Consciousness

A mother takes her six year old child to the zoo. Tatum has never been to the zoo before but at age 6 she knows what most of the animals look like from books and TV. Tatum is 3.5 feet tall and weighs 50 pounds. Mother and child stop opposite the elephant enclosure. An elephant stands 20 feet away separated by a low wall and a moat. The elephant is 12 feet tall and weighs 5 tons. Tatum looks at the elephant.

Let us consider what happens next. Like it or not, we all live in a swirling sea of electromagnetic radiation. These include radio waves, X-rays, microwaves, cell phone transmissions and light waves. Some pass through us and others bounce off . It would be a waste to process them all but as humans, we have evolved the capacity to process wavelengths from about 400-700 nanometers (billionths of a meter). This is the visible light spectrum from violet to red. Light from the elephant is focused by the lens in our eye onto the inside of the back of the eyeball, the retina. The image is upside down but that is not the strangest thing. The cells of the photoreceptors covert the electromagnetic radiation to nerve signals. Elephant data is digitized into a staccato stream of impulses racing along the million fibres in each optic nerve, in total darkness. Note well that the elephant did not enter Tatum's brain, coded impulses did. The nerve impulses travel backwards via the optic chiasm to form the optic tract around the midbrain and on to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), then to the optic radiation and on to the primary visual cortex. The visual signals are processed here and the next thing Tatum knows is that the elephant appears in her visual perceptual space. Tatum is the percipient, but what and where is the percept, i.e. the elephant? Milliseconds before the percept appeared all the information describing the elephant consisted of nerve signals; the brain did not construct a flesh and blood pachyderm! Tatum's neurons exist in physical space but the percept itself is not a physical object in physical space; it is a non-physical construct in non-physical space. The percept is also scale free, it has no size. A 5 ton elephant will not fit into the head of a 50 pound child.

The real, physical elephant is 20 feet away from Tatum and the visual image enjoyed by Tatum seems to correspond with that estimated distance. However, we know that the neural machinery producing the percerpt is in the brain, so is the percept inside or outside Tatum's brain?

The answer is neither.

To assign a location in physical space, either inside or outside the skull, to a nonphysical object in non-physical space, is a non sequitur. As Bertrand Russell pointed out 90 years ago, "Physical and perceptual space have relations, but they are not identical, and failure to grasp the difference between them is a potent source of confusion" (6). An enormous amount of time and effort have been wasted in the search for the fabled anatomical correlate of consciousness.

We now need to consider some aspects of vertebrate brain evolution before we can understand what is going on. During the past 500,000,000 years we have evolved from fish like creatures into the Homo sapiens of today. The story is punctuated by giant leaps forward, the appearance of limbs, migration to dry land and mammalian thermoregulation being a few examples. Generally speaking the brain has enlarged while retaining its position at the "sharp" end of the animal. Brain waves travel quite quickly but they are still slower than light speed by a factor of about 1,000,000. It therefore behoves the creature to keep the neurons coordinating the senses as compact as possible thus reducing communication speed. Whether it be predator or prey, an animal will benefit from the rapid sorting of incoming sensory signals.

During our animal studies we discovered an additional feature of the evolving vertebrate brain. Not only did the attractor dimension increase during evolutionary time but in humans, the dimension recorded correlated roughly with the number of senses being employed. (The attractor describes the moment to moment balance of forces involved in the neurodynamics and its measurement is reported elsewhere. (4) (Fig. 1). The attractor of a pendulum is a circle; as other forces enter the equation, the attractor becomes more complex and its dimension increases.

In humans, we checked back in the records to discover the brain activity reported by the subject at the time of the Electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. We found a positive corellation between the numberof dimensions and the number of senses engaged. (Fig. 2) The "League Table" spread between "Laser Brain" and "Scatterbrain". The lowest dimension was seen in a Zen priest meditating (Figs 2 and 3)

EEG Attractor Dimension Estimate

"Scatterbrain"

Multitasking. 4.8

Big Gestalt. 3.2

Small Gestalt. 2.8

Mental Math. 2.2

Burst of Volition. 2.1

Yoga Meditation. 2.0

Lords Prayer. 1.97

Zen Meditation 1.3

"Laser Brain"

Figure. 2 "League Table" shows increasing attractor dimension as more senses are incorporated. A gestalt is a combined sensory experience, for example seeing and hearing at the same time.

Notice that with mental arithmatic the brain is working hard but the mind is focussed hence the low dimension of 2.2. In the small gestalt, only two senses are involved and in the big gestalt, four senses are involved, hearing, vision, taste and smell.

Why has the brain evolved this way? Why does the brain need to employ non-physical space at all? The sensory system of an animal must gather the maximum information for survival at the least possible cost. We have considered Tatum's vision but what about the other senses? For example, vision senses electromagnetic radiation, the sense of smell involves chemical analysis while hearing analyses vibrations in the air or water surrounding the creature. Animals do not sample their environments sequentially; they would be eaten before they were half way through deciding where the predator was. They employ "binding", that is the bundling of information so that multiple senses may be processed at the same time. Our league table suggests that binding is accomplished by allocating approximately one dimemsion in the brain's neurodynamics to each sense. In this way visual information and auditory information for example, may be appreciated simultaneously without one contaminating the other. The non-physical perceptual space provides common ground for this to happen. Non-physical space is also "elastic" enough to accommodate up to 5D. This would be impossible in physical space. The accumulation of sensory data in non-physical perceptual space helps to explain another conumdrum; "How is it possible for binding of information to occur when the brain areas processing the information are in different unconnected locations?" (Figs. 4, 5, 6).

The realization that perceptual space may exist in a higher dimensional immediately presents the next problem.

How may a 3D person process information that might exist in a higher dimension than they themeves exist? We probably live in a 3D physical universe because receeding galaxies obey the inverse square law. Small, curled up, higher physical...