3-Hour Video Presentation & Map of 'All' Theories

There are a few ways to divide up all approaches to understanding consciousness. One way is to pit Integrated Information Theory against Global Workspace Theory: is consciousness the anastomotic merger in the posterior cortex, or a top-down broadcast from the anterior cortex/thalamus?

Another way is to separate approaches that are more scientific from those that are more "woo". Scientific conferences like SfN (Society for Neuroscience) keep things rigorously accurate, but often show disinterest or even hostility towards trying to crack consciousness. The Science of Consciousness conferences held by Stuart Hameroff allow more voices, and I must say they are fairly proactive towards understanding consciousness, although openness allows some time-wasting, unserious nutcrackers, even occasionally onto the main stage.

A third approach, which this video takes, is to try to divine the essence or substance of conscious experience, thereby creating fields of materialism, quantum, idealism, dualism, and monism.

While this is an interesting way to look at it, I feel like we are too early in the game to even be debating the substance. I feel like the most productive approach is, like the Ring/Bank Theory does, to just try to figure out the mechanism. This involves using the following approaches:

The goal is to force as much correlation as possible in the hopes it will finally reveal bits of the mechanism. If I must place the Ring/Bank Theory on this chart, I would say it likely fits best with a materialist, functionalist, computationalist approach (with the disclaimer that agency and/or binding might require quantum).

They joke in this video that the problem isn't that we have too many theories, it is that we have one too few. We are still missing the one with the power to explain. While I think rings are that missing theory, I don't know what the mechanism or essense is, so the full answer is still missing. I think the real joke is, something that should be so simple to discover (how the brain orchestrates consciousness) has completely eluded the best minds for centuries. It truly is the last frontier, and just the fact it has escaped us means its unveiling will exceed all those discoveries made to-date (rocketry, physics, quantum, etc.).

The fact is, phenomenology from ring/bank theory has seen tremendous correlation in a few tests. Most notably, a study by Deisseroth et. al. found 2 Hz pulsing arising from layer 5 HCN1 channels of retrosplenial cortex in rats that were administered ketamine at sub-anesthetic doses. These pulses entrained the entire cortex, and are almost certain to be correlated with the 2 Hz 'reality frames' reported in ketamine, salvia, hemp, cannabis, and alcohol states (all of these are NMDA antagonists, setting up hyperpolarization and increased burst mode). Another test found that attention (in pulvinar, etc.) can change voices, i.e., can change between air puffs on whiskers to visual stimuli (hello, interrupt-style mic!). This is akin to Michael Graziano's Attention Schema Theory, that the brain makes a model not only of the world, but of the 3D cursor location/shape of attention within that world model, which is practically the same thing as ring/bank theory.

Another pivotal clue linking mind and matter is the discovery, by Mark Churchland, of FM-PCA rings in monkey motor/premotor cortex. A cyclic or repeated behavior like turning a hand-pedal is tied to a tracer making FM-PCA rings. Another study found FM-PCA rings whose duration and 0ยบ phase locked to mental and overt metronome beats. While these rings might sometimes align with percetual rings in timing/phase, they go on even when motor is handled autonomously, and attention is elsewhere, indicating perceptual rings either use a different mechanism, or are free to roam the larger cortex. Nevertheless, these are two tremendous data points showing, functionally, that sequencism by sub-groups of neurons is used to chunk (and progress through) task or tempo. Ring/bank theory says that the worldsim itself is often refreshed in chunked revolvic sweeps or by a tracer following an imperfect ringlike trajectory.

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