forward.
Notwithstanding, for the present I allow just three qualities:
- Absorbed activity (75%)
- Flickering (10%)
- Independent thought (15%).
With one piece of evidence for this being that my DIY DES suggests that good proportion of the sample points in my waking day fall quite comfortably into one of these three categories – with the rough percentages being the numbers in brackets. I would guess that I am high on flickering because I spend a fair chunk of each day walking a regular route on which there is little need or inclination to pay much attention.
Absorbed activity is where the person concerned is fully engaged in some purposeful activity or other, fully engaged to the point where some might say that the person was not conscious at all. A person absorbed in activity is apt to be largely unware of what is going on around him. Examples of absorbed activity include drilling a hole in a wall, making a cake, playing a shot at golf, writing a computer program, chairing a meeting, having a meal at a restaurant, going to a wedding, reading a book, listening to the radio, watching television or being at a theatrical performance of some sort.
Note that an absorbed activity can be either active or passive.
Many people like to add radio or television to an only fairly absorbing activity, in which case their conscious attention might flip-flop between the two threads in an irregular, not so say, random way.
Flickering is what I spend some of my time doing when I am out walking. My attention is flickering from place to place around the scene in front of me, rarely alighting anywhere for more than a second or so. There might be a few vague, verbal thoughts but they do not amount to much. Such flickering is often associated with some undemanding background activity, in my case walking: so one thread for the walking, another for the visual flickering. Perhaps a third, low-grade, verbal thread.
Or perhaps driving on a road that one knows reasonably well and which is not too busy. Or pretending to listen to someone going on about something which one has heard all about before. In the case of a cow, perhaps grazing. While a big cat might just be sitting. In the case of the cow, the flickering is keeping an eye out for predators, while the cat is on the look-out for prey, with its attention flicking to features which the retina is continually flagging up for its attention. Which suggests that flickering might have evolved to help us survive in a jungle full, as jungles are, of both challenges and opportunities.
Third and last, we have independent thought. Independent thoughts are the chains of images in the mind which are not derived directly from the environment, that is to say from the body (the pain in the stomach), from the periphery (the feeling of the hand in the glove) or the outside world (the owl hooting in the garden). Images which might be thought of as flashes, but much more commonly as frames or takes.
A conscious flash of independent thought is going to occupy the whole of consciousness, while a conscious thread can co-exist with another, generally in a foreground-background relationship. One of the conscious threads will be very much to the fore.
The stuff which makes us human by lifting us above the brute world. That said, this independent thought would often be nothing to do with me or my place in the world; it might be about edifying things like prison reform or membership of the European Union. And while it might not be the raw pain, it might be about the pain in the stomach. Was the pain in the stomach down to the prawns I had for lunch?
Sub-quality
I further split independent thought into three sub-qualities as follows:
- word like – and fairly slow. Roughly speaking, this sort of thought seems to be constrained by the speed with which we can speak out loud. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to make progress, to reason with words. For example, all horses are mammals.
- picture like – and generally fairly small. It is easier to image a daisy than an herbaceous border. And it is harder to image an herbaceous border that it is to say ‘herbaceous border’
- other – for example sound, smell or feel. Or some combination.
In my waking day, my impression is that most of my inner thought is in words, with the odd sprinkling of pictures in the background. Perhaps one thread for the words, one thread for the pictures. Inner thought involves more pictures when, for example, I am just waking up, in the dark. Perhaps it is harder to form pictures in the mind when pictures are pouring in from the outside world – or, at the least, harder to see them.
Closing remarks
There will be times when what I am doing does not fit, when my sample point does not fit neatly into one of the three qualities described above. I imagine a triangle with the three corners corresponding to the three qualities, with the sample points quite strongly clustered around the them, but with others dotted about. I associate to those cluster diagrams you get from people who have done principal components analysis on something complicated to pull out some small number of dimensions.
So, for example, if my inner verbal thoughts become coherent, intense and ongoing, we move to somewhere on or near the line between inner thought and absorbed activity. Is it part of the point of inner thought that there is a degree of aloofness from the thought, a sense of self having the inner thought, a sense which vanishes when we are absorbed – or, for that matter, when we are flickering. Or if my absorbed activity is not that absorbed and my mind wanders off the job, we then might move to somewhere on or near the line between absorbed activity and flickering. And so on.
Standing back a bit, using the terms introduced above, taking in a scene or two, we might see what is mainly a period of absorbed activity, with a few patches of flickering or independent thought. Or what is mainly a period of flickering, with a few patches of absorbed activity or independent thought. A period of independent thought is less likely, at least in my experience, being patchy by nature.
And there are the people who can do than more than one thing at once, like Fran, noticed at reference 3, which in this model is reflected in extra threads, perhaps with unusual weights. There may be times when being able to do that is adaptive, but I also suspect that dividing conscious resources between two activities will result in poor performance in both. So not maybe not always adaptive: maybe it is better to concentrate on running away from the tiger, rather than trying to dream up complicated ways to knock it on the head as one goes along. That should have been done beforehand.
Then there are the people, the relations of Fran, who claim to be able to attend to more than one thing at once. This I have difficulties with, although I am quite happy with people who can attend to things which are not there, which are only there in their minds. A trick which, I understand, that some animals can pull off.
Lastly, I offer some thoughts regarding Hurlburt’s unsymbolised thoughts, the subject of much debate in the academic press.
We allow threads whose function is to block out other threads. So I might tap my fingers energetically to block out something I do not like. Other blocking threads might be devices resorted to by the unconscious, with such threads not having any conscious content, but intended either to block unpleasant thoughts or to block conscious interference in some delicate operation that the unconscious is engaged on.
All of which gives us a device to implement unsymbolised thought. Such thoughts are simply going on in the subconscious as unconscious threads, but the bleep tears aside the veil of the blocking thread, revealing all or part of the previously unconscious thought. So I am conscious that I was not conscious of the thought before the bleep, but after the bleep I know all about it and am able to report both on it and its absence. Giving us the phenomenon of unsymbolised thought.
Going forward, I shall test how this way of looking at things stands up to further descriptive sampling. Can I use it to reliably and consistently code up the way that I spend my time – or at least that part of it which I open up to sampling?
PS: with thanks to Charles Fernyhough, one of whose books pointed me in the direction of Russell Hurlburt.
References
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/another-metaphor.html.
Reference 2: http://www.wikiart.org/en/pieter-bruegel-the-elder/the-fight-between-carnival-and-lent-1559-1.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-case-of-fran.html.
Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.
Reference 5: http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com/lab.
Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/transparency.html.
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