Category Archives: consciousness

Between the Stimulus and the Response: the four functions of the Mind

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Victor E Frankl

Schematic of an idealized analytical instrument.

Schematic of an idealized analytical instrument. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In today’s post I will be drawing heavily from the spiritual traditions of India (Yoga etc), and interested readers are redirected to these excellent sources for more information about the same.

As per the spiritual tradition of India, Mind (or Antahkaran) is made up of four functions or parts. These are Manas, Chitta, Ahamkar and Buddhi. These are typically translated as sensory-motor mind, memory bank, ego and intellect respectively. As an interesting aside, Buddha derives from the common root of Buddhi (budh- to know) and stands for the enlightened one.

Here is a brief description of the four functions:

Manas is ordinary, indeterminate thinking — just being aware that something is there and automatically registers the facts which the senses perceive.

 

The subconscious action, memory, etc., is caused by chitta. The function of chitta is chinta (contemplation), the faculty whereby the Mind in its widest sense raises for itself the subject of its thought and dwells thereon.

 

Buddhi determines, decides and logically comes to a conclusion that something is such-and-such a thing. That is another aspect of the operation of the psyche — buddhi or intellect. buddhi, on attending to such registration, discriminates, determines, and cognizes the object registered, which is set over and against the subjective self by aha?k?ra.

 

Ahamkara — ego, affirmation, assertion, ‘I know’. “I know that there is some object in front of me, and I also know that I know. I know that I am existing as this so-and-so.” This kind of affirmation attributed to one’s own individuality is the work of ahamkara, known as egoism.

There is also a hierarchical relation between these with Buddhi at the top and Manas at the bottom. Now, lets look at each of these more closely.

Manas, or sensory-motor mind, is not just registering stimulus but also responsible for executing actions and may be equated with the sensory/ motor cortical functions of the brain.  It controls the 10 Indriyas (5 senses and 5 action-oriented faculties). Its important to note that Manas is doing both the functions associated with stimulus as well as the response,  though its the first one when it comes to stimulus processing (registering the stimulus)  and the last one when it comes to executing responses/actions ( it blindly executes the action that has been decided / chosen upstream). Of course one could just have a reflex action where a stimulus leads to response, but in majority of human action, there is a space between the two. That space is provided by the rest of the mind functions.

Chitta, or memory-prospecting mind, may be typically equated with the association cortex part pf the brain. Many refer to chitta as the memory or impressions bank, but forget to mention the future oriented part of it. Here is a quote:

The part of the Mind thinking and visualizing the objects, events and experiences from the past or the future (emphasis mine) is called the Chitta and this act is called Chintan.

Its thus evident that Chitta drives Manas not only based on past memories, but also based on future expectations or predictions. From brain studies , we know that the same part of the brain is used for memory as well as prospection.  Chitta using past memories to drive manas (and thus behavior or motivated cognition) I view as being conditioned by classical conditioning processes. Chitaa using future expectations/ predictions to drive behavior and motivated cognition, I view as being conditioned by operant conditioning processes. In many philosophical and spiritual traditions, one of the aims is to get over (social) conditioning. Chitta hinders spiritual awakening by using habits, which is an integral pat of chitta function. The habits are nothing but the conditioning, but again one in stimulus path and the other in response/action path.

Ahamkara, or experiential-agentic self, may be typically equated with consciousness/ conscious and ego-driven self. It knows and say ‘I am’  Conscious entities typically have two functions- experience and agency. It is something it is to be like that conscious entity (experience) and the entity has volition or ability to do things (agency). The concept of self as a conscious entity that has experience (in the stimulus path) and agency (in the response/ action path) is important for this notion of ahamkara. With self comes concepts like real self and ideal self which drive and are driven by experience and agency respectively. The less the discrepancy between the two the better your spiritual growth. An interesting concept here is that of coloring or external decorations- your coloring or how you see your self do lead to downward impact on chitta and manas by contaminating the stimulus/ action.

Buddhi, or knowing-deciding mind, is the final frontier on your path to spirituality.  The typical functions associated with Buddhi are knowing, discriminating, judging and deciding. I think knowing/ discriminating (between stimuli/ actions etc) is a stimulus path function, while judging/ deciding (between actions/ responses/ attending to a stimuli) is a response path function. However I also believe they converge to a great extent here or else we will have a problem of turtles all the way down. Once you start to see things as they are, you are also able to choose wisely. At least that is what the scriptures say and what Boddhisattvas aspire or achieve.

To me this increasingly fine-grained control of what we perceive and how we act , from the gross actions and perceptions of manas to the discriminating decisions of buddhi are very intuitively appealing and also appear to be grounded in psychological and neural processes.

Mindfulness (Buddhism based) has become all the rage nowadays, yet if we look at the spiritual traditions of India, perhaps while Yoga defined as Chitta vritti nirodaha (or “Yoga is the silencing of the modifications of the mind”) does refer to being in the present (here-and-now) and not to be disturbed by the perturbations of chitta (memories of past or expectations of future), one also needs to go beyond just Chitta vritti, to addressing the Ahamkara coloring and finally to try achieving the Buddha nature where there is little disparity in doing and being. (Mindfulness) Meditation needs to move beyond being curious, non-judgemental  and in the present to where one doe shave a judgement function, but one that is perfectly attuned.

How Cotard’s and other phenomena throw light on the self

indexCan the Cotard’s syndrome tell us something about the self? A person suffering from Cotard’s syndrome is likely to claim that he/ she is dead- can such a delusional experience make us appreciate what self is what it isn’t – and more importantly how the sense of self can go awry in some phenomena?

Anil Ananthaswamy, in his exquisitely written book ‘ The Man Who Wasn’t There‘ beautifully illustrates how Cotard’s and other such weird and not so weird phenomena can shed light on the true nature of self (provided the self exists and there is something it is like to have a self- more about this later).

The book is beautifully written, weaving narratives of actual patients suffering from various disorders, with cutting edge research in the field and at all times tying it back to the nature of the self.

Although the eight chapters talk about eight different phenomena- ranging from Cotard’s to deperosnalisation to Autism to schizophrenia to out-of-body experiences and ecstatic epilepsy to BIID ( or having a desire to amputate ones limbs) and Alzheimer’s – there doesn’t seem any discontinuity- nor does it seem as if disparate phenomena are being talked about. With self being the focus, each of these is used to approach the self from a different angle.

I am reminded of the parable of  blind men and the elephant – whereby each blind men could only grasp one part of the elephant. Self is such an elephant in the room. The various chapters do advance our understanding of the self and fortunately, this time, the sum is greater than the sum of the parts, and we are indeed able to get a  sense of the elephant/self!

It would be naive to assume that Anil would have solved the problem of self where great philosophers or scientists of past and present have failed to do so- but he does gives tantalizing glimpses of what the answer might me and at least brings us up to speed with what is being thought of in the philosophical / scientific circles.

The power of the book comes from its very approachable and readable writings style and the humane treatment of its subjects.  Whether its the isolation felt by a BID sufferer who has no means of getting his limb amputated legally or the strangeness felt by those suffering from deperosnailsation, Anil makes the stories vivid- loud and clear in one’s mind;s eyes.

The book is also chock full of interesting facts- some of which I was already familiar with, but got an opportunity to brush up on the latest happenings in the filed, others were new to me – for example I hadn’t realized that people with Cotard’s are typically depressed or that people remember more about their life from between 10 and 30 years (the reminiscence bump) and many such nuggets.

The book is immensely readable and holds your attention from chapter to chapter.  I was almost felling bad about having finished it as I wanted more of the treats to continue.  In a week in which we lost Oliver Sacks, it takes some solace to discover that there are others who are keeping the tradition alive.

Both the erudition , humanity and narration of Anil is superb. While reading the book, I thought he was himself a prominent neuroscientist- its only post reading it I realized he is a science journalist and has also written  a best seller in physics. Surprising how brilliant people are able to make their mark in whatever field they chose to focus on. Quiet coincidentally I had also reviewed ‘Subliminal’ by Leonord Mlodinow- who is also a physicist but has written a good book rooted in psychology.

My advice to readers of this blog- if you loved Sacks, if you loved VS Ramachandran,  or even if you didn’t or haven’t heard about them, do give this book a read- you are going to love the easy style- yet a lot of substance. I, for one , am eagerly looking forward to Anil’s next read.

Neural correlates of conscious access: implications for autism/psychosis

ResearchBlogging.org

First published Electroencephalogram of a human
Image via Wikipedia

There is a recent article in New Scientist about consciousness and its neural correlates and the article focuses on work of Stanislas Deheane and his colleagues and how they are trying to get evidence and proof for the Global workspace theory of consciousness as proposed by Beranrd Baars.

That led me to this excellent article by Raphaël Gaillard that uses iEEG (intracranial EEG) using electrodes placed in brain, but not doing single-cell recording but still working on aggregates but at a much higher spatial and temporal resolution than normal extra-cranial EEG. They used electrodes placed in epileptic patients undergoing surgery and determined the difference in neural activity during conscious and unconscious access.

For differentiating between the unconscious and conscious access they used the popular visual masking paradigm, whereby a target word is presented and then immediately afterwords (after a few ms only) a mask is presented; if the duration of stimuli presentation is less and it is immediately followed by a mask, then though the stimulus is processed unconsciously, it is not available for verbal report and is not processed consciously. In contrast, in the unmasked condition, the target is not followed by a mask and hence is available for conscious access. In the present experiment, the authors used a forward as well as a backward mask and also had a condition whereby a blank screen was present instead of target ; so that effects of processing target alone could be determined after subtracting the effect of masks. the paper is one access and very lucidly written so go have a look!

A quick detour: Bernard Baars global workspace theory posits that consciousness arises when neural representations of external stimuli, are made available wide spread to global areas of the brain and not restricted to the originating local areas. This has also been characterized as an attentional spotlight and whatever comes under the spotlight in global workspace, is widely visible to the rest of the audience (the other parts of the brain) and also gives rise to consciousness. In the absence of coming to focal awareness(spotlight), the processing/representation happens unconsciously by the many different parallel brain modules. Thus, while unconscious representations may arise in brain locally, to become conscious they need to become widespread and available to the entire (or most of) the brain. To boot:

We adopted a theory-driven approach, trying to test experimentally a set of explicit predictions derived from the global workspace model of conscious access. This model, in part inspired from Bernard Baars’ theory [30], proposes that at any given time, many modular cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner [22,23,31,32]. Incoming visual information becomes conscious, however, if and only if the three following conditions are met [23]: Condition 1: information must be explicitly represented by the neuronal firing of perceptual networks located in visual cortical areas coding for the specific features of the conscious percept. Condition 2: this neuronal representation must reach a minimal threshold of duration and intensity necessary for access to a second stage of processing, associated with a distributed cortical network involved in particular parietal and prefrontal cortices. Condition 3: through joint bottom-up propagation and top-down attentional amplification, the ensuing brain-scale neural assembly must “ignite” into a self-sustained reverberant state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain.

Based on this theoretical framework, the following hypothesis were developed:

Neurophysiological Predictions Derived from the Global Workspace Model

In the light of our model, the masked–unmasked contrast corresponds to a comparison between a visual representation satisfying only condition 1 and a representation satisfying all three conditions for conscious access listed above. The global workspace model therefore leads to the following four predictions.

Prediction 1: a common early stage of processing.
Both masked and unmasked words should evoke similar neural activity within an early time window, reflecting a fast feedforward sweep propagating from posterior to anterior cortices. In particular, invisible masked words should induce transient event-related responses along the ventral visual pathway, as assessed by iERPs and ERSP.

Prediction 2: a temporal divergence.
Following this initial common stage, only unmasked words should be associated with sustained effects. We thus predict a divergence in cortical activation for unmasked and masked words. Given that we contrasted heavily masked stimuli with unmasked stimuli, we expect a progressive buildup of the divergence between these two conditions. In the light of recent high-resolution scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) studies in visual masking and attentional blink paradigms, this temporal divergence is expected to occur within a 200–500-ms window [1,2].

Prediction 3: an anatomical divergence.
The activation of frontal and parietal areas, which are allegedly dense in global workspace neurons, should be particularly sensitive to consciously perceived words (see [32] and Figure 1 of [22] for explicit simulations of this property). Although masked words may cause a small, transient and local activation within these regions, we predict that unmasked words should elicit a global and long-lasting activation of these regions, corresponding to a broadcasting process.

Prediction 4: phase synchrony and causality.
During this late time window, the long-lasting and long-distance neuronal assembly specific to conscious processing should be associated with an intense increase in bidirectional interelectrode communication. Measures of phase synchrony and Granger causality should be particularly apt at capturing this phenomenon.

And this is exactly what they found. They found that upto 200 ms activity in the unmasked and masked condition did not differ significantly and represented an early stage of processing. In the 200-500 ms window (post stimulus onset), there was temporal divergence with there being long-distance beta synchrony, sustained amplitudes and power in gamma band and Granger causality in the unmasked case, but not in the masked case. Further, there was anatomical divergence, with the unmasked condition showing more occipitotemporal activation, while the unmasked condition showing global (and especially frontal) activation. Lastly while local beta synchrony and reverse feed back causality (accounted perhaps by top-down attentional factors that try to focus more given the masking) was associated with the masked condition, long distance beta synchrony and causal imbalance in the feed-forward direction was only found in the unmasked condition, thereby validating the claim that in the unmasked condition the posterior local representations weer made globally available to anterior regions as well (these are my very brief summaries, you should read the original freely available article for nuances and details).

This is how the authors conclude:

The main motivation of our study was to probe the convergence of multiple neurophysiological measures of brain activity in order to define candidate neural signatures of conscious access. Conscious word processing was associated with the following four markers: (1) sustained iERPs within a late time window (>300 ms after stimulus presentation); (2) sustained and late spectral power changes, combining a high-gamma increase, beta suppression, and alpha blockage; (3) sustained and late increases in long-range phase coherence in the beta range; and (4) sustained and late increases in long-range causal relations.

Our results suggest that in the search for neural correlates of consciousness, time-domain, frequency-domain, and causality-based electrophysiological measures should not be seen as competing possibilities. Rather, all of these measures may provide distinct glimpses into the same distributed state of long-distance reverberation. Indeed, it seems to be the convergence of these measures in a late time window, rather than the mere presence of any single one of them, that best characterizes conscious trials.

That brings me back to the new scientist article:

Dehaene’s group had already shown that distant areas of the brain are connected to each other and, importantly, that these connections are especially dense in the prefrontal, cingulate and parietal regions of the cortex, which are involved in processes like planning and reasoning.

Considering Baars’s theory, the team suggested that these long-distance connections may be the architecture that links the many separate regions together during conscious experience. “So, you may have multiple local processes, but a single global conscious state,” says Dehaene. If so, the areas with especially dense connections would be prime candidates for key regions in the global workspace.

Now it is well known that in autism there are more local connections and more local processing; while psychosis/ schizophrenia spectrum is marked by more long-distance connections/ activity. If so , it is not unreasonable to conclude that psychotics may have higher p-conscious experiences while autistics may be stuck at more lower A-conscious experiences. I proposed something like that in my post titled ‘what it is like to be a zombie‘ and you are strongly encouraged to go read it now.

Further we also know that default mode network is highly activated in psychosis and very less in activity in autistics and that is again converging proof. From the new scientist article:

Certain regions of the brain’s global workspace, dubbed the default mode network (DMN), are active even when we are resting and not concentrating on any particular task. If the global workspace really is essential for conscious perception, Laureys’s team predicted that the activity of the DMN should be greatest in healthy volunteers and in people with locked-in-syndrome, who are conscious but can only move their eyes, and much less active in minimally conscious patients. Those in a vegetative state or in a coma should have even less activity in the DMN.

The researchers found just that when they scanned the brains of 14 people with brain damage and 14 healthy volunteers using fMRI. In a paper published in December 2009, they showed that the activity of the DMN dropped exponentially starting with healthy volunteers right down to those in a vegetative state (Brain, vol 133, p 161). “The difference between minimally conscious and vegetative state is not easy to make on the bedside and four times out of 10 we may get it wrong,” he says. “So this could be of diagnostic value.”

While the DMN may be important marker for brain damaged patients, it also has the potential to become a marker for different feels of consciousness sin brain intact but differently wired brains like those of autistics and psychotics.

I believe one way of conceptualizing autism is as a diminishing of consciousness/ subjective experience; while that of psychosis as overabundance of consciousness/ subjective feeling. Maybe that is why shamans of all ages have been closely identified with the psychotic spectrum.

If autistics have more local processing, then perhaps they should be better at tasks involving unconscious stimuli: perhaps that’s why despite their savantic abilities , much of what happens in the autistic mind is not only non-verbal , but also non-conscious and hence not juts not available for verbal report, but not accessible to consciousness.

I strongly feel that adding the consciousness dimension to autism/schizophrenia spectrum may be a good thing and lead to more clarity and new directions in research.

Gaillard, R., Dehaene, S., Adam, C., Clémenceau, S., Hasboun, D., Baulac, M., Cohen, L., & Naccache, L. (2009). Converging Intracranial Markers of Conscious Access PLoS Biology, 7 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000061

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What it is like to be a zombie?

I am sure many of you are already familiar with Nagel’s perennial question ‘what it is like to be a bat?  (see this one with some added commentary too). Today I propose to ask a slightly different question ‘what it is like to be a zombie‘? That may seem absurd at the outset, as in many people’s mind Zombies are synonymous with no consciousness. I beg to differ. As I have already indicated in my last post on major conscious and unconscious processes in the brain, there is an easy problem of A-consciousness and there is a hard problem of P-consciousness. I have already tried to breakup A-consciousness in its parts and  I similarly think that P-consciousness is much more that qualia (qualia I envisage as more grounded in sensory or perceptive systems). So given the fact that most zombies are behaviorurally indistinguishable from normal humans, and given the fact that most people who argue for zombie models of humans (that ‘there is no one home to watch/direct the picture’) do still endow the zombie and themselves with the A-consciousness aspects – they do not deny that a representation is made and is consciously available for processing (the theater of consciousness) , it is reasonable to speculate that although lacking full P-consciousness, it would still be something like to feel like a zombie. Let me draw an analogy, in some dissociative disorders, one starts seeing the world as unreal (derealization)  and the self as unreal (depersonalization) ; yet even though one believes oneself to be unreal there is still something it is like to exist in that ‘unreal’ state.

Similarly, though one may model oneself and others as zombies, still it would be something like it is to be in a state that thinks and believes that one is a zombie and also acts accordingly. I am making a leap here. I am assuming that awareness or modeling of ones A-conscious experiences leads to or affects one’s phenomenal consciousness. Thus, in my view , someone who models oneself and others as a zombie, would have a different sort of P-consciousness or what it feels-to-be-like, than a person who models oneself and others as sentient agents  and his P-cosnsciousness would be of a different nature.

Now consider the problem we face when confronted with a world which is deterministic and chaotic at the same time, and which is inhabited by agents which seem to be unpredicatable and constrained at the same time. I have already indicated elsewhere, that people may form tow types of model- one is a statistical/ deterministic model that they may apply to the world; another is a probabilisitic/agentic model that they may apply to the self (as well as other sentient beings).  If one keeps these domains of folk-physics and folk-psychology separate, all is hunky dory; all hell breaks lose (pun intended; zombies are correlated with dead apocalypse scenarios in popular culture) when one applies a deterministic  model (that fits the world) to the self/others. Similarly all hell breaks loose, when one applies an agentic/indetrminsitc model (that fits the sefl/others) to the world.

For today, we will focus on the problem of modeling self, and leave the problem of modeling world for a later day. A self may act differently in many similar/same situations. If it acts the same on each occasion, given the same situation; we can easily say that the situation causes the action. This poses no problem for the zombie (I will refer to a zombie as a person whose self/other conceptualization is as that of oneself/others as machines), as one has a deterministic rule that defines the self- (given situation A-> action B), and thus one can keep one’s model of self as-a-deterministic-being consistent. On the other hand, if the situation A sometimes leads to action B, but at other times to action C, then one has to explain the variance in the behavioral output. Consider first the problem of explaining the variance between-subjects. Given the same situation A, subject Z acts in way B while the subject Y acts in way C.   There is considerable variance. If one assumes all selves as created equal, then all should have behaved similarly. Either one has to grant an extraordinariness and uniqueness to all selves, or if one has a statistical  and ordinary nature of human beings, one has to grant that the subject given the same situation, should have behaved identically. But we all see that there is considerable variance.  This variance is individualistc and one may try to explain this between-subjects variance using subject’s personal history (prior conditioning: a behavioristic model; or repressed emotional experiences/memories: psychoanalytical theory), one may also look at subject’s common ancestral history and use that to explain behavior (genetic differences: evolutionary biology; cultural differences : anthropology ) or one may even look at his holistic experiences and use that individualistic experiential history as a basis for explaining behavior ( consider two identical twins that because of their different sampling of environment may end up as differently conditioned etc). Phew that covers all the major psychological theories that I could remember.

Now lets focus on the problem of explaining within-subjects variance ; given the fact that the Situation is the same (situation A)  and the subject is the same (subject Z), why does the same subject react differently to the same situation (acts in ways B and C). This is a relatively hard problem. One could deny the problem itself and claim that no situation is identical, but hey we are doing armchair philosophy right now, and we have already agreed to the premise of existence of a same situation A when we discussed between-subjects variance above, so it doesn’t hurt to concede that the situation A can be same for subject Z, but he may still react differently in ways B and C. None of the above psychological approaches, if applied in a strict, causal deterministic sense can explain the same subject Z reacting differently to situation A , as the subject Z’s personal history (conditioning, repressed memories) or ancestral history (genes, cultural influences) or even previous experiences and choices remain the same and thus should ideally have led to the same behavior. I am making an assumption here that situation A is repeated twice or more in succession (closely in time) so that one cannot counter and say that conditioning (to take an example) has changed in meanwhile due to situation A itself and thus, as the subject Z (at time t=1) has changed to an extent (by delta effect of situation A on the ‘earlier’ subject Z at time t=0) , so he may react differently at tome t=1 from how he reacted at time t=0.   What we are really doing is doing away with a term of the equation; we are saying subject Z is not constant (it  keep changing- self as constantly changing- a Buddhist philosophical premise and also favored by many in psychology) , but in the spirit of Camus’s Absurdity argument in Myth of Sisyphus, I am not satisfied with doing away one of the variables of the equation itself, so let us see, where this model of self-as-a-deterministic-being leads us to. Now that subject Z remains the same for two iterations of situation A, how can one explain the variance that results in action B at one time and action C at the other. One can again try to dissolve the equation by claiming that there is no unified self in space (earlier argument was that there is no unified self in time- it is a constantly changing in time self) – that is we are not a single self , but made up of many different selves- some conscious, some unconscious etc. Different selves may compete with each other and whoever wins at the moment, directs the show. Again assuming different selves cohabiting the same person doesn’t really feel what-it-is like to-be-oneself , and apart from some multiple-personality disorder (DID) this has not been frequently reported; but more importantly . Granting multiple selves to subject Z  again vanishes one of the terms of the equation, and I am not interested, I want to stay and see where my inquiry takes me to.

If the situation is same, the subject is same and a single one, than what explains the within-subject variance? One has to grant unpredictability to a self that was assumed to be deterministic to begin with. One can now take two routes, either resort to the magical mumbo-jumbo of quantum world and indeterminacy and uncertainty; or  stay in the deterministic world but look at complex systems/ chaos theory etc to explain the apparent indeterminacy.  I believe a zombie will prefer the second route and model the self as a complex-system/chaotic self. One could say that the self/ others are still completely determined, but due to an initial ‘butterfly flapping wings effect‘ the self seems or appears to be unpredictable and will continue to remain unpredicatble because of that ‘original sin’. The original sin may be how the infant took the first breath, whether he cried or laughed when born; what the time of conception was etc etc. Whatever may be the initial condition that escaped measuring, it leads to an unperdicatble self, a chaotic self that one cannot measure in the present and thus cannot predict in the long term- a self that is as fickle and as perdicatble as the waether.

There are important implications to seeing / modeling the self as a chaotic system. That leads to a diminished sense of agency / responsibility as perhaps there is not much one can do to correct the original sin and thus modify/ change ones long term behavior. This diminished p-consciousness of agency and the consequent differential experiences of sensations/ perceptions should also lead to diminished qualia or what-it-feels-to be-like feeling.  Maybe the zombies do feel really like zombies- mechanical and chaotic- going along the life stream in a mechanical , predetermined manner- seeing all and understanding all, even acting and reacting, but feeling impotent and lifeless, perhaps just fulfilling a role which has been scripted by someone else (the initial butterfly flapping its wings or the original sin).

This is a good point to stop, but I would like to thank Melbren, a reader of this blog, who commented on my last post and asked me if I would re-define , give a new name to Autism spectrum disorders. Thta made me think and somehow led to this post. But first his comment:

Very cool post. And I love your blog. I am trying to think about this particular post in terms of your psychotic spectrum–most specifically as it relates to autism. But I am impeded by an overwhelming feeling that if we have a new spectrum–we’ll need new terms. The term “autism” has outgrown its usefulness, don’t you think?

For one thing–if we are to use the framework of a psychosis spectrum–I think there will be a lot of people currently diagnosed with autism who are, in fact, organically more biased toward the opposite end of the spectrum. However, such individuals may still have “stereotypies” that we have come to associate with the term “autism.”

That being said–if you were appointed “word czar of the day,” and, as such, had the authority to scrap all of our conventional terminology and come up with “new and improved” terms that are more in alignment with a psychosis spectrum–what new terms would you choose?

I conceptualize autism as defect whereby people falsely apply a deterministic model (relevant for the world/ non-living things) to the self/others (living things) ; I consider of psychosis as the reverse, whereby one applies an agentic model to the world, thus exhibiting magical thinking etc. Because psychotic spectrum is consptualised in terms of a disability (loss of contact with reality), I would rechristen autism spectrum as the zombie spectrum (loss of contact with agency); of course, If I indeed am the ‘word czar of the day’ I’ll probably rename both as consciousness-orientation (psychotic spectrum)  and reality-orientation (autistic spectrum) and highlight the good aspects of both- shaministic Altered states of consciousness and creativity of schizotypals and the scientific and savantic abilities of the Aspergers. Of course, in a lighter vein, perhaps the autistic spectrum people are ‘muggles’  (believers in ordinariness ) who still have to come to terms with the ‘magic’ (believers in extraordinariness)  of consciousness.

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Major conscious and unconscious processes in the brain: part 5: Physical substrates of A-cosnciousness

This is the fifth post in my ongoing series on major conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. For earlier parts, click here.

Today , I would like to point to  a few physical models and theories of consciousness that have been proposed that show that consciousness still resides in the brain, although the neural/ supportive processes may be more esoteric. 

I should forewarn before hand that all the theories involve advanced understanding of brains/ physics/ biochemistry etc and that I do not feel qualified enough to understand/ explain all the different theories in their entirety (or even have a surface understanding of them) ; yet , I believe that there are important underlying patterns and that applying the eight stage model to these approaches will only help us further understand and predict and search in the right directions. The style of this post is similar to the part 3 post on robot minds that delineated the different physical approaches that are used to implement intelligence/ brains in machines.

With that as a background, let us look at the major theoretical approaches to locate consciousness and define its underlying substrates. I could find six different physical hypothesis about consciousness on the Wikipedia page:

  1. * Orch-OR theory
  2. * Electromagnetic theories of consciousness
  3. * Holonomic brain theory
  4. * Quantum mind
  5. * Space-time theories of consciousness
  6. * Simulated Reality

Now let me briefly introduce each of the theories and where they seem to have been most successful; again I believe that though this time visually-normal people are perceiving the elephant, yet they are hooked on to its different aspects and need to bind their perspectives together to arrive at the real nature of the elephant.

1. Orch-OR theory:

The Orch OR theory combines Penrose’s hypothesis with respect to the Gödel theorem with Hameroff’s hypothesis with respect to microtubules. Together, Penrose and Hameroff have proposed that when condensates in the brain undergo an objective reduction of their wave function, that collapse connects to non-computational decision taking/experience embedded in the geometry of fundamental spacetime.
The theory further proposes that the microtubules both influence and are influenced by the conventional activity at the synapses between neurons. The Orch in Orch OR stands for orchestrated to give the full name of the theory Orchestrated Objective Reduction. Orchestration refers to the hypothetical process by which connective proteins, known as microtubule associated proteins (MAPs) influence or orchestrate the quantum processing of the microtubules.
Hameroff has proposed that condensates in microtubules in one neuron can link with other neurons via gap junctions[6]. In addition to the synaptic connections between brain cells, gap junctions are a different category of connections, where the gap between the cells is sufficiently small for quantum objects to cross it by means of a process known as quantum tunnelling. Hameroff proposes that this tunnelling allows a quantum object, such as the Bose-Einstein condensates mentioned above, to cross into other neurons, and thus extend across a large area of the brain as a single quantum object.
He further postulates that the action of this large-scale quantum feature is the source of the gamma (40 Hz) synchronisation observed in the brain, and sometimes viewed as a correlate of consciousness [7]. In support of the much more limited theory that gap junctions are related to the gamma oscillation, Hameroff quotes a number of studies from recent year.
From the point of view of consciousness theory, an essential feature of Penrose’s objective reduction is that the choice of states when objective reduction occurs is selected neither randomly, as are choices following measurement or decoherence, nor completely algorithmically. Rather, states are proposed to be selected by a ‘non-computable’ influence embedded in the fundamental level of spacetime geometry at the Planck scale.
Penrose claimed that such information is Platonic, representing pure mathematical truth, aesthetic and ethical values. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato had proposed such pure values and forms, but in an abstract realm. Penrose placed the Platonic realm at the Planck scale. This relates to Penrose’s ideas concerning the three worlds: physical, mental, and the Platonic mathematical world. In his theory, the physical world can be seen as the external reality, the mental world as information processing in the brain and the Platonic world as the encryption, measurement, or geometry of fundamental spacetime that is claimed to support non-computational understanding.

To me it seems that Orch OR theory is more suitable for forming platonic representations of objects – that is invariant/ideal perception of an object. This I would relate to the Perceptual aspect of A-consciousness.

2. Electromagnetic theories of consciousness

The electromagnetic field theory of consciousness is a theory that says the electromagnetic field generated by the brain (measurable by ECoG) is the actual carrier of conscious experience.
The starting point for these theories is the fact that every time a neuron fires to generate an action potential and a postsynaptic potential in the next neuron down the line, it also generates a disturbance to the surrounding electromagnetic (EM) field. Information coded in neuron firing patterns is therefore reflected into the brain’s EM field. Locating consciousness in the brain’s EM field, rather than the neurons, has the advantage of neatly accounting for how information located in millions of neurons scattered throughout the brain can be unified into a single conscious experience (sometimes called the binding problem): the information is unified in the EM field. In this way EM field consciousness can be considered to be ‘joined-up information’.
However their generation by synchronous firing is not the only important characteristic of conscious electromagnetic fields — in Pockett’s original theory, spatial pattern is the defining feature of a conscious (as opposed to a non-conscious) field.
In McFadden’s cemi field theory, the brain’s global EM field modifies the electric charges across neural membranes and thereby influences the probability that particular neurons will fire, providing a feed-back loop that drives free will.

To me, the EM filed theories seem to be right on track regarding the fact that the EM filed itself may modify / affect the probabilities of firing of individual neurons and thus lead to free will or sense of agency by in some sense causing some neurons to fire over others. I believe we can model the agency aspect of A-consciousness and find neural substrates of the same in brain, using this approach.

3. Holonomic brain theory:

The holonomic brain theory, originated by psychologist Karl Pribram and initially developed in collaboration with physicist David Bohm, is a model for human cognition that is drastically different from conventionally accepted ideas: Pribram and Bohm posit a model of cognitive function as being guided by a matrix of neurological wave interference patterns situated temporally between holographic Gestalt perception and discrete, affective, quantum vectors derived from reward anticipation potentials.
Pribram was originally struck by the similarity of the hologram idea and Bohm’s idea of the implicate order in physics, and contacted him for collaboration. In particular, the fact that information about an image point is distributed throughout the hologram, such that each piece of the hologram contains some information about the entire image, seemed suggestive to Pribram about how the brain could encode memories.
According to Pribram, the tuning of wave frequency in cells of the primary visual cortex plays a role in visual imaging, while such tuning in the auditory system has been well established for decades[citation needed]. Pribram and colleagues also assert that similar tuning occurs in the somatosensory cortex.
Pribram distinguishes between propagative nerve impulses on the one hand, and slow potentials (hyperpolarizations, steep polarizations) that are essentially static. At this temporal interface, he indicates, the wave interferences form holographic patterns.

To me, the holnomic approach seems to be the phenomenon lying between gestalt perception and quantum vectors derived from reward-anticipation potentials or in simple English between the perception and agency components of A-consciousness. this is the Memory aspect of A-consciousness. The use of hologram used to store information as a model, the use of slow waves that are tuned to carry information, the use of this model to explain memory formation (including hyperpolarization etc) all point to the fact that this approach will be most successful in explaining the autobiographical memory that is assited wuith A-cosnciousness.

4. Quantum Mind:

The quantum mind hypothesis proposes that classical mechanics cannot fully explain consciousness and suggests that quantum mechanical phenomena such as quantum entanglement and superposition may play an important part in the brain’s function and could form the basis of an explanation of consciousness.
Recent papers by physicist, Gustav Bernroider, have indicated that he thinks that Bohm’s implicate-explicate structure can account for the relationship between neural processes and consciousness[7]. In a paper published in 2005 Bernroider elaborated his proposals for the physical basis of this process[8]. The main thrust of his paper was the argument that quantum coherence may be sustained in ion channels for long enough to be relevant for neural processes and the channels could be entangled with surrounding lipids and proteins and with other channels in the same membrane. Ion channels regulate the electrical potential across the axon membrane and thus play a central role in the brain’s information processing.
Bernroider uses this recently revealed structure to speculate about the possibility of quantum coherence in the ion channels. Bernroider and co-author Sisir Roy’s calculations suggested to them that the behaviour of the ions in the K channel could only be understood at the quantum level. Taking this as their starting point, they then ask whether the structure of the ion channel can be related to logic states. Further calculations lead them to suggest that the K+ ions and the oxygen atoms of the binding pockets are two quantum-entangled sub-systems, which they then equate to a quantum computational mapping. The ions that are destined to be expelled from the channel are proposed to encode information about the state of the oxygen atoms. It is further proposed the separate ion channels could be quantum entangled with one another.

To me, the quantum entanglement (or bond between different phenomenons)and the encoding of information about the state of the system in that entanglement seems all too similar to feelings as information about the emotional/bodily state. Thus, I propose that these quantum entanglements in these ion-channels may be the substrate that give rise to access to the state of the system, thus giving rise to feelings that is the feeling component of A-consciousness i.e access to one’s own emotional states.

5. Space-time theories of consciousness:

Space-time theories of consciousness have been advanced by Arthur Eddington, John Smythies and other scientists. The concept was also mentioned by Hermann Weyl who wrote that reality is a “…four-dimensional continuum which is neither ‘time’ nor ‘space’. Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it, as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space”.
In 1953, CD Broad, in common with most authors in this field, proposed that there are two types of time, imaginary time measured in imaginary units (i) and real time measured on the real plane.
It can be seen that for any separation in 3D space there is a time at which the separation in 4D spacetime is zero. Similarly, if another coordinate axis is introduced called ‘real time’ that changes with imaginary time then historical events can also be no distance from a point. The combination of these result in the possibility of brain activity being at a point as well as being distributed in 3D space and time. This might allow the conscious individual to observe things, including whole movements, as if viewing them from a point.
Alex Green has developed an empirical theory of phenomenal consciousness that proposes that conscious experience can be described as a five-dimensional manifold. As in Broad’s hypothesis, space-time can contain vectors of zero length between two points in space and time because of an imaginary time coordinate. A 3D volume of brain activity over a short period of time would have the time extended geometric form of a conscious observation in 5D. Green considers imaginary time to be incompatible with the modern physical description of the world, and proposes that the imaginary time coordinate is a property of the observer and unobserved things (things governed by quantum mechanics), whereas the real time of general relativity is a property of observed things.
These space-time theories of consciousness are highly speculative but have features that their proponents consider attractive: every individual would be unique because they are a space-time path rather than an instantaneous object (i.e., the theories are non-fungible), and also because consciousness is a material thing so direct supervenience would apply. The possibility that conscious experience occupies a short period of time (the specious present) would mean that it can include movements and short words; these would not seem to be possible in a presentist interpretation of experience.
Theories of this type are also suggested by cosmology. The Wheeler-De Witt equation describes the quantum wave function of the universe (or more correctly, the multiverse).

To me, the space-time theories of consciousness that lead to observation/consciousness from a point in the 4d/5d space-time continuum seem to mirror the identity formation function of stage 5.This I relate to evaluation /deliberation aspect of A-consciousness.

6. Simulated Reality
 

In theoretical physics, digital physics holds the basic premise that the entire history of our universe is computable in some sense. The hypothesis was pioneered in Konrad Zuse’s book Rechnender Raum (translated by MIT into English as Calculating Space, 1970), which focuses on cellular automata. Juergen Schmidhuber suggested that the universe could be a Turing machine, because there is a very short program that outputs all possible programmes in an asymptotically optimal way. Other proponents include Edward Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, and Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft. They hold that the apparently probabilistic nature of quantum physics is not incompatible with the notion of computability. A quantum version of digital physics has recently been proposed by Seth Lloyd. None of these suggestions has been developed into a workable physical theory.
It can be argued that the use of continua in physics constitutes a possible argument against the simulation of a physical universe. Removing the real numbers and uncountable infinities from physics would counter some of the objections noted above, and at least make computer simulation a possibility. However, digital physics must overcome these objections. For instance, cellular automata would appear to be a poor model for the non-locality of quantum mechanics.

To me the simulation argument is one model of us and the world- i.e we are living in a dream state/ simulation/ digital world where everything is synthetic/ predictable and computable. The alternative view of world as real, analog, continuous world where everything is creative / unpredictable and non-computable. One can , and should have both the models in mind – a simulated reality that is the world and a simulator that is oneself. Jagat mithya, brahma sach. World (simulation) is false, Brahma (creation) is true . Ability to see the world as both a fiction and a reality at the same time, as a fore laid stage and as a creative jazz at the same time leads to this sixth stage of consciousness the A-consciousness of an emergent conscious self that is distinct from mere body/brain. One can see oneself and others as actors acting as per their roles on the world’s stage; or as agents co-creating the reality.

That should be enough for today, but I am sure my astute readers will take this a notch further and propose two more theoretical approaches to consciousness and perhaps look for their neural substrates basde on teh remianing tow stages and componenets of A-consciousness..

Major conscious and unconscious processes in the brain: part 4: the easy problem of A-consciousness

This is the part 4 of the multipart series on conscious and unconscious processes in the brain.

I’ll like to start with a quote from the Mundaka Upanishads:

Two birds, inseparable friends, cling to the same tree. One of them eats the sweet fruit, the other looks on without eating.


On the same tree man sits grieving, immersed, bewildered, by his own impotence. But when he sees the other lord contented and knows his glory, then his grief passes away.

Today I plan to delineate the major conscious processes in the brain, without bothering with their neural correlates or how they are related to unconscious processes that I have delineated earlier. Also I’ll be restricting the discussion mostly to the easy problem of Access or A- consciousness.  leaving the hard problem of phenomenal or P-consciousness for later.

I’ll first like to quote a definition of consciousness form Baars:

The contents of consciousness include the immediate perceptual world; inner speech and visual imagery; the fleeting present and its fading traces in immediate memory; bodily feelings like pleasure, pain, and excitement; surges of feeling; autobiographical events when they are remembered; clear and immediate intentions, expectations and actions; explicit beliefs about oneself and the world; and concepts that are abstract but focal. In spite of decades of behaviouristic avoidance, few would quarrel with this list today.

Next I would like to list the subsystems identified by Charles T tart that are involved in consciousness:

  • EXTEROCEPTION (sensing the external world)
  • INTEROCEPTION (sensing the body)
  • INPUT-PROCESSING (seeing meaningful stimuli)
  • EMOTIONS
  • MEMORY
  • SPACE/TIME SENSE
  • SENSE OF IDENTITY
  • EVALUATION AND DECISION -MAKING
  • MOTOR OUTPUT
  • SUBCONSCIOUS

With this background, let me delineate the major conscious processes/ systems that make up the A-consciousness as per me:-

  1. Perceptual system: Once the spotlight of attention is available, it can be used to bring into focus the unconscious input representations that the brain is creating.  Thus a system may evolve that has access to information regarding the sensations that are being processed or in other words that perceives and is conscious of what is being sensed. To perceive is to have access to ones sensations.  In Tarts model , it is the input-processing module  that ‘sees’ meaningful stimuli and ignores the rest / hides them from second-order representation. This is Baars immediate perceptual world.
  2. Agency system: The spotlight of attention can also bring into foreground the unconscious urges that propel movement. This access to information regarding how and why we move gives rise to the emergence of A-consciousness of will/ volition/agency. To will is to have access to ones action-causes. In tarts model , it is the motor output module that enables sense of voluntary movement. In Baars definition it is clear and immediate intentions, expectations and actions.
  3. Memory system:  The spotlight of attention may also bring into focus past learning. This access to information regarding past unconscious learning gives rise to A-consciousness of remembering/ recognizing. To remember is to have access to past learning. The Tart subsystem for the same is Memory and Baars definition is autobiographical events when they are remembered. 
  4. Feeling (emotional/ mood) system: The spotlight of attention may also highlight the emotional state of the organism. An information about one’s own emotional state gives rise to the A-consciousness of feelings that have an emotional tone/ mood associated. To feel is to have access to ones emotional state. The emotions system of Tart and Baars bodily feelings like pleasure, pain, and excitement; surges of feeling relate to this.
  5. Deliberation/ reasoning/thought system: The spotlight of attention may also highlight the decisional and evaluative unconscious processes that the organism indulges in. An information about which values guided decision can lead to a reasoning module that justifies the decisions and an A-consciousness of introspection. To think is to have access to ones own deliberation and evaluative process. Tarts evaluative and decision making module is for the same. Baars definition may be enhanced to include intorspection i.e access to thoughts and thinking (remember Descartes dictum of I think therefore I am. ) as part of consciousness.
  6. Modeling system that can differentiate and perceive dualism: The spotlight of attention may highlight the dual properties of the world (deterministic and chaotic ). An information regarding the fact that two contradictory models of the world can both be true at the same time, leads to modeling of oneslf that is different from the world giving rise to the difference between ‘this’ and ‘that’ and giving rise to the sense of self. One models both the self and the world based on principles/ subsystems of extereocpetion and interoception and this give rise to A-consciousness of beliefs about the self and the world. To believe is to have access to one’s model of something. One has access to a self/ subjectivity different from world and defined by interoceptive senses ; and a world/ reality different from self defined by exterioceptive senses. The interocpetive and exteroceptive subsystems of  Tart and Baars  explicit beliefs about oneself and the world are relevant here. This system give rise to the concept of a subjective person or self.
  7. Language system that can report on subjective contents and propositions. The spotlight of awareness may  verbalize the unconscious communicative intents and propositions giving rise to access to inner speech and enabling overt language and reporting capabilities. To verbally report is to have access to the underlying narrative that one wants to communicate and that one is creating/confabulating. This narrative and story-telling capability should also in my view lead to the A-consciousness of the stream of consciousness. This would be implemented most probably by Tart’s unconscious and space/time sense modules and relates to Baars the fleeting present and its fading traces in immediate memory- a sense of an ongoing stream of consciousness. To have a stream of consciousness is to have access to one’s inner narrative.
  8. Awareness system that can bring into focal awareness the different conscious process that are seen as  coherent. : the spotlight of attention can also be turned upon itself- an information about what all processes make a coherent whole and are thus being attended and amplified gives rise to a sense of self-identity that is stable across time and  unified in space. To be aware is to have access to what one is attending or focusing on or is ‘conscious’ of. Tarts Sense of identity subsystem and Baars concepts that are abstract but focal relate to this. Once available the spotlight of awareness opens the floodgates of phenomenal or P-consciousness or experience in the here-and-now of qualia that are invariant and experiential in  nature. That ‘feeling of what it means to be’ of course is the subject matter for another day and another post!

Major conscious and unconcoscious processes in the brain: part 3: Robot minds

This article continues my series on major conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. In my last two posts I have talked about 8 major unconscious processes in the brain viz sensory, motor, learning , affective, cognitive (deliberative), modelling, communications and attentive systems. Today, I will not talk about brain in particular, but will approach the problem from a slightly different problem domain- that of modelling/implementing an artificial brain/ mind.

I am a computer scientist, so am vaguely aware of the varied approaches used to model/implement the brain. Many of these use computers , though not every approach assumes that the brain is a computer.

Before continuing I would briefly like to digress and link to one of my earlier posts regarding the different  traditions of psychological research in personality and how I think they fit an evolutionary stage model . That may serve as a background to the type of sweeping analysis and genralisation that I am going to do. To be fair it is also important to recall an Indian parable of how when asked to describe an elephant by a few blind man each described what he could lay his hands on and thus provided a partial and incorrect picture of the elephant. Some one who grabbed the tail, described it as snake-like and so forth.

With that in mind let us look at the major approaches to modelling/mplementing the brain/intelligence/mind. Also remember that I am most interested in unconscious brain processes till now and sincerely believe that all the unconscious processes can, and will be successfully implemented in machines.   I do not believe machines will become sentient (at least any time soon), but that question is for another day.

So, with due thanks to @wildcat2030, I came across this book today and could immediately see how the different major approaches to artificial robot brains are heavily influenced (and follow) the evolutionary first five stages and the first five unconscious processes in the brain.
The book in question is ‘Robot Brains: Circuits and Systems for Conscious Machines’ by Pentti O. Haikonen and although he is most interested in conscious machines I will restrict myself to intelligent but unconscious machines/robots.

The first chapter of the book (which has made to my reading list) is available at Wiley site in its entirety and I quote extensively from there:

Presently there are five main approaches to the modelling of cognition that could be used for the development of cognitive machines: the computational approach (artificial intelligence, AI), the artificial neural networks approach, the dynamical systems approach, the quantum approach and the cognitive approach. Neurobiological approaches exist, but these may be better suited for the eventual explanation of the workings of the biological brain.

The computational approach (also known as artificial intelligence, AI) towards thinking machines was initially worded by Turing (1950). A machine would be thinking if the results of the computation were indistinguishable from the results of human thinking. Later on Newell and Simon (1976) presented their Physical Symbol System Hypothesis, which maintained that general intelligent action can be achieved by a physical symbol system and that this system has all the necessary and sufficient means for this purpose. A physical symbol system was here the computer that operates with symbols (binary words) and attached rules that stipulate which symbols are to follow others. Newell and Simon believed that the computer would be able to reproduce human-like general intelligence, a feat that still remains to be seen. However, they realized that this hypothesis was only an empirical generalization and not a theorem that could be formally proven. Very little in the way of empirical proof for this hypothesis exists even today and in the 1970s the situation was not better. Therefore Newell and Simon pretended to see other kinds of proof that were in those days readily available. They proposed that the principal body of evidence for the symbol system hypothesis was negative evidence, namely the absence of specific competing hypotheses; how else could intelligent activity be accomplished by man or machine? However, the absence of evidence is by no means any evidence of absence. This kind of ‘proof by ignorance’ is too often available in large quantities, yet it is not a logically valid argument. Nevertheless, this issue has not yet been formally settled in one way or another. Today’s positive evidence is that it is possible to create world-class chess-playing programs and these can be called ‘artificial intelligence’. The negative evidence is that it appears to be next to impossible to create real general intelligence via preprogrammed commands and computations.

The original computational approach can be criticized for the lack of a cognitive foundation. Some recent approaches have tried to remedy this and consider systems that integrate the processes of perception, reaction, deliberation and reasoning (Franklin, 1995, 2003; Sloman, 2000). There is another argument against the computational view of the brain. It is known that the human brain is slow, yet it is possible to learn to play tennis and other activities that require instant responses. Computations take time. Tennis playing and the like would call for the fastest computers in existence. How could the slow brain manage this if it were to execute computations?

The artificial neural networks approach, also known as connectionism, had its beginnings in the early 1940s when McCulloch and Pitts (1943) proposed that the brain cells, neurons, could be modelled by a simple electronic circuit. This circuit would receive a number of signals, multiply their intensities by the so-called synaptic weight values and sum these modified values together. The circuit would give an output signal if the sum value exceeded a given threshold. It was realized that these artificial neurons could learn and execute basic logic operations if their synaptic weight values were adjusted properly. If these artificial neurons were realized as hardware circuits then no programs would be necessary and biologically plausible artificial replicas of the brain might be possible. Also, neural networks operate in parallel, doing many things simultaneously. Thus the overall operational speed could be fast even if the individual neurons were slow. However, problems with artificial neural learning led to complicated statistical learning algorithms, ones that could best be implemented as computer programs. Many of today’s artificial neural networks are statistical pattern recognition and classification circuits. Therefore they are rather removed from their original biologically inspired idea. Cognition is not mere classification and the human brain is hardly a computer that executes complicated synaptic weight-adjusting algorithms.

The human brain has some 10 to the power of 11 neurons and each neuron may have tens of thousands of synaptic inputs and input weights. Many artificial neural networks learn by tweaking the synaptic weight values against each other when thousands of training examples are presented. Where in the brain would reside the computing process that would execute synaptic weight adjusting algorithms? Where would these algorithms have come from? The evolutionary feasibility of these kinds of algorithms can be seriously doubted. Complicated algorithms do not evolve via trial and error either. Moreover, humans are able to learn with a few examples only, instead of having training sessions with thousands or hundreds of thousands of examples. It is obvious that the mainstream neural networks approach is not a very plausible candidate for machine cognition although the human brain is a neural network.

Dynamical systems were proposed as a model for cognition by Ashby (1952) already in the 1950s and have been developed further by contemporary researchers (for example Thelen and Smith, 1994; Gelder, 1998, 1999; Port, 2000; Wallace, 2005). According to this approach the brain is considered as a complex system with dynamical interactions with its environment. Gelder and Port (1995) define a dynamical system as a set of quantitative variables, which change simultaneously and interdependently over quantitative time in accordance with some set of equations. Obviously the brain is indeed a large system of neuron activity variables that change over time. Accordingly the brain can be modelled as a dynamical system if the neuron activity can be quantified and if a suitable set of, say, differential equations can be formulated. The dynamical hypothesis sees the brain as comparable to analog feedback control systems with continuous parameter values. No inner representations are assumed or even accepted. However, the dynamical systems approach seems to have problems in explaining phenomena like ‘inner speech’. A would-be designer of an artificial brain would find it difficult to see what kind of system dynamics would be necessary for a specific linguistically expressed thought. The dynamical systems approach has been criticized, for instance by Eliasmith (1996, 1997), who argues that the low dimensional systems of differential equations, which must rely on collective parameters, do not model cognition easily and the dynamicists have a difficult time keeping arbitrariness from permeating their models. Eliasmith laments that there seems to be no clear ways of justifying parameter settings, choosing equations, interpreting data or creating system boundaries. Furthermore, the collective parameter models make the interpretation of the dynamic system’s behaviour difficult, as it is not easy to see or determine the meaning of any particular parameter in the model. Obviously these issues would translate into engineering problems for a designer of dynamical systems.

The quantum approach maintains that the brain is ultimately governed by quantum processes, which execute nonalgorithmic computations or act as a mediator between the brain and an assumed more-or-less immaterial ‘self’ or even ‘conscious energy field’ (for example Herbert, 1993; Hameroff, 1994; Penrose, 1989; Eccles, 1994). The quantum approach is supposed to solve problems like the apparently nonalgorithmic nature of thought, free will, the coherence of conscious experience, telepathy, telekinesis, the immortality of the soul and others. From an engineering point of view even the most practical propositions of the quantum approach are presently highly impractical in terms of actual implementation. Then there are some proposals that are hardly distinguishable from wishful fabrications of fairy tales. Here the quantum approach is not pursued.

The cognitive approach maintains that conscious machines can be built because one example already exists, namely the human brain. Therefore a cognitive machine should emulate the cognitive processes of the brain and mind, instead of merely trying to reproduce the results of the thinking processes. Accordingly the results of neurosciences and cognitive psychology should be evaluated and implemented in the design if deemed essential. However, this approach does not necessarily involve the simulation or emulation of the biological neuron as such, instead, what is to be produced is the abstracted information processing function of the neuron.

A cognitive machine would be an embodied physical entity that would interact with the environment. Cognitive robots would be obvious applications of machine cognition and there have been some early attempts towards that direction. Holland seeks to provide robots with some kind of consciousness via internal models (Holland and Goodman, 2003; Holland, 2004). Kawamura has been developing a cognitive robot with a sense of self (Kawamura, 2005; Kawamura et al., 2005). There are also others. Grand presents an experimentalist’s approach towards cognitive robots in his book (Grand, 2003).

A cognitive machine would be a complete system with processes like perception, attention, inner speech, imagination, emotions as well as pain and pleasure. Various technical approaches can be envisioned, namely indirect ones with programs, hybrid systems that combine programs and neural networks, and direct ones that are based on dedicated neural cognitive architectures. The operation of these dedicated neural cognitive architectures would combine neural, symbolic and dynamic elements.

However, the neural elements here would not be those of the traditional neural networks; no statistical learning with thousands of examples would be implied, no backpropagation or other weight-adjusting algorithms are used. Instead the networks would be associative in a way that allows the symbolic use of the neural signal arrays (vectors). The ‘symbolic’ here does not refer to the meaning-free symbol manipulation system of AI; instead it refers to the human way of using symbols with meanings. It is assumed that these cognitive machines would eventually be conscious, or at least they would reproduce most of the folk psychology hallmarks of consciousness (Haikonen, 2003a, 2005a). The engineering aspects of the direct cognitive approach are pursued in this book.

Now to me these computational approaches are all unidimensional-

  1. The computational approach is suited for symbol-manipulation and information-represntation and might give good results when used in systems that have mostly ‘sensory’ features like forming a mental represntation of external world, a chess game etc. Here something (stimuli from world) is represented as something else (an internal symbolic represntation).
  2. The Dynamical Systems approach is guided by interactions with the environment and the principles of feedback control systems and also is prone to ‘arbitrariness’ or ‘randomness’. It is perfectly suited to implement the ‘motor system‘ of brain as one of the common features is apparent unpredictability (volition) despite being deterministic (chaos theory) .
  3. The Neural networks or connectionsim is well suited for implementing the ‘learning system’ of the brain and we can very well see that the best neural network based systems are those that can categorize and classify things just like ‘the learning system’ of the brain does.
  4. The quantum approach to brain, I haven’t studied enough to comment on, but the action-tendencies of ‘affective system’ seem all too similar to the superimposed,simultaneous states that exits in a wave function before it is collapsed. Being in an affective state just means having a set of many possible related and relevant actions simultaneously activated and then perhaps one of that decided upon somehow and actualized. I’m sure that if we could ever model emotion in machine sit would have to use quantum principles of wave functions, entanglemnets etc.
  5. The cognitive approach, again I haven’t go a hang of yet, but it seems that the proposal is to build some design into the machine that is based on actual brain and mind implemntations. Embodiment seems important and so does emulating the information processing functions of neurons. I would stick my neck out and predict that whatever this cognitive approach is it should be best able to model the reasoning and evaluative and decision-making functions of the brain. I am reminded of the computational modelling methods, used to functionally decompose a cognitive process, and are used in cognitive science (whether symbolic or subsymbolic modelling) which again aid in decision making / reasoning (see wikipedia entry)

Overall, I would say there is room for further improvement in the way we build more intelligent machines. They could be made such that they have two models of world – one deterministic , another chaotic and use the two models simulatenously (sixth stage of modelling); then they could communicate with other machines and thus learn language (some simulation methods for language abilities do involve agents communicating with each other using arbitrary tokens and later a language developing) (seventh stage) and then they could be implemented such that they have a spotlight of attention (eighth stage) whereby some coherent systems are amplified and others suppressed. Of course all this is easier said than done, we will need at least three more major approaches to modelling and implementing brain/intelligence before we can model every major unconscious process in the brain. To model consciousness and program sentience is an uphill task from there and would definitely require a leap in our understandings/ capabilities.

Do tell me if you find the above reasonable and do believe that these major approaches to artificial brain implementation are guided and constrained by the major unconscious processes in the brain and that we can learn much about brain from the study of these artificial approaches and vice versa.

Major conscious and unconcoscious processes in the brain

Today I plan to touch upon the topic of consciousness (from which many bloggers shy) and more broadly try to delineate what I believe are the important different conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. I will be heavily using my evolutionary stages model for this.

To clarify myself at the very start , I do not believe in a purely reactive nature of organisms; I believe that apart from reacting to stimuli/world; they also act , on their own, and are thus agents. To elaborate, I believe that neuronal groups and circuits may fire on their own and thus lead to behavior/ action. I do not claim that this firing is under voluntary/ volitional control- it may be random- the important point to note is that there is spontaneous motion.

  1. Sensory system: So to start with I propose that the first function/process the brain needs to develop is to sense its surroundings. This is to avoid predators/ harm in general. this sensory function of brain/sense organs may be unconscious and need not become conscious- as long as an animal can sense danger, even though it may not be aware of the danger, it can take appropriate action – a simple ‘action’ being changing its color to merge with background. 
  2. Motor system:The second function/ process that the brain needs to develop is to have a system that enables motion/movement. This is primarily to explore its environment for food /nutrients. Preys are not going to walk in to your mouth; you have to move around and locate them. Again , this movement need not be volitional/conscious – as long as the animal moves randomly and sporadically to explore new environments, it can ‘see’ new things and eat a few. Again this ‘seeing’ may be as simple as sensing the chemical gradient in a new environmental.
  3. Learning system: The third function/process that the brain needs to develop is to have a system that enables learning. It is not enough to sense the environmental here-and-now. One needs to learn the contingencies in the world and remember that both in space and time. I am inclined to believe that this is primarily pavlovaion conditioning and associative learning, though I don’t rule out operant learning. Again this learning need not be conscious- one need not explicitly refer to a memory to utilize it- unconscious learning and memory of events can suffice and can drive interactions. I also believe that need for this function is primarily driven by the fact that one interacts with similar environments/con specifics/ predators/ preys and it helps to remember which environmental conditions/operant actions lead to what outcomes. This learning could be as simple as stimuli A predict stimuli B and/or that action C predicts reward D .
  4. Affective/ Action tendencies system .The fourth function I propose that the brain needs to develop is a system to control its motor system/ behavior by making it more in sync with its internal state. This I propose is done by a group of neurons monitoring the activity of other neurons/visceral organs and thus becoming aware (in a non-conscious sense)of the global state of the organism and of the probability that a particular neuronal group will fire in future and by thus becoming aware of the global state of the organism , by their outputs they may be able to enable one group to fire while inhibiting other groups from firing. To clarify by way of example, some neuronal groups may be responsible for movement. Another neuronal group may be receiving inputs from these as well as say input from gut that says that no movement has happened for a time and that the organism has also not eaten for a time and thus is in a ‘hungry’ state. This may prompt these neurons to fire in such a way that they send excitatory outputs to the movement related neurons and thus biasing them towards firing and thus increasing the probability that a motion will take place and perhaps the organism by indulging in exploratory behavior may be able to satisfy hunger. Of course they will inhibit other neuronal groups from firing and will themselves stop firing when appropriate motion takes place/ a prey is eaten. Again nothing of this has to be conscious- the state of the organism (like hunger) can be discerned unconsciously and the action-tendencies biasing foraging behavior also activated unconsciously- as long as the organism prefers certain behaviors over others depending on its internal state , everything works perfectly. I propose that (unconscious) affective (emotional) state and systems have emerged to fulfill exactly this need of being able to differentially activate different action-tendencies suited to the needs of the organism. I also stick my neck out and claim that the activation of a particular emotion/affective system biases our sensing also. If the organism is hungry, the food tastes (is unconsciously more vivid) better and vice versa. thus affects not only are action-tendencies , but are also, to an extent, sensing-tendencies.
  5. Decisional/evaluative system: the last function (for now- remember I adhere to eight stage theories- and we have just seen five brain processes in increasing hierarchy) that the brain needs to have is a system to decide / evaluate. Learning lets us predict our world as well as the consequences of our actions. Affective systems provide us some control over our behavior and over our environment- but are automatically activated by the state we are in. Something needs to make these come together such that the competition between actions triggered due to the state we are in (affective action-tendencies) and the actions that may be beneficial given the learning associated with the current stimuli/ state of the world are resolved satisfactorily. One has to balance the action and reaction ratio and the subjective versus objective interpretation/ sensation of environment. The decisional/evaluative system , I propose, does this by associating values with different external event outcomes and different internal state outcomes and by resolving the trade off between the two. This again need not be conscious- given a stimuli predicting a predator in vicinity, and the internal state of the organism as hungry, the organism may have attached more value to ‘avoid being eaten’ than to ‘finding prey’ and thus may not move, but camouflage. On the other hand , if the organisms value system is such that it prefers a hero’s death on battlefield , rather than starvation, it may move (in search of food) – again this could exist in the simplest of unicellular organisms.

Of course all of these brain processes could (and in humans indeed do) have their conscious counterparts like Perception, Volition,episodic Memory, Feelings and Deliberation/thought. That is a different story for a new blog post!

And of course one can also conceive the above in pure reductionist form as a chain below:

sense–>recognize & learn–>evaluate options and decide–>emote and activate action tendencies->execute and move.

and then one can also say that movement leads to new sensation and the above is not a chain , but a part of cycle; all that is valid, but I would sincerely request my readers to consider the possibility of spontaneous and self-driven behavior as separate from reactive motor behavior. 

Robert Kegan’s stages of Social Maturity/ orders of consciousness

I happened to stumble upon recently on an excellent two series article by Mark Dombeck about the theories of Robert Kegan. The articles are really good and I strongly recommended that you go there and read the stuff in its entirety.

Robert Kegan is a developmental psychologist, based at Harvard, and inspired by Piaget’s stage theories, he has proposed his own stage theory as to how we become socially mature. Critical to understanding his theory are some concepts related to subject-object consciousness. Subject consciousness refers to self-concepts to which we are attached and thus cannot take an objective look. Object consciousness is also part of self, and was a subject consciousness in an earlier stage, but now we can detach ourselves from the underlying phenomenon and take an objective look at that part of self.

It is his thesis that as babies we feel everything as self and actually have no concept of self different from that of the world. Slowly as we develop, we start identifying with our bodily sensations, reflexes, movements, desires, needs etc and our sphere of objectivity grows bigger, while our sphere of subjectivity narrows and shrinks.

He also maintains that we pass through discrete developmental stages , wherein we take a leap from one stage to another, and while stuck in that developmental stage , are not passively dividing the world and self in subject and object consciousness, but it is a dynamic process, though in equilibrium. At each leap, what was earlier subjective, now becomes objective. another way to say the same is that what was concrete (my perspective and thus available to me) becomes abstract(another’s perspective and thus not available to me, but can only be imagined from abstraction)

More complex appreciations of the social world evolve into existence as a person becomes able to appreciate stuff abstractly that they used to appreciate only in concrete (obvious, tangible) forms. This is to say (using Kegan’s terms) that people are initially embedded in their own subjective perspective. They see things only from their own particular point of view and fundamentally cannot understand what it might be like to see themselves from another perspective other than their own. Being unable to understand what you look like to someone else is the essence and definition of what it means to be subjective about yourself, for example. Being able to appreciate things from many different perspectives is the essence of what it means to be relatively objective.

With this introduction, I’ll now like to introduce readers to the seven stages he has identified (he has missed the eighth stage in his analysis!)

Kegan is suggesting that as babies grow into adults, they develop progressively more objective and accurate appreciations of the social world they inhabit. They do this by progressing through five or more states or periods of development which he labeled as follows:

  • Incorporative
  • Impulsive
  • Imperial
  • Interpersonal
  • Institutional

In their beginnings, babies are all subjective and have really no appreciation of anything objective at all, and therefore no real self-awareness. This is to say, at first, babies have little idea how to interpret anything, and the only perspective they have with which to interpret things is their own scarcely developed perspective. They can recognize parent’s faces and the like, but this sort of recognition should not be confused with babies being able to appreciate that parents are separate creatures with their own needs. This key recognition doesn’t occur for years.

Kegan describes this earliest period as Incorporative. The sense of self is not developed at this point in time. There is no self to speak of because there is no distinction occurring yet between self and other. To the baby, there is not any reason to ask the question, “who am I” because the baby’s mind is nothing more and nothing less than the experience of its senses as it moves about. In an important sense, the baby is embedded in its sensory experience and has no other awareness.
Babies practice using their senses and reflexes a lot and thus develop mental representations of those reflexes. At some point it occurs to the baby that it has reflexes that it can use and senses that it can experience. Reflex and sensation are thus the first mental objects; the first things that are understood to be distinct components of the self. The sense of self emerges from the knowledge that there are things in the world that aren’t self (like reflexes and senses); things that I am not. To quote Kegan, “Rather than literally being my reflexes, I now have them, and “I” am something other. “I” am that which coordinates or mediates the reflexes…”
Kegan correspondingly refers to this second period of social appreciation development as Impulsive, to suggest that the child is now embedded in impulses – which are those things that coordinate reflexes. The sense of self at this stage of life would be comfortable saying something like, “hungry”, or “sleepy”, being fully identified with these hungers. Though babies are now aware that they can take action to fulfill a need, they still are not clear that other people exist yet as independent creatures. From the perspective of the Impulsive mind, a parent is merely another reflex that can be brought to bear to satisfy impulses.

The objectification of what was previously subjective experience continues as development continues. Kegan’s next developmental leap is known as the Imperial self. The child as “little dictator” is born. In the prior impulsive self, the self literally is nothing more and nothing less than a set of needs. There isn’t anyone “there” having those needs yet. The needs alone are all that exists. As awareness continues to rise, the child now starts to become aware that “it” is the very thing that has the needs. Because the child is now aware that it has needs (rather than is needs), it also starts to become aware that it can consciously manipulate things to get its needs satisfied. The impulsive child was also manipulative, perhaps, but in a more unaware animal manner. The imperial child is not yet aware that other people have needs too. It only knows at this stage that it has needs, and it doesn’t hesitate to express them.

The Interpersonal period that follows next starts with the first moment when the child comes to understand that there are actually other people out there in the world whose needs need to be taken into account along side their own. The appreciation of the otherness of other people comes about, as always by a process of expanding perspectives. The child’s perspective in this case expands from its own only to later include both its own and those of other important people around it. It is the child’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of the idea that people have needs itself which cause the leap to occur. To quote Kegan again,”I” no longer am my needs (no longer the imperial I); rather I have them. In having them I can now coordinate, or integrate, one need system with another, and in so doing, I bring into being that need-mediating reality which we refer to when we speak of mutuality.”
In English then, the interpersonal child becomes aware that “not only do I have needs, other people do too!” This moment in time is where conscience is born and the potential for guilt and shame arises, as well as the potential for empathy. Prior to this moment, these important aspects of adult mental life don’t exist except as potentials.
The interpersonal child is aware that other people have needs which it needs to be taken into account if it is to best satisfy its own needs. There is no guiding principle that helps the interpersonal child to determine which set of needs is most important – its own, or those of the other people. Some children will conclude that their own needs are most important to satisfy, while others will conclude that other’s needs should be prioritized, and some children will move back and forth between the two positions like a crazy monkey.

As the child’s sense of self continues to develop, at some point it becomes aware that a guiding principle can be established which helps determine which set of needs should take precedence under particular circumstances. This is the first moment that the child can be said to have values, or commitments to ideas and beliefs and principles which are larger and more permanent than its own passing whims and fears. Kegan refers to this new realization of and commitment to values as the Institutional period, noting that in this period, the child’s idea of self becomes something which can be, for the first time, described in terms of institutionalized values, such as being honest. “I’m an honest person. I try to be fair. I strive to be brave.” are the sorts of things an institutional mind might say. Values, such as the Golden Rule (e.g., “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), start to guide the child’s appreciation of how to be a member of the family and of society. The moral, ethical and legal foundations of society follow from this basic achievement of an Institutional self. Further, children (or adults) who achieve this level of social maturity understand the need for laws and for ethical codes that work to govern everyone’s behavior. Less socially mature individuals won’t grasp why these things are important and cannot and should not simply be disregarded when they are inconvenient.

For many people, social maturity seems to stop here at the Institutional stage. Kegan himself writes that this stage is the stage of conventional adult maturity; one that many (but not all) adults reach, and beyond which most do not progress. However, the potential for continued development continues onwards and upwards.
The next evolution of self understanding occurs when the child (by now probably an adult) starts to realize that there is more than one way of being “fair” or “honest” or “brave” in the world. Whereas before, in the interpersonal mindset, there is only one possible right way to interpret a social event (e.g., in accordance with one’s own value system), a newly developed InterIndivdiual mindset starts to recognize a diversity of ways that someone might act and still be acting in accordance with a coherent value system (though not necessarily one’s own value system).
For example, let’s consider how someone with an Institutional mindset and someone with an InterIndividual mindset might judge someone who has become a “draft dodger” so as to avoid military duty. There are precisely two ways that an Institutionally minded person might look at such an action. If he or she is of the mainstream institutional mindset, draft dodging is a non-religious sort of heresy and a crime which should be punishable. If, on the other hand, he or she is of a counter-cultural institutional mindset, then judgements are reversed and draft dodging is seen as a brave action which demonstrates individual courage in the face of massive peer pressure to conform. An institutionally minded person can hold one or the other of these perspectives but not both, because he or she is literally embedded in one or the other of those perspectives and cannot appreciate the other except as something alien and evil.

A person who has achieved InterIndividual social maturity is able to hold both mainstream and counter-cultural value systems in mind at the same time, and to see the problem of draft dodging from both perspectives. This sort of dual-vision will appear to be the worst kind of wishy-washiness and flip-floppery to someone stuck in a conventional Institutional mindset and maturity level. However, if you are following the progression of social maturity states, and how one states’ embedded subjective view becomes something which is seem objectively alongside other points of view as social maturity progresses, you will see that such dual-vision is indeed the logical next step; what a more socially mature sort of human being might look like.

Please note that though Mark only identifies five stages upfront, he mentions another one , which is inter-individualistic as the sixth stage. The reason he is reluctant is because most adults presumably never reach this stage. Also Kegan himself, in this interview talks about fifth-order of consciousness , which is equivalent to the seventh stage and defines it as a self-transforming stage:

WIE: So what about that tiny percent of people beyond self-authoring, or fourth order—what are the characteristics of the next, fifth order of consciousness?

RK: When you get to the edge of the fourth order, you start to see that all the ways that you had of making meaning or making sense out of your experience are, each in their own way, partial. They’re leaving certain things out. When people who have long had self-authoring consciousness come to the limits of self-authoring, they recognize the partiality of even their own internal system, even though like any good system, it does have the capacity to handle all the “data,” or make systematic, rational sense of our experience. In the Western world, we often call that “objectivity.” But just because you can handle everything, put it all together in some coherent system, obviously doesn’t make it a truthful apprehension—or truly objective. And this realization is what promotes the transformation from the fourth to the fifth order of consciousness, from the self-authoring self to what we call the self-transforming self. So, you start to build a way of constructing the world that is much more friendly to contradiction, to oppositeness, to being able to hold on to multiple systems of thinking. You begin to see that the life project is not about continuing to defend one formation of the self but about the ability to have the self literally be transformative. This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about the defending and identifying with any one form.

WIE: I think Don Beck would call your fifth order of consciousness a move to the Second Tier, which is an evolutionary transformation that takes us beyond survival mode to a more integral perspective on life.

RK: Yes. And it is also important to keep in mind that in this move from the fourth to the fifth order, from self-authoring to self-transforming, you have very important distinctions between those who are in the earlier process of that transition and those in the later stages—who have actually achieved the fifth order. So, there’s a critical distinction between on the one hand, a negative postmodernism that is all about trashing any ideological form, which is only deconstructive and is all about a fatigue with and critique of the ideological, and on the other, what I call a more reconstructive postmodernism that is not just about trashing. When you get to the other side of this four to five shift, and you’ve moved to this more reconstructive or transformative side, then there’s a whole capacity for reconnecting to these ideologies and recognizing that each of them is partial. You’re building relationships among them rather than holding on to one and projecting the other. It’s a much more positive spirit.

To clarify things a bit, in his later analysis , Kegan has replaced the stages of social maturity with orders of consciousness.

In In Over Our Heads, Kegan stops using the five stages described above in favor of the newer “orders of consciousness” scheme.

First order consciousness corresponds (roughly) to Incorporative and Impulsive stages and describes awareness which is fixed upon sensation and movement and impulse. It is awareness but it is not really yet a self.

Second order consciousness corresponds roughly to the Imperial self stage. It is awareness of self as a singular point of view without any real comprehension of others as independent selves in their own right.

Third order consciousness corresponds to Interpersonal and Institutional self stages, and describes a sense of self which is aware of both self and other as independent needful beings all of which are (or ought to be) guided by a consistent set of values.

A final fourth order of consciousness is also described which corresponds to the Interindividual self stage in which self-determination and tolerance and acceptance of formerly rejected aspects of self and society becomes possible.

The idea is that all people pass through these various stages as they develop, but not all people make it to the end of the line. Adolescence is typically characterized by the transition from second order to third order consciousness, but not all adolescents end up achieving third order consciousness by the time they become adults. Similarly, adulthood is typically characterized by the movement from third order consciousness into fourth order consciousness, but many adults do not make this transition either. Nevertheless, the institutions we live under (in America and in the West) tend to make demands on us as though we have all achieved fourth order consciousness.

Please note that in the interview Kegan clearly talks about a fifth order of consciousness and thus a seventh stage of social maturity.

To me the stages correspond neatly with the general eight-stage framework:

  1. The incorporative stage is all about the initial formation of a self concept that is different from world and the dawning of the subjective self or subjectivity.
  2. The impulsive stage is all about impulses that drive the self and with which one start identifying.
  3. The imperial stage is all about leveraging ones own interests vis-a-vis those of significant others. Here, there is awareness of others and interaction with them, but only as agents or obstacle- thus the persons are objectified and not treated as persons.
  4. The interpersonal stage is all about treating significant others as real people who can have as much desires, needs etc as one himself can. For the first time empathy comes into picture.
  5. The institutional stage is all about some values which one can abstract and make as guidelines for ones life. One realizes that people can have different values, but thinks that one’s own value system is the best/correct one.
  6. the inter-individual stage is all about appreciating that others can have different, yet equally valid value systems and for the first time one can be said to take the true perspective of another individual.
  7. the self-transforming stage is all about becoming aware that there are multiple value-systems suitable for different occasions and to become comfortable with contradictions in the value systems.
  8. The eighth stage I hypothesize would have to do with finding an integrity or integral perspective wherein one find that the value-systems one is using is holistic , despite contradictions and is able to resolve the apparent contradictions. One would see one as an object and there would be no subjectivity involved at all.

I’ll now briefly touch upon spiral dynamics, because in Kegan’s interview one of the spiral dynamics stages is equated with kegan’s stage/ order of consciousness.

Here again we find that there are eight stages , though unfortunately first six are grouped under tier I and the last 2 under tier II; while as per my framework only the flirts five should be in tier I and the last 3 in tier II.

They are :

Beige

Archaic-instinctive—survivalistic/automatic/reflexological
From 100,000 BC on
“Express self to meet imperative physiological needs through instincts of Homo sapiens.”

  • Purple

Animistic-tribalistic magical-animistic Tribal order
From 50,000 BC on
“Sacrifice to the ways of the elders and customs as one subsumed in group.”

  • Red

Egocentric-exploitive power gods/dominionist
From 7000 BC on
“Express self (impulsively) for what self desires without guilt and to avoid shame.”

  • Blue

Absolutistic-obedience mythic order—purposeful/authoritarian
From 3000 BC on
“Sacrifice self for reward to come through obedience to rightful authority in purposeful Way.”
(Amber is Ken Wilber’s current name for Blue)

  • Orange

Multiplistic-achievist scientific/strategic
From 1000 AD on (as early as 600 AD according to Graves and Calhoun)
“Express self (calculatedly) to reach goals and objectives without rousing the ire of important others.”

  • Green

Relativistic-personalistic—communitarian/egalitarian
From 1850 AD on (surged in early 20th century)
“Sacrifice self interest now in order to gain acceptance and group harmony.”

  • Yellow

Systemic-integrative
From 1950s on
“Express self for what self desires, but to avoid harm to others so that all life, not just own life, will benefit.”

  • Turquoise

Holistic
From 1970s on
A sacrifice self-interest system which is still forming

That should be enough for today!! Take the above spiral dynamics correlation with a pinch of salt, as Clare Graves on whose theory this work is build is explicit that these should not be confused with personality traits, though I am tempted to correlate this with the big eight and propose that when one gets stuck at lower level of development one has more of that trait in the negative direction.

Development of (Infant) Consciousness

I recently came across this poster by Douglas Newman, regarding the development of consciousness in human infants, present in the 10th annual meeting of Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. This paper outlined a 4 stage developmental model (though the accompanying website mentions a five stage model) and I will take some liberties and present the model somewhat in my five stage framework.

Douglas believes that self-touch is the basis for self-model, which is the basis for self-referential thinking, which is the basis for consciousness. The four stage he has has outlined in his poster are:

Stage 1: Use of touch to distinguish ‘self ‘ from ‘other’
Even before birth babies use touch to explore themselves and their environment. The double sensory input provided by self-touch enables them to distinguish themselves from their environment. Kinaesthetic information also enables them to distinguish between active touch sensations produced by their own movements and passive touch sensations not coupled with movements. As consciousness is not necessary for this process it is assumed to be pre-conscious.

Stage 2: 1-4 months: Constructing the physical self-model
Piaget (1952) observed what he called primary circular reactions: repeated actions involving self-touch that begin at about one-month. The author’s observations (reported in Page 4a of the web site) suggest that this behaviour is better described as a systematic exploration by a baby of his own body. The self-referential structure of the primary circular reactions has the form:
If I carry out action B then outcome C will be produced.
Repetitions and slight modifications of self-touching support the development of manipulative skills and the construction of a model of the self as a physical object

Stage 3: 4 months onwards Piaget’s secondary circular reactions mark the onset of dynamic and systematic interactions with the environment.
Piaget (1952) observed that, from about four months old, babies perform secondary circular reactions:repeating actions that involve external objects. Young babies demonstrate this behaviour if they are given access to an appropriate mechanism. Typically, the baby is enabled make a foot movement that actuates a mobile or makes a noise. Repetitions demonstrate the ability to predict action outcomes (or rewards) in a highly structured environment. The self-referential structure of the secondary circular reactions may be expressed as:
If, in my current situation (A), I carry out action B, outcome C will be produced.
For this to be an effective procedure it is necessary that situation A be recognised, that B is part of the baby’s repertoire of possible actions and that C be regarded as a reward. The essential step forward is that external objects are now involved in the self-referential loop.

Stage 4: 6 months onwards – motivation by success
It appears that, around this age, babies become motivated by success: they seek to demonstrate, both to themselves and interested adults, their ability to produce specific effects on their physical and/or social environment. This provides them with the first indication that they have the ability to effect their physical and social environment. This stage is also significant in that it allows the outcomes of actions to be expressed as changing the initial situation (A) to a final situation (C). Simple reasoning processes (observed from about 9 months) can now develop, comparable to those used by other great apes in using tools to achieve objectives.
Conceptualising the outcomes of actions as changes in situation supports the development of chaining – linking successive actions together to produce an overall (predicted) change in the environment.
One consequence of ‘motivation by success’ is the formation of an external world model, in which situations that provide possibilities for effective action are sought. This model necessarily incorporates self-referential aspects that will eventually be eliminated in the (ideally) objective model of the world employed by adults. An important consequence ‘motivation by success’ is that babies become active explorers of their environment. This becomes very apparent when they learn to walk.

Based from the website I can add a fifth stage:

Stage 5: Development of explicit self- and world-models is based on the motivational shift described above. This, and the recognition of agency in others, leads to cultural developments, including the use of symbolic representation and language.

Now this is very much close to the common developmental sub stages identified in the sensory motor stage identified by Piaget.

  1. Reflexive Stage (0-2 months) Simple reflex activity such as grasping, sucking. Motivation is. The instinctual habit of sucking thumb, for example leads to formation of thumb-is-my-own-body/self sort of concept.
  2. Primary Circular Reactions(2-4 months) Reflexive behaviors occur in stereotyped repetition such as opening and closing fingers repetitively. The primary motivation is self-agency. the fact that one can close and open fingers at will, leads to development of concept of self-will, an important ingredient of consciousness.
  3. Secondary Circular Reactions(4-8 months) Repetition of change actions to reproduce interesting consequences such as kicking one’s feet to move a mobile suspended over the crib. Here the motivation is primarily of pleasure. One moves the mobile as it is pleasurable to watch, makes a pleasurable noise.
  4. Coordination of Secondary Reactions(8-12 months) Responses become coordinated into more complex sequences. Actions take on an “intentional” character such as the infant reaches behind a screen to obtain a hidden object. Here the grand transition that Dougals talks about takes place- motivation is now dictated by predicting the worldly outcome and archiving success in actions. The motivation is for success and predictive in nature. Chaining of world events also happens in successfully forming a world representation.
  5. Tertiary Circular Reactions(12-18 months) . Discovery of new ways to produce the same consequence or obtain the same goal such as the infant may pull a pillow toward him in an attempt to get a toy resting on it. The motivation now is novelty – finding novel ways of doing the same thing. Here situation A leads to situation C, but action taken to make the transition may be B or D or E.

The time frames above are tentative and I believe one can observe tertiary reactions in children below 9 months of age. The cognitive revolution that Tomasello et al mention, at 9 months of age, when a children starts recognizing other people as intentional agents , leads to a phenomenal change in consciousness also. But that would be going to the sixth stage of my 8 stage developmental framework, probably taking us to pre-operational period. It definitely would mark a major transition.

I find the above theory of infant consciousness development tenable and compatible with my won framework. Would love to hear conflicting theories, frameworks.