Is resonance the answer? Tam Hunt thinks it might be.
Now the idea that synchronised neuron firing might have something to do with consciousness is not new. Veterans of consciousness will recall a time when 40 hertz was thought to be the special, almost magical frequency that generated consciousness; people like Francis Crick thought it might be the key to the unity of consciousness and a solution to the binding problem. I don’t know what the current state of neurology on this is, but it honestly seems most likely to me that 40 hertz, or a rate in that neighbourhood, is simply what the brain does when it’s thrumming along normally. People who thought it was important were making a mistake akin to taking a car’s engine noise for a functional component (hey, no noise, no move!).
Hunt has a bit more to offer than simply speculating that resonance is important somehow, though. He links resonance with panpsychism, suggesting that neurons have little sparks of consciousness and resonance is the way they get recruited into the larger forms of awareness we experience. While I can see the intuitive appeal of the idea, it seems to me there are a lot of essential explanatory pieces missing from the picture.
The most fundamental problem here is that I simply don’t see how resonance between neurons could ever explain subjective experience. Resonance is a physical phenomenon, and the problem is that physical stuff just doesn’t seem to supply the ‘what-it-is-like’ special quality of experience. Hard to see why co-ordinated firing is any better in that essential respect than unco-ordinated. In fact, in one respect resonance is especially unsuitable; resonance is by its nature stable. If it doesn’t continue for at least a short period, you haven’t really got resonance. Yet consciousness often seems fleeting and flowing, moving instantaneously and continuously between different states of awareness.
There’s also, I think, some work needed on the role of neurons. First, how come our panpsychist ascent starts with neurons? We either need an account of how we get from particles up to neurons, or an account of why consciousness only starts when we get up to neurons (pretty complex entities, as we kee finding out). Second, if resonating neurons are generating consciousness, how does that sit with their day job? We know that neurons transmit signals from the senses and to the muscles, and we know that they do various kinds of processing. Do they generate consciousness at the same time, or is that delegated to a set of neurons that don’t have to do processing? If the resonance only makes content conscious, how is the content determined, and how are the resonance and the processing linked? How does resonance occur, anyway? Is it enough for neurons to be in sync, so that two groups in different hemispheres can support the same resonance? Can a group of neurons in my brain resonate with a group in yours? If there has to be some causal linkage or neuronal connection, isn’t that underlying mechanism the real seat of consciousness, with the resonance just a byproduct?
What about that panpsychist recruitment – how does it work? Hunt says an electron or an atom has a tiny amount of consciousness, but what does ‘tiny’ mean? Is it smaller in intensity, complexity, content, or what? If it were simply intensity, then it seems easy enough to see how a lot of tiny amounts could add up to something more powerful, just as a lot of small lights can achieve the effect of a single big one. But for human consciousness to be no more than the consciousness of an atom with the volume turned up doesn’t seem very satisfactory. If, on the other hand, we’re looking for more complexity and structure, how can resonance, which has the neurons all doing the same thing at the same time, possibly deliver that?
I don’t doubt that Hunt has answers to many of these questions, and perhaps it’s not reasonable to expect them all in a short article for a general readership. For me to suspend my disbelief, though, I do really need a credible hint as to the metaphysical core of the thinking. How does the purely physical phenomenon of resonance produce the phenomenal aspect of my conscious experience, the bit that goes beyond mere data registration and transmutes into the ineffable experience I am having?
I think you are right to say the 40 Hz frequency is the ‘mains hum’ of the brain in action, rather than generating consciousness per se. My interpretation is that a cognitive cycle, which is the time period of a single step of consciousness over the brain as a whole is reflected in theta frequencies of around 5 Hz, and 40 Hz is the update rate associated with binding, this being linked to our ability to deal with about 8 (=40/5) separate concepts at any one time. Theta arises from the time needed for neural firings to progress through multiple layers of neural processing and back (roughly 10 layers, each at 10 ms, there and back).
Consciousness arises only over a whole cognitive cycle, and over (potentially) the whole brain, because there needs to be time for potentially all parts of the brain to contribute, and be affected by, the outcome of decision making. During each cognitive cycle internal attention determines the contents of consciousness, and the brain is both holding the contents of consciousness, and being conscious of it by acting upon it.
They lost me at “panpsychism”. This is just more woo generated by the meta-theory that if something remains unknown to science for long enough, we loosen the rules in order to allow wilder and wilder theories to take root. Consciousness is just part of how the brain works, the real hard problem. Once we learn the latter, the former will be a chapter in that story. Ok, back to work on the real hard problem.
I think that the entire field has a ‘too much too soon’ problem. Every interesting functional discovery has people comping at the bit to use it to explain long standing mysteries. Resonance is interesting in that it potentially gets you very efficient long distance cross coupling. Possibly some form of error correction too. Evolution doesn’t choose a level of abstraction to optimize on so hardware that accidentally takes advantage of weird unexpected effects is fair game.
Phenomenalism could be-always-experienced as one’s interactions-movement-in more than one direction-present…
…then the ‘allowing’ of ourselves to be conscious entities may become the effort we are to resonate with…
Is phenomenalism sensing feeling thinking intuiting viewing my self here, but in the unknown..
“but it honestly seems most likely to me that 40 hertz, or a rate in that neighbourhood, is simply what the brain does when it’s thrumming along normally”
That’s a good way to put it. I think of brain waves as simply the baseline pace of the neurons firing. Ones stimulated from excitatory synapses are firing more often, and ones reigned in by inhibitory synapses are firing less often. The differences are information. In that sense, the brain waves are analogous to the clock rate of a computer processor.
I’m with Paul; when I first saw this article, I lost interest with the word “panpsychism”. That usually indicates that what is about to be described happens everywhere and is not really specifically about what happens in conscious systems.
Post modern panpsychism is phenomenalism and are experience and observation today…
That philosophy’s descriptions are to understand ‘conscious entities’, for living here and now…
…at some point in this, a person may begin to gain self knowledge (conscious systems) and then….
Does anyone know if the 40 hz phenomenon has been correlated or dis-correlated with attention? If it was correlated, that would explain the “hum” idea, as you would expect to see it all over the brain, sometimes here, sometimes there.
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In reply to 7. James of Seattle. From the papers I have read, gamma at 40 Hz tends to be phase locked with theta at about 5 Hz and to be associated with dealing with new or changing features. There seems to be a relationships to working memory and its ability to hold about 8 distinct items (8=40/5, so you can have 8 gamma firings within 1 theta cycle). Gamma levels tend to be lower if there are not new features to deal with, and once a new feature is detected and dealt with, gamma strength dies back.
I have implemented in software models of how this might work and this gives a clue to what is happening here. To detect new objects that will persist in mind, or new relationships between objects, we have to inhibit what we already know about in order to discriminate the best new object or relationships, and this has to be done in serial, not in parallel. However once we have detected and characterised a new object or relationship, we can update it as it moves or changes, and delete it when it disappears, in parallel. The fastest we can go to inhibit and detect is gamma (40 Hz), being about 2 firings at 80 Hz (inhibit, detect, inhibit, detect) and there is time to do 8 of these within each theta cycle (5 Hz). The theta cycle corresponds to the cognitive cycle, being the time it takes for a neural signal to go across the brain and back again, and thus for a whole-brain coherent step to be taken. So, with relatively slow neural processing, theta is going as fast as it can to make whole brain decisions, and gamma is going as fast as it can to detect or interpret new stuff.
New objects are characterised by pointers to the information that will cause their properties to change, and the values of the attended information that generate these changes. Attention is actually just another way of looking at those pointers, rather like names of variables in conventional software. When applied to external sensory data, this translates into attention as we normally think of it. When attention, in this sense, is applied to the objects in mind themselves (and their properties), consciousness results.
I’d agree that Bottom Up Panpsychism’s ongoing problem is going from whatever “tiny” is to something more…but won’t any materialist explanation face the same problem along with the assumption of starting with matter that has no consciousness about it?
I don’t see a way out of the impasse between metaphysical options, barring some major surprises. But then regardless of metaphysics we can still sort out the less-hard problem of finding the correlated brain structures.
Isn’t the position then to just allow we are metaphysical we are conscious…
…that we have to carry it ourselves…
Then…
Apologies Arnold, not sure I understand your post.
One thing I’ve been thinking about is theories of consciousness, regardless of metaphysical claims, should come with very strong predictions. After all even if there’s no medical value that will come out of a theory it should – at the least – give us some predictions about what we should expect about the correlates.
Is that what you’re getting at?
I wish I could write as well as you…
Using correlates of Wikipedia article ‘Expectation’ by ‘Science’ as a informal background…
Value(s), Iam persuaded, are preceded by sincerity–sincerity, probably, is metaphysics and medicine, but not always about consciousness…
Uncertainty as a theory allows dis-appointment or appointment of evidence for predictions…
…this is what Iam getting at…The evidence for a theory of consciousness has to be found in me, it isn’t ‘it takes gold to make gold’, more we have given gold value having found it in ourselves…
Peter:
“Resonance is a physical phenomenon, and the problem is that physical stuff just doesn’t seem to supply the ‘what-it-is-like’ special quality of experience….How does the purely physical phenomenon of resonance produce the phenomenal aspect of my conscious experience, the bit that goes beyond mere data registration and transmutes into the ineffable experience I am having?”
Good question, which could be posed about any proposal of there being a causal relation between an observable physical process and phenomenal experience, which seems a categorically private and unobservable affair. The effects (causal outcomes) of physical processes will be themselves physical, and as Dennett says, there is no “second transduction” in the brain that produces something that resides in a different sort of subjective medium. But still, there is a close correlation between certain neurally-instantiated goings-on and consciousness, so getting a fix on the functions associated with consciousness might shed light on what sort of *non-causal* entailment there might be from, say, representation, to the phenomenal content of experience.
Tom 13: A subjectively conscious entity only needs to know of its conscious existence in its own terms of what it is to know. That is structured in terms of large distributed patterns and processes over relatively big chunks of space (25cm) and time (250ms), which represent big families of solutions of the constraints of the underlying physics.
There isn’t a conflict in terms of causality, because the conscious entity is just describing to itself what is going on physically, but in big crude handfuls. ‘I’ result from mentally drawing a crude boundary around certain materials (my body), patterns (what I know) and processing (what I decide to do) and saying ‘that’s me!’ Physics doesn’t care.
Do we have a solution to body-body problem, the question of causality between physical entities?
Seems as if we are still stuck w/ Hume’s critique…as such it seems premature to worry overmuch about a mind/body causation problem.
Causality is mind body observation and is absolute relativity…
…but we ignore the gravity of observation of ourselves…
Free will can come from understanding relativity-uncertainty-gravity as our existence…
Just throw the word consciousness away and use the word reality. At the level of particles and atoms there is A reality, submicroscopic as they say. At the level of larger molecules, viruses and cells; there is a microscopic reality, which is larger, locatable and slower in the sense of a longer event horizon. So move up to neurons and the microscopic becomes this reality that we are in, which is larger and slower in the sense that the neurons are building a longer event horizon, perhaps by some type of synchronization of metabolic processes that gives us the resonance pulses, gamma waves etc. Think of a single copper atom becoming a wire and then wound into an armature with an electromagnetic field that emerges into this bigger reality so it can actually move objects etc. The forces of nature manifest depending on the size and sophistication of the structure that nature builds up.
@ VicP: Interesting points. I do wonder if Consciosuness is a sub-group, the larger group being the Interiority of All Objects. So at the core of our observations is the relata of the varied scientific/phenomenal relations.
Graham Harman seems to be trying to find a way toward describing the interiority in such a way, so that everything has an interior but only some interiors are possessed of Consciousness – this might also be where the Information is Fundamental crowd is headed?
Though I’ve sadly yet to see a satisfying account for the word “Information’, it always seems to reduce to Materialism or Idealism to me.
Peter
The most fundamental problem here is that I simply don’t see how resonance between neurons could ever explain subjective experience.
It depends what you mean by ‘explain’. Physics never “explains” anything, so tying a mathematical entity to an objectively-measured metric that can be extracted from subectively-experienced consciousness and linking that to the activity of neurons is no less dishonest than anything else physics does. It fulfils the primary and sole deliverable from physics, and that is a predictable result, rather than an explanation.
Regs
JBD
Now all you need is whether physics can predictably show the behavioral origin of a need for an explanation of consciousness.
…behaviors of origins vs origins of behaviors…
The relativity of atomic particle objects gravitating in uncertainty…
Can we intend our own observation of this universe cosmos…
…to be or not to be…
I think a really difficult hurdle is certainty. Trying to grasp the idea of oneself as a process with absolute certainty in doing so engages in two problematic things. One of them is giving absolutely no room to just be. Certainty has a demand, and that demand means understanding self as a process requires inflicting on the self an absolute structure that is utterly fixed. No room for loose cannons and surprise elements. No room for a soul. To engage it without rejecting it utterly for abhorence, you have to give up trying to be certainty and instead look at things as a series of uncertainties. Give up a game of thrones for a game of unknowns.
…then our host’s “ineffable experience” is “unknown”-“transmutation” observation…
Could we want more…