It remains an entirely physicalist idea: the phenomenon will be influenced by what materials—notably sugar and oxygen—are in the blood that perfuses the brain and other organs.
I propose that the highly distributed nature of the information in the proprioceptive minds, including that generated by the visual systems, collects to a singularity and is projected (and nobody knows how) into an analogue array that constitutes our sense of the world and our identity and our being in the world. It is probably a field event, including resonance effects but we must await the arrival of some paradigmatic change for any kind of explanation. There are candidates from related fields of research, including families of receptor proteins on the surface of cells, macromolecules in the cytoplasm and nucleus; even photon generation by DNA has been suggested.80
Whatever mechanisms may eventually be revealed, I suggest that from this collection into a singularity a highly fragile entity emerges and one that is in a constant state of reforming and updating at varying instants. It is a creation of the best guess about the external and internal worlds with all the information at our body's disposal. It allows “us” to imagine that others are having the same experience and by the confirming veracity of this exchange—like a self–fulfilling prophesy—reinforces our sense of self and the stable continuity of the world of things and events. Such an analogue structure could not possibly be embedded in such a form and so is re–digitised as a compressed simulacrum in order to be stored. Only selected elements of it can be stored at all as episodic memory, like tags. When the memory is retrieved, it is re–imagined, reassembled, recreated as an analogue sketch to resemble the original analogue but can only be an approximation of what was itself an approximation. Analogues are inherently smooth and continuous while digital sequences are discrete and granular.
Let me explain the thinking behind this model which depends upon ideas already expressed in this book. I hope the repetition will clarify and not be tedious. All biological beings have mindedness. This does not mean sentience, though mindedness must be a prerequisite for the evolution of any degree of conscious Mind. Borders certainly exist but can be no discontinuity between the matrices that make up the being. (Discontinuities belong between beings which bridge the gap by communication.) As brains become more complex, burdened (and enabled) by information that is not solely proprioceptive because it is co–supplied by memory, the continuities between different parts of the forebrain and midbrain become more ramified and filtered. In social and communal animals where the individual brain size is large, the social brain becomes more coherent in herds, more cooperative in packs and more multivariate in higher primates. What kind of consciousness can be experienced by solitary, herd or pack animals may never be known. Very probably they lack the capacity to retrieve detailed memories as clearly as we can, though what they do retrieve is complex and adapted to their circumstances. Forward planning requires the capacity to imagine differential future states: we need prospective imagination to survey the choices before we act. What may look like anticipatory behaviour in other animals appears to be programmed and more reflex–like. Nothing like our capacity to visualise alternative states seems manifest in animal behaviour except perhaps for the higher apes, notably bonobos and chimpanzees.
Complex learning in humans depends especially on memory. Or, more accurately, the components of memory: recomposing fragments in new forms might serve as a definition of creativity, as it might of dreaming.81 The state of the visible matrices is congregated in the proprioceptive (“thalamic” and “hypothalamic”) minds as summarised in the table in Section 3. These states converge and contribute to the directed behavioural sense (which is itself an analogue outcome). For social creatures this state has to be marked as “self” and then communicated to this self's constituents and to other people. Although such communication depends upon molecular synaptic arrays, it must eventually transcend or at least partially escape from the more deterministic senses, such as smell. Put simply, the state may be discussed.
For the state to be expressed and discussed, an analogue simulacrum of the state of affairs (or the case for an alternative state of affairs) is projected. Whether this projection even has a location is a daunting question. The philosopher's question of “Qualia: what is it like to be?” may be answered by a self–describing circularity: it is like this, the simile, the metaphor, the analogy. Our communicative minds are analogic and are our best attempts at an approximate description of the world, its forms, its limitations and its possibilities.
These simulacra—approximations of the state of the self and the world—are continually refreshed at a rate that makes them appear continuous to the selves (in similar fashion to the frames of celluloid film when projected onto the cinema screen are interpreted as an apparently seamless stream). These states are embedded in digital form but have to be recreated in analogue form when they are retrieved for consideration or further discussion, analysis or contemplation. Their approximate nature may not always be apparent. In this way memory is constantly remodelled and group memories face the tension between conserving the original “truth” and expanding the possibilities of “realities” resident in the recalled elements of the “facts”. The singularity to which I referred earlier is presumably some collective output of the reticular activating system.82 Even if this were shown to be the case, it does not explain how the extraordinary feat is accomplished. I suspect that with the aid of modern imaging techniques, recording outputs of the brain between waking and dreaming and deep–sleeping, it will become clear that consciousness (which, after all, we lose each night) results when we traverse some threshold of network activity, the size and states of which reflect the need for analogue conversion and the extent of its expansion and penetration.
While the recording of the analogue back into digital forms the basis of all memorialising, even for the very short term, this process of digital–to–analogue conversion as the basis for eventual consciousness provides a further very important outcome: in rehearsing our communication with others, we create the possibility (almost a certainty) for endless rehearsal. A small step can be taken for the imagined player in this communication to become the self. Once the self is memorised and rehearsed, the possibility of endless dialogue installs itself so that an impresario of the analogue state is kept in post.
Language, a sequential (and therefore digital) form, encodes the analogue structure, but as events are told they engender analogue impressions in listener and reader. Language and speech are universal but literacy is not. Presumably writing and reading were invented as societies became more settled and centralised. Speech and grammar itself are sequential modes that attempt to cope with these burdensome interconversions (and serial approximations) of digital–to–analogue and analogue–to–digital. Because the problem is so huge, it is a wonder that the invention of writing works as well as it does, but neither should we wonder at the enormous difficulties that it may present some individuals and the consequences for the distribution of social and political power.
There is of course no single consciousness; the illusion of a singularity is the trick played by the flow and retention of identity. Mind and mindedness are always there while we are alive. The conscious mind—whether in dreams when we are asleep or in the waking state—is freshly brought into being by RAS: the Reticular Activating System. The “thalamic mind” will present its data directly and in parallel through the “hypothalamic” mind, but the conscious mind may have other preoccupations: the dominance of attention may be subverted by the interface between need and desire.
From the moment we utter our first cry (or fail to), consciousness reflects the binary state of pain and pleasure, the basic observation of Epicurean philosophy, one of mindedness. As the primal state develops into memorial consciousness, it becomes the tail that wags the dog, issuing joys and also the heavy burden. Illness is the manifestation of this disquiet and the practitioner of medicine should first of all recognise the state in its full form. Patients benefit from recognition more than the limited power of sympathy. Awareness cycles through several phases in the day/night period, from puzzling REM to outward alert, then on to daydreaming, from boredom to ecstasy, so that to speak of States of Altered Consciousness is rather to state the norm. One characteristic of a schizophrenic state is that it fails to alter, though it has its own cycles.
Imagination is the powerfully adaptive product