One Observer, Two Reality Choices.
Dynamics in Attractor Space

1. 1) anatomical networks (hardwired) to guarantee the biological integrity of the human species as an inherited first order priority in association with amygdaloidal complex, insula and visceral brain. It operates at feed forward (inputà output) unconscious levels. It includes the classification of sensory inputs from internal body proper and external environmental receptors or the organization of motoneuronal outputs to effector cells. While the biological survival imperative defaults the operation of the system it can consciously be inhibited contra natura or become pathologically biased. Ordinarily we would find no complex ‘point attractors’ between the input and output elements except when a novel stimulus is encountered at which time the output is temporarily inhibited (freeze response) pending the results of a hippocampus contextual analysis at subconscious levels.

2. 2) structurally organized with variable Hebbian synaptic weights to guarantee the maintenance of constancy within the natural variations in the psycho-social equilibrium milieu as a second order priority in association with hippocampus complex, parietal association areas and Broca’s area. While influenced by first order biological defense strategies, it operates at subconscious levels until a positive novelty receptor input requires accessing higher level inferential assessment, e.g., language processor. At this point it operates as a ‘point attractor’ subsystem where the initial classification/corroboration of the novel input requires that it converges further from a finite number of states towards one of the several point attractors. This now becomes the output to the neighboring attractor in closer synaptic proximity. This step initiates the transition subconscious à conscious level where the former must access higher inferential levels of processing to extract the meaning of the novelty stimulus to the actor/agent within her individualized BPS parameters.

3. 3) central command language processing unit to extract BPS meaning of novelty input as a third level integrator of relevant genetic, memetic and emotional data from all subsystems attractors before the transition from subconsciousness to the recursive cycling co-generation of language and thought at conscious levels. It also functions as a point attractor in that it converges into one of many probable alternative solutions based on their probabilities of adaptive success.

4. 4) organized as an uncommitted, multipotential, undifferentiated group of neurons and glia with seemingly random connections ready to commit under the appropriate novelty input stimulation. They operate as a replacement reservoir for injured neuronal units and providing for plasticity variations relevant to individualized circumstances.

   5) plasticity generators connecting networks correlating neighboring columnar subsystems. Important in the identification and subsequent isolation of cortical attractor with the best probability of an adaptive response to the new contingent novelty input. Provide for the display of the relevant attractor assemblies during the streaming flow of consciousness prior to the conscious collapse of the selected wave function.

          We are not sure where would be the best cortical location for our postulated linearizing subsystem attractor charged with the transduction of atemporal, non linear, asymmetric receptor input into a temporal linear or recursive ‘periodic attractor’ in harmony with innate linear language processing, the asymmetry of our natural experience of causal processes and the functioning of natural internal biological clocks, all of which are essential to coordinate neurohumoral control subsystems. The convergence from a series of states into a ‘periodic attractor’ is more complex. But not more complex than subsystem 5) which in our opinion represents an unfathomable ‘strange attractor’ chaotic (not random!) subsystem, the result of transitions through large parts of the state space system before converging into a hypercomplex but predictable internal structure whose general function in brain dynamics we believe is to amplify feeble sense receptor inputs by resonant coupling to pre-existing specific waveforms, a labeling process to guide its destination into the appropriate cortical attractor.

          It can be demonstrated that all of these five neocortical Hebbian cell modular subsystems can recursively recycle into one of several probable attractor states to maintain and update their content in active working memory (see Miyashita and others). Since all of the inherited genomic information content cannot account for the many neuronal Hebbian connectivities it makes sense to make room for the environmentally acquired memes (internal and external inputs) and their interactions in defense of the biological, psychic and social (BPS) wholeness of the individual subject. In the BPS model, while philogenetic and ontogenetic defaults control the neuronal network architecture and their geographic location in deep archi layers at unconscious reflex levels of instinctual perceptual activity, it must provide the substratum for the emergence of the paleo levels of subconscious activity that incorporates the acquired element (memes) when having to adapt to new un-anticipated environmental ecosystems in the biosphere, giving rise to the subconscious level of perceptual analysis, the only one capable of reciprocal access to and from higher consumer subsystem levels such as language processing that recursively co-generates thought and narrative inner language at self conscious levels as yet another stage in a bottoms-up emergent process in a brain dynamic system theory..

          EMERGENT PROCESSES. To better understand brain dynamics we need a much simpler example to illustrate. We all have seen, e.g., a kidney at the macro level of organization and wonder how may such bean shaped structure makes urine by sorting out so many blood components by glomerular filtration (according to molecular size) and then selectively reabsorbing some back into circulation, letting other noxious components to be eliminated, such that the emergent characteristic of body detoxification can be executed. If we consider the kidney organ as a system decomposed into self-organizing subsystems at a lower level of tissue organization using the available tissue elements (epithelial, neural, muscular, connective, etc.) to organize the tubular structure most efficient to carry out the function of selective blood filtration. For an efficient filtration it needs the association with another vascular subsystem with a glomerular and peritubular proximity so that selective glomerular and tubular filtration/secretion and reabsorption properties emerge. If we consider the tissue level as a system then we need a cellular subsystem to guarantee the emergence of a selective filtration/secretion/reabsorption process. This selective cellular processing system would not be possible if intracellular organelle systems didn’t specialize in producing the macromolecular enzyme subsystems, etc. in place to guarantee either diffusion, active transport, rennin/erythropoietin production, etc. We can continue in a transfinite regression and identify the different atomic subsystems making possible the special activity of the macromolecular enzyme system and the subatomic orbital quantum organization that made it all possible until we find ourselves in the metaphysical domain of explanations. This way quantum theory controls the chemistry of atoms in the macromolecules forming the organelles of the cells in the tissues forming the organs that made the emergence of life possible. It should be noticed that the structural/functional details of emergent processes arise spontaneously via negentropic ordering we accept without being able to describe or explain it. We can say the same when instead we attend to the emergence of thought, language and consciousness from brain dynamics in the BPS model. This is probably true of the structural / functional organization anywhere super complex systems are discovered. This way mathematical inferences from observations emerges as quantum physics; the latter emerges as the atomic theory of chemistry that explains the macromolecular organization of organelles in an emerging biology of cells, tissue, organs and organ systems of the individual plant or animal. The spatiotemporal interaction of the species system form social ecosystems in our biosphere and so on in a transfinite progression to cosmos. The BPS submodel of cortical attractor dynamics will never simulate a brain, it only tries to cover what the important aspects of this dynamic negentropy should be like. It is not possible to experimentally determine the particularities of any column attractor isolated from the cortex other than to suggest what they should be like to generate background noise for amplification of weak receptor input, generate cycles used in measurements (clocks) or the most important point attractors which are driven by feature detector receptor inputs to destabilize and pass on the information to a neighbor attractor, etc. until eventually an output attractor will trigger an appropriate effector response. In the AI lab one can use Hopfield networks in the design of learning modules based on the assignment of Hebbian weights to synaptic connections, generate and direct attention to other attractors (like the reticular activating system RAS), etc. The most important feature of point attractors in a system is that they should be able to converge and settle into a finite number of stable states regardless of the initial state, the basis of information processing in complex system dynamics. These self-organizing Hopfield Networks (SOHN) are sandwiched between sense-phenomenal receptor inputs and executive action-output network channels.

          Of particular interest are the ‘feature detectors’, like the olfactory ganglia neuronal assemblies described by Walter Freeman able to capture a subtle chemical change in air composition and deliver the information to the particular attractor for further processing. In so far as the observer is able to consciously experience and report such change, such networks are self-referential. We may be able to design mirror neuron assemblies to ‘look’ inward, self-referentially, the simulation equivalent of self-consciousness as a receptor initiated feature-detection (objects/events) effort prior to extracting its semantic content. The significance of all this is that we already have computer programs for feature detection tasks, e.g., face recognition.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS.

          When we study nature’s complex systems we normally choose from one of two strategies depending on our background studies and biases. We can observe nature directly or emulate its workings in the lab and analyze the data measurements to identify patterns of behavior and then force the data into geometrical or numerical models approximating that behavior, e.g., sinusoidal temporal variations, etc. We can also ignore such falsifiable observations of the ‘science methodology’ and model an universal mathematical poem that metaphysically describes ALL such behaviors, all based on abstract axioms, tautologies and rules of procedure. The physicalist approach is faith inspired by a certainty that all of the visible macro reality can be reduced to formulations, notwithstanding the human species serious limitations in the perceptual sense-phenomenal and the brain’s conceptual inferential resolution. His deterministic bias contrasts the indeterministic, open-ended stance of the transfinite view of the mathematician/philosopher.

          We have consistently advocated a quasi-deterministic hybrid approach incorporating the ontological perceptual wonders of the sense-phenomenal and the epistemological beauty of the conceptual poems of the abstract counterpart, into an existential real time model of a reality that has intractable invisible components that resist descriptions and/or explanations. A quantum model shares both the ontological and the epistemological interfaces, the descriptions of the visible and the explanations of the invisible allowing our models of reality to evolve along the asymptotic sinuous path trying to reach neither the certainty of the scientific formulation nor the impossibility of metaphysical infinities but the quasi deterministic probabilities of an occurrence; a Schrodinger wave function representing a mind state may deterministically evolve as a function of time but my free will ‘collapse’ of a competing state function may frustrate such determinism. If QM can ‘explain’ non-locality and velocities of wave propagation exceeding the speed of light based on correlated observables, the same referential base can be argued in behalf of the causal efficiency of an invisible mind on a visible physical brain! The detailed Newtonian explanation/description of an invisible gravitational force acting on visible matter or the detailed explanation of the temperature, direction, humidity, flow pattern, etc. of an invisible nominal reality we call ‘wind’ based on falsifiable consequences is not different to the gymnast conscious control of what may have otherwise been the evolutionary reflex-driven conclusion of an unconscious act originating from strong, hard-wired genetic/acquired forces as discussed below.

          Many of our mental states can be simulated in the dynamics labs as attractor space processing. At the unconscious level of operation we think that the genetically controlled feed –forward, inputà output reflexly controlled, avoidance reflex activity, to protect from nociceptive stimulation illustrates the workings at this ground level of organization. Experience tells us that conscious activity may even frustrate this stereotyped hard-wired reflex activity in pathological cases. It is intended to safeguard the biological viability of the species. Its programmed code cannot be consciously accessed (machine language) but its resulting effects may be frustrated.

          At another level, when confronted with significant changes in the configuration of environment space, we may need to shift into subconscious state when we access acquired memory data bases trying to evaluate further the context in which the changing stimulus may affect or not the integrity of the species. If the context check is positive at the biological level we still reflexly respond by avoidance or a Cannon strategy. Like in the purely genetic memory response of the preceding example, it can be consciously but inadaptively inhibited. When a gymnast trains for the olympics Hebbian synaptic facilitation becomes almost hardwired in their respective attractor spaces but, e.g., a new visual input may activate an attentional subsystem and destabilize them throwing the ongoing subsystem into a new global state. This is more difficult to happen in the unconscious mode.

          If, based on the context analysis, the potential threat exists at the psychosocial level we need to engage higher level consumer networks to extract the meaning content, we have arrived at the conceptual level of processing using our language processing capabilities. As an inner language is generated with the parsings in its attractor space so is the corresponding thought and qualia in their respective subsystem point attractor modules. As we provide the new inputs in more precise terms the dynamics converge towards one solution, not necessarilly the optimal, but the one most in harmony with our BPS individualized idiosyncrasies.

          This way we can have a biopsychosocial BPS hierarchical structure where the higher level (‘peaceful conviviality’) network S is controled by the dynamics of the lower systems B (biological integrity) where P (in an associative network) is simultaneously receiving and coordinating genetic and memetic, sensory perceptual and memory conceptual inputs and where B essentially defaults the subsystem. The general reticular activating (RAS) and the specific intralaminar thalamic attentional attractors would play a fundamental role in narrowing the scope of probable outcomes from relevant point attractor networks depending on the number and arrangement of SOHN networks participating in the generation of chain reaction brainwaves. This is obviously not the work for one dreamer or one institution alone and it generally outlines the possible arrangement a dynamic simulation of brain function may look like and then watch for the emergent phenomena it can ‘create’ in behalf a better understanding of the optimal biopsychosocial algorithm to ultimately guarantee the human species an affordable physical and mental health compatible with a peaceful and productive social conviviality.

Bibliography.

1. Anderson, J.A. and Sutton, J.P.[1995]: A Network of Networks. In the proceedings of the ``World Congress on Neural Networks'', Washington,D.C.

2. Cohen, J. and Stewart, I. [1994]: The Collapse of Chaos. Viking Penguin 1994

3. de la Sierra, Angell O. [2008] An Epistemontological View of Reality. Lulu Press

4. de la Sierra, Angell O. [2000] Neurophilosophy of Consciousness. A Biopsychosocial Model.

5. Goertzel, B.[1996]: From Complexity to Creativity. Plenum Press 1996, online

6. Freeman, W. [1987]: How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10:161-195.

7. Werner, G.[2000]: Computation in Nervous Systems. Online

Dr. Angell O. de la Sierra in Deltona, Florida Winter 2008

End of Chapter 4

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EXPLAINING THE BPS MODEL OF BRAIN DYNAMICS

INTRODUCTION.

          In a previous writing we tried to defend the arm-chair philosopher or mathematician’s view of reality in abstract: “There is nothing wrong with the poetic mathematical or reductionist explanations of invisible objects/events that impact our quotidian existence. The motto should be, “..if you can’t describe it, an explanation will do…for now.” This we do when we experience the un-explainable (not to mention the un-describable!) wonders of cosmology, life and mind. It is within these nature-imposed constraints that at this moment, in our humble opinion, quantum theoretical approaches offer the best quasi reductionist, quasideterministic model to explain a narrow aspect of that wondrous invisible experience we call mind/brain or brain dynamics.”

          Life within the confines of our ecosystem is all about the real time experiences of our quotidian existential reality, some described as felt in our internal body, witnessed in the external environment or emulated in the lab as sense-phenomenal macro objects or events. Some can only be explained with relevant combinations or permutations of symbols or sentences used to represent and/or substitute for structural or functional attributes outside our un-aided perceptual sensory field resolution. These attributes may be revealed with instrumental extensions of our sensory perceptions at the ‘mesoscopic’ level of resolution e.g., subcellular organelles like mitochondria, plastids, etc. or, at the microscopic level, through the magic of mathematical or logic manipulations using the pencil or the computer. This way we create poetic models of invisible structures that conform to a measured or inferred functionality, e.g., the quantum theoretical ‘wavicle’ that combines the measured values of a waveform propagation in the oscilloscope and/or the inferred resonant recoil and energy transfer by an emitted particle during its absorption. So long as their predictive structure/functional feats are verified at the macro level of observations they are useful. We have briefly summarized elsewhere why those models may eventually evolve further into oblivion or a real time, operational theory of everything (TOE), well… most everything as we explained: “The departure from abstract models explaining real-time human issues into abstract models based on counterintuitive abstractions from exclusively axiom-based premises trying to explain everything are valid exercises in sophisticated poetry so long as they carry a potential to be developed into solutions to real-time problems affecting our human biopsychosocial health and welfare.”

          However such models, as they apply to the human brain, should be consistent with existential reality and encompass the biological, psychic and social aspects of the human experience and be dynamically flexible to accommodate and adapt its internal organization to the evolving, ever-changing, cumulative nature of reality in an infinitely complex and probabilistic world. It all becomes a mind-boggling interactive balancing dynamics act where ontology, epistemology, stochastic and dynamic system theory come together into a self-organizing marvel of the lattice structures of both the inorganic world and the resulting autogenous motion / ‘animation’ of organic macromolecular proto-life at fertilization as analyzed in Vol. I, “Neurophilosophy of Consciousness.” (http://delaSierra-Sheffer.net).

          As discussed below, a quantum-based subatomic model may, in theory, adequately explain a Darwinian poem of structure-function evolution at the micro and mesoscopic level postulating a random nature-driven selection of surviving organic macromolecules like DNA/RNA or other randomly structured polynucleotides. Beyond that, the Darwinian model must give way to admit another stage, the inexorable presence of life animation of macromolecular complexes of microreality into the mesoscopic world of organelles and their subsequent integration into life, as described by Dr. Behe in his book “Darwin’s Black Box”! The ‘emergence’ of life seems to be much more than an ‘animated’ macromolecular assembly, e.g., Rous Sarcoma virus. The qualitative transition from the nature-controlled Darwinian evolution of the seemingly blind, random, atemporal, acausal and symmetric microreality into an asymmetric, causally efficient design of a spatio-temporal negentropic macro reality processing, giving rise to a self-conscious human able to gain freedom from nature’s control by free willing his liberty, is what life is all about.

          What follows below is an abstract, inferred, speculative synthesis on how it may have all happened at the transition from subatomic ‘wavicles’ à microscopic organic polymers à mesoscopic organelles à macroscopic brain neuronal level of organization based on experimental data obtained from EEG, MEG, fMRI and other electronic data recordings. We are all too familiar with the little value given, if any, by most brain scientists to these continuous crazy chaotic wave oscillations resisting their cognitive apprehension.

ARGUMENTATION.

          At the macroscopic level the very first impression a neurophilosophy student gets from observing the widespread distribution of the messy temporal recordings of oscillatory potentials in an EEG or MEG is that they seem to represent low level brain tissue epiphenomenal activity that needed prior instrumental amplification to be detected in the oscilloscope monitor or polygraph. When more carefully analyzed by computers of average transients (CATs), Fourier analysis, etc. they show peaks of activity at the typical alpha, theta, beta and gamma frequencies sprouting out from a waveform noise, as if the peaks represented the addition of resonant coincidental phase coupling of two or more wave peaks from a multiplicity of oscillatory background activity (thermal Brownian activity?). These time-stretched oscillations/wave forms may represent the converging activity of, among other things, information-laden non-linear chaotic attractor activity continuously undergoing modulations or temporal state transitions.

Minkowsky Diagram on Wheeler-Feynman Advanced Waves

          This may be a big surprise to many classical neuroscientists whose ‘action potentials in neuronal networks’ security blankets blinds them to the reality of those infinitesimal continuous modifications as found in non-linear chaotic activity that when amplified by background noise come alive as peaks averaging 5 Hz theta, 10 Hz alpha, , 20 Hz beta and 60 Hz gamma. These are the hidden signatures for non random, complex but deterministic chaotic activity. This signals the beginning of the causal transition from chaos to order as we extend our observations until convinced that they represent the submicroscopic configuration of a modifiable, dynamic but stable attractor basin underlying the complex mesoscopic histological architecture of the brain’s cortical columns. We have detailed elsewhere: “..the histology of the human neocortex as a prominent thin outside layer of neurons organized as six structurally distinct layers parallel to the brain surface which are penetrated by vertical perpendicular columns. Subsequently neurophysiologists have described how they are organized functionally to provide a sensory input analysis to a large association interneuronal area converging into a motor area for thinking and decision-making.”

          As we travel from the verifiable macrostructure of the brain to the mesoscopic neuron and into the invisible lipoproteic molecular disposition of the neuron membrane and tight synapses we are entering a new dimensional domain beyond Minkowsky 4d space-time considerations. We then try to explain how exocytosis, pre and post synaptic microscopic active/passive transit of charged ‘particles’ across membrane channels may generate the subatomic , non-local emission/transmission of radiant energy to appropriate absorbers in participating attractors at speeds faster than light to generate a demonstrable (EEG) waveform dynamics associated with quantum physics. This way ontology yields to epistemology, descriptions to explanations, determinism to probabilistic quasideterminism and the perceptual sensory phenomena to the conceptual invisible abstraction. However, two things still resist efforts to be explained within the constraints of a rational, logical mind set, i.e., intelligent design and the causal efficacy of a non-physical conscious free will interacting with a physical brain.

          It is very easy to demonstrate in a physics lab how a tuning fork vibrating at increasing measured frequencies is able to transmit a signal through air to another tuning fork placed several yards away when a certain critical frequency is reached that is resonant with the distant fork vibrating potential at which time it starts to vibrate also. Not so easy is to demonstrate/describe the frequency of transmission of a radiation wave from an external object emitter to a sensory receptor organ absorber like e.g., visual rhodopsin, especially when it is required that such wave emission is significant to the subject. This means we may ignore many things in our visual field until one object (emitter) catches our attention and we lock in (entangle). At that time the absorber molecules radiate back an advanced signal ‘accepting’ the emitter’s ‘offer’ followed by a retarded signal completing the transaction. This transmission pattern is counterintuitive to say the least, especially when the radiation offer from the emitter may have originated not several yards away, a second ago but a million miles away, many light years ago in a distant galaxy! The retarded signal can be registered in the physics lab by the pattern of transmission and the energy absorption spectra resulting but the presence of an ‘advanced’ wave component that preceded the ‘retarded’ component registered in the lab can only be mathematically inferred. Feynman, Wheeler and others have described this exchange between an emitter and an absorber which we adopt by reference and suggest that the receptor molecule locks (entangles) on emitter upon receiving its advance wave and, upon absorbing the delayed particle traveling in the emitter wave, the absorber then itself radiates back an advance notification of ‘acceptance’ followed by a retarded notification.

          Just like all other physical systems evolve in time according to the Schr¨odinger equation d/dt |ψi> = − i/h H |ψi> as Everett’s many worlds poetry (MW) or Schr¨odinger time evolution operator U = e^−iHτ/¯h explains we can also represent with mathematically symbols the vector states (dimension, direction, location, etc) of both emitter and absorber where the advance component wave, travelling in negative time faster than the speed of light stands for the complex conjugate of the vector representing the retarded wave transmission. The sub-threshold half waves of the retarded component waves of both emitter and absorber, travelling in opposite directions reinforce each other by an increase in phase resonance amplitude and can now be detected (measured). The advanced waveform components, traveling in negative and opposite directions cancel each other and their presence before extinction can only be mathematically **inferred. The mathematical demonstration is beyond the scope of this brief writing. This way all the relevant attributes or particularities of the emitter object get transmitted to the sensory receptor in this modified transactional model between emitter’s ‘offer’ and absorber’s ‘acceptance’, a “handshake” across space.  In this model, the advance wave components lock emitter and absorber into each other (entangle) recursively and the particle component of the wave effects the energy transfer from emitter to absorber in the sensory receptor site iff the latter has been previously activated by the RAS-induced lower threshold attention state of receptor (based on BPS significance of external environmental input). The details on the processing of internal body- proper sensory inputs are not discussed here. A state of conscious cognitive attention to external stimulus is not necessary unless the preceding unconscious and subconscious context analysis required accessing the language processor to extract the conceptual meaning of the novel external stimulus from the emitter.

          Following the transmission of information from environmental objects/events to sensory receptors, its amplification by background waveform noise and transmission/distribution to appropriate attractor basins has been detailed in a previous writing by the undersigned at the mesoscopic level. We need to remember that we are dealing with various different time frames of information conveyance. From the advance and retarded waves of emitter/absorber à the graded depolarization of the sensory receptor cell membrane à the classical action potential of the afferent sensory neuron depolarization à presynaptic vesicle à the slow molecular diffusion of liberated neurotransmitter from synaptic vesicles à post synaptic membrane of effector/motor (neuronal, muscular and hormonal synaptic sites). The flow of information along such paths with so many stop signs, whether electrical synapses, membrane tunnel transit, exocytosis or reverse endocytosis is compensated with arguably feeble, subthreshold ‘non-local’ quantum transmission. This way the biological complexity of brain dynamics originates with the role of background ‘noise’ as studied in the electronic communications labs.

          We need to explain clearly how the dreaded electronic broad spectrum ‘noise’ from conventional radiation transmission now becomes an essential component in sustaining the relative dynamic stability of brain processing of converging, oscillating, non-linear, non-local inputs at different time scales into individualized modifiable/adaptable (i.e., in transitory phases) attractors in a common neocortical basin as expressed in EEG or MEG monitors of experimental neocortical activity. The neuronal trans membrane transit of charged particles becomes the emitter with an ‘offer’ to appropriate neocortical attractors whose neuronal absorbers recognize and become entangled as explained above, giving rise to subsequent depolarizations and transmission (feed-forward, cyclic feedback, etc., as needed) as detailed above. We discussed the role of ‘cortical attractors’ in another article: “That part of a column in association with a given layer constitutes a subsystem of the neocortex in our BPS model. Each subunit constitutes a recursive cycling, self-organizing attractor neuronal network. Each sub-unit is expected to provide/become, under ideal conditions, part of the best adaptive and optimal network solution to a novel sensory, genetic or acquired (memory) input challenging the BPS equilibrium. The resulting output strategy is executed via motoneuronal network pools controlled by neurohumoral activators/inhibitors and transmitted to glandular and/or muscle effectors.”An important aspect of the postulated cortical brain dynamics are the neuronal “.. plasticity generators connecting networks correlating neighboring columnar subsystems. Important in the identification and subsequent isolation of cortical attractor with the best probability of an adaptive response to the new contingent novelty input. Provide for the display of the relevant attractor assemblies during the streaming flow of consciousness prior to the conscious collapse of the selected wave function.”

          The details on the subatomic complexity in the generation, amplification, transmission of emitter ‘wavicle’ and entanglement with targeted absorber are still far from being completed after the progressive evolution of quantum thought following the seminal contributions of Einstein, Heisenberg, Lorentz-Dirac electrodynamics, Feynman, Wheeler absorber theory, Schrodinger’s time arrow and Wigner’s time-reversal operators, Freeman’s model, Cramer’s transactional model and others. The continued development of these ideas is essential withing the broader context of our BPS model which encompasses an integration of all levels of organization from the subPlanckian, atomic, mesoscopic, macrobiological and sociological domains. No doubt that Dr. Walter Freeman’s observations on the olfactory system got everyone moving from classical to quantum theory focus. Dr. Cramer’s challenge of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics made it easier for us to explain how information/energy transfer can flow from environmental objects/events inside our own bodies or a distant galaxy to sensory receptors to cortical attractors and back credible! Now we are on our way to get asymptotically closer to an understanding of self-consciousness, free will and life itself.

          Meanwhile we still need to demonstrate how the faster-than-light quantum non-local transmission from neuron membrane, interneuronal connectivity couples with the much slower electrochemical action potential, not to mention Ficks intersynaptic diffusion times. It has been demonstrated how phase transitions can be induced by resonant phase coupling of noise with subthreshold external periodic signals to produce synchronized wave peaks of high signal to noise ratios.  (Sinha 1998). A chaotic environment is inherent to neuron networks when each member receives thousands of synaptic dendritic arborization inputs from thousands of other members and produces thousand synaptic outputs within the axonal radius. This random environment of self-sustained background noise fuels the emergence of order at the macro biological brain level as recorded in the EEG. This structural complexity explains its capacity for sudden transitions in organization triggered by minimal perturbations as would be expected from the plasticity of behavior in a normal brain as external environmental and internal thought processes continuously change with time. The description at the mesoscopic level of excitatory/inhibitory coupling, spatial integration/divergence of reciprocal signaling (feed-forward, feedback, lateral) between neocortical layers and columns for a brain volume conductor with electrically insulated (by cholesterol) neuron participants is outside the scope of this brief synopsis. For the olfactory system see *Freeman 1992 and .

 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSSIONS.

          It has been some time since Einstein labeled quantum non-locality demonstrations as “spooky actions at a distance” and Heisenberg as merely a stage of mathematical “knowledge interpretation” unrelated to physical reality. If one represents electrodynamic theory mathematically as time symmetric (Lorenz-Dirac) we are in essence, as Cramer argued, identifying in the orthogonal solution of the EM wave equation an imaginary, non-physical negative time component as the complex conjugate of the ordinary wave time-dependent, causally efficient component.  We now call the complex conjugate the ‘advanced’ component and the ordinary slower wave the ‘retarded’ wave. We now consider convenient to identify the ‘advanced’ component as responsible for establishing the reciprocal dialogue between two or more interacting particles when they become entangled non-locally. This establishes the ensuing asymmetric transmission of information/energy between them akin to the relation between a radiation emitter and an appropriate absorber as explained by Wheeler and Feynman. Since only particles e.g., electrons, are known to be absorbed, a massless wave can constitute the faster ‘advanced’ wave (e^-iwt) followed by the ‘retarded’ (e^+iwt time dependence) particle arrival at the absorber. This is a variation of Cramer’s transactional model. The first order time-dependent, non-relativistic, limiting case evolution of the conventional Schrodinger equation (equation 1 below) is incomplete to the extent that it ignores the complex conjugate component (equation 2 below) that would have explained the advanced wave we posit as responsible for the non-local entanglement between emitter and absorber that co-exists with the energy/information transfer discussed above.

m = mass of the particle, h= Planck’s constant 

          For the alert reader, the orthogonal vector representation contains in its formulation the beginning of a most important qualitative transition from the atemporal, acausal, symmetric reality of the subplanckian domain (reality in se?) as symbolized by the complex conjugate formulation to à time dependant, asymmetric, causally efficient macrophysical domain of existential reality. This is the transition from the conceptual epistemology to ßà the perceptual ontology domains. This is the role of the human brain, to make order out of a perceptual chaos of sensations as Kant described it.

          It is not easy to visualize how an advanced component wave from an explosion originating in a distant emitter galaxy many years ago makes its presence felt to my eyes in the present whereupon I accept the ‘offer’ wave as soon as my visual rhodopsin absorbs the radiant energy transfer carried by the retarded wave and consequently acknowledge the offer by sending back an advanced absorber phase resonant wave that destructively cancels the emitter’s own while the absorber’s retarded wave enters into a constructive resonant phase coupling with the emitter that amplifies the original subthreshold  emitter signal bringing it to its threshold detection value by the retinal receptor absorber. Please notice that this destructive cancellation would explain the lack of energy transfer back to the emitter, an asymmetric, causally efficient energy transfer as in the conventional Schrodinger equation where the advanced component is ignored and non-relativistic invariance is back in play! What is even more difficult to visualize is that the resulting non-local cyclical recursive coupling signifies that the observer has been able to instantaneously communicate with an event that happened many years ago, millions of miles away! This is the magic of faster than light speed (not infinite speed!) non-local communication of information that fascinates us more when carrying simultaneous transcontinental long distance phone conversations than when our brain adaptively responds instantaneously to significant sensory perceptual or memory conceptual inputs, especially if the input carries biological life threatening, negative psychic content information or implies non-adaptive social  information, in that BPS order of priority.

          Where the Cramer and the BPS model differ more is where it matters most in explaining the role of the non-physical conscious free will (Cramer’s ‘measurement') in being causally efficient in producing the collapse/reduction of the state vector wave function in the physical, neocortical brain attractor. We need to part company with the inadequacy of Von Neumann quantum formulation. For Cramer the non-local collapse mechanism has no physical reality because he wants to strictly adhere to the conventional Copenhagen formalism and resists any possibility of a non-physical mind consciously freely choosing from available physical brain alternatives in neocortical loci. Magnetic and electrodynamic forces are outside our sense-phenomenal descriptive resolution capacities but that did not stop theoretical physicists from providing convenient conceptual representations thereof regardless of their real essence/existence status. In our case we provided instead examples from falsifiable real-life situations where the required speed to generate an adaptive responses to life threatening contingencies cannot be explained even with the neuronal classic action potential speed of propagation. The ‘collapse’ in our model is the equivalent of a conscious free will choosing from the various neocortical attractor adaptive solution alternatives to significant biopsychosocial contingencies, that particular one with the greatest probability of adaptive success within the context of an entire BPS emotional state spectrum background. It has been detailed in a previous publication. While free will invocations are beyond measurement or reduction to formulations it is possible that it may be consistent with other basic falsifiable experimental results as we hope is the case here.

Dr. Angell O. de la Sierra, Esq.

Deltona, Florida Midsummer 2009

References. See authors articles @: http://profiles.yahoo.com/blog/VHN6HSYWK3LTKWCTZZFCKR2C3U

·         Dynamics in Attractor Space.

·         An Ontology of Consciousness?

·         Epilogue to an epistemontological view of reality.

·         From Chaos to Probable Outcome

·         Dynamic Synthesis of Levels of Consciousness.

·         More on Brain Dynamics

·         Is probabilistic causation possible?

·         Monotheistic Pluralism

·         More on 'being and becoming' in the physical world.

·         Perception of nature's temporal asymmetry.

See also:

[1] J. G. Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics 58, 647 (1986).

[2] Feynman, R. P., 1967a, The Character of Physical Law, (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), p.129.

[3] Bell, J. S., 1966, Reviews of Modern Physics 38, 447

[4] M. Born and A. Einstein, The Born-Einstein Letters, Walker, New York (1979).

[5] Dirac, P. A. M., 1930, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, (Oxford Univ. Press, London).

[6] M. Jammer, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, Wiley, New York, (1974).

[7] Feynman, R. P., 1967a,b The Character of Physical Law, (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), p.129.

[8] Freedman, S. J., and J. F. Clauser, 1972, Phys. Rev. Letters 28, 938.

[9] J. von Neumann, Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanische, Springer, Berlin (1932).

[10] Schrödinger, E., 1935, Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 31, 555.

[11] Stapp, H. P., 1982, Physical Review Letters 49, 1470

[12] Wheeler, J. A., and R. P. Feynman, 1949, Reviews of Modern Physics 21, 425

[13] Wigner, E. P., 1962, in The Scientist Speculates, ed. I. J. Good, (Heinemann, London).

End of Chapter 5

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FREE WILL AND HUMAN BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL (BPS) SURVIVAL.

(Free willing is being in proximate control of present, ongoing causal influences at play, a balancing act between genetically-based unconscious inner compulsions, memetically-based subconscious external manipulations and conscious, logically based, critical, deliberative faculties, all in harmony with my past, natural law and my biopsychosocial future perspective.) Dr.d

Is there free will? 

ABSTRACT.

          The deterministic ‘incompatibilism’ claim that everything there is, seen or unseen, is determined by physical antecedent laws of nature begs the question on nature’s random, blind ‘intelligence’ to guide the self-evident negentropic biopsychosocial evolution history has recorded, thereby ruling out the existence of another self-evident experience of human freedom to consciously freely will their responses when facing existential quotidian contingencies..., not to mention the infinite regression ‘incompatibilism’ creates when trying to identify the ontology of that random, blind intelligent force, thing or process driving nature’s cycles. We posit that the arguable truth of unconscious genetic and subconscious memetic determinism does not preclude the existence of an ultimate proximate control by conscious consent to one of various probable alternatives available encompassing all relevant things considered in the individual biopsychosocial circumstance domain. We also briefly touch upon the down to earth normative ethical or moral responsibility of quotidian existence and its ultimate metaphysical aspects and deliberatively stay away from the underlying conundrums of mind/brain dualism and agent causation.

INTRODUCTION.

In a previous publication (Towards a Coherent Metaphysics of Existential Reality) we suggested that: “Our notion of free will in the BPS model is ‘freedom by conscious consent’ to (one of) an elaborate cortical attractor complex concatenation of appropriate adaptive responses consistent with a qualia of emotional happiness. Subhuman species are not free because they cannot transcend the subconscious awareness stage and think outside the genetically and memetically programmed default box. The bridge across the dichotomy between the biological determinism of Darwinian natural law and the experienced indeterminism of social existence is provided by the quasideterminism of an inherently probabilistic quantum theory where conscious free will survives, as detailed elsewhere...” Now we expand on this assertion by dissecting and pointing out the various interplays between the most important components of what is understood as ‘free will’, e.g., the inherited, the acquired and the resulting qualia of emotional states thereby generated as we consciously zero on the best probable outcome to give our consent to.

From the very outset we need to distinguish between freedom to will and freedom to act on one’s willed response activity. When confronted with a contingent problem to solve, rather than having to rationally decide to choose from among various probable logical outcomes we prefer to view the process as giving an exclusively rational (or not) conscious consent to one probable alternative in harmony with the relevant biopsychosocial circumstance of the normal decision-maker subject. At a more primitive level of neuronal organization we experience this decision-making pattern every time we freely choose to execute a given complex movement, e.g., jumping over an obstacle on the ground, from various alternatives available as determined/controlled by initial body posture, health, time, body position or any other circumstance. Notice how, in the process, we can rationally come to an abstract rational conclusion, e.g., based on jump distance covered, which we nevertheless cannot execute because of constraining factors beyond our conscious control, whether physical (e.g., our weakened state of biological health), theological or psychic factors. However, willing an action that is onerous, disgusting or cannot be executed because of known health constraints is like willing to fly over a building by flapping our arms. But, what if the constraint is unknown to the subject? To the deterministic position that free will is a mental illusion we counter by the self-evident quotidian experience of being in conscious control of the decision-making process whether it can be actually realized or not or even executed against self-interest. Stay tuned.

We posit the reality of Darwinian determinism as being restricted to the unconscious and subconscious levels of decision control. We have argued that these two levels of control generate -by cyclic recursive parsing- both the response (probable best moto-neuronal execution sequence) and, with the instrument of the language processor, the best afferent conceptual input alternative to trigger that response. Co-processing of motor responses probable alternatives to match the afferent perceptual sensory or memory input alternative is mediated by the language processing faculty. We have no evidence yet to conclude if the mental qualia state generated by coetaneous neuro-humoral activity biases the conceptual input to moto-neuronal networks or just fuels the execution of the moto-neuronal output.

          We don’t pretend to be exhaustive but will touch upon the issues of free will generating moral and/or legal responsibility for one’s actions (which we have discussed previously in another volume Neurophilosophy of Consciousness, Vol. I), the axiology of individual and collective social behavior as it relates to psychosocial equilibria and its expression as feelings of pride, dignity, love, compassion and other psychosocially relevant mental states. One thing is clear, free will is a multidimensional entity as will be evident below.

ARGUMENTATION.

          The experience of free willing an exclusive, adaptive end result implies having previously consciously considered/compared the short and long term consequences of that choice vis a vis equivalent considerations with other probable alternatives available in the neocortical attractor basin. Notice how the choice is very much individually tailored and thus dictated by rational, circumstantial and affective components from experiential elements, what we have called the individualized BPS equilibrium. This requires the subject to engage in an introspective positioning as an active self observer of relevant past events, if any, as they relate to the present sensory/memory contingency input to adaptively achieve the future circumstantial stage willed. This complex processing (the I perspective), including the consequent moral implications of the chosen response, is denied to subhuman species at best operating at subconscious levels only.

          Just, what is it that we consciously will, the rational general solution or the consequent result we personally may not even like? What effectively controls the process? Can we independently isolate the Platonic rational being pursuing the higher axiological common good from the underlying, ever present animal being more concerned with its own individual BPS survival? How do inherited animal desires may be in conflict with environmentally/culture acquired norms of social conviviality, important as they both are for the human species survival? What is the higher road, the Darwinian survival of the fittest individual or survival of the collective, mixed human species?

          Any careful, objective student of nature and history will disagree with Rousseau’s contention (The Social Contract) that man is born pure and society corrupts him. Historically the opposite is true. Likewise, St. Thomas Aquino’s position that under nature’s guidance humans will spontaneously will those solutions most consistent with the abstract general goal of social goodness. The BPS model position is that, left in isolation from culturally acquired influences, man is driven to spontaneously and subconsciously ‘will’ whatever solution there is guaranteeing his individual biological integrity, a default imperative to be subsequently more finely controlled in its expression by the higher level imperative of human species survival, a collective goal. The individualized survival effort is gene controlled as modified by coded memory experiences acquired in the environment. Perhaps, even the meme-controlled data base can be argued on the basis of an environmental activation of inherited archetypes in a Jacques-Monod/Darwinian landscape. This is an important, ever present element of the human experience. But the human historical experience transcends Darwin, man was meant to live in society. As he evolved the mirror neuronal network capacity to anticipate the intentions of the other human in his ecological niche, he subsequently evolved the capacity for introspection by using the other face of the ‘mirror’ where he can see himself. It was then when he was able to distinguish the third person ‘that’ out there as being different from the first person ‘I’ inside self (see Piaget). The freedom to will one out of various existing alternatives is predicated on the ability for self consciousness, not mere subconscious awareness. Subhuman species and even complex industrial thermostats can exhibit complex programmed behavior in response to the environmental changes monitored.

          Needless to say that, given man’s perceptual and conceptual limitations as a species, survival required from man an ability to make mental representations of sense reality to adequately extract the meaning of objects and events in his midst, within and without perceptual/conceptual ontological cognition. Enter the language processing faculty to control environmental resources and consciously will the appropriate adaptive strategies for his biopsychosocial survival as a species not as individuals. If what we will as individuals is of necessity for biological survival, it is not rationally dictated, it is not free. When we transcend the individual and match the conceptual, rational common good with the individualized affective desire by parsing among the various means available to both personal and social ends and commit ourselves to a given course of action, we have then willed freely. The genetic endowment and the socially acquired intellectual sophistication of the subject will determine the degree of adaptive success in solving a given external/internal new contingency. The point we are trying to stress is that the primitive unconscious drive to satisfy the requirements to preserve life are so strong that unconscious or subconscious neuro-humoral driven responses cannot be considered as freely willed especially when under stressful or drug-induced circumstances. In this case the reflective, rational deliberation faculty is not absent but is driven and thus biased by the primacy of the life preservation imperative. In other words, like in sophistry, rational deliberation is not neutral, dispassionate or free, it is controlled in susceptible individuals by external or internal psychological compulsive forces outside conscious control of the subject, whether they are hypnotic, religious, political, addictive or disease manipulations. Free willing is a balancing act between genetically based unconscious inner compulsions, memetically based subconscious external manipulations and conscious, logically based, critical, deliberative faculties. The theological God abstracted by man from JudeoChrIslamic mythopoetic scriptures, who must always trade in justice for compassionate solutions, cannot be free to be otherwise and is to be distinguished from the historical proto-gods or prophets who existentially had to engage in balancing acts to improvise adaptive, rightly-ordered responses to new contingencies. The balancing act is the equivalent of the biopsychosocial (BPS) equilibrium, a coherent metaphysical approach to existential reality. Man is he and his evolving BPS circumstance. The critical role of theologies in society is to partially satisfy man’s natural cravings to know more about his origins and destiny as much as it is to show the way to evoke spontaneous rightly-ordered responses to the quotidian challenges to his evolving BPS equation. In theory when the individual man acts freely in harmony with his BPS equation of life he generates an equivalent moral but not legal responsibility. In practice society has to generate coercive legislation to show the abstract way that individual equation should evolve into in behalf of social conviviality, an indirect strategy for species survival. Consequently, all that society requires from the individual is that he acts freely regardless of whether or not the action is the spontaneous result proceeding from a free will. We say that he acted freely because, when balancing out his desired actions with his reflectively identified rightly-ordered alternative, he had control over the causal influences at play in his choice to  consider and further reflect on according to the level of individual sophistication achieved in his BPS evolution. The statement ‘control over the causal influences’ of course implies the non-physical mind controlling the physical brain, something physicalists viscerally reject ab initio.

          Any experienced neurophysiologist is fully aware of the complexities in organizational sequences of unconscious sensorimotor reflex arcs, genetically wired-up in defense of our biological integrity as Sherrington, Eccles and others amply developed. As we have amply expanded elsewhere, we are conscious of the various response alternatives available even though we cannot describe or explain them adequately step by step, yet we can summon one of them into action at the speed of light when needed. We have exercised our free will by giving our conscious consent to a solution best adapted to our circumstance at the moment the stimulus triggered a response. Even Libet, when arguing that adaptive motor responses are already initiated before the subject consciously wills to do it, concedes that we still retain the ability to negate the progression of an action already initiated by the motoneuronal pool (his “unconscious psychological structures”). The causally efficient invisible forces in a non-physical mind controlling the motoneuronal network activity of the physical brain is just as mysterious as the equally efficient and invisible, magnetic field forces acting on matter across ‘empty’ space. We do not feel or experience any particular need or compulsion to identify the mind with either macrophysical matter, bosons or fermions outside our human sensory and combinatorial brain resolution capacities. We are more impressed with that invisible plan or design responsible for that wondrous macrophysical world we experience phenomenologically and psychologically. That self evident historical experience cannot be the exclusive result from the laws of nature or even the quasi-deterministic chaos of an underlying quantum theoretical underpinning. One could of course argue in abstract that, ultimately, when we trace back to the original source of our metaphysical freedom of choice, it resides in external factors that determined my genetic endowment, my memetic environment and my psychosocial circumstances, all determinants beyond my control. Yet, as argued, all things considered, our existential control of proximate causality resides in our ability to consciously consent or not to one of various probable alternatives of action.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS.

          Existentially speaking, man is a creature of complex biological, psychic and sociological circumstances beyond his effective control to significantly change. Yet, he reserves the freedom to consciously control by consenting or not, at every moment of his existence, to one of several available solutions by exercising his proximate causation faculties as illustrated above. This way, man alone, all relevant unconscious, subconscious or conscious factors considered, can consciously initiate a course of action in harmony or in defiance of his best genetic, psychic or social interests.

          Thus, those that conveniently recite after transubstantiation communion that God is a necessary and sufficient, wholly determining cause for everything that is seen, unseen or happens, are denying themselves the God-given freedom -and responsibility- of proximate causation by attributing to God alone the good and evil in the world, thereby impugning his theological abstract perfect goodness.

Dr. Angell O. de la Sierra              Deltona, Florida   Summer 2009

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

• Aquinas, Thomas (1945). Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (2 vol.). New York: Random House.
• ----- (1993). Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. T. McDermott. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Aristotle (1985). Nichomachean Ethics, translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Augustine (1993). On the Free Choice of the Will, tr. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
• Ayer, A.J. (1982). “Freedom and Necessity,” in Watson (1982b), ed., 15-23.
• de la Sierra (2009) “Towards a Coherent Metaphysics of Existential Reality.” In press.
• de la Sierra, Angell O. (1987) “Biopsicosociología” Mexico, Editorial Limusa.
• de la Sierra, Angell O. (1998) JudeoChrIslamic Theology, a Strategy for Psychosocial Survival. In “Neurophilosophy of Consciousness, a Biopsychosocial Model.” Lulu, ed.
• de la Sierra, Angell O. (2009) Sociology in the BPS Model of Consciousness. in Telicom, Journal of the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry.
• Erich Fromm (1968) “El Miedo a la Libertad.” Buenos Aires, Argentina, Editorial Paidos.
• Piaget, Jean (1977) “The Development of Thought.” in New York, The Viking Press.
• Oesterle, John (1957) Ethics, the Introduction to Moral Science. New Jersey; Prentice Hall, Inc.

End of Chapter 6

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CAVEATS RE: NEURODYNAMIC INFORMATION TRANSFER IN THE BRAIN.

DNA

Abstract

Before embarking on an ambitious systematic search of the possible formulations most appropriate to represent the processing and transfer of mental state information across the brain’s neurodynamic phase space we decided to briefly go over the conceptual obstacles expected to be encountered during the transition from the macroscopic brain dynamics lab measurement data to the abstract model design desk, via the antiquated mesoscopic maps of neocortical layers and columns maps where cortical attractor basins hold the mental enigmatic treasures. If successful we should be able to account for the dynamic signature of the different brain states measured during human sleep or vigil, synchronized or desynchronized, stationary or dynamic, unconscious, subconscious or self-conscious.

What we found from the brief perusal of the literature on event-related synchronization or desynchronization studies (ERS, ERD, respectively), EEG, MEG, fMRI or multiunit neuronal recordings, was very disappointing in that there is a lack of a comprehensive plan to bridge the structure/function gap between the macroscopic perceptual experimental data and the microscopic conceptual formulations poetry derived therefrom. At the macroscopic measurement level it remains unclear how best to account for the dynamic variations in the measurement baseline accompanying the different mental states. We cannot tell the significant difference there may be on the measured values of event-related synchronization/desynchronization baselines for e.g., between ongoing, unperturbed mental states or those following evoked thalamic reticular activation; all of which we consider central to an understanding of resonant phase coupling amplification of a sensory information signal before further processing and transmission ensues. We need to understand how, e.g., a sense-phenomenal (internal body proper or external) somatosensory stimulus (eg., beta 10 Hz or visual~40Hz) causes a stereotypic sequence of first an ERD and then an ensuing amplitude overshoot (event-related synchronization, ERS), which at a dynamical cortical state becomes evident only if the natural relaxation dynamics of unperturbed EEG rhythms is utilized as reference dynamics. Ditto for memory-based conceptual influence (upper alpha band of left hemisphere) for an ongoing language processing brain state. We outline the caveats to be avoided when analyzing the neurodynamic data.

Introduction.

Functional complexity in a physical system can only be explained by the consistent, falsifiable and measurable macro-effects it creates by its presence. These macro effects measurements are then forced to fit into customized mathematical straight-jackets to make their symbolic abstract representations familiar and intelligible to human understanding. The brain’s complex functional activity is no exception especially when explained at the meso and micro levels of organization. At best such abstract explanations must be based on relevant circumstantial evidence indirectly obtained by optical, electronic, and other forms of amplification of whatever invisible, subthreshold signal is consistently present and registered. It is also impossible to separate the measured probabilistic observation from the observer’s interpretation. But sometimes we must plow and till the soil with the oxen we have, in this case, the electroencephalogram (EEG) or the magneto-encephalogram (MEG), multiple unit recordings, fMRI, PET scans and evoked potentials.

Human species survival in his potentially hostile environmental ecosystem is predicated on the constant monitoring and analysis of endogenous and exogenous changes as they become manifest to external and internal sense phenomenal receptors. The subsequent processing of the sense data will depend on the species coetaneous mental state of passive/active vigil or sleep. The brain is never at rest, a passive vigil with eyes closed will always register prominent oscillations averaging a frequency rhythm of 10 Hz (alpha wave). This resting, passive synchronous background activity is interrupted as soon as subject, e.g., opens his eyes and allows even subthreshold light quanta to impact the retinal receptor surface. The visual event-related input will induce a desynchronization (ERD) producing an ‘alpha blockade’ by suppressing the reference base line ongoing activity and substituting it with a characteristic macroscopic visual oscillatory signal as monitored in the visual occipital lobe EEG monitoring electrode. The induced changes in the pattern of oscillatory dynamics, even for an identical input, will vary depending on various mental state factors (cortical attractors?) simultaneously present which we will need to examine before we even attempt to identify their underlying neural architecture. This is true in the processing of all sense-phenomenal input with a dynamically varying base line reference level of background activity.

Desynchronizations, as a reliable measure of ongoing information processing or transmission activity (sensory, associative or motor), are topologically distributed in the cortex. Thus it is to be expected that an ERD is “state-conditional”, i.e., it reflects the state it was in before the new event arrived and it is possible that  the impact of rapidly fluctuating brain states whether based on endogenous or exogenous variables may escape detection. This makes the importance of identifying a reliably constant base reference line on which to assign measure values and minimize unavoidable variability. In any case we assume that the event related synchronization that follows represent the stabilization in an adaptable attractor state.

In the previous case of a passive vigil mental state above, characterized by synchronous background alpha oscillations, a subthreshold environmental stimulus was amplified to threshold values by a process of resonant phase coupling explained elsewhere as modifications of a ‘plane wave’ in the Schrodinger analysis that we find incomplete as briefly explained below. This amplification step resulted in a desynchronization (ERD) of the preceding background baseline synchrony seen in the EEG pattern. What is more difficult to swallow is the explanation for the visual event-related synchronization (ERS) that follows the alleged increase in amplitude to threshold levels by resonant phase coupling unless we are dealing with an experimental plane polarized photon.

To complicate matters further consider this. If the background base line of activity, where resonant phase coupling with sensory input amplifies the signal reaching its cortical attractor basin destination (where the ERS amplitude overshoot can only be detected), the result must be different for the various mind states possible (passive or active vigil, sleep, etc). It is not clear whether a stationary base rhythm, sleep or passive vigil is invariant and coexist with an ongoing mental state or substituted by the ongoing, online mental state as the exclusive source of input wave amplification. In other words, what is the reference dynamic baseline?

To simplify things, we prefer to speculate that the thalamic reticular activating system (RAS), by alerting the relevant cortical networks (place theory) to pay attention to incoming sensory signals, creates a unique uniform background of activity for selection and amplification of sensory mode signal by phase resonant coupling activity. More experiments on mode-specific measurements of evoked event-related potentials (ERP) are needed.

We realize the possible implications these speculations, if proven true, may have on the seminal studies on olfactory pathways by Dr. Walter Freeman, et al (where olfactory cell signals by pass the thalamic relay station on their way to cortical attractor basins) and subsequent quantum theoretical interpretations based on that genial model. We are specially concerned about the limitations of Schrodinger based formulations -based on plane wave analysis- as it may not reflect the real-time 4-d landscape situation of a stationary, non-propagated background oscillation better represented as travelling 3-d spheres than a plane wave. Similar reasoning may apply for a 4-d time dependant wave transfer of information best represented by a spiral displacement to minimize brain matter frictional resistance. This aspect will be expanded on in a later writing.    

Argumentation.

Theoretical neuroscientists sometimes get so mesmerized by the beauty of their abstract mathematical formulations that they often forget they barely represent an idealized structure or function of the material object/event they should be familiar with to obtain the highest possible correspondence with the measured variables their instruments are able to register. To study mental function one needs to know the brain substrate and the dynamics of its spatiotemporal disposition at both the neuronal unit and collective network level of organization.

In our own effort to elaborate further the BPS model of consciousness we find it necessary to investigate further the pattern of information transfer to and from sense receptors via neurohumoral effectors that is consistent with the data available from measurable spontaneous and evoked activity at its various mental states of vigil and sleep. We need to know how the brain processes and transfer information across synaptic or non-synaptic pathways before we can ascertain the role played by the self-sustained chaotic background activity in bringing order to what deceptively seems like an atemporal, acausal and symmetric Kantian world of sensations out there. A self-sustained, emergent, spontaneous negentropic causal step indeed, all in behalf of the biological viability of the human species.

We assume the reader’s familiarity with the basic tenets of signal propagation in excitable and non-excitable cells as controlled by the ionic composition of the extracellular and intracellular millieu and their active/passive movements across the bare cell membrane or its special ion channels.

The brain never sleeps, every ubiquitous neuron displaying a mesoscopic, spontaneous, self-generated averaged oscillatory 10 Hz signal as a function of equivalent rates of change in their membrane selective Na/K ion permeability as predicted by the Nernst, Hodgkins-Huxley equation. It is very tempting to suspect that the negentropic transition from chaos to order, which was initiated by the special sense receptor selection of environmental input, may continue when the signal arrives at the specific cortical site previously alerted by thalamic RAS (Place theory) where the resonant phase coupling amplification may result. This brings in two complications, one that wave transmission from receptor to sensory cortex was faster than synaptic mode of transmission (electrical or diffusive types) would allow. The next complication is explaining the phase coupling between the arriving sensory 3-d spherical wave signal and the background oscillatory frequency of the cortical neuron. The Schrodinger-based formulations we use in analyzing these events are based on plane waves, contrary to what is expected in the absence of a plane polarizing intermediate step. It may be easier to assign the receptor cells as mediating the resonant phase coupling.

The next step in the route to order is predicated on existing loci of spatially distributed, simultaneous, equivalent clusters of cortical activity and their subsequent spatial propagation (by random, chaotic, parallel, distributed or cascading modes) resulting in aggregations from interacting neurons to eventually form coherent cortical attractor clusters with varying probabilities of enactment to be eventually chosen from by free will ultimately based on existential particularities of subject. It remains a mystery the underlying common denominator responsible for the association between relevant clusters in the formation of complementary/supplementary coherent attractors, whether based on mesoscopic, macroscopic or microscopic parameters. However, meanwhile, multi-electrode electrophysiological, EEG and MEG recordings, fMRI imaging and evoked potentials continue to provide valuable evidence of such specific locations of structured, dynamic collective activity of neural circuits.

Summary and Conclusions.

The living functional brain is probably the most complex physical system in existence. We suspect that its emergent dynamic complexity cannot be accounted for by the sum total of all the participating constitutive parts. The integration of the collective network dynamics of participating cortical circuits just won’t cut. Yet, for pedagogical reasons, we have to build it up from that unit neuronal oscillator onwards, from the computational unit of these neuronal networks -the excitable neuron- on to cortical attractor basins. At the microscopic level we have to explain how that unit cell receives and transforms a large set of spatial and temporal information inputs from different neuronal regions into a dynamically coded spatiotemporal pattern, an information-laden signal output delivered to the next neuron or network station node. This is important to consider for many reasons, first because the unit output content is fashioned and controlled by what happens before a voltage threshold propagating value is reached when the computing unit will reset again, making the process highly non-linear. Secondly because there may be significant and distinctive variations in the regional cluster of neuronal membrane capacitance (C)/resistance (R) to ionic current flow and these distinctive values may control membrane conductance (and/or selective permeability) and thier excitatory or inhibitory presynaptic potentials and consequently the voltage threshold values for information transfer to next station to occur. Are these distinctive variations relevant to resonant phase coupling to subthreshold, non-synaptic incoming signals from wave packets? Quare. The subthreshold resting membrane potential Vt fluctuates as a function of a time constant t given by the product t = RC; this is the signature (state) of each unit oscillator. It would be naive to think that information processing and transfer can be exclusively explained by membrane and synaptic transfer especially when each oscillatory unit receives 10K excitatory/inhibitory inputs plus the influence of membrane receptor agonists/antagonists and other neurotransmitters. When we imagine this integrated output signal being transmitted to cortical columns, each populated by 10 million other neurons, computations become intractable and meaningless; we have no choice but moving into what we hope is creative abstract speculation based on inferential poetry and wishful thinking.

As one poem would have it, it is still possible to track the subthreshold internal state dynamics of each individual neuron, as outlined, and then you consider the network dynamics of the collective, the population density approach. We have to remember that the emergent features of a dynamical living brain is NOT the sum of all the individual unit neurons participating but rather they emerge from the dynamic flow and dispersion of states over phase space in a population as represented in the Fokker-Planck formulation because inputs from individual units are deemed as uncorrelated, the contributions of those sharing same state (Vt) are merged. Subsequent information processing and transfer depends on adding the number of unit neurons that a given time t share same membrane potential Vt during a given interval dV as evidence of the temporal evolution of the probability density function (see the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation in integral and differential form) under specified probability conditions [those which infinitesimally change Vt (dVt) during the infinitesimal interval dt.

As expressed in a previous communication, the brain’s structural/functional goal is to channel the sensory information from receptors and memory data bases into stationary and stable neocortical attractor basins which represent coherent global representations of conflictive/alternate ways of dealing with a significant novelty change in the critical environment, all encoded in the resulting dynamic interactivity representations of the oscillatory units..

But first we have to identify the initial conditions and the relevant equations of motion responsible for the flow of information (Vt) in the phase space regardless of how it was encoded in each state of the evolving population. One would normally use eigen vector representations whose bio-orthogonality reveals the uncoupled dynamics and how the probability coefficients progress following an environmental change. In general, while the unit oscillator exhibits non-linear stochastic dynamics, the target population’s average values are linearly stable to these inputs during the build up of the stimulus current and subsequent large amplitude oscillations that wane as stimulus ceases. Analytically speaking, it is all about the characterization of neuronal and quantum connectivities conceptually conceived at the microscale, functionally inferred at the cortical column mesoscale level and perceptually ‘corroborated’ at the cortical surface regions of the macroscopic level. In moving across these spatial scales uncertainty creeps in as we try to obtain manageable information, e.g., it should be clear to the alert reader that analytically, the unit stochastic oscillatory input is a 4-d chaotic dynamics phenomenon being forced to integrate with planar 2-d representations of population dynamics. For those poems describing how mental states can be represented as probability densities evolving across the brain phase space, by reducing the available data to approximations of neural mass or field locations to generate evolving, spreading spatiotemporal Schrodinger-like wave equations, all we can say at present is that not all that shines is gold.

Dr. Angell O. de la Sierra, Esq. In Deltona, Florida  Winter 2009.

Bibliography.

1.   Freeman WJ, Barrie JM (2000) Analysis of spatial patterns of phase in neocortical gamma EEGs in rabbit. J Neurophysiol 84: 1266–1278.

2.   Freeman WJ (2003) A neurobiological theory of meaning in perception. Part 2: Spatial patterns of phase in gamma EEGs from primary sensory cortices reveal the dynamics of mesoscopic wave packets. International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos 13: 2513–2535.

3.     Hopfield JJ (1982) Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 79: 2554–2558.

4.     Kelso JAS (1995) Dynamical patterns: The self-organization of brain and behavior. Cambridge: MIT press.

5.     Tuckwell H (1988) Introduction to theoretical neurobiology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6.     Dayan P, Abbott L (2002) Theoretical neuroscience: computational and mathematical modeling of neural systems. Boston: MIT Press.

7.     Jirsa VK, McIntosh AR (2007) Handbook of brain connectivity. Berlin: Springer.

8.     De Groff D, Neelakanta P, Sudhakar R, Aalo V (1993) Stochastical aspects of neuronal dynamics: Fokker-Planck approach. Biol Cybern 69: 155–164.

End of Chapter 7

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How May ‘Other’ Mind Reading and ‘Self’ Metacognition Share a Common Introspective Meta-Representational Processing. .

The Two Reflecting Surfaces of the Same Mirror (Neurons).

Abstract

Electrical activity from specific pre-motor cortical neurons has been recorded in the human brain when an agent observes an external (‘other’) subject’s ongoing overt behavioral activity, e.g., lifting left arm to wave. Same motor neurons would fire when the agent introspectively simulates similar (‘self’) behavior by virtually lifting his own left arm. This suggested that an agent may anticipate the behavioral intentions of the external subject by activating his own set of neurons, a sort of   internal mind reading event in reverse. Mind reading other’s intentions are interpreted within the context of the agent’s own current existential circumstance covering all aspects of his biopsychosocial (BPS) reality and thus is prone to admit confabulatory events as being real. This result suggested to us in 1996 that turning the same introspective meta-representational faculty used in ‘other’ mind reading inward, toward the agent’s self, would provide introspective access to one’s own intentions, a possible mechanism for attaining the self-conscious state. We provide arguments in favor of such conclusion by analyzing the mechanisms that must be present to achieve such results. Upon careful analysis we conclude that the ‘other’ mind reading and the ‘inner self’ mind reading activities may share the same first order cognitive and second order meta-cognitive resources in processing their respective inputs of information. The analysis include making distinctions between processing the same or novel sensory input originating from all sources of relevant information, whether genetic / memetic memory data bases, internal / external perceptual and conceptual sources. The mechanisms playing out in the introspective access of Fodor’s propositional attitudes processing and our alleged consequent co-generation of inner language and thought, the hallmark evidence of being self-conscious needs further development. Opposing views from known introspective specialists in academia is discussed. How this model may change our understanding of autism and passive schizophrenia is briefly discussed.

Key words: Mind reading, mirror neurons, metacognition, metarepresentation, propositional attitudes, introspective analysis, inner language, autism.

INTRODUCTION.

          Ever since Gallese and Rizzolati’s unexpected results on mirror neurons research were published in 1996¹, it was clear that an entirely new chapter on the neurophilosophy of consciousness was about to be started. I could see then how the outer mindreading ‘tool’ discovered could be turned inwards to fathom the inner aspects of self, like the two reflecting faces of same mirror! Finally, an open window to look into the elusive structure of the self-consciousness apparatus! But where to start, I mumbled in my Yahoo blog and a later article? Early on, for starters, we had to consider mindreading as the sensory arm and self-consciousness as the pre-motor arm (motoneuronal pool) of a supercomplex reflex arc where the substructure of the associated interneuronal interface joining them held the functional secrets we are looking for, an updated Sherringtonian neurophysiology layout, I thought. The sensory arm would code for ALL relevant input to include the ‘outer’ sense-phenomenal input from outer environmental sensory receptors, a first order level of processing. This later had to be modified to include sensory inputs from internal receptors monitoring the neuro-humoral equilibrium state of the internal milieu (visceral brain). We hesitated at that point to include also inputs from genetic (amygdaloidal) and memetic (hippocampus) memory data bases as participants in the elaboration of this first order cognitive representation for reasons to become clear as we go along. On the other motor end of the reflex arc we found it convenient to elaborate a motoneuronal plan to guide the execution of the adaptive response to maintain a biopsychosocial (BPS) equilibrium in the agent. This plan was conveniently located in the pre-motor cortical attractor space (where mirror neurons were recorded originally) to be made available as a probable response alternative to contingent psychosocial circumstances disrupting the current BPS equilibrium state, especially a plan to deal with novelty inputs, as discussed elsewhere. See “Neurophilosophy of Consciousness, a BPS Model.”, Vol. 1

It is to be noted that the adaptive motor execution of this plan, by necessity, requires previous cognition of the current neuro-humoral/neuro-muscular state as found coded in the first order account derived from the perceptual inputs. As such, the pre-motor plan qualifies as a second order network structure (meta-representation II, or met II) of the current mental state and part of the interneuronal mix containing the sensory end or met I. It is important to realize the importance for an agent to know his current self existential situation (physically, mentally, emotional, etc.) before responding to a novel contingency. Consequently, the agent needed an introspective  excursion into met II and propositional attitude systems to establish his metacognitive BPS readiness to adaptively respond. Adaptive may not mean necessarily the most efficacious solution, it means an individualized response tailored to and in harmony with the agent’s current BPS (emotional, physical and mental) resources to respond. The novelty of the reflex sensory arm input required an interpretative function to provide meaning of the novel input and thus the need for accessing the language processing faculty (propositional attitudes) to co-generate the corresponding inner language and thought, welcome self-conscious state!

The careful reader may have noticed the fine distinction we are making between the sensory and motor arms of this reflex arc at both first order cognitive and second order metacognitive conscious state elements. Now, a second distinction, iff it were the case that the sensory arm input was experienced before then there is no need in a subsequent response to include the participation of met I or met II system nor any other metarepresentational or metacognitive introspection because the adaptive solution is already coded in a cortical attractor and all is needed is to trigger a brief conscious streaming review of existing probable alternatives and a free will consent to a particular solution in store. This essentially subconscious reflex activity presupposes a motor plan readiness to execute the stereotyped response in accordance to metarepresentation II previous motor resources availability. Both met I and met II are part of the same interneuronal networks in attractor space and ready to be the object of a ‘mindreading‘ activation process whether triggered by ‘other outer’ or ‘self inner’ events.

Now, If it were the fact that the neuro-humoral/neuromuscular motor resources have changed significantly since the last recorded experience, then the introspective conscious processing will be as described even when there is no novelty in the sensory aspect of the input, but only in the previous premotor plan to respond since the latter was partially based on circumstances no longer present affecting either perceptual input and/or motor readiness to respond. But suppose now that neither sensory nor motor aspects have substantially changed? Should the stereotyped response be triggered into action without any conscious control? We still can count on two ways to stop (inhibit) the reflex, subconscious discharge of this response.

The first inhibition is based on recorded changes in previous conceptual considerations (beliefs, attitudes, etc.) as it relates to same previous input in memory storage. This self evident source forced our hand into including memory data in out BPS model as a potential candidate for a mind reading input event.

The second inhibition is more controversial and somewhat counterintuitive in some of its aspects because it requires the attribution to free will causal efficiency control of the physical brain activity by the non-physical mind. It is easier to explain how pathology (autism, passive schizophrenia, etc., as discussed below) may be the source of disruptions in the formation of parietal first order representations (imageries, etc.) or second order metarepresentations, introspective or interpretative difficulties (ADS, etc.). It is more difficult when the inhibition is triggered by acts of heroism or altruism where acts contra natura or self interest are freely willed into action by allegedly normal persons.

We hope that this brief dissertation may provide convincing arguments against claims that mind reading is restricted to events occurring exclusively in the external environment because in a quiet and motionless setting there will be no behavior available to the mind reading faculty to interpret. See Nichols and Stich (2003)² and Goldman (2006)³. Carruthers, a leading introspection theorist, does not accept memory data input as equivalent to external perceptual data and cannot conceive either that sensory accompaniments to mental state may constitute an unitary cortical attractor event. We believe, in partial agreement, that the mindreading system can receive as input ANY sense-phenomenal, conceptual or emotional information that gets “globally broadcast” to all judgment-forming, memory-forming, desire-forming, and decision-making systems. See: *Baars, 1997^4,5; Kreiman et al., 2003⁶ Keep tuned, more to come below.

ARGUMENTATION

When I, eyes closed, receive as input a visual representation of my dog Charlie, a virtual black dog in memory, barking and wagging his tail, I should be capable of forming the introspective judgment, “I am thinking of my black Labrador dog happily barking.” This should be possible provided that the memory state in question has been formed and stored as previously conceptualized by other mental faculties and coming to the metacognitive state with the linguistic concepts dog, barking and tail wagging already attached. This way we can introspect perceptual, conceptual, imagistic or memory based mental events. In so doing and by virtue of receiving globally broadcast mental states as input, the mindreading system should be capable of self-attributing those outer external / inner internal percepts and their phenomenal accompaniments as a unit meta-representational structure good for ‘outer other’ and ‘inner self’ monitoring . Since the subject’s own current behavior or existential circumstances need to be ascertained in the course of making these judgments, the upshot will qualify as a form of analytical introspection, in the broad sense being used here.

It should be stressed, however, that external perceptual states, like internal mental states in memory data bases, do NOT have an independent existence divorced from their existential conceptual circumstances, not just like an account of introspection for experiential or another for “phenomenal” consciousness as Carruthers would have it, All, arguably, are examples of a garden variety ‘access consciousness’. (see Block,1995)⁷ Contrary to the reasons given by Nichols and Stich’s (2003)², it is unnecessary to introduce a separate perception-monitoring mechanism for metacognitive processing since the latter would need to have access to the agent’s own conceptual/perceptual state inseparably linked as a unit in attractor space. No need for a distinct system to monitor for outer mindreading and inner metacognition, they both share the same, common meta-representational neuronal network structure.

It may not be in controversy that the mindreading system has access to sense-phenomenal perceptual states coded in memory. What needs to be remembered is that external, environmental facts find their meaning to the observer by first unconsciously comparing the input to data in the amygdaloidal genetic memory to guarantee the biological integrity of the observer. If the results of this first fast, life-preserving enquiry is negative and a second hippocampus contextual clearance is also negative as a biological threat, then a psychosocial enquiry network may be activated If stimulus and context are negative in their psycho-social consequences the subconscious event may not ever reach consciousness. If threatening or novel, a third stage of transition from sub-conscious awareness to self consciousness ensues.

This is initiated by accessing a higher consumer network to find the specific meaning of the input to the individualized observer and his existential circumstance, usually accessing a natural language processor to receive the outputs of the belief-forming and decision-making mechanisms that feed off those states. Hence, introspective self-attributions of propositional attitude events like judging and deciding are thus the result of a swift, subconscious process of language and symbolic/sentential logic parsing resulting in the simultaneous cogeneration of both the relevant inner language and thought self-interpretation. It is indeed the subject’s ongoing overt behavior and existential circumstances (mental, emotional and physical) that provide the basis for such circumscribed interpretation integrating data about ALL perceptions, visual and auditory imagery, “inner speech”, attention details, and emotional quale, as found and consciously experienced now as a streaming mental review (reverie) of viable alternatives of probable solutions in cortical attractors space. Notice that, since inner speech probably utilizes the same perceptual and language processing network systems that are involved in the hearing of speech (Paulescu et al., 1993⁸; Shergill et al., 2002⁹), this will be available as input to both the mindreading and metacognitive systems alike. Sense-phenomenal perceptual (of either the external environmental or internal milieu variety), emotional or memory states of all kinds are capable of their network representations being globally broadcasted when attended to, and will thus become available to the co-generation of language/thought or any conceptual system that depends on such broadcasts for its input.

The two-sided mirror neuron system we suggested before, one for mindreading and the other for metacognition, has available the same access to information data systems whether attributing mental states to external others or internal self. That possibility should not be construed as a guaranty that the perception and corresponding representation truth values correspond on a one to one basis since the mind-reading data will always be given meaning within the context of the agent’s existential reality not the unknown’s external overt actor. Likewise, we may have the same sense-phenomenal perceptual input and varying conceptualizations of the same falsifiable reality, depending on who is the mind-reader. I don’t need the external actor to report to me his experiential quale for it may be as reliable as my audiovisual interpretations of his overt behavior within a given environmental context, just like I will never have the sort of direct and reliable access that my metacognitive system has to my own brain-coded audio/visual images and bodily feelings stored as either genetic or memetic information. Unfortunately, the total picture is more than the sum of its constitutive parts.

Human choices, by en large, are characterized by assurances that biological integrity is preserved and psychosocial equilibrium is maintained, all of which can be translated as a self full-filling, natural confabulatory tendency for individuals, as Wilson in 2002¹⁰ suggested, that it is, all things considered,  “…easier for subjects to engage in various kinds of adaptive self-deception, helping them to build and maintain a positive self-image.”.

It would be safe to assume that the basic capacities for both mindreading and metacognition are dependent of our linguistic finesse, our developed capacity for natural language communication, a sine qua non for an incisive inferential introspective, self-interpretative output because the external-other monitoring and the internal-self monitoring mechanisms fueled by metarepresentations feedback/feedforward cycling that will generate their output by effecting logical/linguistic computations on the data of both inputs fedback into the same meta-representational system.

Agents, as observers, have only two ways to access their own mental states, as interpreter of themselves (as in metacognition) or as having direct introspective access (as in mind-reading). In our opinion it is foolhardy to make distinctions between an interpretative and an introspective processing when it is self-evident that both need to make inferences within the context of the agent’s own, ongoing existential circumstances/reality, whether manifested as overt sense-phenomenal behavior or current mental state. Because an agent is sitting quiet and motionless, i.e., no external behavior is available for the mindreading system to interpret, should not be construed as proof that current, ongoing mental/memory input to a metacognitive system, is not interpretative and introspective.

It should be clear that agents have access to their own mental states in two different ways: either the mindreading system can represent agents as interpreters of themselves or it can picture them as having direct introspective access to their own mental states. Either way, we believe, is triggered by a nociceptive or novel change in either the perceptual or conceptual environment, as described.

Common sense would tell us that a nociceptive challenge precedes a solution to either avoid or eliminate it. Consequently, meta-cognitive development (embryological rather than evolutionary) will depend on prior mind-reading input. See Gopnik and Meltzhoff (1993,4,7)¹¹ data based on a parallelism between children’s matched performance in mindreading and metacognitive tasks. Thus, as we suggested before, mirror neurons are structured as a two-faced mirror, one looking at the ‘external other’ and the other facing the ‘internal self’.

There is a lot of confusion in the cognitive science literature regarding the transition from the first order cognitive à second order meta-cognitive state which in our BPS model means the stage at which mere subconscious, robotic awareness of a novel perceptual/conceptual input requires being interpreted at a higher mental level to extract its meaning to the psycho-social equilibrium of an agent. At this point access to a consumer system, e.g., language processor, is required. At this point we speculate that there exist various relevant cognitive states in the form of cortical attractors each with various degrees of adaptive probability which are modifiable to reflect the changing background attending individualized existential circumstances (physical, emotional, cognitive, etc.) of the agent. As the language processing generates the candidate propositional structures there is a concomitant co-generation of a new inner language and thought at conscious levels, at which time there will be a metarepresentational mental review of alternatives by deploying mental state types of the various attractor alternatives which makes it possible to freely choose the best probable adaptive solution (attractor) in harmony with the agent’s individualized BPS current reality/circumstance.

Sometimes human beings, before going to bed, engage in forms of conscious thinking and reasoning that are completely immersed in meta-cognitive analysis of imbued beliefs and judgments. There is no current ‘external other’ perceptual mindreading input yet we can be assured that either an inner-perceptual (body proper) or a novel but controversial inner-conceptual evidence appears to contrast a previous belief or judgment and is acting like a trigger. Furthermore what appears to initiate the transition from the subconscious à consciously accessible state is that they are simultaneously conducted in a new inner speech and possibly other kinds of relevant imagery. Eventually the resultant configuration becomes part of the cortical attractor space armamentarium in the subconscious cognitive domain and consequently a probable target to be subsequently analyzed during the elaboration of a new metacognitive state upon the arrival of a new novel perceptual/conceptual input. That is to say, cortical attractors were meta-cognitive states during their conscious elaboration but once coded and stored they become degraded to subconsciously accessed cortical attractors in cognitive space when necessary.

To complicate matters more, it seems like the agent is actively ‘mind reading’ his own deployment of relevant cortical attractor sceneries in which case this type of metacognitive review / analysis becomes consistent with a “mindreading is prior” in reverse, the equivalent of a “metacognition is prior” account. What is important to keep in mind is that, first, in either case the same meta-representational system is deployed and, second, it all is preceded by a previous novel perceptual or conceptual input. The computational effort in interpreting metarepresentational structures as stored cortical attractors is thereby considerably reduced. Perceptual and conceptual memory data bases are accessed during the elaboration of cortical attractors, as needed. Likewise, sense-phenomenal inputs from external-other or internal milieu-self can similarly participate in the mind reading effort by the elaboration of attractors, if needed. Consider also that previous perceptual/conceptual inputs and their associated ‘inner language’ / thought combo can be part and parcel of an attractor package. See also Nelson, 1992¹²; Metcalfe and Shimamura, 1994¹³.

After the recent experiments of Kornell et al., 2007¹⁵ and others, one may suspect that only human beings can either access cortical attractor’s space content or, if successful, as we will discuss, give a free consent to the one best adapted to solve a new contingency present. In the BPS model, subhuman species, like humans do in most of their vigil state, are more concerned with life preservation, i.e., maintaining their biological integrity; and this includes in subhumans social interspecies/intraspecies conviviality. Counterintuitive as it may sound, we humans live an essentially stereotyped subconscious awareness life (which many confuse with consciousness!), depending on the state of our external and internal monitors of change to adjust our biopsychosocial equilibrium. Arguably, the achievement of a self-conscious state, preceded by metarepresentational and metacognitive processing, has only being ‘demonstrated’ in the human species. Consequently subhuman species have not evolved any known capacity for an introspective mindreading of propositional attitudes (as argued above), as evident from their limited symbolic/sentential language development, instead they have concentrated in the development of their external-other and internal-inner (limited to their neurohumoral internal milieu) ‘mind-reading’ capacities, mostly related to internal/external sense-phenomenal input associated with life preservation and species perpetuation. Ergo, there is no evidence or logical arguments to defend animal metacognition. If animals are able to store complex, life-preserving behavioral information in the equivalent of a human cortical attractor space, quare?

Metacognitive processing for animals has been defended in cognitive trials where animals behavioral hesitance or stress-in-response has been argued as a metacognitive equivalent of a humanoid ‘‘there is not enough data to form a judgment’’. It is easy to show anxiety when important input data is incomplete or confusing, at which time you give the monkey a peanut every time he presses the “there is not enough data….” key in the operant conditioning set-up. Pressing that key can be explained as based on first order mental activity (adding possible subconscious, primitive, introspective, non-interpretative Machiavellian and/or confabulatory activity?) and cannot be construed as proof that the chimp’s was consciously aware of being ‘uncertain’. We cannot label this processing as metacognitive introspection because there is no demonstrated ‘self’ to turn into. Has the Skinnerian-learned behavior prove metacognitive propositional  attitudes processing? We think not. Even in a human newborn, with an evolving capacity for mind-reading, cognition and a functional meta-cognition, the lactating mother’s facial expressions and coos cannot engage as audio-visual input in an interpretative activity because this activity is then still functioning at the subconscious stage of sense-phenomenal processing of input and have not developed yet the ability to distinguish themselves from the surrounding environmental features, the crucial distinction between me and other. Arguably the distinction is dependent on the language-dependant concurrent development of the meta-representational faculty, the dawning of self-consciousness and human species chevrons! This is amply discussed by Paget in his “Development of Thought.” Viking Penguin Press 1977¹⁶.   

It is usually accepted that the generation of propositional attitudes requires introspective activity by the agent whereas in their absence agents will self-interpret instead, as if there existed clear criteria to distinguish one from the other. Self attributions of beliefs and judgments in response to novel contingencies will require one or the other or both, depending on the novelty of the sense-phenomenal or conceptual origin of the input, within the context of the agent’s individualized circumstantial reality, as discussed above. In our opinion, much of the Wittgensteinian confusion results from linguistic semantics and not realizing that ALL important/relevant and novel contingencies require introspection into propositional attitudes to situate the agent (I) in respect to the psychosocial novelty. At this stage the language faculty has been accessed and the co-generation of the relevant inner language and thought ensues and self-consciousness has been achieved, a sine qua non for self interpretations and attributions. The latter event required a subsequent representation of the coded original perceptual/conceptual input, a meta-representation I. The meta-representation II that follows is an interpretation -all things physical, mental and emotional considered- and an elaboration/codification of an adaptive pre-motor response to be stored inside a cortical attractor space as one of several probable alternatives to be chosen from during a possible subsequent stage of self-interpretation. The latter processing coincides with the qualia of self attribution. Once such probable response can be retrieved from attractor space memory in response to a future contingency, no new introspection into propositional attitudes is then required, only a self-interpretation harmonizing the input with the current psychosocial/emotional status of the agent. The latter response may be then considered a transient subconscious awareness, something a computer main frame can easily perform with the information previously stored as indicated.

It should be noticed that if the introspective mechanism into propositional attitudes, in response to a novel contingency, is delivering the judgment “No judgment” or “No decision” when processing meta-representation I (based on a two way ‘other’ ß à ‘self’ cyclic mind-reading effort) then the information gets stored in attractor space for possible future use as an available probable alternative since self attributions preceding adaptive responses are not necessary because meta-representations II are usually associated with the premotor aspect of a response to an existing contingency.

Yet, another interesting result may follow when a “No judgment” (based on inputs fed  into met I) is substituted by confabulated input, whether of the conscious, self-serving, Machiavelian variety or the subconscious type based on required causality considerations. Remember, genuine self-interpretations followed by self-attributions require the mental state of self-consciousness (an awareness that I am different from my circumstance) generated by the language faculty as discussed elsewhere. See Wegner and Wilson 2002¹⁷ where they negate the existence of a conscious will to make decisions. In our BPS model it does exist in the form of a free willed consent to an existing attractor solution as amply discussed elsewhere.¹⁸

The ‘unconscious’ state processing involving genetic memory input, like the machine language in a computer, cannot be accessed. By exception, during exigent circumstances arising out of a sudden and unexpected change of events, pathology, heroic or altruistic behavior contra-natura, may allow unconscious processing to be accessed and transient modifications willed into action. We discussed elsewhere a case where a decision to act here-and-now would issue by changing a previously learned sequence of motor movements instructions by an Olympic gymnast about to land (and be killed) after a high bar sommersault jump when an unexpected change in the disposition of the high bar was suddenly detected, all without the intervention of any further practical reasoning. The fleeting, fast stream of consciousness (including inner speech and other forms of imagery) may be properly considered as a subconscious introspective state (except for the brief conscious interlude in novel situations awaiting solutions as explained above).

This is not different, in theory, from what happens when trying to decide on the best adaptive response from a relevant set of probable alternate responses available in cortical attractor space to a similar past or novel future contingency. If the input is essentially similar, ‘consciousness’ as such may be the execution of a reflex act or may be limited to the stream of consciousness preceding the free consent to one probable response (especially when met II has changed, see below); if input is novel, access to propositional attitudes is required as explained above. When that probable future comes into being the decision is then a free will consent to an existing attractor solution in harmony with the current biopsychosocial circumstance (existential reality) of the agent

There may be minor changes reflecting, e.g., the agent’s current capacity to physically execute the coded response or the emotional quale accompanying the response (met II has changed).

This mechanism tends to blur somewhat the distinction between a decision, to act now, and a judgment to act later. See Frankish, 2004¹⁹. It will not be an exaggeration to consider attractor space probable solutions as equivalent to a transient pre-motor cortex belief system adequate to a relevant, individualized set of perceptual/conceptual inputs as described above.

It should be kept in mind that in both set of circumstances, whether the relevant perceptual/conceptual input demands an immediate or delayed response, in both cases there needs to be present a free will choice (consent); to one among various set of adaptive responses causally efficient to mobilize the effector motor machinery (met II) into responding. For an opposing view on free will intervention see Carruthers.²² Ergo, there is no distinction as to the intervention of introspective, interpretative and/or propositional attitude events in the elaboration of the final action.

Theoretically, it is safer to settle for a co-generation of inner language and thought in the initial introspective, propositional attitude event-response to meta-represented I perceptual/conceptual inputs to be followed by the premotor elaboration of an adequate adaptive response taking into consideration the exigent or not circumstances present and the current biopsychosocial readiness reality of the agent, now based on facts present in another meta-representation II. In other words, one needs meta-cognitive access to the meta-representation II of the pre-motor response plan at the relevant cortical attractor basin. See Southgate, et al 2008²⁰

When the biological integrity of a normal human agent is about to be compromised, the genetically-coded response is fast, unconscious, non-introspective and controlled by amygdaloidal mechanisms. Otherwise, we repeat again, the response will depend on the novelty of the contingent occurrence input where the current*** current .