Bridging the Gap Between Consciousness and Matter: Recurrent Out-of-Body Projection of Visual Awareness Revealed by the Law of Non-Identity
Jinsong Meng
备注：
20 pages, 9 figures, and 1 table. Comments: 21 pages, 9 figures, and 1 table: typos corrected, references added, a figure moved from the supplementary part to the main text, typesetting changed from double columns to one column. Comments: 28 pages, 10 figures, and 1 table: style changed to APA, title changed, typos corrected, references added, a figure added
发表信息：
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science,Volume 57 Issue 2, June 2023
Consciousness is an explicit outcome of brain activity. However, the link between consciousness and the material world remains to be explored. We applied a new logic tool, the non-identity law, to the analysis of the visual dynamics related to the naturalistic observation of a night-shot still life. We show that visual awareness possesses a postponed, recurrent out-of-body projection pathway and that the out-of-body projection is superimposed onto the original, which is reciprocally verified by vision and touch. This suggests that the visual system instinctually not only represents the subjective image (brain-generated imagery) but also projects the image back onto the original or to a specific place according to the cues of the manipulated afferent messenger light signaling pathway. This finding provides a foundation for understanding the subjectivity and intentionality of consciousness from the perspective of visual awareness and the isomorphic relations between an unknowable original, private experience, and shareable expression. The result paves the way for scientific research on consciousness and facilitates the integration of humanities and natural science.
It has been said that complexity lies between order and disorder. In the case of brain activity, and physiology in general, complexity issues are being considered with increased emphasis. We sought to identify features of brain organization that are optimal for sensory processing, and that may guide the emergence of cognition and consciousness, by analysing neurophysiological recordings in conscious and unconscious states. We find a surprisingly simple result: normal wakeful states are characterised by the greatest number of possible configurations of interactions between brain networks, repre…
We seek general principles of the structure of the cellular collective activity associated with conscious awareness. Can we obtain evidence for features of the optimal brain organization that allows for adequate processing of stimuli and that may guide the emergence of cognition and consciousness? Analysing brain recordings in conscious and unconscious states, we followed initially the classic approach in physics when it comes to understanding collective behaviours of systems composed of a myriad of units: the assessment of the number of possible configurations (microstates) that the system ca…
Attention Schema Theory (AST) is a recent proposal to provide a scientific explanation for the basis of subjective awareness. In AST, the brain constructs a representation of attention taking place in its own (and others') mind (`the attention schema'). Moreover, this representation is incomplete for efficiency reasons. This inherent incompleteness of the attention schema results in the inability of humans to understand how their own subjective awareness arises (related to the so-called `hard problem' of consciousness). Given this theory, the present paper asks whether a mind (either human or …
We have analysed the many facets of Consciousness into two distinct categories. First: the organisational state of the neural networks at any one time, which determines whether a person is conscious - awake, or unconscious - asleep. Second: the processes that underlie the traffic of electrical signals across these networks that accounts for all the experiences of conscious awareness. This paper addresses the former; namely, how the state of the billions of neural networks and the trillions of additional axons, dendrites and synapses varies over the daily cycle - what physically changes when we…
Consciousness is a sequential process of awareness which can focus on one piece of information at a time. This process of awareness experiences causation which underpins the notion of time while it interplays with matter and energy, forming reality. The study of Consciousness, time and reality is complex and evolving fast in many fields, including metaphysics and fundamental physics. Reality composes patterns in human Consciousness in response to the regularities in nature. These regularities could be physical (e.g., astronomical, environmental), biological, chemical, mental, social, etc. The …
It is proposed that both human creativity and human consciousness are (unintended) consequences of the human brain's extraordinary energy efficiency. The topics of creativity and consciousness are treated separately, though have a common sub-structure. It is argued that creativity arises from a synergy between two cognitive modes of the human brain (which broadly coincide with Kahneman's Systems 1 and 2). In the first, available energy is spread across a relatively large network of neurons. As such, the amount of energy per active neuron is so small that the operation of such neurons is suscep…
A measurement based formula for consciousness, C, as a function of time t, is constructed. The formula depends on identifying a natural relevant self-generated, time-dependent dynamical process inherent in any entity. For human beings the relevant dynamical process identified is the ensemble of brain waves, observed in EEG measurements, that are represented in the model by their measured time dependent correlation functions. These correlation functions define the accessible dynamical state of the brain at any moment of time. From them a time dependent probability function, P(t), is extracted b…
The scope of human consciousness includes states departing from what most of us experience as ordinary wakefulness. These altered states of consciousness constitute a prime opportunity to study how global changes in brain activity relate to different varieties of subjective experience. We consider the problem of explaining how global signatures of altered consciousness arise from the interplay between large-scale connectivity and local dynamical rules that can be traced to known properties of neural tissue. For this purpose, we advocate a research program aimed at bridging the gap between bott…
The cognitive functions of human and non-human primates rely on the dynamic interplay of distributed neural assemblies. As such, it seems unlikely that cognition can be supported by macroscopic brain dynamics at the proximity of thermodynamic equilibrium. We confirmed this hypothesis by investigating electrocorticography data from non human primates undergoing different states of unconsciousness (sleep, and anesthesia with propofol, ketamine, and ketamine plus medetomidine), and funcional magnetic resonance imaging data from humans, both during deep sleep and under propofol anesthesia. Systema…
This study aimed to identify white matter (WM) deficits underlying the loss of consciousness in disorder of consciousness (DOC) patients using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) and to demonstrate the potential value of DTI parameters in predicting recovery outcomes of DOC patients. With 30 DOC patients (8 comatose, 8 unresponsive wakefulness syndrome/vegetative state, and 14 minimal conscious state) and 25 patient controls, we performed group comparison of DTI parameters across 48 core WM regions of interest (ROIs) using Analysis of Covariance. Compared with controls, DOC patients had decreased F…
Identifying the physiological processes underlying the emergence and maintenance of consciousness is one of the most fundamental problems of neuroscience, with implications ranging from fundamental neuroscience to the treatment of patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). One major challenge is to understand how cortical circuits at drastically different spatial scales, from local networks to brain-scale networks, operate in concert to enable consciousness, and how those processes are impaired in DOC patients. In this review, we attempt to relate available neurophysiological and clinical…
Severe traumatic brain injury can lead to disorders of consciousness (DOC) characterized by deficit in conscious awareness and cognitive impairment including coma, vegetative state, minimally consciousness, and lock-in syndrome. Of crucial importance is to find objective markers that can account for the large-scale disturbances of brain function to help the diagnosis and prognosis of DOC patients and eventually the prediction of the coma outcome. Following recent studies suggesting that the functional organization of brain networks can be altered in comatose patients, this work analyzes brain …
This contribution examines two radically different explanations of our phenomenal intuitions, one reductive and one strongly non-reductive, and identifies two germane ideas that could benefit many other theories of consciousness. Firstly, the ability of sophisticated agent architectures with a purely physical implementation to support certain functional forms of qualia or proto-qualia appears to entail the possibility of machine consciousness with qualia, not only for reductive theories but also for the nonreductive ones that regard consciousness as ubiquitous in Nature. Secondly, analysis of …
The quest for a scientific description of consciousness has given rise to new theoretical and empirical paradigms for the investigation of phenomenological contents as well as clinical disorders of consciousness. An outstanding challenge in the field is to develop measures that uniquely quantify global brain states tied to consciousness. In particular, information-theoretic complexity measures such as integrated information have recently been proposed as measures of conscious awareness. This suggests a new framework to quantitatively classify states of consciousness. However, it has proven inc…
Examining task-free functional connectivity (FC) in the human brain offers insights on how spontaneous integration and segregation of information relate to human cognition, and how this organization may be altered in different conditions, and neurological disorders. This is particularly relevant for patients in disorders of consciousness (DOC) following severe acquired brain damage and coma, one of the most devastating conditions in modern medical care. We present a novel data-driven methodology, connICA, which implements Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for the extraction of robust indepe…
Quantification of complexity in neurophysiological signals has been studied using different methods, especially those from information or dynamical system theory. These studies revealed the dependence on different states of consciousness, particularly that wakefulness is characterized by larger complexity of brain signals perhaps due to the necessity of the brain to handle varied sensorimotor information. Thus these frameworks are very useful in attempts at quantifying cognitive states. We set out to analyze different types of signals including scalp and intracerebral electroencephalography (E…
This article questions the widespread assumption that there are brain representations that will always remain unconscious in the sense of being inaccessible to individual awareness under any circumstances. This implies that some part of the knowledge generated by the brain is once and for always excluded from consciousness and, therefore, from being communicated to the outside world. This standpoint neglects the possibility that the human brain might have a capacity for generating metarepresentations of nonconscious knowledge contents at a given moment in time through context sensitive adaptiv…
Conscious awareness refers to the association of information processing in the brain that is accompanied by subjective, reportable experiences. Current models of conscious access propose that sufficiently strong sensory stimuli ignite a global network of regions allowing further processing. The immense number of possible experiences indicates that brain activity associated with conscious awareness must be highly differentiated. However, information must also be integrated to account for the unitary nature of consciousness. We present a conceptual computational model that identifies conscious a…
