How Does Consciousness
                  Arise?

About this website

From around 2000 philosophers and scientists began in earnest to explore theories of mind based on the idea that consciousness - and the stream of subjective experience that comes with consciousness - can arise from neurological genesis of self-models. Foremost has been Thomas Metzinger, who has referred specifically to a "phenomenal self-model".*  

Given those developments I felt it worthwhile in 2011 to post here some speculative work I completed in the 1990s founded on a self-model approach, but that goes further to propose a form of information processing system within a person that could enable them to experience a subjective, moment-by-moment sense of themselves as a physical being interacting with a physical world.

The aim of that work - and of the more recent material posted here - is development of an encompassing conceptual framework to aid understanding of how ideas in philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience might be formed into a general theory of consciousness.


One of the most important aspects of the work remains that it speculates as to a real-time mechanism - and an overarching information processing architecture - by which a self-model, and with it moment-by-moment subjective experience, might be generated. To my knowledge - even up to 2023 - other approaches have not speculated as to an overarching mechanism for real-time genesis of subjective states, although the centrality of sensory-motor coordination, and the related need for predictive capability, have been increasingly recognized.

In the Introductory Summary I provide extracts from a series of posts I published in late 1997 to early 1998 to the moderated web forum Psyche-D. (The full series of these posts to Psyche-D is available here.) Importantly - along with a set of fundamental ideas about self-models - the Introductory Summary introduces a notation to give those ideas definition. This notation is applied in all later work posted to this site. In my view a simple notation of the type provided in the Introductory Summary is likely to prove crucial to allowing the philosophy of consciousness to successfully evolve and converge with related fields, such as cognitive science and neurophysiology, to properly form a science of consciousness. 

Beyond the Introductory Summary, I provide an essay (Main Essay) which I believe sketches a powerful, albeit highly speculative and illustrative, approach to explaining consciousness as it manifests in the here and now. It integrates a phenomenal self-model approach, a rudimentary form of predictive processing architecture, and a real-time mechanism for delivering moment-by-moment subjective states. Although it is now in certain ways dated, I believe a number of the deeper intuitions expressed through the Main Essay remain important. These are recast and carried forward in a more contemporary form through the material discussed below.      
 
Some of this more recent material is provided at links in the right margin under Free Will and Time.The note exploring the nature of time was developed because one way to test a theory of consciousness is to see if it has sufficient explanatory power to clarify how, in certain cases, phenomenal experience seems at odds with physical reality. How we perceive time, versus how physicists understand time, is one of the starkest examples of this. I believe the approach provided in the note meets this challenge at least as well as any other available as of May 2020. Again, with respect to understanding the nature of phenomenal time, there is a heavy emphasis on mechanism, which I continue to see as an essential part of the way forward in the study of consciousness and of how subjective experience can be generated.

I have also added considerable material at the right margin links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. These each go to one of three parts of an extensive suite of new conjectures brought together under the rubric Working Note A.
A link to an index of Definitions has also been added. This index forms an appendix to Working Note A, but its contents apply to all material posted on this website.

The link at Metaphysics goes to a note: Deconstructing the Physical World, posted in 2023. The note describes in detail - then explores, extends and defends - the metaphysical framework underpinning the work presented on this site. This framework was first described in claims and notation introduced in the Psyche-D posts referred to above (available here) and also given under Definitions.

The links at DPW A, DPW B and DPW C go to appendices that extend and further situate the conceptual framework - call this CF1 - developed in Deconstructing the Physical World (DPW). 
  • DPW A describes the relationship between Russellian Monisms and CF1, and shows that CF1 has all of the advantages of Russellian Monisms but can defeat their disadvantages.
  • DPW B describes in more detail what is meant in DPW by phrases such as, ‘language learning operations’, and further explores the relationship between the contents of any person’s W[i] and those of their language using group’s W[z], where these terms are as defined within CF1.
Readers most interested in general philosophical issues should read Metaphysics first.  

Otherwise, the reading order I recommend is the Introductory Summary, Free Will and then Time. After that, Part 1 in conjunction with the Main Essay, then Parts 2 and 3, followed by Metaphysics.

Readers unconvinced by metaphysical claims made in the Introductory Summary - or who are more interested in the traditional riddles of the Mind Body Problem than in 'explaining consciousness' - may wish to read Metaphysics straight after reading the Introductory Summary.
  
As an overarching qualifier I wish to emphasize that across much of the material referred to above I have not been concerned to get everything right at the level of detail. That's too daunting a challenge for any project as encompassing as this, particularly given
the difficulty across the field in establishing key neurological facts and germane, scientifically demonstrated theories of brain function. But I have tried to be as definitive, self-critical and searching in my underlying thinking as possible - particularly regarding Metaphysics - and hope that the ideas and conjectures presented will still prove worthwhile to other researchers, and other interested readers, particularly at the level of conceptual frameworks.

Comments and questions are most welcome.

I'm at brendon.hammer@gmail.com

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   ------------------------------------------------------------

*  Metzinger, T. Being No One p299-427, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts USA 2003.
    Metzinger, T. The Ego Tunnel p3-12, Basic Books NY USA 2009.
See also:
    
Lehar, S. The World In Your Head, Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis NY 2003.
   
Gray, J. Consciousness: Creeping Up On The Hard Problem, Oxford University Press,
    Oxford, UK 2004.

    Ismael, J. T. The Situated Self, Oxford University Press, NY 2007.
    Revonsuo, A. Inner Presence, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts USA 2006. 

** Friston, K. (2003) Learning and Inference in the Brain Neural Networks 16 1325-1352.
     Friston, K. (2010) The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory? Nature Reviews
    Neuroscience 11
127-138
See also:
    
Clark, A. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind, Oxford University
    Press, NY 2016.
    Hohwy, J. (2020) New Directions in Predictive Processing Mind & Language 35 209-223.




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