Origin of the Conscious Mind

by Dave Howard
revised 7/5/2019

Emergentist theories of mind, those which propose that consciousness emerges synchronically with neonate brain development or that it emerged diachronically as biological matter evolved, have been unable to account for the phenomenon of experience which accompanies psychological behavior systems—that which makes it like something to be a conscious organism. Dubbed the hard problem by David Chalmers, it is generally cited as a compelling reason to reject theories proposing that consciousness emerges from physical and wholly non-conscious reality. Chalmers wrote:
It still seems utterly mysterious that the causation of behavior should be accompanied by a subjective inner life. We have good reason to believe that consciousness arises from physical systems such as brains, but we have little idea of how it arises, or why it exists at all. How could a physical system such as a brain be an experiencer? Why should there be something it is like to be such a system? (Chalmers, 1996, p.xi)
He points out that most books and papers written about the subject today deal mainly with easy problems such as how "the brain processes environmental stimulation" and/or the integration of information. These may be easy problems, and doubtless important ones, "but to answer them is not to solve the hard problem: Why is all this processing accompanied by an experienced inner life?" (Chalmers, 1996, p.xii)

It has been thought that if mentality were to have a physical origin it would be produced somehow in and by the brain—selection pressure would bring about its emergence at some point in the evolution of life. This assumption arguably locates the mind within a causal chain linking consciousness with the body, replacing Cartesian dualism with a materialistic  monism. But does the brain actually create consciousness? It is impossible to deny that we are conscious, and it is nearly as impossible to deny that the brain has something to do with it, yet with the  recent technological progress of robotics one can't help wondering whether consciousness might never have been an evolutionary requirement. Cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad puts it this way:
 If organisms were indeed mindless, then there would only be the “easy problem” of explaining how and why organisms can do all those things they can do (swim, fly, learn, communicate) . . . . But if organisms do have minds, the hard problem is to explain how and why such survival/reproduction machines would evolve minds: What is the added causal role and adaptive value of having a mind, over and above the causal role and adaptive value of just having the behavioral capacities themselves, to do whatever needs doing in order to survive and reproduce: those behavioral capacities that the slow but growing successes of modern robotics are showing to be implementable mindlessly. . . .(Harnad, 2016)
Irrespective of whether consciousness in fact emerges from physical components and processes in the brain there is an epistemological problem which is responsible for the hard problem. Theories about emergence of consciousness assume that a correlation could be found between an occurrence in the brain and a subject's report of a conscious event or events. They further assume that the brain event causes the mind event and that the causal relation stands in need of explanation. Something occurs in the collection of physical elements comprising a brain (it is surmised) which causes experience to happen. The arising of this conscious experience is called 'emergence'. The explanation of emergence must describe how the event or series of events which results in the production of consciousness in the subject's mind from ordinary non-conscious physical elements is caused. 

For Descartes this problem didn't exist because God solved it. The human soul (non-human animals have none) was not created from matter, and it lacked the extension in space characteristic of material bodies. It was supplied by God one conception at a time and its existence was deduced by Descartes in a reductio argument based on the claim that thought can't think of its own non-existence without contradiction. Critical to this argument was the way Descartes defined 'soul' as consciousness, mind, mentality, or thought. In the Latin edition of the Meditations Descartes alternately used "mind' (mens) and 'soul' (anima) to indicate the same thing. In the later French translation he conflated 'mind' (esprit) and 'soul' (âme) for, he said, "I make no distinction between them." (Cottingham, et al, p. 10) The soul's existence was thus guaranteed by definition, and its provenance by God. Its  manifestation was incorporeal.

An early critic of the insubstantiality of consciousness was Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. A frequent correspondent of Descartes with an acute and abiding interest in philosophy she wasted little time in writing to him. He had failed, as she saw it, to provide a straightforward explanation of bidirectional causal communication between the soul and the body. She wrote:
how can "the human soul ... act on the spirits of the body in order to perform voluntary actions (since it is purely a thinking substance). For it seems to me that movement can be produced only by an impulsion applied to the thing moved, by the manner in which it is impelled by the thing that moves it, or by the quality and shape of the latter’s surface. The first two situations require contact, the third extension. You altogether exclude the latter from your notion of the soul, and the former seems to me incompatible with an immaterial thing. For which reason I am asking you for a more detailed definition of the soul than you provide in your Metaphysics, that is to say, of its substance, as distinct from its action, thought."
She therefore felt that the soul must be a physical, or material, substance:
I admit that it would be easier for me to ascribe matter and extension to the soul, than to credit an immaterial being with the capacity to  move bodies and be affected by them.
Elisabeth's concern was prologue to nearly four centuries of growing skepticism regarding Descartes' incorporeal characterization of consciousness. Following Elisabeth, Descartes' dualism was rejected by (for example) Hobbes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Nietszche, James, Russell, and many others. Most who study consciousness today believe the ultimate explanation will find consciousness to be a part of the natural physical world.

It is hard to understand what selection pressure there may have been to cause consciousness to evolve. And if consciousness began to develop after life had started it seems there would be a cut-off point somewhere in the evolutionary record on one side of which would be organisms with minds and on the other side those without.

Perhaps consciousness was there all along. In The Principles of Psychology William James rejected the idea that the evolutionary succession could contain some organisms with and some without consciousness. He wrote that consciousness:
however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution. "If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things." (James, 1890, p. 149) [James's emphasis]
Panpsychism is a way of dealing with this problem by holding that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous ontological constituent of the universe. This assumption avoids the need to account for an emergence of consciousness from non-conscious elements since its presence is held to be ab initio and should be no more puzzling in principle than the idea that space-time or mass/energy are fundamental. However there is a problem that is likely fatal to any theory which ascribes consciousness to microparticles: there seems to be no straightforward way to explain how the conscious properties of a multiplicity of particles, each supposedly with its own point of view, can combine by aggregation into the unitary macroconscious perspective of an organism with a singular point of view. 
Nevertheless this idea that consciousness did not emerge due to natural selection—that it may have existed at the root level of reality and preceded the evolution of biology rather than having been born of it—holds an allure that has prompted a growing minority of philosophers (Coleman, Goff, Seager 1995, 2006, G. Strawson 2003, 2006) to revisit panpsychism.

The existence of mass/energy, and that of space-time, fundamental constituents of the universe, are accepted empirical facts but the idea that consciousness also is a primitive ontological constituent of the universe provokes contention within the mainstream psychological community, and mystifies the lay public. The allure, such as it may be, is due mostly to the glaring absence of an alternative explanation.

William James, despite the fact that he felt consciousness "must have been present at the very origin of things," spent most of chapter six of The Principles of Psychology criticizing what he acerbically referred to as the Mind Dust theory, a panpsychist theory which held that consciousness is ubiquitous and possessed by the smallest indivisible building blocks of the universe. Although he  subscribed to the idea that consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe James nevertheless ironically argued against the possibility proposed by the panpsychists of the day that an aggregation of conscious elementary particles could combine their individual consciousnesses to form a mind. 

He searched for an explanation of how bits of aboriginal consciousness inhering in elementary particles could combine into the unitary macroscopic awareness of biological entities, and failed to find it. In his view, an aggregate always remains an aggregate—separate entities can't "self-compound" into a new unity:
Aggregations are organized wholes only when they behave as such in the presence of other things. A statue is an aggregation of particles of marble; but as such it has no unity. For the spectator it is one; in itself it is an aggregate; just as, to the consciousness of an ant crawling over it, it may again appear a mere aggregate. No summing up of parts can make an unity of a mass of discrete constituents, unless this unity exist for some other subject, not for the mass itself. (James, 1890, p. 159)
If individual particles possess consciousness as a fundamental property then aggregating them in order to combine their individual points of view would seem on the face of it impossible—if particles possess consciousness they are subjects, and a biological being composed of billions of these particles would have a fragmentary subjectivity composed of billions of different points of view, whereas a subject in its own right would instead be expected to have a distinct and singular point of view. As David Chalmers describes it:
Our phenomenology has a rich and specific structure: it is unified, bounded, differentiated into many different aspects, but with an underlying homogeneity to many of the aspects, and appears to have a single subject of experience. It is not easy to see how a distribution of a large number of individual microphysical systems, each with their own protophenomenal properties, could somehow add up to this rich and specific structure. Should one not expect something more like a disunified, jagged collection of phenomenal spikes? (Chalmers, 2003)
The problem results from assuming that consciousness exists at the level of elementary particles or their properties. Most panpsychist theorists have assumed that if consciousness were physical, rather than being located in some transcendental realm as Descartes held, and if it also were a natural part of the original composition of the universe rather than having emerged as a product of evolution, its presence would necessarily be at the level of particles which are irreducibly simple. This is because if the entities underpinning consciousness are not themselves irreducible we would then be owed an explanation of how such composite particles could come to be conscious if the more basic ones comprising them are not.

And since modern panpsychist theorists have not only abandoned Descartes' substance dualism but have abandoned his substance, tout court, what is left is property dualism—physical particles adorned with mental properties or else some form of functionalism, neither of which acknowledge consciousness to be a substance. But there is no good argument for assuming that the panpsychist consciousness must be a property of or a functional relation of material substances rather than a substance (an entity, in Descartes' usage of 'res')  in its own right. Elisabeth's suggestion that consciousness might be an extended material substance, retained the cartesian concept of an entity as opposed to a property.
   
William James' rejection of the particulate assumption of panpsychism comes to a head in chapter six of his  Principles of Psychology and can be read as a swan song for panpsychism, beginning with his endorsement of the ontologically fundamental nature of consciousness, and ending with his disillusionment—he could find no coherent physical candidate to replace the suppositious soul of  scholastic theology. The main problem with panpsychism, he argued, is that:
the theory of mental units 'compounding with themselves' or 'integrating'... is logically unintelligible; it leaves out the essential feature of all the 'combinations' we actually know.
    All the 'combinations' which we actually know are EFFECTS, wrought by the units said to be 'combined,' UPON SOME ENTITY OTHER THAN THEMSELVES. Without this feature of a medium or vehicle, the notion of combination has no sense. [James' emphasis]

 ... In other words, no possible number of entities (call them as you like, whether forces, material particles, or mental elements) can sum themselves together. Each remains, in the sum, what it always was; and the sum itself exists only for a bystander who happens to overlook the units and to apprehend the sum as such; or else it exists in the shape of some other effect on an entity external to the sum itself.
    ... Just so, in the parallelogram of forces, the 'forces' themselves do not combine into the diagonal resultant; a body is needed on which they may impinge, to exhibit their resultant effect. (p. 158-159)[ my italics]
The Principles was published in 1890; in 1905 Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity dispelled the theory of  a luminiferous ether supporting electromagnetic wave transmission, so James' comment about the parallelogram of forces does not describe electromagnetic force vectors—as regards a force field there is no medium required. The electromagnetic field (EMF) needs no body in order to combine the resultant of two or more interacting sources. The forces combine geometrically by superposition into a new force vector in the free space surrounding their sources.

If consciousness is physical, not transcendental, and if it actually has causal power over the body, then it seems that it would have to be a force. Consciousness is holistic, continuous, and its analog character suggests that its dispositional mien would most likely be a homologous counterpart in the brain such as a field of some sort—say, a force field.  Being a part of the natural world, such a force would necessarily be a fundamental element of the repertoire of current physics which would thereby ensure causal closure of mind-body interaction. Of the four known forces of nature, gravitational attraction is too weak to have any effect on the operation of neural processes, and the two nuclear forces act over distances too infinitesimal to affect the brain.  In the brain's environment only one sort of field could be of any consequence, the electromagnetic field.  The action potentials of billions of neurons produce an endogenous electromagnetic field (EMF), evidence of which can be detected non-invasively by electrodes on the surface of the scalp.  Remarkably, it happens to be generated by the activity of the very neurons assiduously studied by neurophysiologists. This electromagnetic field may be the most experientially relevant structure in the functioning brain, but inexplicably most attempts to explain the origin of consciousness ignore it.

As a candidate to replace the idea that conscious elementary particles are the substrate of experientiality in the universe, the brain's EMF, existing as a virtual unit, could quite naturally provide a solitary point of view rather than a composite of many disparate points of view such as the "disunified, jagged collection of phenomenal spikes," that Chalmers has pictured—and all while binding together the multitudinous contributions from billions of neurons into a virtual unity. The interaction between mind and body would be mediated by the EMF without violating causal closure—unlike the inevitable effect that some supernatural entity or some heretofore undiscovered property might induce—because the EMF belongs to the repertoire of physics, and therefore is, so to speak, already baked into the equations.

Thus we have two different types of theory on offer, panpsychism and an electromagnetic field theory of consciousness, each of which has interesting potential, but each of which also has a major problem. The problems are quite different and yet fortuitously complementary—it seems that each theory has the potential to resolve the problem that besets the other. Panpsychism's combination problem, is due to its inherent atomicity, whereas it is the hard problem of explaining how the physical becomes experiential that could beleaguer an electromagnetic field theory. The combination problem doesn't affect a field theory because a field is a unity, not an aggregate, and the hard problem doesn't apply to panpsychism because panpsychism axiomatically assumes consciousness to be a fundamental constituent of the universe's ontology, not something that evolved from non-conscious reality. The proposal in this paper is, therefore, to retain panpsychism's fundamentalist remit but to apply it instead to the universe's electromagnetic field, ascribing aboriginal status to consciousness, and attributing it to the electromagnetic field instead of to irreducibly elementary particles. By not invoking emergence this proposal moots the hard problem and provides a holistic physicalism as a correlate of consciousness thereby obviating the combination problem as well.

It is proposed that consciousness is identical to the brain's electromagnetic field. As an identity theory there is no "transformation" of non-conscious neural entities into conscious mind entities. The perception of categorical differences between experiential phenomena (qualia) and the brain's endogenous  field is a result of the different perspectives from which the sole entity is observed.

For example consider this gedankenexperiment: A neurologist believes she has discovered the neural correlate of consciousness—my brain's endogenous EMF—occurring, say, when I view a red colored object. I see redness, and she sees an event in my brain. The event of "my sensing redness" is viewed by me as being perceived from the inside, or intrinsically. The event of her seeing the neural correlate of my consciousness (NCC) is her monitoring of the same event from the outside, or extrinsically.

The neurologist may believe that the NCC is  somehow different from my consciousness and that the manner in which consciousness is generated from or emerges from it stands in need of explanation. This is not the case: what makes them seem different is that one and the same entity is viewed from two perspectives. The NCC is numerically identical to the thought, not a precursor or some "protoconscious" thought. The situation is analogous to the topological impossibility of getting from the outside of a closed 3d membrane to the inside without penetration. It is as if the subject is on the inside, the investigator is on the outside, and the NCC is the membrane. Obviously they are irreconcilable perspectives—the first person (subjective) viewpoint belonging to the subject and the third person (objective) viewpoint belonging to the investigator; it is an epistemic impossibility to explain the subjective perspective premised on third person facts which are themselves derived by inference from the very first person acquaintance that demands explanation.

Colin McGinn's mysterianism attributes the human brain's cognitive inability to grasp the solution to the mind-body problem to this impossibility. As a scientific problem this situation is epistemically  unique—the mind-body problem lies in uncharted territory. However McGinn's conundrum results from the requirement that data gleaned from the two different perspectives is to be reconciled by means of a deductive nomological explanation. The pseudo-topological situation outlined above illustrates a barrier that constrains deductive but not abductive inference, so it is possible to craft a tentative solution as an inference to the best explanation. The failure of epistemology is no constraint on ontology.

Consciousness can be thought of as the intrinsic, or categorical access to the brain's EMF, viewed via introspection, whereas the NCC is its extrinsic, or dispositional character, known only by inference from the effects it has on instruments such as the electroencephalograph. The inside/outside metaphor is an analogism used didactically to aid conceptualization of this ontological monism.  To get clear about this requires adopting a stance from neither perspective, a view from nowhere,  as it were.

But, it may be asked, how can a substance be the experience of the subject? How does it make sense that a substantial entity serve as a predicate for the being which is the subject? I think that Russell was on the right track here:
Let us begin by examining Descartes' view. "I think, therefore I am" he says, but this won't do as it stands. What, from his own point of view, he should profess to know is not "I think", but "there is thinking". He finds doubt going on, and says: There is doubt. Doubt is a form of thought, therefore there is thought. To translate this into "I think" is to assume a great deal that a previous exercise in scepticism ought to have taught Descartes to call in question. He would say that thoughts imply a thinker. But why should they? Why should not a thinker be simply a certain series of thoughts, connected with each other by causal laws? Descartes believed in "substance", both in the mental and in the material world. He thought that there could not be motion unless something moved, nor thinking unless someone thought. No doubt most people would still hold this view; but in fact it springs from a notion—usually unconscious—that the categories of grammar are also the categories of reality. (Russell, B., An Outline of Philosophy, The World  Publishing Co., Cleveland, 1960, page 171)

"I think" is [Descartes'] ultimate premiss. Here the word "I" is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premiss in the form "there are thoughts." The word "I" is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum. When he goes on to say "I am a thing which thinks," he is already using uncritically the apparatus of categories handed down by scholasticism. He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker, nor is there reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense. The decision, however, to regard thoughts rather than external objects as the prime empirical certainties was very important, and had a profound effect on all subsequent philosophy. Russell, B., A History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972 (page 567)

Descartes to himself should appear as a series of events, each of which might be called a thought, provided that word is liberally interpreted. . . It was this series of "thoughts" which constituted Descartes' "mind," but his mind was no more a separate entity than the city of New York is a separate entity over and above its several inhabitants. Instead of saying "Descartes thinks," we ought to say "Descartes is a series of which the members are thoughts." And instead of  "therefore Descartes exists" we ought to say "Since 'Descartes' is the name of this series it follows that 'Descartes' is a name." But for the statement "Descartes is a thing which thinks" we must substitute nothing whatever, since the statement embodies nothing but faulty syntax. (Russell, Portraits From Memory, p.148-149)
And William James:
The phenomena are enough, the passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker, and its empirical connection with the brain-process is the ultimate known law. (James, Pr. Psych, p. 346)

If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond.
 And from the Buddhist contingent:
"[I]t is the thought that thinks...there is no thinker behind the thought." (Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught p.42)
Nietzsche writes:
"Something is thought, therefore there is something that thinks ": this is what Descartes ' argument amounts to. But this is tantamount to considering our belief in the notion "substance" as an "a priori" truth:— that there must be something "that thinks" when we think, is merely a formulation of a grammatical custom which sets an agent to every action. In short, a metaphysico-logical postulate is already put forward here— and it is not merely an ascertainment of fact.... On Descartes' lines nothing absolutely certain is attained, but only the fact of a very powerful faith. (Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, Vol. II, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, T.N. Foulis, London, 1913)
If in fact the thinker is the thought and nothing more, then the 'I' which human grammar demands  is neither the brain nor the body and the thought is identical with the electromagnetic field.

II

What, it may be asked, happens to consciousness during, say, episodes of anesthesia, deep slow wave sleep, or coma. Such episodes are commonly assumed to be periods of absent consciousness, and yet there is an accompanying EEG. A defense of the present hypothesis begins with a consideration of memory.

It is sometimes asked what the brain is for if it doesn't produce consciousness. (McGinn, 2003; Searle, 1996)  Brains create memory. Brains are needed also for mobility, for feeding, for defense (and offense), for breeding, and—importantly—to retain lessons learned. There is plenty of work for brains to do—survival necessitated their evolution even if consciousness came "for free." In neural networks is incorporated the organism's behavioral repertoire which provides for the functioning and survival of the organism while consciousness rides along as the intrinsic nature of the accompanying EMF.

What factors determine which events are committed to memory? Nature is parsimonious when it comes to energy expenditure. In terms of memory we shouldn't expect brains to have evolved to encode into memory any more information than necessary for survival and reproduction. Memory storage of irrelevant data would impose an unnecessary burden on the energy budget. Only 'mission critical' situations and functions would have memory implementations and so nonessential conscious electromagnetic activity probably won't leave a residual memory trace beyond a few milliseconds, if at all. Hence a subject might be aware of some episode as it unfolds and yet have no memory of it milliseconds after it concludes.

Motile organisms typically have brains, whereas sessile ones do not. Survival requires memory of food sources, locations of sanctuary, etc., as well as the means of motility. Contrast these needs of animals with the absence of similar needs in plants. The mammalian hippocampus contains place cells which allow the individual to map its territory, a very useful ability for motile organisms (e.g., taxi drivers, at least before GPS and Uber came along), and of no use to sessile ones. Thus it should not be a mystery why plants do not have an analog of the hippocampus. In fact an inventory of the behavioral repertoires of motile versus sessile organisms makes it pretty clear why only the former even need brains at all. Plants don't need to remember where the food is.

There are plenty of functions acquired as the animal brain evolved and  consciousness wasn't one of them. They all seem to be contingent on the mobility of animals, learned improvement thereof, and memory—plants seem to get along fine without brains. Indeed the Sea Squirt, a member of the phylum chordata, when leaving the larval stage attaches head-first to some object where it will become sessile for the rest of its days, and proceeds to consume its brain. If you're going to live like a plant, who needs a brain?

Of especial importance for understanding the present hypothesis is sensory memory. It has been known for many years that memory of the present persists for a very short time before either decaying or entering into working memory. This can be observed by twirling a bright object such as a glowing ember at the end of a branch in the dark. If twirled fast enough the ember describes an enduring 360 degree ring of fire. From the rate of rotation at which the ring becomes steady the length of persistence of memory can be be calculated.

In 1960 George Sperling designed an experiment to obtain a significantly more accurate assessment of the decay time of this form of memory. He used a tachistoscope to present his test subjects with a grid of 12 letters, three rows of four each, flashed on a screen for a brief interval of time. He found that the subjects could recall three or four letters out of the twelve. Next he specified which row (first, second or third) that the subjects were to focus attention on. This was done by sounding a tone as a cue to designate the row: several milliseconds after the letters were flashed either a high, or a medium, or a low pitched tone was sounded, the pitch of the tone indicating which row of letters for the subjects to attend to. But the letters had already been flashed and were gone by the time the tone was sounded.

Nevertheless the subjects could still recall three or four of the letters but this time they were all from the cued row. To do this they would need to have initially possessed a memory of all 12 letters since the letters were no longer visible by the time the designated row was cued. The maximum length of time after the letters had vanished from the screen before the cue was sounded gave an estimate of the duration of this kind of memory. The conclusion is that sensory memory is retained in consciousness for between 250 and 1000 milliseconds before decaying, varying among persons. As the result of this decay, sensory memory of no more than one fourth to one third of that which was seen passes into working memory—the rest is lost. It seems to be a sort of involuntary winnowing or culling of information not directly attended to and, therefore, presumably not needed. A way to conserve memory space.

Sensory memory is the gateway through which it is believed that all sensory information passes into the brain. It has been empirically established for visual (iconic), auditory (echoic), and tactile (haptic) memory, and it is thought to operate on the gustatory and olfactory senses as well.*
*An interesting question is whether there is a similar type of memory (perhaps of longer duration) which screens inner rumination, expunging ideas not acted on or reviewed within a certain period of time.
A key proposal of the present hypothesis is that phenomenal experience is that which occurs prior to extinction of sensory memory, and reports of the experience are based off the short term memory which remains after sensory memory has decayed. This explains why while gazing uninterruptedly at a scene for a time, one is conscious of a great deal of detail and can repeatedly scan the scene focusing attention on various areas. The scene is being refreshed repeatedly as long as it is held, extending duration of consciousness of the scene in the same manner as that which creates the continuous 360 degree circle while the burning ember is rotated. But reporting on the scene after attention has been diverted can't produce much detail—all that's left of the Cheshire cat is the smile.

The psychologist Edwin Boring suggested that introspection is actually based on immediate memory rather than present consciousness. Introspection, he wrote is early retrospection:
[L]et us try to imagine a condition of progressive amnesia in which consciousness is normal but no memory persists for more than a second of time. . . . Without memories of a second's duration no introspective report would be possible, nor would there, if the subject had no memory at all of what was immediately past, be any moment in which he would be aware of his own consciousness.             
    . . . [C]onsciousness actually depends upon memory for our knowledge of it, and . . . the concept of a consciousness that exists independently of memory is a concept pretty far removed from the actual consciousnesses that enter as subject matter into scientific psychology. (Boring, page 224, 225)
. . .To be aware of a conscious datum is to be sure that it has passed. The nearest actual approach to immediate introspection is early retrospection. The experience described, if there be any such, is always just past; the description is present.  (Boring, 1933, pp 228, 229)
Thus it seems that what we can report is what we can introspect from working memory, but that is limited to the portion of the initial sensation that was attended to. What must next be asked is why does a static visual scene persist until I close my eyes (or turn my head, or douse the light, or...)? This is for the same reason that the ring of fire persists as long as the twirling continues. As long as the visual scene is beheld its memory is continuously replenished as fast as it decays. Turn away and the final impression soon decays, leaving only the fainter copy (i.e. the humean idea) dredged from memory. A great deal of the scene doesn't survive to working memory which is the source of introspective recollection, or retrospection. It has been confirmed that there is a form of sensory memory for vision (iconic), hearing (echoic), and touch (haptic). Sensory memory of olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic modes probably exist as well.

Benign emergence. A preponderance of empirical evidence cited in the neuroscience literature suggests that the neural correlates of consciousness are, or are related to, synchronous oscillations of networked neurons and the feedback between various brain structures. I submit that the evidence of synchronous oscillation may be indicative not of correlates of consciousness per se, but of the processes involved in memory encoding, consolidation and retrieval.

These mechanisms which have evolved to facilitate the encoding of spatiotemporal electromagnetic patterns  may be unique to biological systems. The activity of several billion actively firing neurons confined in close proximity is only found in biological systems so it is fair to say that a distinction can be drawn between certain characteristics of the electromagnetism within brains and those extant elsewhere. This distinction conceivably satisfies the definition of 'emergence' in a sense which defangs the hard problem—the difference between the EMF emergent within the skull and that at large is merely a matter of the spatiotemporal complexity of the wave function.

The only field effects which can be encoded into sensory memory are the end result of a cascade beginning with environmental impingement of information on sense receptors and culminating in the reverberation of synchronously oscillating neural networks which have evolved to hold the information repetitively for a few hundred milliseconds. It is reasonable to believe that considerable processing occurs along the way, sorting and comparing with previous memory stores and so forth, the jist being that the spatiotemporal configuration of the final encoded field effect constituting the source of the verbal report bears little resemblance to the "raw consciousness" extant in the exterior environment aside from the fact that the seed of experiential cognizance is ontologically primal. Henceforward I will use 'protoconsciousness' to signify the EMF phenomena external to biological systems, reserving the term 'consciouness' for the retrospectable, and therefore reportable, memory of the organism's previous neurally induced sensations.

Unconsciousness. There is a type of memory which needs to persist only long enough to produce a learned procedure. Procedural memory is familiar to anyone who has spent hundreds of hours mastering a musical instrument or any of a number of other manual repetitive operations. When learning to play piano, for example, one may be agonizingly aware of the need to will each individual finger to perform. But an accomplished pianist, for example, can flawlessly perform complex musical works, and have no recollection after doing so of consciously willing each finger to depress the necessary key at the required time, it having been unnecessary to institute transfer from sensory memory to working memory for a task already well honed.

We now know that this type of memory is not stored in the same location in the brain as other types of memory. Henry Molaison, known in the literature only as H. M. until his death, unfortunately suffered epilepsy to such an extent that his hippocampi and portions of his temporal lobes were excised in hopes of lessening his seizures. After the surgery his short term and working memories no longer transferred into long term memory. Each day his memories started afresh. The investigator interviewing and testing him had to introduce herself over again each day. It was thus learned that the hippocampus mediates the transference from short-term to long-term memory. Henry formed no explicit long-term memories from the time of his surgery until his death 55 years later. Surprisingly, though, he was still capable of encoding procedural (implicit) memory which he acquired during testing sessions of his abilities on manual puzzles such as the Tower of Hanoi. His improved performance over time surprised investigators and led to the discovery that long term storage of procedural memory is facilitated by something besides the hippocampus (Corkin, 2013).

Procedural memory was the only sort of memory that he could retain long term, yet he seemed not to be cognizant of it. At each new session playing Tower of Hanoi he seemed totally unaware that he had ever played it before, and yet his ability improved with practice. Therefore some memory of the strategy involved in playing the game must have been encoded, and must also then have been subsequently retrieved. If Henry seemed unaware of this memory, can we then say that it was unconscious? As noted above, intact individuals also seem to have no recollection of the note by note playback of implicitly learned musical ability, for instance, or otherwise implicitly learned routines like riding a bicycle. Is the action performed unconsciously, or is it simply not remembered due to a mere millisecond retention period? Correspondingly, it would hardly seem correct to assume that Henry was unconscious on Tuesday since he couldn't remember anything about it on Wednesday. His episodic and autobiographical short term memory each day failed to be transferred to long term storage because the brain region necessary to encode it had been surgically removed, not because he no longer possessed consciousness.

A case study. There are two pathways in the brain by which information passes from the occipital lobe—the dorsal stream which terminates in the parietal lobe, and the ventral stream which terminates in the medial temporal region. Melvin Goodale and David Milner (Goodale and Milner, 2004) have extensively studied a subject, D.F., who has bilateral lesions of the cortical ventral stream. As a result of her trauma, she is unable to identify objects, qua object, seemingly conscious only of colors and textures. Nevertheless her dorsal stream is intact and consequently she has little difficulty reaching out and grasping objects, although she frequently will grasp an object quite deftly but in a manner unlike that which a person familiar with the object's use would tend to grasp it. The reason for this, it is surmised, is that she is unable to perceive the object as an object due to the damage to her ventral stream. A person with an intact ventral stream would tend to grasp the screwdriver by the handle; D.F. will likely as not grasp the screwdriver by its shank. She nevertheless does not report having any conscious experience of the object. 

Goodale and Milner (GM) theorize that the ventral stream is necessary for conscious perception whereas the dorsal stream enables action but does not provide perception. It could be the case, however, that D.F. consciously perceives her actions, which rely upon the dorsal stream, but simply cannot remember them. The inability to remember would make introspection impossible, as introspection depends upon retrospection. Reportage of experience is reportage of mediate experience, i.e., experience as mediated by memory. Therefore if certain experiences leave only millisecond sensory memory trace the experiences cannot be verified behaviorally, the point being, however, that D.F. may nevertheless actually be conscious of her actions while she peforms them. EMF activity may always be an indication of consciousness even though no consciousness can be reported.

If actions such as grasping, which are modulated via the dorsal stream, are experienced simultaneously with their performance but result in no memory trace, then a differential physiological examination of the two inter-cortical routes might yield empirical insight into memory formation. GM write:
First let us revisit for a moment what natural selection has designed the two systems to do. Visual perception is there to let us make sense of the outside world and to create representations of it in a form that can be filed away for future reference. In contrast, the control of a motor act from picking up a morsel of food to throwing a spear at a fleeing antelope requires accurate information about the actual size, location and motion of the target object. This information has to be coded in the absolute metrics of the real world. In other words, it has to be coded in terms of the actual distance and size of the objects. In addition information has to be available at the very time the action has to be made. These two broad objectives . . . impose such conflicting requirements on the brain that to deal with them within a single unitary visual system would present a computational nightmare. (p. 73)
The ventral pathway employs relative metrics based on relations among objects perceived not relying upon the location of the observer. Physical interactions such as grasping of objects in the visual scene require that the brain analyze the scene using absolute metrics, or egocentrically, i.e., placing the observer at 0,0,0 rather than relating objects to other objects. This is accomplished via the dorsal pathway.

To be effective and reliable, actions must be initiated concurrently with the real-time analysis of the objects' locations. If the actions depended on recollections from memory of the objects' locations, inaccuracy would be introduced by movement of either the subject, the objects, or both during the time intervening between perception and recall.

GM argue that "the brain has to compute precise parameters needed to specify an action immediately before the movements are to be initiated. By the same token it would make little sense to store this information for more than a fraction of a second, whether or not the action is actually performed. Not only would its value be strictly time-limited, it would be positively disadvantageous to keep the information hanging around in the system." (p. 77) Its "sell-by date" follows in milliseconds.

The subject may very well be conscious during the exact few milliseconds when the decision to act occurs, but retains no recoverable memory of it a few milliseconds later, and therefore will have nothing to report. It can thus be concluded that at least some of the brain's electrical activity may leave no memory trace even though it originated as conscious awareness. This fact is not incompatible with the notion that all electromagnetic field effects in the brain are immediately perceived consciously but that some are pruned off by millisecond decay spans depending on their relevance to survival. Therefore failure to account for "unconsciousness" in no way invalidates the electromagnetic field theory about consciousness.

Thus it is possible that what has generally been called unconsciousness for many years is actually the void left after the decay of sensory memory. During certain conditions such as coma or surgical anesthesia decay of sensory memory reaches 100 per cent. Once it decays short term memory is blank and there is nothing to be reported. The subject is then thought to have not been conscious during the time in question. During deep dreamless sleep the subject may be conscious of relaxing peacefully in bed, but failing to record the episode in working memory once sensory memory decays. Likewise in the case of coma. And surgery patients occasionally report having (frightening) memories of their surgery.

A caveat is needed at this point. The argument presented so far is intended to show only that a lack of report of conscious experience following  conditions such as deep dreamless sleep, coma or surgical anesthesia is not sufficient to rule out the possibility that the EMF is in some way the ground of experience. 

What is not argued is that there cannot be such a thing as The Unconscious Mind. The vast reservoir of intelligence, feelings, fears, urges, intuitions, etc. that is hidden from the "conscious" mind is not by any means ruled out by the foregoing arguments. The term 'unconscious' in the latter case is a noun. The same term is an adjective when arguing that an organism cannot be both alive and insentient. Much neural activity probably never generates the quality of EMF signal that would trigger sensory memory, but which nevertheless may produce a Hebbian connection. It is unlikely that all increases in synaptic efficacy could result in a memory trace.

Cosmopsychism. It is known that aside from isolated pockets of space surrounded by electrically shielding material, regions called faraday cages (e.g., microwave ovens, etc.), the electromagnetic field spans the universe. There are no barriers where the field is terminated, nor where it commences. Therefore, as the skull and/or meninges obviously do not provide a faraday cage-like environment (since  EEG signals can be detected from the scalp) it can be concluded that if the EMF, being the ground of consciousness, is ontologically fundamental then the entire universe must be in some sense experiential.

Since the universe is spanned by a single unitary electromagnetic field it would follow that a single consciousness of some sort, or a protoconsciousness pervades the cosmos. Others have speculated, trying to avoid the combination problem, that the entire universe may be a singular subject of experience. None of the theories of cosmological panpsychism, or cosmopsychism, that have so far been advanced (Mathews, Shani,  others) pick out the electromagnetic field as the most likely correlate of consciousness. Mathews and Shani both ascribe consciousness ubiquitously to the whole of physical reality, interpreted from a unified field theoretical (or geometrodynamic) perspective. Mathews uses the metaphor of an ocean to describe this imagined  unity, replete with waves and vortices, much like the electromagnetic field, but she fails to make the identification.

Cosmopsychism brings with it a problem which is a sort of inverted combination problem. Rather than a problem of how to combine things which are inherently separate, it is a problem of how to separate that which is an amalgam or some sort of holistic unity into individual components, viz., individual consciousnesses. It raises the question of what separates one individual consciousness from another when they are all thought to derive their essence from the universal EMF. How does an organism sequester its own private bit of mind away from the universal protoconsciousness? What prevents mind-reading, for instance? A 'quick and dirty' response to this is that the local inputs to the field, generated from the synchronous firing of neuronal tracts (a) may suffer some attenuation simply in exiting the brain due to the conductive meninges and skull and (b) attenuation over distances of mere millimeters would at any rate suffice to prevent intercranial signalling.

But there is a more compelling explanation of the "individuation" or privacy of consciousness. Sensory memory is the gateway from the senses to the mind, and as a gateway it culls information which is not of imperative priority in order to conserve resources. What we generally consider to be instantaneous awareness of the stream of consciousness is actually retrospection of that portion of the previously stored awareness, or if still ongoing, of the reverberation of what remains after the culling. Since the only electromagnetic impetus of sufficient amplitude and frequency to trigger memorization (synchronous oscillation) is of local  origin, external influence from the field at large is therefore invisible to the organism's awareness. Unlikely as it might be, anything that should dribble into the brain from external EMF effects would simply not be remembered.

If consciousness literally spans the universe-at-large, irrespective of the presence of biological matter, memory encoded in a brain creates the sense of personal identity. The only EMF events Jones's memory records are events occurring within Jones's brain, and so are unavailable to Smith. Awareness of our thoughts, sensations, perceptions etc.—the conception of self—results from memory and we are oblivious to EMF events occurring outside our brains because EMF field strength attenuates with distance (remaining in virtual contact but with diminished amplitude) so barring anomaly nothing outside the skull can affect one's "personal" field. And information within a brain can have no unaided effect beyond the skull.

Thus there is no "individuation problem." Physiologically electrical activity of neuron firings unites each organism's brain with the omnipresent universal protoconsciousness by virtual contact, but attenuated greatly and therefore without the possibility of introspecting anything not stored in the organism's own memory structures. Each organism is part of the whole by virtue of its connection to the universal field, but possesses only the awareness of an individual because of the privacy of its memory.

Agency. The electromagnetic field which spans the universe has no agency. It's relevance to the existence of consciousness is the quality of experientiality, which I have opted to call protoconsciousness, reserving the terms 'consciousness' and 'mind' for the EMF generated in biological systems which evolution has endowed with the means to interact causally with the environment.
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