THE COMPWARENESS THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS:
HOW OUR BRAINS COMPUTE OUR SOULS:
At last, an intuitive, explanatory, scientific
theory of consciousness.
By
Edward Winslow Porter
aka
waveTuned Ed
Abstract:
The compwareness theory hypothesizes that all the qualities we sense in
human conscious awareness are nothing but -- and indeed are -- qualities of
awareness inherent in the computation of the brain, qualities of an
awareness required by the laws of physics, themselves. The Compwareness
theory’s teachings combine and expand on those from other major voices in
the study of consciousness like Bernard Baars, Giulio Tononi, Christof
Koch, Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Patricia Churchland, Max Tegmark,
David Chalmers and many others. It also involves ideas from many leaders in
AI and cognitive neuroscience. The theory’s main features include its
belief that:
(a) all of physics, and all computation, requires an awareness -- a
proto-consciousness -- in the form of compwareness, that is, the awareness
of the information a computation computes required for its outputs to vary
as a function of that information;
(b) human consciousness is nothing but an extremely special form of such
compwareness;
(c) many of the alleged special qualities of consciousness are qualities of
compwareness of meaning, where “meaning” is defined as experiential
associational grounding, that is, temporally-unified, rich, interconnected,
grounded complexes of awareness of semantic, sensory, and emotional
experiential patterns that are associated with concepts we are consciously
aware of;
(d) brain synchrony, including theta-gamma phase synchrony, plays a major
role in unifying massively parallel compwareness of experiential patterns
into complex, unified, relational, and temporally coded senses of awareness
of such meaning;
(e) consciousness comes in many different dynamically varying degrees and
kinds, depending, in part, on the extent to which widespread compwareness
is focused by synchrony on the meaning of one or more related concepts;
(f) we have the most conscious awareness of that which our brain has the
most unified compwareness of;
(g) one can best explain the qualities, or "qualia," we experience in our
consciousness by studying the qualities of what is aware of what, when, and
how, in the dynamic, spreading, recurrent activation of extended pattern
awareness complexes in the brain;
(h) the 200 trillion synapses, 16 billion neurons, and 160 million cortical
mini-columns in the cortex have more than enough resolution in
sensory/emotional/semantic hierarchical pattern space to provide
compwareness with all the representational richness and qualities we sense
in our conscious awareness;
(i) that, since qualities of conscious awareness are nothing but qualities
of the computational architecture of brain compwareness, the study of
consciousness can be guided by predicting and mapping the qualities of one
such awareness from the qualities of the other; and
(j) that brain science already suggests there are such large complex
similarities between consciousness and brain compwareness as to create a
substantial Occam’s razor argument that they are, in fact, the same thing.
=====================================
Many claim explaining consciousness is Philosophy’s hardest problem. I
think I have taken a major step toward solving that problem. I have
developed a theory of consciousness called the "Compwareness Theory." It's
much more explanatory, rigorous, and intuitive than any other consciousness
theory I know — although, of course, it builds substantially on the works
of others.
It says the awareness — the proto-consciousness — from which human
consciousness is woven is not something unknown to physics, as most in the
field suggest. Rather it’s something that stares us in the face every time
we look at an equation of physics. It’s “computational awareness”.
("Compwareness" for short.) Compwareness is the awareness of the variables
and constants of the equations of physics that compute all reality. Such
awareness is necessary for reality to compute as a function of those values
as demanded by both Newtonian and quantum physics. This compwareness fills
the entire universe. It’s arguably a great spirit, of which our bodies and
consciousnesses are but a small, interwoven part.
But as special, complex, and interconnected as the computation of all
reality is, the computation, and thus compwareness, in our brains has
special qualities that make our conscious compwareness vastly different
than the compwareness in most of the universe. The compwareness theory
proposes that human consciousness is nothing but an extremely special form
of compwareness computed largely, or entirely, by the brain.
In my theory, the famous "hard problem of consciousness" is redefined. It
no longer asks what in physics could possibly produce the awareness of
consciousness -- since there has to be awareness, in the form of
compwareness, of the massively complex and interconnected information
computed in our brains. Instead the redefined "hard problem" asks a more
narrowly focused and much less metaphysical question. It asks how the
brain's compwareness of information computed by the brain could have all of
the many miraculous qualities of awareness we sense in our own conscious
experience. In other words, how can compwareness explain the qualities, or
"qualia", of our conscious experience of, say, the color red; the smell of
a rose; the hurt of a pain; or the linguistic, semantic, imaginary, and
emotional experiential mix of being swept away when reading a great novel.
As mysterious as such qualities are, the compwareness theory provides at
least partial explanations for a surprising number of them, and points the
way for finding much more complete explanations in the future. Let me
discuss just a few of such explanations to give you a feel for the
incredible explanatory power of the theory.
One important quality of consciousness is its subjectivity. The
compwareness theory claims the subjective/objective distinction is one of
interconnect bandwidth and point of view (P.O.V., what is aware of what,
when, and how). The subjective awareness of consciousness is that of a
compwareness having an internal computational bandwidth billions of times
more complicated than any description a human mind could model. Its P.O.V.
is of massively parallel awarenesses of experiential patterns organized
into interactive, associational/generalizational/compositional pattern
hierarchies. When measured at the synapse level the cortex has a bandwidth
equal to 100 million HDTV screens. Measured by cortical minicolumns it has
the resolution of 160 million pixels, where each pixel is a powerful neural
net with 100 neurons and compwareness of one million synapses. The thing
itself is many orders of magnitude more complex than any description we can
ever extract from it, or understand if we ever could – and, thus, it has
the qualities of being “subjective”.
Another important quality of consciousness is its “aboutness”. Many brain
scientists believe much of what we are consciously aware of corresponds to
information our brains compute, and, thus, are compware of. This shared
“aboutness” includes information defining many, if not all, of the
qualities we sense – including qualities of color, shape, sound, smell,
objects, actions, thoughts, imaginings, emotions, etc. Brain science would
suggest that the computational richness of this correlation of aboutness is
in the megabyte to terabyte per second range. This creates a huge, complex
correlation between qualities of conscious awareness and compwareness –
providing strong Occam’s Razor probabilistic support for the notion that
consciousness and certain brain compwareness are, in fact, the same thing
-- i.e., If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ( and has million
or billions of other similar attributes per second), there is a good chance
it *is* a duck.
One of the most intellectually challenging qualities of consciousness it is
sense of unity. It’s one thing to say the brain might have compwareness of
everything we have conscious awareness of – it’s another to answer the
question “How could the compwareness of the brain’s billions of separate
neurons have the qualities of unity we sense in our consciousness?”
Since the compwareness theory claims brain compwareness and consciousness
are the same thing, it requires that the unities of consciousness are
unities of compwareness. But what are unities? Nothing is totally
unified. Virtually all unities are unified properties of separate things.
A rock is made up of trillions of molecules and atoms. At the atomic scale
these move in different directions at different speeds. But at time and
distance scales humans can directly sense, these molecules and atoms move
as a unit because of electrostatic forces. Even a black hole is a
distributed unity, having an event horizon and gravitational field which
move in unison with the black hole. (And some believe the massive
plurality of the universe created by our big bang is the inside of a black
hole in a parent universe that occurs in a substantially separated space
time fabric). Science shows that brain compwareness has many unified
properties that correspond to unities we perceive in consciousness, and
there is reason to believe that as we learn more about the brain, the
mapping between the unities of conscious and computational awareness will
be become increasingly tight.
For example, our brains is made of billions of neurons that each fire to
indicate awareness of a pattern – that is, awareness of the unification of
features that *are* that pattern. So brain compwareness is largely
compwareness of the unities of patterns -- or at least compwareness of
probabilistic belief in such unities. Furthermore, our brain’s neurons are
interconnected in ways that can create compwareness of unities of pattern
awareness much larger than that which can be represented by a given neuron
or a given neural assembly representing a single pattern. This includes
synchronized unities both up and down generalizational and compositional
pattern hierarchies. These temporal hierarchical unities can be mapped up
from sensory data, down from higher level patterns, or both. The brain can
also create synchronized unified awareness of associational patterns which
represent groups of hierarchical patterns that have a co-occurring or
sequential patterns of temporal correlation.
The brain’s neurons can store and recall patterns of experience, creating
unities of pattern awareness across multiple different time scales. The
brain contains billions of these patterns, many of which are reasonably
stable across time. This creates the unity of a relatively continuous
audience of patterns and memories -- an audience that is the “self”. This
“theater of consciousness” is the homunculus that is aware of our
sensations, thoughts and feelings. It is self-aware because this “self” is
aware of the patterns within it which are activated, and because the
recursive spreading activation within its
associational-generalizational-compositional pattern space creates
awareness of patterns of patterns of patterns.... The brain’s recurrent
connections enable large complexes of neurons associated with a given
concept to fire in synchrony, enabling large portions of the cortex’s
audience of activatable patterns to have awareness of the temporal unity of
the complex of pattern awareness associated with that given concept.
Furthermore, the brain has mechanisms for tuning substantial portions of
the brain’s audience of activatable patterns into the frequency of one or
more of such synchronized conceptual complexes, so as to focus the
receptivity of the much of the brains’ self, i.e., its audience of pattern
compwareness, on them. This creates a massively parallel unified
compwareness of such a concept, as represented by its associated complex of
activation of many patterns across many levels of hierarchical and
associational connection.
The compwareness theory defines a concept’s “meaning” as a unified
compwareness of such a concepts associated interconnected pattern
activation complex. It defines meaning in terms of sensory and emotional
experiential associations that provide “grounding.” It proposes that
compwareness of such meaning is a major source of many of the seemingly
mysterious qualities of consciousness. To understand the qualities of
consciousness we need to understand the architectures of such meanings,
that is, what patterns of patterns of patterns is there compwareness of,
and in what temporal sequencing. This includes trying to better understand
the qualities and complexities of the sensory, emotional, and semantic
experiential pattern spaces defined by the brain's neural networks, and the
qualities of the dynamic, interconnected, focused, multiplexed temporal
patterns of compwareness that take place across those spaces. For example,
the different qualities that distinguish hierarchical patterns related to
vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, kinesthetic, bodyspace, and emotions
are different qualities of representation in the different pattern spaces
specific to each such sensory modality. Vision grounds out in a 2D space
of color distributions; hearing grounds out in a space largely defined by
frequency over time, smell grounds out in a space defined by thousands of
different types of chemical sensors, emotions ground out in a space defined
by different neuromodulators, hormones, and body states and their effect on
many processes in the brain itself -- and so on for each of the brains
basic representional modalities. And much of the meanings of higher level
patterns mapped into each of these sensory spaces includes groundings that
span across multiple such spaces.
For example, let us consider our consciousness of meaning within a visual
scene. The brain is not only compware of a visual scene as a time-varying
spatial distribution of color information from the eyes projected into a 2D
visual field. It also has compwareness of multiple hierarchical pattern
complexes that are mapped onto that visual field. This includes patterns of
lines and shapes mapped into patterns of colors; patterns of objects mapped
into patterns of shapes; patterns of motions and actions mapped into
patterns of shapes and objects across time; patterns of relationships
mapped between objects and/or actions; and patterns in both short- and
long-term memory into which patterns mapped onto the visual field are
themselves mapped. If the brain’s wavetuning mechanism tune a significant
portions of the brain’s audience of neurons into the synchronous firing of
one of the pattern complex activations mapped onto objects in the visual
field – hundreds of millions or billions of neurons will be tuned into and
have a temporally unified compwareness of that object’s complex of
hierarchically and associationally connected patterns – and you will have
rich conscious compwareness of that patterns meaning in its current
context.
The focus of such tuning can be rapidly changed. In fact, through
theta-gamma phase synchronization we can be made conscious of the
interconnected meaning of a rapidly repeating sequence of such concepts.
For example, a 5 cycle per second theta brain wave can be phase
synchronized with a 40 cycle per second gamma brain wave, so there will be
8 gamma wave cycles per theta wave cycle, much as there are 8 beats per
measure in music with an 8/8 time signature. The prefrontal cortex and
hippocampus can use such theta-gamma phase synchronization to, in effect,
repeatedly activate the meaning of up to 8 different concepts together,
each in one of the eight repeated time slots, so as to enable more
explicitly grounded compwareness of concepts which involve relationships
between multiple different sub-concepts.
================================
This is far from a complete explanation of my current understanding of the
compwareness theory. I currently have many more ideas about consciousness
and other high level functions of the brain. But before I spend much more
time working on this theory by myself I would like to have discussions on
the web, by phone, or in person with others who think they have something
to add to, subtract from, change, challenge, or negate in the theory. In
particular, I look forward to discussions with people who have expertise in
various areas of brain science, including knowledge of the brain’s
connectome, synchronization, basil ganglia, cerebellum, thalamus,
hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, mammillary bodies, brainstem, and the
cognitive function of various neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. I am
interested in talking with people with knowledge of artificial
intelligence, as it applies to the brain. And I am interested in talking
with people with knowledge of quantum mechanics, about what, if any, role
quantum levels of description might play in helping the compwareness theory
explain the qualities of human conscious experience.
If you are interested in learning about or discussing any of these subjects
please email me at [email protected].
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AGI
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