Abstract: After the highly contested match of theories of consciousness that began in 2018, which is marking time, Stratium could reconciles and surpasses them, as a self-organizing theory that seeks to explain the phenomenon in addition to the function. Neurons are elementary feedback loops that process the regularities of sensory signals. They organize themselves into graphs of increasing complexity. Complexity is considered here as a fundamental physical dimension and not a simple property of mathematics. This solution sheds light on the most difficult questions about consciousness. How does information become interpretation? How does the user of the information appear? Interpretation assumes a relative independence of each level of complexity on the previous ones, while remaining closely entangled with them. This independence is the stability of the configuration of the constitutive probabilities of the underlying level. A higher graph observes and synthesizes the constitution of the lower graphs in the complex dimension. This is the fundamental beginning of the phenomenon of consciousness. At the pinnacle of complexity, waking consciousness results from the aggregation of brain functions into a single level, overcoming a very large number of underlying stages of interpretation, each superimposing its layer of consciousness, explaining the remarkable final thickness of the phenomenon. Under this complex illumination the brain is able to “turn around” to experience the meaning of its own activity.
Presentation
CH1: I tell the story of the match of theories on consciousness initiated in 2018, which has not yet found a winner, nor even a real consensus on how to conduct it. CH2: I lay the foundations of the investigation into consciousness and point out the conceptual gaps to be filled. CH3: I present Stratium, a theory encompassing the others. CH4: I seek the birth of the phenomenon of consciousness in the very physics of reality. CH5: I identify a universal principle explaining the emergences as well quantum, thermodynamic, as mental. CH6: I discuss the scientific character of the theory, before the conclusion.
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The point on research on consciousness in 2024
The last great mysteries reside at the extremities of the complex dimension, in the quantum void and at the summit of mental complexity with consciousness. The scope of the void, both cosmic and infinitesimal, is difficult to grasp. But how can a mass of neurons cloistered in a skull maintain so much mystery? An attempt to shed light on the matter took place in 2018 during a meeting of philosophers and neuroscientists at the Allen Institute in Seattle. The group had to agree on a method for experimentally confronting the different theories on consciousness.
This “adversarial collaboration” launched by a philanthropic organization, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, quickly turned into a crab basket, says Lucia Melloni, a researcher from Frankfurt who coordinated it. Each favored specific experiments that would demonstrate their theory. A nasty incident occurred a few months after the meeting: a hundred researchers signed a letter openly treating one of the competing theories, Integrated Information (IIT), as pseudoscience.
Two entrenched camps
The divide is therefore terribly abrupt between theorists. Why so much sensitivity? There are dozens of theories about the subjective experience produced by the brain, mainly demonstrating the great vagueness about its nature. First critical problem: the authors do not agree on the definition of consciousness. The subject involves philosophy as much as science, but it is rare that researchers are equally versed in both disciplines. When neuroscience began to fiddle with the matter, things were simpler. It was a question of identifying the neural correlates of consciousness. The improvement of fMRI techniques has allowed rapid progress. But now, what do we do with these neural correlates? How can we make them explain the phenomenon of consciousness? Why these specific neural activities and not others?
Philosophically, the divide is between illusionists and phenomenologists. Illusionists see consciousness as a purely accessory phenomenon associated with particular neural relations —extensive, involving reentries, inter-analytic, etc. Phenomenologists are convinced that there is a deeper reason, linked to a nature of reality still poorly understood by classical science. The controversy is also a quarrel between classicists and avant-gardists. Is it a surprise that some treat the others as charlatans?
Four theories dominate the discipline
Global Neural Workspace Theory (GNWT)
Consciousness appears when the information processed by neurons diffuses across a workspace extended to the entire brain. Local tasks connect together.
Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
Consciousness results from an integrated structure of information. The stronger the integration, the higher the level of consciousness. In principle, any highly integrated information system becomes conscious. This is not yet the case for AI, which has not reached such a level.
Higher Order Theory (HOT)
A first-order stimulus, such as a visual stimulus, becomes conscious when it is part of a meta-representation formed in the higher parts of the brain, which synthesize the tasks of other areas.
Recurrent Process Theory (RPT)
Consciousness of a visual stimulus comes from a feedback loop between the first-order and higher-order areas. There is ascending and descending signaling.
The two most popular theories are GNWT and IIT. They are also the most foreign to each other. IIT is the only true phenomenological theory, while the others come from a more classical science where the phenomenon remains a side effect of neural activity. Hence the qualification of pseudo-science received by IIT!
Two experiments to decide
A compromise was finally drawn up, in this very adversarial collaboration called Consortium Cogitate, in the form of two experiments, each preferred by one of the two camps. The first experiment consisted of showing participants a series of symbols, asking them to report those indicated beforehand. IIT predicted a synchronous and sustained activation of the posterior cortex. It was observed but only transiently. GNWT predicted that the prefrontal cortex would be activated, as well as a global network throughout the brain. This was the case, but only at the beginning of the experiment, not at the end.
The second experiment put the participants on a video game. Then they were asked if they were aware of images embedded in the background. The goal was to separate awareness (of the background) from attention (to the game). The results are not published. We can fear that it will be interpreted in the same way as the first: each camp gave its own explanation about the discrepancies. No common conclusion, not even a partial questioning of one or the other theory. It is true that they seem very difficult to mix.
A Stratium to unify them all
There is indeed a theory capable of harmonizing them, called Stratium, but it has not been honored by the Cogitate Consortium. It comes from outside the very closed arena of academia, agitated by the fierce competition for publication. In these times of gangrenous networks of suspect influencers and self-proclaimed experts, filtering is necessary, but using the sole academic title is harmful when it comes to a transdisciplinary field such as consciousness. A satisfactory theory about it must encompass intuitive, religious and philosophical approaches as well as scientific ones. Without forgetting to say how it escapes the accusation of circularity, since it is consciousness that seeks to explain itself!
Stratium satisfies this criterion of nexialism (transdisciplinarity) by revisiting our fundamental concepts about reality. Please understand that this is not about diluting the explanation of consciousness in mystical spaces, poorly supported beliefs or vague sectors of science. On the contrary, it is about redefining a precise structural framework for all this knowledge, from which consciousness emerges as a natural phenomenon. Three out of four of the competing theories arrive with purely neuroscientific documents in their baggage, the fourth with mathematical documents. Stratium, for its part, has voluminous files on physics, philosophy, and above all a discipline that is in its infancy but located at the heart of the matter: complexity.
From the new point of view established by Stratium, the most ironic thing is that the four theories examined by the Cogitate Consortium cannot function without each other. GNWT HOT and RPT are conceptually similar. None of them explains how networks correlated with consciousness bring this exceptional increase in meaning to the signals exchanged. On what depth are these spaces established? IIT is the theory that models this depth. But it lacks the independent space that separates unified conscious perception from other information. Collaboration is less adversarial than the participants believe. Let us resume the investigation from the beginning.
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The investigation
Let us begin by precisely defining the subject of our competing theories: what consciousness is. We all experience it, but there are multiple ways of defining it. It might seem more interesting to say what it is not, in the search for consensus. By approaching it from the cloud of approximations we could thus arrive at a single definition. But the danger is then to miss aspects that are independent and irreducible to each other. We must be very attentive to the postulates used at such an early stage of the investigation. However, I will choose one, as valuable as it is consensual, to save us time: The two irreducible aspects of consciousness are function and phenomenon.
The function
The function concerns the contents of consciousness, more sophisticated in humans than in any other species. Here we find the archaic definition of consciousness as a faculty reserved for the human species, or even for certain ethnic or religious groups who thus congratulated themselves on the relevance of their conscious contents. This exclusivity is not yet extinguished since some still draw intangible boundaries between human and animal consciousness. There are in fact large individual gaps in complexity between mental contents, with a significant overlap between humans and higher animals. For example, it is impossible to find a mechanism for locking trash cans that is understood by all humans and no bears. The overlap is about 30%.
More generally, the function is “the consciousness of something”. The brain has modeled a material or virtual subject. This subject can be itself. Consciousness “of oneself”, of her neural functioning, of her personality compared to others, etc. The subject can extend to congeners. Consciousness of the couple, of the family, morality, etc. All these functions are intertwined and hierarchical. They reflect a mental structure made of successive layers of complexity.
The phenomenon
The phenomenon is “what it feels like to be conscious”. A pure, fusional experience, in which functions assemble and link together. The phenomenon has no direct function but indirectly produces representations of itself. It is not invisible. It is real. Using the term “illusion” is to project it into a sort of parallel universe where it could exist without interfering with our theories. It is a dualistic procedure, incompatible with a unified vision of consciousness. We must get rid of illusionism in order to achieve a complete understanding of our subject.
The phenomenon is not explicable by a purely neurological theory. To claim that it comes from neural reentries is an unacceptable shortcut. Why should a back-and-forth between electrochemical signals become anything other than an electrochemical effect? Assuming that something as unexpected as consciousness is produced in this way, we should see all neural reentries cause it. This is not the case.
However, we do not know of any other correlate to the phenomenon of consciousness than this neural activity. The two are perfectly superimposable. Inventing invisible causes, such as a “field of consciousness” that would be mobilized by neural exchanges, contravenes the principle of simplicity, has no possible experimental confirmation, and does not constitute a real explanation. We will avoid falling into this kind of radical dualism.
First stage conclusion: no theory is complete
The phenomenon is indeed linked to neural activity and nothing else, but the detail of the properties of the activated neural networks is still too mysterious for us to understand how consciousness appears. The situation of the competing theories is becoming clearer. Three of them, GNWT HOT and RPT, are content to be theories of neural correlates, without explanation of the phenomenon. Only one, the IIT, really tackles the phenomenon, but has the defect of a vaguer superposition on the neural correlates.
We now understand better the hostility between the supporters of the IIT and the others. These theories belong to different epistemological categories. The IIT does not strictly satisfy the classical scientific criteria. It ventures into a new field, complexity, which does not belong to a specific discipline of knowledge. The existing branches, physics, biology, neuroscience, sociology, manipulate the subject in their own way. Complexity is seen as an emanation of equations, large numbers, the multiplication of criteria in the environment. It is not considered as a dimension in its own right. This is, I am convinced, where the Consortium sailing in search of consciousness has failed.
The IIT is trying to get the ship back on track —Cogitate would become Navigate? It links consciousness to the depth of complexity of the brain’s activity. This correlate corresponds better to the phenomenon. But it does not explain in itself why such a phenomenon appears or why a priori blind processes become intentional. Elsewhere in reality, complex equations have never shown more consciousness than simple ones.
Second stage conclusion: our fundamental concepts are insufficient
Correctly theorizing consciousness requires reviewing our concepts of reality. Reductionism is a dead end. Instead of making complexity a fundamental dimension of reality, it makes it a simple emanation of processes located at its origin. But this origin is not knowable. Believing that we can identify it with certainty is a trap of circular reasoning, an authentic cognitive bias: the brain considers itself capable, through imagination, of extracting itself from reality to contemplate it, while it is always entirely integrated into it. Reductionism is not a monistic vision of the Universe but rather a hidden dualism.
By neglecting the complex dimension, reductionism has locked reality in a real corset: Einsteinian space-time. This model has received a multitude of confirmations that confirm its remarkable efficiency… for a population of particles. The immeasurable size of the cosmos does not make it a model of the entirety of reality. Einsteinian space-time remains a theory of particles. It is not a sociology of neurons or human beings. Einsteinian eternalism in no way explains subjective time and even less consciousness. It even blocks the road to a solution. Let us break out of the corset and revisit our theories of reality if we want to understand these phenomena.
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At the heart of Stratium
Stratium is a theory of consciousness born at the heart of complexity. It did not start in neurons or in conscious space but between the two, in the personality. As a doctor, I am surprised every day to see the sudden transitions of my patients from one facet of personality to another, under the effect of physical pain or moral suffering. Without falling into schizophrenia, they seem to me to be polyphrenic, composed of facets negotiating with each other and taking over in turn. I deal sometimes with the Angry, the Depressive, the Comical, the Anxious, the Parent, the Child, etc. Obviously the neurons at work behind these transformations are constantly reconfiguring themselves, but not at random. It is not a chaotic system. Switches are made between pre-established patterns. I call these patterns persona.
Persona form a kind of psychic society. I discuss with one or the other depending on the context. Together they constitute a person who feels unique in their continuity. I easily grant this faculty to each of my interlocutors since I feel it myself. Nevertheless, this global identity sometimes moves durably within its possible configurations. I have witnessed many frank transformations of personality, triggered by serious medical events, heart attacks, cancer, accidents, etc. The person feels the same and yet the discontinuity is obvious to those close to them. Identity appears metaphorically like a boat anchored in the ocean, agitated by the currents of the depths, whose power sometimes breaks the bond and it goes to anchor itself elsewhere.
Many neurons to organize together
Before we look at a phenomenon as strange as consciousness, it seems useful to me to expose these astonishing psychological transformations. How could they emerge from an incredibly vast system of neurons in such a well-organized form if we are satisfied with an action/reaction model? These developments are very similar to those of a society, with its successive political regimes.
However, a society is structured hierarchically. A complex system is both global and split into independent levels of complexity, managed by local rules. A model is outlined by graph theory. The independence of each neural graph is relative, because each is entangled with the others and its symbolism would not exist without the underlying ones. But I keep this term because absolute independence does not exist anywhere, except in dualist thinking.
Levels of integrated information
What defines a level of complexity is the integration of its constituent information. The state of each element results from all the others, with a variable impact. This can result in a stable state at the global level. This stability is not immobility; it is a statistical equilibrium, as thermodynamics first theorized. A level of complexity thus has two facets, on the one hand the collection of integrated individual states —constitutive face—, on the other hand the global state —resulting face.
The resulting face in turn becomes an element, creating a different context with comparable entities. A new system is formed, entangled with the previous ones. We are faced with a true crossing of reality. Why this certainty? The best proof is our simple and direct experience, without any theory or intermediary instrument. The mind does not experience itself as neurons exchanging electrochemical signals and even less as quantum fields in interaction. The mind experiences itself as a space of meaning, traversed by powerful sensations. This inescapable experience signals that our consciousness has moved far away from its physical reality. To denigrate it, as illusionism does, would be to amputate the most intimate part of our mind, the one that philosophers call the “first person”.
Material evidence?
Claiming that a leap in complexity is a crossing of reality is not material evidence. We need a physical mechanism to explain it. Every dimension has rules for moving from one element to another. The equations of motion allow us to move in the spatial framework. What are these rules for the complex dimension?
Until now, I have used the inconsistencies and inadequacies of classical theories to arrive at this question. I have been channeled by these flaws towards the best escape: formalizing complexity as a fundamental dimension of reality. Now I am reaching the unknown. I need new hypotheses. I no longer have any flaws in classicism to guide me. The rest of this article will therefore be much more speculative.
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How reality surpasses itself
There are nevertheless arguments to gain confidence. By making complexity the most fundamental dimension of reality, many insoluble controversies of contemporary science are resolved. If we install each of our great fundamental theories in its own level of complexity, then they harmonize without difficulty. No framework is universal, no more than space-time than any other. The cosmic scope is no longer synonymous with universality. Our theories are discontinuous models of a continuous reality aggregated by this complex double-sided collage at each of its levels. It remains to determine the nature of the glue, which must be the same everywhere if we want to keep complexity as a unified dimension.
I will present my thesis to you in a moment. However, since it is the greatest conceptual evolution ever proposed to our knowledge, I must prepare you to receive it. To do this, and since we are in consciousness, become aware of the abysmal gap between the physical nature of a thought —a network of neurons in synchronous activation— and the perception that we have of it. This “first-person” experience is that of a meaning constantly changing in information content, depth and sentimental coloring. What does this have to do with cells filled with excitement? These two phenomena really don’t have the slightest thing in common. Besides, neither our urban electrical networks nor even the internet have ever generated this kind of feeling. That is to say, the term used in neuroscience, “correlate”, is so inadequate to connect electrochemistry to thought that it becomes “conceited”…
Levels of information that can be observed
You will not be able to accept such self-conceit, I have in mind. This is the necessary frame of mind to read what follows. This is not an abracadabra theory or a new religion. On the contrary, it is based on a vision of reality that is consensual today in physics: that of a universe of information. Without a fundamental substance identified with reality, all “matter” is reduced to field excitations and reality is described entirely by exchanges of information.
Let us not deduce from this the certain absence of any fundamental substance. Note that I spoke of “reduction” and “description”. We are definitively limited by the fact of being simply observers of reality. The mind observes, and so do our instruments. They access levels of information that themselves emerge from an unknown where something substantial can eternally be hidden. I will not stray any further from my subject, consciousness, but I am still touching on it. Reality, in fact, is described entirely as a layering of levels of information, from classical matter to the conscious pyramid built by our neural networks.
The observer is not divine
Of the two terms characterizing our observation, reduction and description, I will keep the second and banish the first from our investigation. As much as description fleshes out and enriches our vision of reality, reduction flattens it, by ignoring the layering whose importance we have just pointed out. Reduction is an epistemological technique that is occasionally useful for focusing on a level of information. Unfortunately, it is still too often used today as a theory of reality, asserting that there is an ultimate foundation for reality and that the other levels are simply emanations of it, illusory aspects.
Consciousness is not the only one concerned by reduction. Neuroscience illusionists generally forget that reductionism also declares the neuron as a simple aspect resulting from more fundamental processes. Biological molecules are illusions. The whole of reality is illusory, except for the “ultimate foundation”. Unfortunately, this level is definitively inaccessible and undemonstrable. It is indeed strictly impossible for us to extract ourselves from reality to verify its existence. At least if we want to keep monistic reality. To emancipate one’s mind from it is a dualism. It is to divinize it. Reductionism as a theory of reality is an authentic mysticism. By wanting to make everything an illusion, it becomes one itself.
Self-defined, rich and delimited consciousness
Let’s banish reduction. Description, on the other hand, is a much more fundamental notion. Its synonyms are ‘representation’, ‘symbol’, ‘definition’, ‘story’. In these terms we already guess the presence of consciousness in its functional version. To describe is to “become aware of”. It is easy to spot the function from within our conscious space. We are this space, even if it does not describe us entirely. We perceive that the function describes a certain number of levels of information but not all of them. Consciousness manipulates thoughts without accessing their structure. We do logic without knowing anything about the foundations of logic. A visual image presents itself without the process that allowed a crowd of neurons to assemble the points into scenes. When we want to “become aware” of these deeper levels, we must build models that will be juxtaposed with other conscious thoughts. It is not by chance that the reductionist has seduced scientists so much. Our conscious workspace uses this technique. It “cuts up” the levels of information to make models that it then assembles like a puzzle in its personal space, which is a single horizontal system. This work plan very naturally transforms the verticality of the world into a “flat Earth”.
This does not detract from its richness, which is considerable, with the myriad of subjects, criteria, angles of description, which are all pieces of the puzzle, in perpetual reconfiguration. But we must understand that this space is by nature horizontal in complexity, a dimension formed by its integrated information. It cannot escape from what defines it. What is not integrated into it is inaccessible by essence. It is only possible to grasp these things by representing them. Representation, that is to say the simulation of one piece of information by another, is the fundamental mode of consciousness as a function.
How is a workspace delimited?
Let us be wary, in our theories on the brain, of these hidden homunculi who would come to wire the neurons according to designs known only to them. Neurons are entirely owners of their mode of organization. The rules are physiological and common to all graphs. It must be assumed that they have been selected by evolution as the most suitable for processing regularities in sensory signals. The brain is an organ of feedback control of the environment. The greater the variety of criteria proposed to it, the more it spontaneously increases its complexity. There is thus a stunning contrast between the constant simplicity of the organizational mechanisms and the increasing sophistication of the information contents of consciousness.
This contrast challenges and will be our guide in the complex dimension. It suggests that there is a simple and universal principle behind each crossing of reality, from one complex level to another, and this from the lowest levels of matter to the virtual altitudes of neural networks. It is such a principle that can define complexity as a homogeneous and itself universal dimension. Let us look at it more closely.
The principle of relative independence
Any system of elements tends to find an equilibrium under the effect of two factors: 1) Its self-delimitation —the system is self-defined by the relationships that have appeared between its elements. 2) The sequence of its states often includes islands of stability in which it loops. Equilibrium is not immobility. The sequence of states has not vanished. However, the overall properties of the system remain stable. We find this astonishing combination within a single entity, the system, between a perpetually changing constitution and an unchanged whole.
A single thing that is both changing and unchanged? There is only one way out of this oxymoron. Times are different for change and constancy. A time lag has appeared within the system. A system is a strange object that presents two faces combining indissolubility and dissimilarity. It creates in itself the beginning of an additional dimension, the gap between the gaze of its constituents and that of the integrated whole. This “distance” is the elementary unit of measurement of the complex dimension.
Each individuation defines its own time
The time lag within the complex interface has major consequences. The existence of the system as a collection of elements is punctuated by successive relational states. The existence of the system as an integration only changes if its global properties change. These are two clearly independent existences, the great liveliness of one included in the nonchalance of the other. I think that the birth of consciousness is located there, in a life included in another, the second directly experiencing the existence of the first. This phenomenon seems to correspond very exactly to the direct conscious experience that we experience in the first person, that of an invisible swarm of concepts that assembles into a continuous thread of thought.
Thought would thus be a succession of these global integrations of the collective of neural states occupying the brain’s upper workspace. Be careful, the phenomenon is not reduced to this interface! It results from the stacking of all the underlying interfaces, which the neural graphs raise to a considerable height. The phenomenon is intimately linked to the depth of complexity, precisely as the IIT affirms.
A consciousness recognizes only itself
How can we find coherence between the statements of GNWT and IIT about the phenomenon? Conscious experience is indeed specific, qualitatively, to the upper workspace. It is particular to this final integration, whose relative independence I have pointed out. But this experience is constitutively indissoluble from the underlying complex layering. If this layering is modified, without changing the relations of the upper space, the phenomenon will be different.
The layering does not only include neural graphs but also physical constitution, neuronal physiology and matter. There is no break between material and virtual in the complex dimension. If neural exchanges are reproduced by silicon chips, a thread of thought will be born in the higher workspace, with a phenomenon of the same order as our own consciousness, but which will be qualitatively foreign to ours. In fact, only our individual phenomenon can recognize itself, because it is entirely personal, to the point that alternative states of consciousness such as dreams already seem partially foreign to our waking consciousness.
“Unconscious consciousnesses”
The dream is specific to the same workspace as the waking consciousness, in a much less widely integrated version. Disconnected from sensory influxes, the dream detaches itself from the body and the real world. A phenomenon different from alternative consciousnesses where the entire workspace is disrupted by the action of drugs, with a body present but in an unreal representation. All these consciousnesses are phenomena from the same neural space, capable of recognizing and comparing themselves.
But other consciousnesses are inaccessible to the waking consciousness: those attached to autarkic mental functions, when they are not integrated into the higher space. Their existence is attested by the brain’s capacity to react or even remember in a coma. Different depths of coma correspond to different degrees of residual integration of mental functions. These consciousnesses are specific to lower levels of mental complexity and it is impossible for the higher space to connect to them. It can connect to a concept located at the same level of neural complexity but not at its lower levels. The “consciousnesses” of the unconscious do exist, invisible, much more crude obviously, far from the “second brain” imagined by Freud.
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The physics of conscious independence
Our principle of relative independence needs a physical support. The emergence of a whole above the parts has long been an attractive idea but too mystical to make it a scientifically testable principle. Research on consciousness has suffered from this weakness of emergentism. However, a perfectly physical manifestation has come to give it new vigor: quantum decoherence. Superimposed quantum states become entangled in a single macroscopic state. Classical physics emerges from probabilistic physics.
I cited thermodynamics, an already astonishing example of a stable entropic value emerging from a system of particles in perpetual reconfiguration, described by Boltzmann’s formula, S = kB*ln(Ω). Brilliant formula for many, “crappy” say some. Why such strong opinions? Because the ‘=’ sign in this formula hides an emergence as frank as it is surprising. Equality brings together members with truly divergent qualities, inverted temperature on one side, number of micro-states of the system on the other.
A mathematical transition in emergence
Quantum decoherence is a new mathematized example of an equally surprising emergence. A stable macroscopic state is united with a set of probabilities. Is there a common mathematical entity to contain the quantum Whole and the thermodynamic Whole, solid and reproducible enough to accommodate qualities so foreign to their constitution? The common point is the stability of the global configuration of the underlying probabilities.
The great interest of this notion is that it describes a continuity over discontinuities. No obvious break between stability and instability. Stability is an attractor, a conceptual ideal but never truly achieved in reality. We only perceive ideal stability by voluntarily or involuntarily compartmentalizing our observation, which reality does not do. The fusion of probabilities in an evolutionary synthesis is the closest thing we know of in terms of continuous phenomena.
A stable configuration of probabilities
Continuity over discontinuities is the perfect description of the phenomenon of consciousness. It is a continuous experience encompassing perpetual mental agitation. Here opens up an extremely fruitful perspective for our investigation. If the same fundamental mechanism of emergence is found in quantum physics, thermodynamics and neural networks, we can suspect in it a universal principle of the complex dimension. This candidate is therefore: any integrated information system creates a global level which is the stable configuration of the probabilities of its possible states.
This global level has an existence independent of its constitution in the sense that its state is preserved “during” a very long sequence of constituent states. Temporal separation is ontological within the physical system itself. No human observer is necessary to make it work. This existential independence, this fragment of “consciousness of something” present in the Whole above its parts, is manifest in matter well before the constitution of the mind.
Consciousness, a qualitative fusion specific to its constitution
Of course, the “consciousness phenomenon” associated with quantum entanglement or thermodynamic entropy is completely foreign to that of the higher neural workspace. Since the latter already does not access the (un)consciousness of lower neural graphs, how could it access that of particles or molecules? Yet these consciousnesses of levels in complexity are integrated into its own. Which makes the astonishing depth and richness of the final conscious experience.
Why does the mind form a consciousness that is phenomenally different from that of matter? On the one hand, perceptions cannot be exchanged, as we have just seen. But the main reason is that neural graphs are structures particularly adapted to the elevation of complexity. They construct a phenomenal layering, found nowhere else in known reality. A graph is an integrated system for analyzing incoming signals. When its constituent neurons synchronize, it becomes a symbolic Whole. All the signals are transformed into a concept, a crossing of mental reality that corresponds in every way to the crossings of physical reality. It shows an entropic behavior between the birth of the excitations and the final synchronous state. This global state is a myriad of excitations traveling through the neurons in a succession of microscopic states that have a unified meaning.
Thank you…
I thank you for your attention to a theory that attempts to reconcile physics and our phenomenal experience without the shortcut of illusionism. Whatever your obedience, philosophical, scientific or religious, a single but crucial step is necessary: to admit the complex dimension as fundamental, before any other spatial, temporal or spiritual framework.
The interest of Stratium is to replace the other theories of consciousness in frameworks where each one is explained, while providing clearly more ambitious general answers. Let us briefly see its application to the questions of intelligence and subjective time.
Intelligence
Why do some conscious workspaces produce thoughts that seem crude to others? Yet they are all equally active at the neural level. Theories competing for consciousness have no clear intrinsic explanation for intelligence, unlike Stratium. Intelligence is not in the higher workspace but in the height of complexity of which it is the supernatant.
Intelligence increases with the maturation of the brain, without enlargement of this higher space and without perceptible change in the fMRI images, only by the extension of underlying complexity, and according to a very organized structure thanks to the independence of its conceptual stages. The synthesis of representations becomes a personality.
Subjective Time
Temporium is a book dedicated to the experience of subjective time theorized by Stratium. The independence of global-vs-constitutive times of a level of complexity is not enough to explain the experience of temporal passage, invisible in physical frameworks. It is necessary to “start” this passing time. The starter is the delay between the beginning of the integration of the system’s information and the equilibrium found in the configuration of probabilities. The Whole has a conception period, a “uterine phase”, and this period has a non-reversible temporal arrow. The entropic arrow of the temporal sequence of states starts the passage in a large number of levels of reality, probably all, but sometimes in such an instantaneous way that it is invisible to our instruments.
Time thus starts within a level of reality. But if there were only one of these passages, we would have no perception of it. Our final consciousness would be “on board” a moving mental vessel, without external visibility and therefore without “awareness” of a movement. Perception comes from the “friction” of temporal layers. They have indeed faster rhythms within the complexity underlying our conscious workspace. These layers are indissoluble while scrolling at sometimes incredibly contrasting rhythms. The passage is a phenomenon that could not be more intimate to the resulting experience.
You understand the benefits of this explanation, which accounts for the disconnection between random subjective time and metronomic physical time. Subjective time varies according to the context and the level of complexity used by neural graphs for its processing. Physical time is all the more stereotyped because it depends on a very low level of complexity in matter. Subjective time varies from one person to another, from one age to another, from an excited attentional state to a meditative state, because the heights of mental integration are different and specific to each state. We only have personal time and it is sometimes difficult to adjust it to that of others.
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Is Stratium a scientific theory?
Stratium integrates the findings of scientific theories on consciousness and resolves their controversies. Does this make it a scientific theory in itself? No. It must itself be testable. But here we reach the limits of the scientific method. Falsifiability requires an independent tester. What to do when the theory includes the tester?
Science generally uses instruments. The objectivity of the experiment is based on the fact that the instrument is connected to the same level of reality as the subject to be tested. However, the experiment is only monistic in this dedicated space. It is globally dualistic because there is a theoretical mind lying in wait that interprets the result in its mental simulation space. Marriage between two spaces located at different levels of complexity. Who can say if the marriage is faithful? There is no external observer to attest to it. Science thus goes through unpredictable revolutions.
The entangled and detached mind
The limitation appears clearly in quantum physics, where it becomes impossible to explain one level of complexity without involving another. Observer problem. Theoretical subject and theoretician suddenly appear less independent than we thought. My point here is not to tell you that consciousness “decides” the fate of a quantum interaction, but that it cannot observe it in a completely independent manner. Mental simulation remains inexorably attached to its object. The mind has not escaped from shared reality.
The mind is completely entangled with its physical reality and phenomenologically clearly detached. Even the most convinced illusionist does not reduce her conscious experience to a collection of quantum interactions. The abyss between process and phenomenon does not need to pass the Caudine Forks of falsifiability, it is a given. We are inside. Science is practiced inside. It would be to make of it a new Unique God, competing with the previous one, to apply it from the outside. Who actually sits behind this new God? The human mind, which conceived science. Far from a posture of humility, we are witnessing the self-divinization of the scientist when she denigrates the reality of the phenomenon of consciousness.
A testable theory in a framework that is not
With these remarks, I am not seeking to exempt Stratium from the criterion of scientificity, but to recall that the shared mental framework in which we have installed reality is by nature an approximate mask. It is a simulation of reality per se. We repaint it as scientific revolutions occur. But only some of its properties can be tested scientifically. The framework itself is not. Two advances must be carefully differentiated in my article. The change of framework, consisting of defining the complex dimension as the most fundamental, is not testable. The theory that I am installing in the new framework to explain consciousness, Stratium, has testable outcomes.
Let us take for example the experiments proposed by the Cogitate Consortium. In the first, participants had to identify symbols in a series. Neither the GNWT nor the IIT fully verify their predictions. In particular, the predicted activations only appear at the beginning of the experiment, not at the end. Stratium explains that since a thought is a stable configuration of probabilities, it is not necessary for these probabilities to be constantly recalculated for the thought to be maintained. The brain being naturally economical with its resources, it stops as soon as possible the neural activity that is no longer necessary for the synthesis present in the workspace. These graphs are reactivated when the signals differ and change the course of the thought. A routine task will thus consume resources at its initiation but much less at the end.
As for the brain areas involved, they of course depend on the signals analyzed, as neurologists have known since the dawn of their specialty. A visual task involves the occipital cortex, and the observation itself involves the prefrontal cortex. The networks still lit at the end of the 1st experiment are those essential to the management of the routine initially engaged by the global workspace.
And attention?
I do not know the results of the second experiment, which are not published. It is therefore more discriminating for Stratium since my explanation cannot be done a posteriori. The experiment attempts to separate the attention paid to a video game from the awareness of the wallpaper. The interpretation will be delicate because the relationships between attention and ‘consciousness of’ are not a consensus. Attention is generally considered as a wandering focus of ‘consciousness of’. There would therefore be no attention without consciousness, while there could be consciousness without focus. But the matter is not settled. Some points remain obscure. What neurological mechanism is associated with attention? How can we identify this focus in the midst of the neural correlates of consciousness?
Stratium metaphorically describes the conscious workspace as a scene powered by all mental functions. The virtual objects they produce are all present on the scene, included in the ‘consciousness of’. Attention is not a mental function but the global scale of the workspace. Attention materializes the stable configuration (temporarily) of the possible worlds that the scene is describing. The possible worlds vary according to the importance taken by each object in the scene. Since many are connected, the possibilities are not entirely random. For example, if attention is focused on a person, it seems difficult to remove the hat that person is wearing. On the other hand, the scenery of the scene disappears from attention when it focuses on people.
A prediction on the second experiment
The shift of attention corresponds to the reconfiguration of possible worlds according to the new objects that constantly enter the scene. There are ways to inhibit the incessant jumping of attention: the irruption of a particularly famous object or a prospect of reward, or sensory deprivation. Possible worlds cluster around celebrity or, on the contrary, the absence of any captivating subject.
The interest of Stratium is to explain what attention physically consists of and why it behaves this way, which the competing theories do not do. About the second experiment, Stratium predicts that the neural correlates will be rich at the beginning of the test, at the time of setting up the scene, including the background and the actors in the game. Then these correlates will correspond only to the movement of the actors, the background not influencing the reconfiguration of possible worlds.
Cinderella at the ball of theories of consciousness
When questioning participants about what they saw, it is important to take into account the delay after the interruption of the game. If the question is immediate, in the participant it is the attentional configuration still focused on the actors in the game that responds. The background will be ignored. If the participant has time to think about the whole scene at leisure, by motivating her with a reward, she will revisit all her memorized attentional configurations and will remember the background better.
Stratium is testable, certainly. It is the part of the theory that is scientific, once the postulate of the complex dimension is accepted. Any scientific theory uses postulates. But is it a good idea, in fact, to chain consciousness with science? Perhaps I should have presented Stratium to you as a tale? Tales always clearly illuminate the foundations of reality. Stratium is the Cinderella of the ball of consciousness theories. As beautiful on the surface as the elitists GNWT, HOT and RPT, as deep as the IIT, does not our princely mind dream of marrying her? Unfortunately she is lost far from the academic world. To find her, there is only one clue: a slipper of consciousness with extraordinarily complex contours. Who can wear it?…
Conclusion
The real “hard” problem of consciousness is that we do not use the right framework to think about it. The spatial, temporal, mystical, quantum, neurological frameworks are unsuitable for this study. Science, and even philosophy, which focuses on all methods of knowledge, show their limits. All these processes belong to the human mind, included in what it must study. The Creator mind is integrated into its Creation. How could it know that a property belongs to reality per se and not only to its space of creation? Such a property must concern the entirety of what it observes, including itself. This is not a sufficient condition of course, but by observing this property from one end to the other of its knowledge and of the self that knows, it can suppose that it extends beyond.
Space was classically the best candidate property. Everything seems to belong to a continuous space, including ourselves, which makes it easy to confuse Reality and Universe. Space is blinding in its size but seems itself to be the production of more fundamental information plans. And above all, eternalist space-time is incapable of including a phenomenon such as consciousness. We are thus encouraged to extract our minds from reality and think that we can theorize it from the outside.
The good candidate property is complexity, I hope to have convinced you of this crucial advance with this article. It is not a fixed vision of reality that must strive to explain consciousness; it is the presence of the phenomenon consciousness that must unlock the vision of reality. By introducing complexity as a fundamental dimension of reality, all our frameworks fit smoothly into this vast cabinet where new shelves are added as needed. The whole of reality including our conscious mind fits there without difficulty, encouraging us to think that the cabinet is larger than our personal reality without changing the principle with respect to its observable part. Thus we can escape our limited vision without surreptitiously divinizing our Creator spirit.
Rather than assuming the existence of a hypothetical field behind consciousness or reducing it by illusionism, which are dualistic approaches, I preferred to seek it at the heart of the complexity of reality. It is born in the principle of a continuous merging the discontinuous: the configuration of the probabilities constituting a level of complexity. Draft of a view of an integrated system of information on itself. This fragment of “consciousness of” is superimposed on the others in the complex dimension. Neurons have a particular ability to quickly raise complexity thanks to their graphic organization. The particularly rich consciousness that we experience in the upper workspace of the brain results from an impressive layering of ‘consciousness of’1, ‘consciousness of’2, ‘consciousness of’n…
The brain stretches its physical links in the complex dimension. At the top, our conscious workspace is still flat, but it now overcomes the reality of a very high altitude, having managed to procure the plans for its own structure. It truly scrapes the sky…
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