Contents
- Introduction
- Traditional definitions
- Ground rules
- The parable of the shell
- The taxonomist
- The engineer
- The demographer
- Descriptive binners
- Intermediate binners
- Classifying binners
- Language
- How does all this play in the LWS model?
- Conclusions
- References
Introduction
Much ink has been spilt, some by me, on defining, classifying and categorising various different sorts of consciousness. In this paper, prompted by references 1 and 2, we turn some of this over, taking a quick look as we go at how such activities might play in our LWS model of consciousness – with this last having been introduced at reference 11 and with some more recent stuff in the second half of reference 12.
Part of our motivation for this model to try to be able to say something about why it is that most humans are conscious a lot of the time, while robots, who can now do many things until recently thought to be the exclusive preserve of humans, appear to be a long way from being conscious. What exactly is it about a robot – at least one of today’s robots – which means that it is not conscious?
Traditional definitions
One traditional, simple definition of consciousness is in terms of reportability. If we are conscious, we can report on it, usually in words, in more or less sophisticated natural language, to someone else. We will often call the person doing the reporting the subject and the person to whom the report is being made the experimenter. Quite often the subject will report on what it is he is conscious of. The vase on the table, the train of thought about his new car, the pricking in his thumb or the feeling of irritability after reading of another bit of vandalism in the town. There are weaknesses here:
- The report may be inaccurate for one reason or another. One being the difficulty of reporting in words something which is not words. Hitherto it has been impossible to check such reports, although this is now changing with scanner magic
- The report may be particularly inaccurate in the case that illness or substances are involved. Or when the report is made or elaborated some time after the event
- The report may use language which the experimenter does not care for or include opinion with which the experimenter does not agree, while at the same time also being about something which the experimenter recognises, something which is real if misrepresented
- This definition does not do in the case of all young and some not so young human subjects who do not have or who have lost speech, or in the case of non-human subjects generally, some of which are generally thought to be conscious, at least to the extent of having more than animal rights
- The business of reporting consciousness disturbs that which is being reported on, particularly if the subject has been interrupted with an experimenter request to report. These interruptions may, for example, result in some kind of play-back or summary of what had been unconscious being made conscious. The play-back may not be very accurate. The business of reporting may be making conscious what might otherwise have remained unconscious. On the other hand, the sort of reporting that pathologists do into their microphones while they work probably becomes automatic, is just part of their job rather than a disturbance.
Sometimes, trains of inner thought are rather fragile, and quickly fade as soon as soon as one notices them, becomes conscious of them. Rather as a dream quickly fades on waking. The subject needs to report his thoughts quickly if they are not going to be lost.
At other times, the subject is conscious of a feeling and that feeling is tied up with something. Perhaps the location of the feeling, perhaps the cause or source of the feeling. While sometimes he will just have the feeling but not be aware of why, not know why. Sometimes, he will just have a feeling, just feel emotional, perhaps with a lump in his throat, without being able to put a name to the feeling.
Another line is the distinction between being conscious of something outside the body (for example, sight or sound), something in or near the body (for example, touch, heat or pressure) and something going on in the brain (for example, thought in words, also known as inner speech).
And there are all kinds of complications at the margins. We might, for example, think that walking or talking is a good marker for consciousness, but some people walk or talk when they are asleep. We might think that lying flat and unresponsive on your back is a good marker for unconsciousness, but some people in that state have been shown to be conscious. They can talk, after a fashion, to a scanner or an EEG machine. See reference 7.
Another traditional, simple definition of consciousness is in terms of what it feels like. So Kastrup talks at reference 1 of one being conscious if there is something which it is like to be conscious. Perhaps put another way, if there is something there. We are not so keen on this one because while it may be true, it does not seem to get us anywhere.
Aware of the fine line between streams of thought which are conscious and streams of thought which are not, Kastrup goes on to generalise what we mean by consciousness and to talk about the possibility of everything being conscious, with lots of mutually unaware streams of consciousness going on in the one head. We are not keen on this one either, and stick to the position that there is only one stream of consciousness in any one person at any one time, although we grant that that one stream of consciousness may be tapping into different streams from the unconscious at different times. Kastrup offers some neat diagrams about all this.
In sum, consciousness is a complicated business. Nevertheless, we want to do better than to be able to say in some rough and ready way whether this person is conscious or not.
Ground rules
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| Figure 1 |
Figure 1 is a box model adapted from the beginning of Reference 10 and first used at reference 12.
Where we have it that a unit of consciousness is a frame, lasting for the order of a second or so, with sequences of frames grouped into takes and sequences of takes into scenes, by analogy with the world of film. The subject is the person having the experience.
We suppose that the moment of conscious captured during Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) at a bleep (see reference 4) amounts to a take.
We further suppose the frame to be made up of a number of layers; one layer for this, another layer for that, after the fashion of technical drawing packages. There will be a sense in which layers persist across frames but this is not of much present concern. There is also a sense in which any one layer contains information from just one modality; sight, sound, taste, whatever.
To this last end, we have grouped layers into threads, so the subject might have several threads about reading, as it were, on the shelf, to be brought into frames of conscious as and when appropriate. Data and objects is the information content of threads and their layers, derived somehow from a combination of old input from memory and new input from the senses and the rest of the body. This new input being real time input (in the jargon of computer people) in that it is arriving not much before, maybe a few hundred milliseconds before, a few tenths of a second before the corresponding subjective experience.
While there is not much of a gap in time between successive frames or between successive takes, there may well be gaps of more or less arbitrary length between scenes. There is apt to be such a gap, for example, when the subject is asleep.
Any one subject has exactly one stream of frames in time. We do not allow more than one frame at a time, it is enough to allow more than one layer. We do allow things to go on of which we are conscious, say our arms and legs waving about, but of which we have no ownership, it being as if someone else was waving them for us. But it is only ‘as if’, it is just some unconscious stream of activity, not some second sentient being lurking inside us.
Anticipating, we make the assertion that there are exhaustive and exclusive classifications which we can usefully apply to layers. That the layers of LWS generated by its compiler have the sort of internal homogeneity which makes this both possible and useful.
The parable of the shell
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| Figure 2 |
Let us suppose that we have a naval shell flying through the air, the sort of thing illustrated at Figure 2, maybe several tons of explosive projectile, and we want to know all about it. We suggest seven lines of attack, each named for what seems to be an appropriate profession.
We note that naval shells have been flying through the air for a long time. Over the years there must have been many millions of such events, all slightly different. We suppose that we have some manageable subset of all these events, a population which we dub XS, ‘X’ for population and ‘S’ for shell.
Taxonomist
A taxonomist might start with the brochures, the sales catalogues of all the people who sell shells and then cut and paste all the relevant bits together to achieve an exhaustive classification of the sort of shells that we are talking about. With the resulting big classification being both exhaustive and exclusive. There is exactly one category in the classification for every event, for every shell. Put another way the classification is exhaustive (everything has a place in it) and exclusive (nothing has more than one place in it). And probably hierarchical. In the case of plants and animals, the work of such classification is called taxonomy, the people that do it are called taxonomists, and there are plenty of learned disputes, mostly friendly, about exactly how things should be done. There was some discussion of this sort of thing at reference 6.
It might even be that some international standards organisation would feel moved to act in the matter, to produce and promulgate a standard list of shells to which sellers of shells were expected to adhere in their offerings.
Demographer
A demographer might use binners, that is to say classifications and other properties to map the events of XS into a low dimensional Euclidean space. One has a property of these shell events for each dimension, perhaps a classification like manufacturer or country of origin, convertible to an integer; perhaps a real number like weight, but also convertible to an integer by banding. One can then talk about the events in some particular cell in this Euclidean space: the events in this cell are like this, the events in that cell are like that. All this was discussed at reference 6.
And beyond some simple classification of the shells themselves, one might be interested in the circumstances of the shell’s firing and classify the ships doing the firing, the weather and the phase of the moon at the time of firing and the places where the firing was done. All kinds of more or less elaborate cross tabulations of our population XS, tabulations which might tell us a good deal.
Statistician
Rather than coming up with the proper dimensions of analysis of our events for himself, the statistician might get the computer to find his dimensions for him, chucking a whole lot of data into the computer and asking it to do principle components analysis or something of that sort. One difficulty being that it can sometimes be difficult to come up with a catchy but accurate title for the dimensions that the computer comes up with.
Engineer
The engineer would take the shells to pieces to see how all they all fitted and worked together. One decomposes the shell: fins, casing, explosives, fuse, nose cone and so on. The bill of parts. Also known as a parts explosion.
Psychologist
The psychologist might try to put the shell flying through the air into context. One can model the flight of shells through possibly turbulent and murky air. One can work back to the gun that fired the shell and see how all that works.
Anthropologist
While the anthropologist might work further back still to the captain of the ship spotting a target and follow the whole business through to the shell flying through the air on its way to that target, with the captain watching the whole business through his binoculars. Or further back still to the organisation which put the ship and its captain in that particular place at that particular time. Or one can work forward to impact.
Priest
The priest would make rules about how shells ought to be and then try and mould the world of shells to his vision. Freud has been accused of working in this way.
Which one are we?
In this paper, our shell flying through the air is a particular bit of consciousness experienced by a particular person in a particular time and place. And while we start with the taxonomist and the engineer, we shall mainly be concerned with the demographer, with cross-tabulations. Or to be more precise, with the machinery for doing cross-tabulations; the cross-tabulations themselves will have to come later.
In this we need to have a care about what the unit of analysis is, what exactly it is that we are counting into our cross tabulations. Is it the scene, the take, the frame, the layer or the thread for the duration of a frame? Are we saying, for example, that the frame as a whole involves consciousness, some subjective experience – or that some layer within that frame is generating that experience, that consciousness? Or, more probably, both.
The taxonomist
In this section we restrict ourselves to mammals, the point being that the classification of mammals presents quite different problems from the classification of frames of consciousness.
In the present context, we have various important facts:
- There are hundreds of different kinds of mammals. Comment: it seems unlikely that a classification of anything like this sort of size would help with states of consciousness
- All the mammals of any one kind are very much alike and it is usually easy to distinguish mammals of different kinds. You can often tell by looking. Comment: it is possible that one could come up with a classification of states of consciousness which was like this – but it presently seems unlikely. Any one state will be able to morph by imperceptible degrees into lots of others. There will always be borderline events
- The evolution of mammals has given us a branching structure, with the nodes of that structure being species of mammals, past and present. Comment: while our repertoire of states of consciousness may well have evolved over time, say over the last 250,000 years or so, in this sort of way, we do not think that this is a promising line of approach, at least in the near term. Not enough data
- Another way of looking at the previous fact is that if one mammal has evolved from another, most of the properties of the later mammal will be the same as the corresponding properties of the earlier mammal. The same sort of thing can be observed in the evolving models of, say, Ford cars. The designers, the fashion people, might change the wrappings, but the engineering only moves along very slowly. Engineers don’t like to fix what ain’t broke. The same sort of thing can be observed in hierarchical classifications of all sorts of phenomena
- Taxonomy provides a tool to put animals in their places in the evolutionary tree and to give them labels for the purposes of communication between all the people interested in mammals. But this is only one part of the story. These other people might well be more interested in things like the dental arrangements, the diet, the details of hands, the details of feet and in the arrangements for getting on and about in the world, than in the position of the animal in question in the evolutionary tree
- Mammals are tangible and permanent. We can keep a live mammal in a cage and study it. We can keep a dead mammal in a drawer and study that, possible taking it to pieces for the purpose. We can go back and look again in the light of changing interests. None of this is possible in the cases of frames of consciousness which are neither tangible nor persistent. This distinction is being weakened as scanning technology develops, but we have a long way to go yet. Our only advantage in this connection is that we can talk about ourselves, something that the rest of the animal kingdom cannot manage at all.
It may well be helpful to keep the arrangements for classifying mammals in mind when classifying states of consciousness. But that is about all; there is little read across.
The engineer
What follows is a further model of consciousness which is intended to complement that summarised at Figure 1 above. Figure 1 above and its elaborations are about the way that the data content of consciousness is expressed, while Figure 3 below is more about what that content is, and it complements rather than competes with Figure 1. In the sections that follow we shall try to say more about this content.
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| Figure 3 |
Box models are a good way of putting a bit of order onto a complicated world and we offer here a very simple box model of the content of consciousness, with the model’s premise being that there is always a primary concern of consciousness, a something that we are conscious of, a something which this frame or layer of consciousness is about. Something that we are attending to. This something might be:
- An object. One is conscious of something in the here and now. Often a thing of the ordinary sort, which might be a cardboard box or a cricket match. While the something might involve the self, commonly it does not; rather one is conscious of something out there in the world. One or more of the five senses will be involved: sight, sound, touch, taste or smell. One might split touch into active touch, when I touch someone or something, and passive touch, when someone or something touches me
- A feeling. One is conscious of a feeling, taken here to include both sensations like pain and like emotions. A sense that feelings tend to be internal, while objects tend to be external. One might, although we do not, argue that pain is physical and belongs with the senses, while emotion is mental and deserves its own spot
- The void. We allow one to be conscious of the void, of emptiness – an experience that some people might actively seek
- An activity. One is more or less absorbed in the activity. One is not watching someone else doing it, which would count as an object, one is doing it oneself. For example, digging the garden, changing a wheel on the car or thinking about the meal to come, after I have finished walking around Epsom. Such an activity will have a mode, for example physical activity or inner thought. We will return to mode below
- An aperçu. By which we mean the experience of suddenly noticing something about oneself or what one is doing. An example commonly given is suddenly noticing that one is shouting at somebody for no very good reason. Schooler offers at reference 2 and we discuss at reference 12 what we think is rather a good example, the experience of suddenly noticing that one’s mind has wandered a long way off from the book you are trying to read. Or from the sock that one is trying to turn. There is no need for words to be involved, although they commonly are. I had a rather different example the other day, walking along the road to Hexworthy, across Holne Moor. It had been quite misty with little beyond the roadside to see. Then next time I thought about it, the mist had more or less completely lifted. There had been no conscious transition.
There may also be one or more secondary concerns. I am mainly conscious of the battered cardboard box on the floor of the dining room, but there are other images there, possibly quite unrelated.
Generally speaking there will be more information in LWS about the primary concern than about any secondary concerns there may be.
And in the case that the primary concern is a feeling, that feeling may be linked to secondary objects by descriptors, by single words. So the primary object ‘pain’ might be linked by the descriptor ‘location’ to the secondary object ‘toe’. It is the pain which is uppermost, but I am also aware that the pain belongs to, comes from the toe. A few examples:
- Pain in toe
- Ashamed of or about something – a feeling which is culturally rather than genetically defined
- Pleased to see someone
- Attracted to someone
- Fear of someone or something
- One might be depressed about something, or one might just be depressed
- Euphoria does not have an object. One is euphoric, not euphoric about something
- Dizziness or nausea may not have a location in the body.
Sometimes one not only sees something red in front of one, one is also, sometimes, conscious of seeing red. I am not sure whether aperçu above should include this phenomenon or not, something that many people see as being an important aspect of consciousness. Perhaps, to the extent that this is an occasional event, aperçu is fine. To the extent that it is pervasive, it is not. Maybe this is something that DES, or some similar technique, could throw some light on. In any event, I return to this in the next section.
Generally speaking, regarding the mapping of all this stuff in to LWS, we can say:
- Information on any one layer in LWS will all be in the same mode, for example sight or sound, and will all be encoded in the same way
- Important objects may be given their own layer or layers, being linked into any background there may be on some other layer or layers
- Other things being equal, more stuff, more objects is apt to result in more layers
- The primary concern and its dependants, however they are expressed, are going to get more activation, to have a stronger presence in consciousness, than everything else.
The demographer
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| Figure 4 |
As suggested above, and as suggested at reference 6, a well tried tactic, when faced with a complex phenomenon, is to try to break it down into dimensions, with each dimension described by what we have called a binner, that is to say something which puts things into bins. To come up with binners – things like the length, width, height and weight we might use with brick or boxes – which help us to describe particular instances of our phenomenon in a consistent and helpful way.
In the case that our population is of people, perhaps all the people living in the Isle of Wight on 30th June, 1981, we know quite a lot about that population. It is worth collecting quite a lot of information about every member of that population, a collecting which is what is done at a census, operations which might cost tens of pounds per person. In this case there was a census a few months earlier in that same year, and given that people do not move around that much, we can make a good guess at what was going on in the middle of that year. We have a lot of information about all the households and about all the people in those households – leaving aside the complication that not everybody lives in what one might ordinarily understand as a household. Information like number of bathrooms, number of cars, number of televisions, income of household; age, sex, marital condition and religion of the people in it. Information which one can collect in a reasonably reliable and consistent way from the households and people concerned. One can do complicated cross tabulations about the people living in the Isle of Wight and compare them with the same cross tabulations for the people living in London – or in Sardinia – with this last being the business of Eurostat. See reference 13. One can write learned papers about the differences and the reasons for those differences.
In the present case, frames of consciousness or some such, we do not have a census. We do not have internationally agreed binners which everybody can use to describe our population. Frames of consciousness are ephemeral, much harder to capture in numbers than people. But perhaps not impossible. Perhaps Hurlburt has shown the way, that it is possible to capture information about frames, or possibly takes, of consciousness. And one step forward might be to develop some binners of reasonably general application.
In the next section we discuss some descriptive binners (blue and to the right in Figure 4), some of which may be appropriate to frames of consciousness, layers of frames of consciousness. Descriptive binners which try to describe the various states of consciousness in some direct way. In the section that follows that we shall discuss some classifying binners (red and to the left in Figure 4), which while not describing states of consciousness in a direct way, do try to describe the different contexts in which subjects might find themselves, different contexts which do affect their experience, their states of consciousness.
Descriptive binners require the subject to report on their state of consciousness, in contrast to classifying binners which can be determined from the outside, objectively. We also have a number of intermediate binners (green and in the middle in Figure 4), determinate from the outside and having a direct effect on the inside. Furthermore:
- Some of these binners appear straightforward and informative most of the time, but not all of the time. It may that one can hang on to them by use of a ‘not applicable’ bin for the misfits
- A few of them are numeric, in that what it is that is being classified, described can be mapped onto numbers in a natural way. Most are not
- For most of them, one can come up with cases are hard to bin. There are nearly always boundaries where the rules and definitions start to break up
- It is easy enough to dream up binners which would be easy enough to code. Things like geographical location, height above sea level, state of the moon and ambient temperature, things which might well have a bearing on the problem. But these particular ones have not been included in the selection we have called ‘Demographics’
- These binners are mostly more or less correlated, not independent in a statistical sense at all. Not even independent in the sense (from reference 6) that any combination of bins is possible, does crop up, at least sometimes
- Where a binner is used at a higher level than at its home level, we are apt to get into multi-coding. A scene, for example, is very likely to involve more than one mode
- This categorisation into descriptive, intermediate and classifying may change as time goes on and we get cleverer at scanning into that which is presently the more or less private domain of subjective experience.
Note that in Figure 4 we have both a descriptive binner called object and a column called object. The binner is about what sort of an object is uppermost in consciousness. The column is about the various objects which might be expressed in the individual layers of LWS, one of which is the former object.
There is a similar issue with, for example, social one, where we see social one as being a property of a scene, but one which is expressed in one or more layers and one or more objects in those layers. There is the complication that there may be a disconnect. On can envisage the extreme case of being in a tête-à-tête with someone, but with that someone having no direct expression in consciousness at all, in LWS at all. They may well be traces and consequences, but not the person him or herself. It is for this reason that we have included the intermediate binner ‘Reality’ at the frame level.
Note also the procedural difficulty that often the experiementer only knows what cross tabulations he wants after the event. After he has moved from data collection onto data analysis, by which time any missing data needed to put cases into bins can no longer be recovered from the subject. The answer of computer people would be to do plenty of data analysis before you start the data collection; a recognised and important stage in designing a computer system.
Descriptive binners
The descriptive binners we address are:
- Flavours of consciousness
- Location one
- Location two
- Active and passive
- Ownership
- Mode
- History
- Self-consciousness
- Attention
- Object.
1: Flavours of consciousness
Going a little beyond a crude dichotomy between conscious and unconscious, Schooler offers as the basic, coarse classification: unconscious, conscious and meta-conscious, with the last two being a split of the category conscious into two sub-categories. I think that his meta-conscious is related to my aperçu.
Block, at reference 9, cuts the cake a little differently. According to Wikipedia at reference 8:
‘Ned Block proposed a distinction between two types of consciousness that he called phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access (A-consciousness). P-consciousness, according to Block, is simply raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies' and responses at the center. These experiences … are called qualia. A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behaviour …’
I think this A-consciousness is also related to my aperçu.
Kastrup, at reference 1, talks of re-representation, where some types of consciousness are replays, rather than experience in the here and now. Replays which can go wrong, which do not always do a very good job of reproducing the original experience. This is where he, I think, puts Schooler’s example. We think that an aperçu which refers to the recent past will involve replay in this sense.
Hurlburt, at reference 5 and discussed at reference 4, talks of inner thought, which might be in words, in pictures or in what he calls unsymbolised thought. We go along with this, certainly to the extent that we were able to catch ourselves doing plenty of inner thoughts in words when we were walking about the home suburb, rather than being on an expedition to the big town.
We have already have Schooler’s unconscious, conscious, meta-conscious. He also, at reference 2, mentions a number of related constructs: self-awareness, private self-consciousness, meta-cognition, higher-order thought, autonoetic or extended consciousness, mindfulness, flow experience. Note: according to Wikipedia:
‘autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to thus be able to examine our own thoughts …’.
While Kastrup, at reference 1, contributes the keywords consciousness, co-consciousness, meta-consciousness, neural correlates of consciousness, unconscious, self-reflection, re-representation, dissociation, dissociative identity disorder and philosophy of psychology.
Damasio, in one of his books, talks of core consciousness and autobiographical consciousness. Supported by protoself, core self and autobiographical self.
Tononi, in one of his, talks of higher order consciousness and primary consciousness.
While the bit of Wikipedia already noticed at reference 8 goes on to offer lots more:
‘.... William Lycan, for example, argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness of; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness) – and that even this list omits several more obscure forms’.
So plenty of work has been done on doing better than coarse. But I do not think that it is work which yet gives us a candidate binner. It is all too hard to get a grip on.
2: Location one
A candidate binner which is motivated by the thought that some frames of consciousness are clearly about something outside of me, perhaps the elephant in the cage in front of me, in the here and now, while some are clearly about something which is inside of me, perhaps thoughts about and images from the meeting last week. Something which might have been outside of me once, but is clearly inside now. Derived from memory, rather than derived from the senses.
Anything experienced by the brain, whether conscious or not, has to come from somewhere. That somewhere has to be the brain itself (which includes precursors of the outbound efferent traffic) or afferent traffic from cranial or spinal nerves.
In the case that most of the frame is accounted for by afferent traffic on the first (olefactory) or on the second (optic) cranial nerve, the frame is about something outside of me, a smell or a sight.
In the case that most of the frame is accounted for by afferent traffic from the spinal nerves serving the skin, the frame is about something which is in contact with me, so surface. One might distinguish the different nerves and the different regions of the body served.
This is not disturbed by the fact that the brain also has access to at least copies of efferent traffic, efferent traffic which might, for example, be activating muscles in the ears or eyes.
Hearing might usually be about something outside of me – but not always. Taste is always about something in contact with me, so surface. Speech is tricky in that it starts inside and ends outside, plus the complication that I might get to hear what I am saying.
Running around in the garden generates plenty of traffic up and down the nervous system, but does not fit in the foregoing. It is all of us, mind and body, not something which can be located with reference to that mind and body.
Does this leave us with binning frames, or at least layers as follows:
- Outside, including sight, smell and most hearing
- Surface, including all taste
- Inside (body) – afferent stuff from cranial nerves serving the interior, the viscera
- Inside (brain) – stuff derived from the brain itself, from memory
- Not applicable – most motor activity, speech, some hearing and anything else not yet thought of which does not fit very well.
Not something which maps neatly onto something like the real interval [-1, +1], with minus one for inside and plus one for outside, as that does not leave us with a good home for not applicable.
3: Location two
The location, relative to the host body, of whatever it is that one is conscious of.
Outside the body, the usual front, back, left, right, up and down.
Position on the surface of the body. Quite detailed. As a special case of surface, we will have some sense of location of the sensations from the surface of some of the body cavities, for example the inner surfaces of mouth and throat. Position inside the body. Apt to be less detailed. All this might be covered, be binned by looking at the cranial and spinal nerves supplying the information.
Inner thought. Somewhere in the head, usually not further specified. I do sometimes have the sensation of thought moving around the head, of the head being an interior space, like a room, more particularly like a cave, in which mental activity can move about, simulating, to some degree, physical activity. But I think can be left out of account here.
Giving us:
- Outside, mapped in some suitable way
- Surface, mapped in some suitable way
- Inside the body, probably mapped in some simple way
- Inside the head, probably not further mapped at all.
In sum, a more geographically and less physiologically flavoured version of the inside, surface and outside which we have already had at B above.
4: Active and passive
A candidate binner which is motivated by the thought that some frames of consciousness are clearly about something which I am doing, something involving physical activity, moving about in the outside world, doing something in the outside world, while some are clearly about someone or something else, from the outside world, doing something to me. Active when I am cutting the front lawn, passive when John is cutting my hair.
This might translate to active when the dominant nervous traffic is efferent, motor traffic, to passive when the dominant nervous traffic is afferent, sensory traffic. And when there is a lot more activity inside the brain than to or from the brain, we say neither or neutral.
Which fits with the active and passive we learned from Latin at school. If I run across the road or hit you with a hammer, that is active as far as I am concerned. If you hit me with a hammer that is passive as far as I am concerned. If you run across the road that is sight which counts as passive.
Alternatively, one might say that anything involving skeletal muscular activity, including here the muscles of the face, tongue and mouth, is active. Which while not always under conscious control, are at least susceptible to conscious control. While the muscular activities of the ears, eyes, intestines and blood vessels are not, leaving aside the exceptional control some eastern mystics are said to have over their innards.
We note that we do not say that activity generated by efferent traffic down spinal nerves equals active, as the muscles in the face, tongue and mouth are activated by cranial nerves, also responsible for the muscles of the ears, eyes and innards. We note also that, from some points of view, the eyes are not very passive at all, with their movement playing a very active role in vision.
What about frames of consciousness which are generated internally and which remain internal? Can we distinguish those which are consciously willed from those which bubble up from the unconscious? Our vote is for neutral.
Running and talking are active, seeing and hearing are passive. Touching might be active, passive or somewhere in between. Inner thought, including here inner speech, inner images and hallucinations are neutral.
Does this leave us with binning frames, or at least layers as follows:
- Active – activities which are clearly active, like running down the street
- Neutral – activities which are neither clearly active nor clearly passive
- Passive – activities which are clearly passive, like listening to a string quartet or being hit by a runaway bicycle.
So this time we perhaps do have something which maps neatly onto the real interval [-1, +1], with minus one for passive, plus one for active, zero for not applicable and intermediate values for intermediate activities.
5: Ownership
Sometimes one feels fully in charge of what is going on, body and soul, sometimes things seem to be going on in either body or soul over which one has no control. One might, for example, be hearing voices.
- No ownership
- Partial ownership
- Normal, full ownership.
Perhaps a numeric binner on the real interval [0, 1].
6: Mode
We might have a binner called mode which builds on the regular, sensory modalities of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Frames of consciousness mainly about one or more of these modes may account for a significant proportion of the total. inner thought (words), inner thought (other). Once one gets beyond the first four of these there are plenty of different ways of doing things.
One might split touch into active and passive. Active touch is what I get by touching something. Perhaps running my finger along a rough surface. Passive touch is what I get by someone or something touching me, pressing on or otherwise in contact with me, usually my outer surface. In the normal way of things we are aware of contact of foreign bodies with the inner surface of structures likes the alimentary canal – in which case the foreign bodies should be food and drink – but otherwise contact with our insides proper is unusual and can make us feel rather odd.
To fill out the roster a bit, we might add feelings and emotions. Feeling might be some vague bodily sensation, perhaps a feeling of congestion in the lungs, or it might be something much less vague, perhaps pain. While emotion might be something like shame or sadness. For feeling we have in mind something physical, while for emotion we have in mind something mental, cerebral or cultural.
We might add inner thought, either in words or images. More rarely in some other mode.
And round things off with activity. Just leaving the aperçu of Figure 3 missing.
Hurlburt reports at reference 3 that something that he calls unsymbolised thought accounts for a fair bit of time. As the abstract has it:
Unsymbolized thinking—the experience of an explicit, differentiated thought that does not include the experience of words, images, or any other symbols—is a frequently occurring yet little known phenomenon. Unsymbolized thinking is a distinct phenomenon, not merely, for example, an incompletely formed inner speech or a vague image, and is one of the five most common features of inner experience (the other four: inner speech, inner seeing, feelings, and sensory awareness). Despite its high frequency, many people, including many professional students of consciousness, believe that such an experience is impossible. However, because the existence of unsymbolized thinking indicates that much experienced thinking takes place without any experience of words or other symbols, acknowledging the existence of unsymbolized thinking may have substantial theoretical import.
With something of our own take on unsymbolised thought being given at reference 4. In brief, what we might have in LWS is a mixture of strong content which is weakly activated and weak content which is strongly activated, neither resulting in what Hurlburt calls inner thought, it is too weak for that. Whether or not such stuff is expressed in words, pictures or in some other form is another matter. In any event, sometimes such stuff will be promoted to words or pictures which we are conscious of in the ordinary way of inner thought. I think that this is what can happen on one of Hurlburt’s probes; what was unconscious becomes conscious.
Which leaves us with a binner along the following lines:
- Sight
- Sound
- Smell
- Taste
- Touch
- Feelings
- Emotions
- Inner thought – words
- Inner thought – other
- Speech
- Other physical activity
- Other.
Other because we think that every frame of consciousness has a mode. There has been an experience of some kind. And some kind does not seem to include not applicable.
With a numeric code not making much sense at all for this one. Mapping this lot onto a line does not help us, other than for the purposes of tabulation and cross-tabulation.
7: History
This candidate is about how old the subject matter of consciousness is. When did the subject first acquire the information in question?
We might have:
- Zero or in the present, coming in through the senses in more or less real time
- Less than 10 seconds
- Less than a minute
- A minute or more but less than an hour
- An hour or more but less than a day
And so on until we get to:
- Not stated – for the cases when we simply do not know
- Not applicable – for the cases for which the notion of age breaks down. Perhaps because the data has been drawn from, conflated from different occasions over a period of time, possibly a long period of time. Perhaps because the data involved is from semantic memory and more or less impossible to date, rather than from autobiographical memory.
Anything more than zero is going to involve the re-representation mentioned above, and the attendant possibility of error.
A binner which is numeric and in which difference in bin numbers will have some significance.
8: Self-consciousness
The moment of self-consciousness one gets when one catches one’s mind wandering off, or having wandered off whatever it was that one was trying to read. Or suddenly noticing that one is shouting at the person one is supposed to be talking to. Or that everyone round the table is looking at one. Rather distinctive varieties of consciousness.
The fact that one needs to be conscious in order, for example, to change the wheel of a car, but that I might effect that change without much self-consciousness at all. Completely absorbed in the activity with no inner thought.
However, we suggest that this candidate be expressed in LWS be expressed by the presence of one or more layers which are about the self, one of which might be a feeling of fear or of pride. The binner for self consciousness then reflects the power (see below) of these layers, relative to that of the others. Zero in the case when there are no such layers, one in that where there are no others.
We see self-consciousness as lying on a continuous scale.
9: Attention
What are we attending to? Some people have it that being conscious means that we have to be attending to something. There has to be an object of attention. Or put another way, we have to be conscious of something.
And if that something is a feeling, that feeling might itself have a location or be about another something. I might just be angry with Jane or I might be conscious of being angry with Jane. I might be angry with Jane because she burnt my toast.
We might also be attending to something else. We might be trying to read a book, but have the forthcoming visit to the dentist in the back of the mind.
All of which can be nicely accommodated in Figure 3 above.
Attention is probably closely related to what we have called arousal, with the difference that arousal is a property of a frame, perhaps even or a take or scene, rather than of an object.
We see the attention we are giving something as lying on a continuous scale, a non negative real number.
10: Object
Another way to cut this cake, would be to classify the object of attention, the subject of consciousness in some way.
- Self
- Some other sentient being in the flesh. Distinguished because being conscious of, say, another person, is not the same as being conscious of a brick or a bicycle. There is apt to be interaction
- Other material object in the flesh. A mountain or a box of chocolates
- Some more complex material object. Perhaps the visual scene as a whole rather than some particular object within that scene
- Object in the mind, from memory be that autobiographical or semantic, fictional, conceptual, whatever
- Taste. One might debate whether the object of attention was the taste or whatever it was that gave rise to the taste
- Smell. Likewise
- Other
- Not applicable. There is no object of attention in the everyday sense of the word.
And so on. Furthermore, one might have it that feelings and emotions could be objects of attention in their own right, as well as being felt.
Intermediate binners
The intermediate binners we address are:
- Arousal
- Mood
- Reality
1: Arousal
We need to be reasonably aroused to be conscious of anything. Low arousal then consciousness will be rather dim, there won’t be much there. While in a state of high arousal, there will be plenty in consciousness, although one can be very aroused without being in the least self-conscious. One might be in the flow state that rock climbers talk of.
We think that one is aroused in this sense when one was having a nightmare, so being asleep does not imply that one is not aroused.
According to Wikipedia we have it that:
‘arousal is the physiological and psychological state of being awoken or of sense organs stimulated to a point of perception. It involves activation of the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS) in the brain, which mediates wakefulness, the autonomic nervous system, and the endocrine system, leading to increased heart rate and blood pressure and a condition of sensory alertness, mobility, and readiness to respond’.
It may be that medical people have agreed on a physiological measure for arousal.
We take the view that arousal is a scene bound variable measuring the amount of power available for the compilation and subsequent activation of the takes and frames making up the scene. This is likely to involve more data and more detail than would otherwise be the case. It may be that when we are highly aroused we are also very still, our not having the resources to be both aroused and running around. Or would on high alert be a better term than highly aroused?
We see arousal as lying on a continuous scale, a non-negative real number.
2: Mood
As with substances, mood can have a big effect on the subjective experience of consciousness. One might want to analyse by the full gamut of emotions, considered in LWS to be expressed by the contents of a small number of emotional layers. Most of the time there would be none such, as most people, most of the time are not feeling emotions. They might be considered to be in neutral in this regard.
For the present we go for a numeric binner in the range [-1, +1], with three bins:
- Down, including depressed and sad
- Normal
- Up, including euphoric and manic.
3: Reality
As a concept reality seems fair enough, in that sometimes one has a very poor grip on reality. That one’s subjective experience is a long way from that which others might think it ought to be. This is more than being mistaken, more that the sensory experience of the world has come unstuck. One can imagine a therapist taking a view on this as a result of interview, but hard to get a statistical grip on in a frame-to-frame sort of way.
In any event, we see reality as a real number in the range [0, 1]. Zero from complete dissociation from reality, one for a good sense of reality.
Classifying binners
The classifying binners we address are:
- Coma
- Social one
- Social two
- Substances
- Health
- Demographics.
1: Coma
More particularly, the Glasgow Coma Scale. This particular scale is really three scales, and they are about grading, classifying various states of unconsciousness and coma. The product of what is essentially a tick-box activity and widely used to say something about how far a person is from being fully conscious, with poor scores being associated with poor outcomes. These scores are sometimes augmented by work with fMRI scanners and EEG, which sometimes demonstrate the presence of life not otherwise visible. However, they are about the many different flavours of unconsciousness, not the many different flavours of consciousness. Nevertheless we might want something like:
- Awake
- Day dreaming
- Other dreaming
- Other normal sleep
- Drugged sleep and other anaesthesia
- Coma
- Other
With there being states of consciousness in at least the first three of these. One might need some care with the definitions to keep the bins exclusive.
2: Social one
Many people believe that the key to understanding humans lies in their social behaviour. It is that which makes us what we are.
With that in mind, one might want to classify scenes, takes or frames of consciousness according to how many people were involved. Which is straightforward enough when one is talking about a small group of people in a more or less closed environment like a dining room or a meeting room, but which can soon get difficult.
What about animals and pets? What about the men who talk to their toys, their cars and steam engines, as if they were people?
Should one weight the people according to the strength of their interaction with the subject? So there might be millions of people in a radio audience but they would not score much because their scope for interaction with the subject was close to zero.
We pitch social one at the level of the scene, but one might also look at the individual layer; how social is this particular layer. Does it contain information about self or others? How many others?
We think that there is something to be analysed here, but maybe it needs to be kept simple, sticking to people.
- One – for when one is by oneself. There might be people around but there is no interaction with them
- Two – one to one is different, usually more intense, than when there are more
- Three or more
- Other – for all the cases where there are people or animals, but which do not seem to fit in with the foregoing. Perhaps because there is little interaction.
Another numeric binner, but possibly not one where the difference in bin numbers would be of much use.
3: Social two
Rather than just looking at the number of people with which the subject in involved, one might look at the sort of situation involved.
- Alone
- Telephone call
- A date
- Other one on one
- A meeting involving three or more people
- A presentation to a lot of people
- Acting on a stage
- Appearing on radio or television
- A rehearsal of some sort
- Dinner party
- Outdoor barbecue
- Other party
- Baptisms, marriages and funerals
- Watching someone else, watching other people doing something or other
- Other.
Lots of possibilities; one would have to see where the analysis led.
4: Substances
It is well known that certain substances, psycho-active substances, can alter consciousness. It may be that we mostly want to tabulate the result of that alteration, but we will also want to tabulate the cause. Complicated to the extent that we can put less reliance on drugged subjects’ self-reports of their state of consciousness.
One option is to have a series of binners each tabulating the level of one substance in the blood.
Another option is to have a composite binner flagging up the presence of significant amounts of one or other of these substances.
- Sugar
- Alcohol
- Nicotine
- Caffeine
- Cocaine
- Morphine
- Marijuana
- Mescaline
- LSD
- Other
- Cocktail – for when there are two or more different pyscho-active substances present at significant levels
- None.
Getting even more complicated, one might split each of the above into two or more sub-categories:
- Alcohol – high
- Alcohol – low.
Or going the other way one might attempt to summarise:
- Normal
- Low – small amounts of some psycho-active substance
- High – large amounts of some psycho-active substance
- Cocktail.
Lots of possibilities.
5: Health
Again, as with substances and mood, the state of health can have a big effect on the subjective experience of consciousness. At the same time, one might be more interested in the result than the cause. Nevertheless, there will be some interest in tabulating cause. Complicated to the extent that we would have greater difficulty getting self-reports from unhealthy subjects of their state of consciousness and we could put less reliance on them – although, that said, the way self-reports changed as state of health changed might well be interesting in itself, regardless of their veracity.
- Healthy
- Fever – this physical complaint is included as consciousness is altered in a distinctive way when one has a fever
- Pain – which if severe will affect, will occupy the state of mind. But what threshold do we apply?
- Depressed
- Manic
- Euphoric
- Other mental problem or illness
- Other physical problem or illness.
Once again, a lot of possibilities. Perhaps small binners addressing particular aspects of health would be the way forward.
6: Other demographics
Lots of stuff here, any or all of which may well have some effect on the states of consciousness. We do not attempt details.
- Sex
- Age
- Race
- First language – one of the few candidate binners which invites a complex, hierarchical classification
- Place of usual residence – one might be interested in the extent the consciousness of an individual was coloured by place of usual residence or by what was going on around him or her.
Language
We have, in the foregoing, said very little about language.
This is an omission which we would like to do something about. To say something about:
- The extent to which conscious content is expressed in language
- Whether the quality of consciousness differs from one language to another
- How the quality of consciousness is changed by having language. Accessible to the extent that some people recovering from strokes experience temporary loss of speech. Are there people that experience temporary but total loss of language?
One person is distinguished from another by their use of language and (more tractably) by their use of words. Any one mood of any one person is distinguished in the same way. Different people have different clouds of meaning, emotion and association around any particular word. Some people go through phases of making heavy use of some particular word, with the meaning they give the word starting off narrow and particular, then gradually widening out to the point of vacuity, at which point the use falls off. All of this could be captured and measured.
We note:
- That until recently the usual way to report on consciousness, on the existence and content of consciousness was by using language. This was, however, always supplemented by the subject being able to respond yes or no to questions by tapping fingers or blinking eyes. And has now been supplemented by similar tricks with fMRI scanners and EEG, some discussion of which is to be found at reference 7. Which reduces the need for language in the conscious subject to yes, no and being able to understand the other
- The robust nature of words as a signal. Words can be said or expressed in all kinds of different ways, but one usually locks onto the right word. In that respect rather like the mammals discussed above.
- The constituent words are robust, the meaning of words grouped into utterances or sentences rather less so
- The tricky role of spoken language in consciousness, possibly being all of input, internal and output at roughly the same time. And the muscles of face and mouth perhaps have a stronger presence in consciousness than those of the eyes
- The relative lack of language in conscious imagery in either of the transitions between being asleep and being awake – and we remain satisfied that language is not necessary for consciousness. While also remaining with the thought that while language might not be necessary for consciousness to happen, once the ability is there, it might be very helpful for putting together the ability to be conscious in the first place. With the language and consciousness coming at roughly the same time in babies.
How does all this play in the LWS model?
There has already been some discussion of how all this might look in LWS. We add a few further notes here.
LWS has layers, so allowing a foreground visual scene, built from some combination of new input from the eyes and old input from memory, to co-exist with, for example, self feelings. Everything on its own layer, with the strength of their presence in consciousness measured by the power, the activation of those layers.
In the case of verbal inner thought, it may well be possible to recover that thought for the past few seconds and replay it, together with self feelings. Recovery of other kinds of inner thought is likely to be less complete.
Given that we can mix and match components from a variety of sources, there is less need to come up with exclusive categories and classifications and we can settle for tendencies. Particular episodes of consciousness, particular frames of consciousness no longer need to fit tidily into the pigeon holes that have been prepared for their use. We can allow diversity.
We can say that a subject is conscious or nor during this or that frame. In principle, we could go on to say that this consciousness is derived from this layer or layers. With layers perhaps given a weight which summarised, in some sense, the part of any particular layer in the conscious experience as a whole, with zero meaning none at all, at least not in any direct way. A shading which complicates the preparation of cross tabulations – although the value field of an Excel pivot table does address this complication. We also note in passing that we are not keen on the Tononi & Koch insistence on the integrated nature of a frame of consciousness.
We suggest that it will be possible and useful to define a function defined on compiled frames of LWS which takes real values in the range [0, 1], with 0 being completely unconscious and 1 fully conscious, where fully conscious includes being alert and having an object of attention, but not necessarily meta-consciousness in the Schooler sense of the phrase. This function can take all values in the range, but, given that we are asleep or otherwise unconscious a lot of the time, with mean value nearer 0 than 1. While meta-consciousness is about what any self layer is up to.
Conclusions
In some sense we have ducked taxonomy. We have not attempted an elaborate taxonomy of all the different states and sorts of consciousness, after the fashion of taxonomists of the animal and plant kingdoms. We have not done much with all the words listed in the binner called flavour.
Rather we have suggested a variety of small binners which could be used to tabulate data about consciousness, more particularly tabulate collections of descriptions of frames of consciousness, the sort of descriptions that could be coded up into a worksheet of an Excel workbook, one row to the frame, one column to the property. We believe that given data, such analysis would yield interesting results.
But a type of analysis which is perhaps more usual, better suited even, to demography and medicine, rather than to the very subjective business of consciousness. It is going to be hard to collect the data for more than a few of the descriptive binners suggested at any one time and it is going to be even harder to go back to review data after the event. One only has what one had thought of or was able to collect at the time.
So a good next step will be to go back to our 1,000 data points of DES sampling, reported at reference 4 and see what we make of them.
References
Reference 1: There is an ‘unconscious’, but it may well be conscious – Bernardo Kastrup – 2017.
Reference 2: Re-representing consciousness: dissociations between experience and meta-consciousness - Jonathan W. Schooler – 2002.
Reference 3: Unsymbolized thinking - Russell T. Hurlburt, Sarah A. Akhter – 2008.
Reference 4:
http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/progress-report-on-descriptive.html.
Reference 5: The phenomena of inner experience - Christopher L. Heavey, Russell T. Hurlburt – 2007.
Reference 6:
http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/on-multi-dimensional-binning.html.
Reference 7:
http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/ruminations.html.
Reference 8:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Types_of_consciousness.
Reference 9: On a confusion about a function of consciousness - Ned Block – 1995.
Reference 10:
http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/on-scenes.html.
Reference 11:
http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/geometry-and-activation-in-world-of.html.
Reference 12:
http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/on-tuits-and-trits.html.
Reference 13:
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/.
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