Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Subjects and objects; metaphysics, biology, consciousness, and cognition.




Subjects and objects; metaphysics, biology, consciousness, and cognition.

Seán Ó Nualláin 

Freeman Lab,
Department of Molecular & Cell Biology
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley CA 94720-3206 USA
tel 1-510-642-4220  fax 1-510-643-9290

Published in Biosemiotics journal, Volume 2, Pp. 239-251


Abstract

Over the past half-century, the Freeman laboratory has accumulated a large volume of data and a correspondingly extensive interpretive framework centered around an alternative perspective on
brain function, that of dynamical systems. The purpose of this paper is first briefly to summarise this work, and bring it into dialogue with other perspectives. We end with a causal view of consciousness  qua process as a force. The contents of consciousness, by contrast, are seen as an inevitably sparse sample of events in the perception-action cycle. The paper proceeds to an attempt to elucidate the contents of this sparse  sample. A critical concept is that of selfhood, and how it presents itself phenomenologically. It is argued that our experience of selfhood is an artifact of the necessity of preservation of subject/object relations.  As this part of metaphysics has been badly misunderstood, we  scrutinise it at some length in quantum mechanics, biology, and cognition. The paper then proceeds to outline a view on how selfhood is best considered wrt the immune response. This is interrelated with phenomenology, and some data are adduced to support this central hypothesis. Finally, consequences for the social sciences in general are hinted at.


1 Introduction


In recent years, we at Freeman laboratory (Freeman 1975, 2000, 2007) have teased out the consequences of the dynamical  approach to cognition and consciousness at some length.  In Freeman (2005a ) we established  that local dynamics in rabbit and human neocortex are scale-free, and that every skilled action involves all cortex and basal ganglia in varying degree. Self-similarity from the microscopic to the macroscopic levels of the cortex allows the cortex to change state very quickly. Freeman (2002)  introduces the notion of a wave packet, amplitude modulation of which constitutes
the expression of knowledge, which is stored in synaptic modifications and expressed by phase
 transitions.  Freeman (op.cit., 517) also makes the radical contention that we do not need
 independent access to the external world for communication to occur; it is sufficient that the
internal meanings in speaker and hearer  come transiently into harmony.

In recent work, we have elaborated on the notion of consciousness as it fits into classical physics. It is hypothesised that consciousness is best regarded as a force, perceived like other forces through volitional activities of the psychophysical entities that we are. The felt experience of consciousness is constrained by the fact that the cortex operates discontinuously, with “shutter” states interspersed with the generation of wave packets (Freeman 2007). Moreover, while eschewing the technical apparatus of decoherence, recent work has adopted quantum field theory (Freeman et al, 2006c) to explain the phenomenon of anomalous dispersion in the brain. Just as the vibration induced by a blow will reach the other side of a solid object at a different time to the sound thereof, wave packets show properties of transmission independent of neural impulse itself. In fact, the brain behaves in ways not dissimilar to a boson.

Freeman (2005b) introduces several other  leitmotiven.  Globally coherent brain activity may be
 an objective correlate of consciousness through preafference. Preafference, in turn, enters once
the more veridical notion of circular causality is substituted for the stimulus-response act.
Briefly, once an action is lined up, the brain prepares the system for the sensory consequences of this action in the preafference process. The consequences for consciousness qua process are enormous.

Essentially, Hume was right; there is no conscious will, but there does exist a conscious “won't”. Agency as a concept needs to be correspondingly attenuated; when the intending of an act presents itself to consciousness, it is experienced as a cause;consciousness of the consequences thereof are experienced as effects. This vastly consequential idea is revisited below in the context of the late Benjamin Libet's (1994) classic work.

 What we assert, then,  is that conscious states comprise a sparse sample of the wave packets that embody motor commands, corollary discharges, and pre-perceptions that we conceive as unconscious. We accept the idea, pioneered by Piaget (1954, P. 434) that  “thought in its various aspects reproduces on its own plane the processes....in the case of sensorimotor intelligence and the structure of the initial practical universe” Wave packets embodying motor commands are the substratum for mathematical and other abstract thought. Furthermore, focal consciousness samples at far too slow a rate to give veridical access to  the contents of our cortices, and nature has gifted us various mechanisms to get around this, some  of which are mentioned below.





2 Subjects and Objects

2.0 Introduction


The Vedanta tradition in Hinduism is monist to the point of apparent folly. There is one entity, the Self, which is synonymous with Being, Reality, and consciousness. Adepts in Vedanta are trained to change their  habits of proprioception to experience their bodies as continuous with the physical world outside. (As it happens, of course, our body image is quite malleable along these lines. See Ramachandran et al, 1998). Vedantins are similarly encouraged to view their minds, as if from outside, as a set of disconnected thoughts given spurious unity by a pseudo “I”. Again, contemporary cognitive science can countenance this (Gazzaniga, 1995); we go through the day narrating to ourselves  a set of fictions about what is happening to us that posits ourselves inappropriately as chief protagonist in events which are far beyond our control. Where Vedanta goes off the page, as might be expected, is in its confrontation with quantum mechanics (QM). Haines in James Joyce’s Ulysses comments that Shakespeare is a happy hunting-ground for a  mind that has lost its balance; such minds may now turn to QM.

This is all the more true in that Qm initially seems to confirm the most egregious extremes of Vedanta. Reality is boundless, non-specific, spread out over time and space; so is the wave function prior to observation. Von Neumann (1955) famously proved that the boundary between S and O could be placed anywhere in the paradigmatic task of observation in QM; as the experimenter and her observing apparatus are themselves made of the same sub-atomic particles as the putative object, the line between S and O can be put anywhere.  In fact, it can be put between a disincarnate pure consciousness and a world coming into existence instant by instant. Alternatively, the weaker claim can be made that the identity of the wave function just before breakdown and the observer just before observation parallels the Vedantin’s positing of identity between Brahman, external Reality, and Atman, the individual soul.


The analogy can be continued, and perhaps even lived out. We do not seem to need biology in this description of human existence. While we feel that the notion of a ‘molecular nirvana principle’ (Balazs, 2004) is somewhat extravagant, it does posit an alternative route to solving the symbol-matter dichotomy, with some reference to personal experience, however strained. Stapp (in press) does not cavil at a Leibnizian dualism; his quantum interactive dualism posits “two entirely different types of realities, mental and physical, which interact”.  His adaptation of Von Neumann (1955) was slightly less extreme; the subject could be attenuated to physical neural processes supporting the contents of consciousness, and the system the rest of the experimenter's psychophysical apparatus and the  object being observed.

It is not the business of this current paper to adjudicate between the ontological and epistemological interpretations of QM; briefly, the former states that the Qm experiment can reveal where the particle is, while the latter does not assert that reality is cognitively penetrable at this level, and is content with operational knowledge. The latter also allows for state-vector reduction in the absence of conscious observers; this objective reduction can be implemented by a mechanism like spontaneous localization.  Let us be clear; the ontological interpretation allows for a universe generated at Planck time intervals through some kind of cosmic observation process, just as objective reduction allows this to occur by a mechanism like spontaneous localization. There is little need for biology to mediate between subject and object in these Olympian perspectives.

 One task of this paper is to reintroduce biology in as principled a form as possible at all levels of description.  For Pattee (2001), the paradigmatic subject-object distinction belongs to Biology; it is the other disciplines that will have to phrase their analogous distinctions in terms created by the biological science. The central problem of life for Pattee is how symbolic structures can control dynamics. He posits as his central concept an “epistemic cut”, a distinction between rate-independent symbols and the rate-dependent dynamics that they control. This epistemic cut is discernible for him in the relation between genotype and phenotype, observer and observed in QM, and indeed mind and brain. Conversely, the problem of measurement is mapping from the latter dynamics to a single symbolic entity; in the case of QM, that is to be a single real number.

Our central concerns here are different to Pattee’s valuable contributions to the issue of the origin of life itself. The central argument in Ó Nualláin et al (2007)  is that, just as natural language processing by computer(nlp) failed because of its inability to handle the problem of context, so also is the general problem of gene expression likely to prove intractable.  Moreover, Pattee’s subsuming of all the issues involved under the general rubric of “the epistemic cut” is naïve. The problem of how symbols mean something is a “semantic” problem (Freeman, 2002). The problem of how they relate to the external world, including controlling processes, is a often a subset of this issue, a “pragmatic” problem (ibid).  The problem of the correct sequencing of symbols is a syntactic problem (ibid.). At times in nlp, context becomes so restricted that both semantic and pragmatic relations can be elicited from syntax alone.

At one extreme, then, we have the Vedantin’s non-biological link straight from consciousness to all aspects of reality without the mediation of Biology. At the other, we have Pattee’s salutary emphasis of the reality of our existence as biological creatures, with the caveat that his vocabulary needs to acquire a finer grain. To wit; the metaphysical problem is the general issue of the relation between subjects and objects, and includes the conundrum of observer status in Qm. Must an entity be conscious to be an observer, or can any substantial entity, organic or not, obtain this status? Indeed, is observation necessary at all, or does spontaneous localization of the wave function occur to pre-empt its necessity? Secondly, the semantic problem is the problem of how symbols mean something, which subsumes the pragmatic issue of how they relate to the world.  This has been a bugbear in Cognitive Science and AI for a generation (O Nualláin, 2003,  143-144, 208-209). Both fields have had some success in cognition at the subsymbolic level, where links between organism and environment are not preprogrammed in any strong sense, and emerge through experience. We currently hide our ignorance of the specific processes that obtain through invoking almost as shibboleths “dynamical systems”, “emergent behaviours”, “complexity”, “self-organisation”, and so on.  The task of unpacking these words into something resembling hard science may take a generation, and we began this paper with some preliminary attempts.

At a more macro level, a distinction between systems that re tightly coupled to their environment and “decoupled” architectures that are more likely to be explicitly symbolic  has correctly been stressed by Tirassa et al in their contributions in  (O Nualláin, ed., 2000). A final shibboleth, another indication of our ignorance, in nlp is “context”, which  relates a fortiori to decoupled/symbolic processes. This concept is central also to the problem of gene expression (Ó Nualláin and Richard Strohman (2007)  )This, the semantic problem, in turn needs to be distinguished from the ontological problem, which arises when subject, object, or both are conscious. At the phenomenological level, this has been stressed by French existentialists like Sartre (“Hell is other people”) and, far less melodramatically, by Merleau-Ponty’s (1942, 1945) careful analysis of the flow of information between subject and world. Below, and in O Nualláin (forthcoming) argue in this context that our sense of self, when coherent and familiar, is an indication that the brain has succeeded in successfully differentiating the information impinging on the organism into that which is useful and that which is not. Finally, the epistemological problem is the general problem of objectivity, the relationship between mind and world. Let us now review these issues systematically, from QM through biology.


2.1 State-vector reduction in QM


This writer gives a more detailed run through of this material in O Nualláin (2004, Pp 74-82).  However, it behooves us here to familiarise ourselves with a theory of the ultimate nature of physical reality so bizarre that vedantins seem at least to have a point.  The paradigmatic QM measurement  involves these three steps;

1.      Preparation of the system
2.      Evolution
3.      Measurement

Evolution is time-reversible; it is possible to get back to the starting point. The wave function is a potentially infinite set of terms with complex number weightings. Measurement involves asking a simple yes/no question.  Obviously, the massive number of terms is going to be collapsed into a single real number. More fundamentally, the operation of matrix multiplication involved produces a large number of cross-products which are ignored in the calculation of the ultimate value.  This loss of information is called “decoherence” and makes the experiment time-irreversible at this point. Again at this point, a break from classical mechanics has been made.

It is important to note that there is no need for a human or indeed sentient observer in many interpretations of QM. Any physical body of a certain body may be said to have “observer” status; the “dynamic reduction” ethos claims a spontaneous series of wave-function breakdowns; according to the Bohmian model, a “guide wave” probes the environment for information which is used to regulate the nature of the state vector reduction. It is fair to say that we are not going to be biologically enlightened by these lines of inquiry

2.2 Gene Expression


For Strohman (2000, 2003) , the classic account by which genotype can be determined from phenotype and vice versa is extremely incomplete. He refers to work by Veech et al (2001) that examined metabolic control.  This painstaking work gave the lie to the simplistic story by which a single enzyme is pre-selected to be rate-limiting, and thus switches particular genes on and off. The situation is much more complex in our brave new world; any enzyme may be rate-limiting under various conditions. In Strohman (2000) the new scenario is made abundantly clear;

“Complex organizational states exist where, as we now realise, there also exist networks of regulatory proteins capable of organising patterns of gene-expression and much other emergent cellular behaviour in a context-dependent way”

We have  seen  that  for Ó Nualláin and Strohman (2007)   the same story applies for language. Strohman has recently received support from researchers like Bentolila (2005) who argue that “operational information” is a province of the cell body and its “cytoplasmic regulatory protein components”  (ibid), just as  much as it is one of the DNA database. Enzymes like NAD can sense the bioenergetic status of the cell at a given moment and in fact regulate the flow of information between genes. Each act of gene-expression exploits the entire experience of the cell. That is also the case for nlp by humans, and is ultimately reflected at a phenomenological level as subjective experience.

As we have seen, attempts by researchers like Howard Pattee (2001) to find a continuity from state-vector reduction in physics through gene-expression to the relation between mind and world, though interesting, are misguided.  The relation between subject and object in physics can be mediated by the well-understood mathematics of Hilbert spaces; there are specific restrictions, for example, on the types of operators allowed for wave-function evolutions (unitary operators) and breakdown (Hermitian operators).  No rules as principled as that are discernible for gene expression; at best, the mathematics of complex systems may become a bit less opaque as we are forced to familiarise ourselves with them over the next several generations. The case of mind and world is worse again; more sophisticated thinkers like Walter Freeman (2002), as we have seen, doubt that we can ever link thought to object in the external world, even in the best possible case. The most we can hope for is to describe the brain state corresponding to the subjects’ personal experience of the environment, an experience that will inevitably be idiosyncratic to that subject.  For gene expression, language is the most appropriate analogy.

2.3 The Immune system

The quintessential biological locus  of subject/object distinction is the immune system. Since  Metchnikoff in the late nineteenth century, the role of phagocytes in maintaining the integrity of biological entities has been well attested. Burnet’s is essentially the prevalent view of immunological selfhood.  Edelman followed this up with the notion that  the recognizing system first generates a diverse population of antibody molecules and then selects ex post facto those that fit or match (Tauber 2006 is a reasonable history of these ideas)

Related to our work is the notion that meaning then just as  the immune system is determined by the number and position of appropriate B lymphocytes in the whole of the organism, the meaning state of a particular antigen occupies the whole of the immune system in much the same way that Freeman argues informational meaning states (and indeed consciousness) occupy the whole brain. Yet Tauber (1997), aware of challenges to the classical view of self from postmodern thought, wishes ultimately to complicate the scenario. To some extent, this current paper is an exploration of the extent to which the immune system metaphor can be applied to cognition and consciousness; Tauber (opus. citatum., 424) argues that Jerne's work is essentially an exploration of the immune system qua cognitive system. In that context, the comment (ibid., 427) that the immune and nervous systems have the same messenger molecules and are highly integrated is intriguing.

The immune system knows only itself; the notion of the other, foreign matter, is a concept of invasion or degeneracy (425). The truly alien would not be processed at all. Moreover, the perception of foreign matter, the epitope, is context-dependent. Tauber finds a postmodern echo in the work of Varela et al in the Santa Fe institute (Perelson, 1988). The Santa work emphasises that selfhood is constructed through life, and is not a once and for all event as the Edelman immunological work would have us believe.

We wish to extend this argument. In engineering terms, we often have to learn immensely complex tasks in which there is little room for conscious feedback. For example, the conventional wisdom as expressed by Libet (1994) is that there is a time lag of 350ms before we become conscious of a desire to act. There is then a 200 ms interval during which we are conscious of the readiness to act, and can veto it. While there is no desire here to question Libet's findings, which usually related to experimental subjects' voluntarily moving a finger, the fact remains that half a second is an eternity for skilled action. Currently, tennis players of both genders can serve at over 190 km/h; in a half-second the ball is gone over the receivers' baseline. Yet skilled players can line up a return and hit it with accuracy during that interval.

Somehow, we manage also to accrete skills, while maintaining a coherent sense of self as our performance improves. Indeed, failure to perform at the highest level of which we are capable is intuitively felt as personal inauthenticity before being articulable. Similarly, we manage to process microgestures lasting as little as a fortieth of a second while being unable to report any stimulus lasting shorter than a tenth of a second.

The argument here, then, is that humans have found ways around the slow, serial nature of consciousness and can recruit unconscious mechanisms in the pursuit of certain goals.





2.4Cognition

It is probably not an exaggeration to say that, within the cognitive sciences, we are still recovering from Descartes.  The central mistake in Cartesian theories of mind is to roll all possible aspects of the subject/object relation, that is  the metaphysical, epistemological, and symbolic into one crude cut. Conversely, non-human biological nature was reduced to res extensa,  on a continuum with inanimate nature. Pattee's work (2001) goes a long way to rectify this. The Cartesian error is indeed greater still, and extends to the hylomorphic, to use an old scholastic term.  Res cogitans  and  res extensa
are proposed to be different in degree of spiritualisation, with the angels being the former to the  total exclusion of the latter. These mistakes are not present in the Thomist views that Descartes presumed to supercede.

An understandable reaction is to fight fire with fire, and to attenuate the disincarnate subject. This can be done by asserting that many so-called mental contents are “out there” in the external world, to be picked up as affordances (Gibson, 1979).  In this vein, Merleau-Ponty (1942, 1945) attempted to describe subject/object relations at a “coupled” level, to use the terminology in  O Nuallain (2000). What we wish to do now is to propose a framework in which both “coupled” and “decoupled” cognition can be countenanced. It is argued that selfhood can best biologically be naturalised as analogous to the immune response. We then proceed to observe some experimental and simulation data showing the brain processes that our consciousness samples.


The writer is fully aware of the lacunae in the theory of embodied cognitive science, and considers it
important briefly to address them. While the Cartesian disembodied homunculus is undoubtedly an
absurdity, the notion of cognition in which there is a sharp distinction between subject and object –
including abstract thought  - is not absurd, and such thought does happen.  Let us be clear; the distinction is epistemological, not ontological as Descartes’s conventional interpreters would
have it, and there is no dualist subtext here.  Neither Heidegger’s “dasein” nor Merleau-Ponty’s
“esprit incarnée”  catered for the possibility of this distinction, and the inability to handle thought
that is both symbolic and situated has hampered cognitive science (O Nuallain, 2003). This is
exemplified not just in the work of Gibson, but the embodied robotics schools like those of Brooks,
 and the contrasting projects like CYC.  One starting-point is to consider the various types of
 relationship that can arise between organism and environment in navigation, and then extend this
reasoning to the symbolic level (see introduction in O Nuallain, 2000).  

The following section extends this line of reasoning. Finally on this point, while it is argued elsewhere (Freeman 2005a)  that neural networks should concede some ground to the dynamical approach, it is undoubtedly the case that the central idea of distributing symbolic entities and processes over a set of disparate units undoubtedly leads to  certain cognitively veridical phenomena like the neural network
simulation of senile dementia.

Elsewhere (O Nuallain, forthcoming), the writer  attempts to open dialogue with those who, while perhaps disagreeing with the details of the Cartesian Meditations, insist that Descartes got the method andgranularity of analysis correct. In fact, Strawson (2006) goes rather further, and wishes to
rehabilitate the great Frenchman. In our viewpoint, Descartes's' error is simultaneously more subtle
and more egregious that seems at first the case; far from being a disincarnate, masterful “punctual”
 self as described by Locke,  the experience of self is essentially that of maintaining intact subject-object relations. This forms the leitmotif of section 3 here.


3.0          Self as gatekeeper


The child manages to differentiate the physical body from the world outside in the first such
achievement; when this experience is recapitulated, a tacit sense of self enters consciousness.
Similarly, in skill learning, we have to maintain previous achievements under the rubric of a sense
of ego-consistent versus ego-alien; this is not how I hit a backhand, I need to get back to myself.
Only from these tacit directives can we construct new skills; conversely, absent brain damage,
nature does not allow us to regress to previously achieved relations of subject and object.

When wave packets propagate, previous experiences of selfhood are recapitulated, sampled at rates
 much faster than normal focal consciousness. They are reported back to us merely as ego-consonant
 versus ego-dissonant (to use perhaps better terms). This goes for physical skill-learning, from the
most basic operations like walking to the finest musical performance, as it does for explicit, symbolic
belief-systems. So self as gatekeeper , preventing us from being overwhelmed by data ,  is the
unifying concept through all of this.



Damasio (1999, P. 79) is concerned with establishing how our experience of qualia can include a sense of self;

“The brain uses structures designed to map both the organism and external objects to create a fresh, second-order representation....it presents within the mental process the information that the organism is the owner of the mental process”

So, as he continues, “objective brain processes knit the subjectivity of the conscious mind out of the cloth of sensory mapping” (ibid.)

Damasio separates selfhood into two aspects; one related to  a core consciousness, located perhaps in the upper brain stem and hypothalamus, and an extended, autobiographical consciousness, ceaselessly re-created for each object with which the brain interacts. The latter might, he suggests,  involve the cingulate cortex.

Tauber (2006) is concerned with emphasising the contingent, socially conditioned nature of selfhood and recruits Charles Taylor (1989) to his cause. Taylor (ibid.) argues that political structures require the notion of a “punctual” self; masterful in that it can control the rest of the organism, and also introspectively available, to be reflected upon as necessary. More radically, Marxist critics would argue that it is economic forces that generate selves. We of course disagree with this latter presupposition, though its radical nature is not inconsistent with the rest of this paper.

Let us now look at some of the relevant experimental evidence. We have recently extended the findings in Freeman (2006a) which shows that 3-7 times a second, the brain approaches a limit attractor cycle at which any external signal is amplified as the noise abates at the singularity. Consequently,  there is no need to invoke stochastic resonance to explain how extremely weak signals get detected. At this point, the phase is undefined and background noise is  minimised.  Remarkably, we have established that one can usefully simulate neural activity as white noise, approximated at the mesoscopic level as brown noise, and the resulting activity shows remarkable parallels with real data in its being filtered through gamma-rate EEG (figures 1a and 1b);

Figure 1a; real data, filtered at the gamma level.



Figure 1b; simulated data, same scale, again at gamma level



It might indeed be argued that these maximally sensitive states are a result of brown noise being filtered at a certain ratio of the Nyquist. But how does this relate to the main themes of this paper? It is being claimed that consciousness is a sparse sample of overwhelming volumes of data buffeting the organism from instant to instant. Moreover, the sparseness of this sample apotheosises in intuitive feelings that can be described only as ego-consistent or ego-alien. We experience the cognitive equivalent of T-cell activity when the going gets sparse; recent work on microgestures indicates that such experience is indispensable in allowing us function in the world. In particular, we seem to be able to identify con-artists through the activity of these fast unconscious processes that reveal to consciousness only the half-glimpsed  fact that something is  amiss. 

What then of our rich mental life?We weave a narrative placing ourselves at the center of our world, and ascribing considerable agency, often totally inappropriately, to ourselves. What we in essence are is a moot point, and the Marxist notion on this point is by no means without merit, as Cushman has indicated in his critique of contemporary American culture (O Nuallain, 2003, 248) . In fact, Vedanta goes so far as to say at a psychological level that self is awareness itself, and its exercises can be seen as attempts to stabilise one's self-identification at the cutting-edge of subject and object, force itself. On that point, it is worth noting that the vast and confusing literature on the physiology of meditation is beginning to throw up the hypothesis that its deeper levels involve prolonged periods of zero amplitude, null spikes as above in figs 1a and 1b but extended over seconds and then minutes.

We are converging in scientific terms toward a notion of consciousness as force, and self as utterly labile, capable of being precisely the perception of the effects of that force. What remains to be discussed is the nature of the world which is presented to this bare consciousness. That will require an inventory of what is “out there” in the consensual social world, and will be the subject of a much longer paper than this.



4 Conclusion

Above all, this paper concerns itself with the linkage between mind and matter. At the quantum level, the palette of options available includes the (mis?)application of the ontological interpretation to yield a universe generated by a cosmic mind. Inevitably, one is at least operationally committed to a less grandiose view once experiments on the relation between the cognizer and its world begins. Having reviewed QM, we looked at Pattee's work, which is reminiscent of symbolic AI, with rate-independent symbols controlling rate-dependent processes. That this for Pattee is the quintessential subject/object and indeed mind/matter relation, subsuming QM, gene expression, and cognition motivated us to examine all these fields in a little more detail. We found that his work in uninformative in the QM context, where the mathematical apparatus provided by Heisenberg and Schrodinger is agnostic wrt his work. Gene expression itself turns out a great deal more complex than his work might suggest; finally, cogntion admits of a contrast between decoupled and coupled, egocentric and allocentric, all of which terms must be engaged with.

The immune system provided some guidance. In particular, a narrative along these lines seems possible; the experience of self is an immunological process in the cognitive system. A consonant feeling of self arises from appropriate exclusion of ego-alien material. Superimposed on this simple process, we create a narrative attributing agency and potency to ourselves, most of the time (if not always) inappropriately (Libet, 1994). The self as built up by socioeconomic forces, with its immersion in nature, depths, and orientation to the good as described in Taylor (1989) is a virtual system built from these modest beginnings.

Therefore, selfhood is built from sketchily sampled data, events that occur far faster than the conscious moment of perhaps 0.1 seconds. Experimental work (Freeman, opera cit)indicates that during periods of maximal sensitivity – the null spikes of 1a and 1b above – the entire cortex can be destabilised in 0.003 seconds. Absent the processing resources of focal consciousness, we are left with qualia indexing self-consistent versus self-alien as our best guide. Conversely, there does seem to exist the possibility that trained meditators can keep the amplitude of the EEG at zero for some time, allowing the self to identify with pure observation, devoid of contents, while maintaining exquisite sensitivity.

What then is the relationship between subject and object? Where there exists a neat semantic characterisation of the domain, precisely as Howard Pattee describes; rate-independent symbols with reference in the outside world. A fair analogy, and one that indicates how rare this is, might be the fact that only 2% of diseases have been found to have a precise genetic correlate. The other 98% of the time, the symbols are being affected by contextual factors; metabolic  processes in the case of gene expression, and “world knowledge” in the case of human symbolic operation. The latter also is itself the apotheosis of a distancing from the world, initially achieved by “decoupling” from the realities of Gibsonian affordances.

Finally, we come to the messy reality of our actual existence. Here we use the virtual machine surrounding  selfhood to guide us. The social and other realities that we encounter are indeed, as Piaget claimed, the results of internalisations of physical experience.Much of our knowledge is beyond conscious access; indeed, it would be impossible to function otherwise. As we behave, we rely on a lifetime of previous learning, the results of which are presented to us, instant by instant, as self-consistent versus self-alien. We can indeed unpack these intuitions, given time, and find their origin in previous learning experience; modern life rarely affords us what has become almost this luxury.


While the ontological interpretation still stands as a possible viewpoint, and mind/matter dualism is entirely logically defensible, in this writer's opinion it behooves us to consider what the disciplines surveyed in this paper have to say before multiplying entities unnecessarily, to adapt William of Ockham. It is indeed possible that we will find acts of cognition that require an ontological or otherwise QM characterisation, but they will be in a tiny minority. It is appropriate first to look for developmental disciplines which focus on our  embodiment and situatedness, and possessors of a nervous system that has evolved over billions of years to do very different things from what we are currently doing.









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