Theories of Consciousness

Welcome! This site is still in progress, but is dedicated to explaining my thoughts on how the brain may make consciousness.

In particular, it is my thinking that the brain has a way to give memory to perceptual shape on a somewhat cubic structure I call the bank. Different regions/networks of the brain are constantly vying for usage of this structure. For example, bottom-up processes like a wasp stinging you could grab the bank to record a solid memory and to bring attention to some resolution of the issue. But top-down processes could take over also, such as remembering a remedy of sticking a cigarette butt on the sting. Different schemas can take control of it, too. In the case of the wasp, either the real world schema could take control of the bank and bring it to the location on your body where sting occurred, or the imagination schema could depict a blown-up image of a wasp stinging a person on the particular location and vibrating at a dedicated high frequency to give the feeling of pain. Also, things that have already happened and moved on can attract the bank within a fusing timeline schema (like the stroke of a grandfather clock that was heard but not attended to until a second later). Incoming stimuli (sensations) and outgoing command (actual or mental movement control) also vie for the bank (when motor response has the bank, it is voluntary will; without, it is handled autonomously and often unconsciously).

The whole brain is fighting over the bank, which lends conscious memory-attention to processes (usually a good thing; sometimes a bad thing for, say golf or musical professionals who overthink under crowd pressure and bring too much consciousness to things that would have been handled better by their basal ganglia muscle memory). So what brain region is being fought over? Well, that is hard to say. It might be possible that grid/place cells of the hippocampal area (/entorhinal/perirhinal/etc.) are the bank resource, but it could be that cortical networks, cortical columns, or synapses/ncDNA methylation somehow encode it.

It may be that the brain uses a sort of double-cipher to encode and communicate (to the PFC network viewer?) consciousness. At the first level, each millisecond of neural activity maps to a single point voxel location in perceptual space - the space around you. Over the course of, say, one-tenth of a second, the voxels move slightly 100 times and trace out a squiggly ring path in a 2D plane at some attitude. At the second level, the ring path is a low-dimensional cipher, linking to high-dimensional cortical patterns. The PFC (you) can then understand the full 3D thing because of invariant patterns encoding lots of aspects of experience, and the positions along the ring encoding exactly where they are, say, in your body, so that you can construct the full body in its proper orientation for a series of tracer shoutouts. These "rings," whether drawn out over 100 ms or grouped into a nearly instantaneous flash, are the edges of the "frames of consciousness." These frames, with boundary rings, move around within perceptual space in discrete steps, largely unnoticed by us but painting the entirety of conscious experience.

GPT

Poster

New App!

Rings of Fire: How the Brain Makes Consciousness:

PDF Papers

• "Perceptual geometry as underlier of consciousness."
• "Spectral Amplitude Modulation in EEG: Potential Correlations with Musical Stimuli"

Slides from Six Classes on Perceptual Optics

• 1. Physical and Geometrical Optics: Light, from Emission to Capture
• 2. Voxel Theater: Changing 2D to 3D
• 3. Bank Necessities: 3D Etch-a-Sketch

Perceptual Optics Book Preview

• Perceptual Optics:
• "What does a pinhole do?"
• "What does a lens do?"
• "What is focus?"
• "Perspective vs. orthographic images."
• "Casting perspective images to 3D."
• "What is stereoscopic vision?"
• "Ten trillion voxels in perceptual space?"

Contact

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to me at caldwbr@gmail.com.