The electrical assumption

We are trying to explain how it is that we are conscious and what it is that we are conscious of, and we have been reminded by an article about pain in the DANA newsletter (a useful resource, see reference 1) that we have been making some assumptions here, assumptions which might be better explicit than implicit.

We are interested in the consciousness of mammals, particularly the familiar, if enigmatic, consciousness of humans. Animals with brains, eyes and spinal cords. With humans having voices and language too.

We assume that this consciousness is a product of that part of the central nervous system which is above the brain stem. Roughly speaking, the brain down to and including the medulla.

We assume that this consciousness can be explained by the firing activity of the neurons in the brain, the distinctive pulses of electricity which usually travel from the centre of the neuron, up the axon, and which jump across gaps to the next neurons in line, thus making the neural networks inspiring a lot of the work noticed at reference 3.

Now while it is now possible to capture, to record the firing of individual neurons, hundreds if not thousands of them at a time, we need to remember that this explanation is something of a tall order, with the brain containing billions of neurons, each of which might fire a hundred times a second, at least sometimes. And as reported at reference 4, one needs a very big computer to model a hundred thousand or so of them, never mind a billion or so. And as also suggested there, it may well be that the machinery of algebraic topology will prove helpful in describing, in explaining these networks.

Against that, we expect that both the position and the firing activity of neurons will figure in this explanation. Geometry will be as important as network.

However, we further assume that we do not need to include all the other activity, in particular all the chemical activity going on in the brain, or all the activity of all the other cells, in particular that of the many glial cells. Or all the scaffolding, for example the blood supply, which underpins all this activity. All these may well be important pre-requisites for consciousness, may be part of the machinery needed to build a frame of consciousness, but we assume that they are not part of consciousness per se. They can be left out of our first model of consciousness, although we might find it helpful to include them in the second. Particularly if our ambitions reach to working models.

This electrical assumption comes close to, but is not quite the same as, the thesis that consciousness can or will be explained as the product of an electrical field of some sort. Perhaps deep inside the brain, perhaps detectable from the outside.

And it is very much part of the model known to regular readers as LWS. For which see, for example, reference 5.

Reference 1: http://dana.org/. Which led to reference 6.

Reference 2: http://brainmadesimple.com/medulla-oblongata.html. The source of the illustration. The general idea is clear enough and we don’t need to get into a debate about what counts as brain and what counts as brain stem.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/more-google.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/big-brains.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/geometry-and-activation-in-world-of.html.

Reference 6: Pathological pain and the neuroimmune interface - Peter M. Grace, Mark R. Hutchinson, Steven F. Maier & Linda R. Watkins – 2015. To be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5525062/.