A general theory of consciousness I: Consciousness and adaptation

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how cognitive processes in living beings become conscious. Consciousness is often assumed to be a human quality only. While the basis of this paper is that consciousness is as much present in animals as it is in humans, the human form is shown to be fundamentally different. Animal consciousness expresses itself in sensory images, while human consciousness is largely verbal. Because spoken language is not an individual quality – thoughts are shared with others via communication – consciousness in humans is complex and difficult to understand. The theory proposed postulates that consciousness is an inseparable part of the body’s adaptation mechanism. In adaptation to a new environmental disturbance, the outcome of the neural cognitive process – a possible solution to the problem posed by the disturbance – is transformed into a sensory image. Sensory images are essentially conscious as they are the way living creatures experience new environmental information. Through the conversion of neural cognitive activity – thoughts – about the state of the outside world into the way that world is experienced through the senses, the thoughts gain the reality that sensory images have. The translation of thoughts into sensory images makes them real and understandable which is experienced as consciousness. The theory proposed in this paper is corroborated by functional block diagrams of the processes involved in the complex regulated mechanism of adaptation and consciousness during an environmental disturbance. All functions in this mechanism and their interrelations are discussed in detail.

KEYWORDS:

• Consciousness
• cognition
• adaptation
• regulation
• sensory images
• language
• autism
• visual thinking

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ivette Jans for her critical support and valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

[a] In the literature, the occurrence of a reaction or after-effect after a disturbance has ended is often taken as proof that the process under scrutiny is adaptive. However, any more or less differentiating process, feedback or otherwise, shows a reaction after a disturbance has ended and only a series of after-effects with declining magnitude indicates adaptation [see e.g. 17].

[b] With regard to ‘optimal’, we do not know what criteria define optimal for an adapting organism. They are determined by deliberations too complex to understand and depend on the species, the individual, the situation, the history of the individual, etc. However, this does not mean that optimal is not a real parameter for an individual in a certain situation. A problem faced by any adapting system is that it often has to satisfy multiple, perhaps conflicting, goals [17,20,21,112,113].

[c] The words thought an cognition are here often used interchangeably as they both refer to the same neural process. The medium in which the outcome of a thought process is expressed to become conscious, however, can differ widely as will be discussed.

[d] It should be realized that an ‘image’ of the environment seen or experienced by a living organism through its senses is neural information representing that environment. This information depends on how its senses operate, i.e. on their transfer function. The relation between sensory images and environmental situations is innately acquired or develops through experience and is essentially arbitrary [13,39, 89, 90, 114]. At the same time, it is dynamically dependent on the relation of the organism with its environmental situation [see e.g. 115].

[e] The term visual language is often used to indicate a translation of verbal language into visual symbols but should then be denominated as visual-verbal language.

[f] That new adaptation processes are conscious is generally accepted, see e.g. Baars [35]: ‘The loss of consciousness of a predictable event is the signal that the event has been learned completely. Habituation of awareness is not just an accidental byproduct of learning. It is something essential, connected at the very core to the acquisition of new information. And since learning and adaptation are perhaps the most basic functions of the nervous system, the connection between consciousness, habituation, and learning is fundamental indeed.’

[g] The word database and the division into two data bases is an arbitrary description of the real, neurological process, used to elucidate the translation mechanism.

[h] Roger Penrose [73], The Emperor’s New Mind: Letter from Einstein: ‘The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined. ...The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.’

Temple Grandin [60], Thinking in Pictures: ‘Einstein told his psychologist friend Max Wertheimer, “Thoughts do not come in any verbal formulation. I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I try to express it in words afterwards ’.”

[i] With the possibilities digital technologies offer at present, it might be possible to develop visually based communication methods which might be faster and more accurate than verbal communication.

[j] The word process is used here in a very broad sense. It may mean a procedure, a function, an action, an operation or an activity of any kind such as motor functions, electrical activity, chemical reactions etc. In addition, processes are composed of sub-processes, the functioning of which often depends on parameter values set in the main process.

[k] The word ‘image’ is a visual metaphor widely used for the way information is presented by sensory systems (see Section 2). This is a confusing use of language, however: the sensory information is generally dynamic in nature, resembling more a film than an image [116, Land et al., 2013]. This is especially the case in kinesthetic data and when data from different senses is presented. It might be more accurate to regard images in this respect as maps of data, either static or dynamic [Singer, 2015].

[l] All applications of automatic processes have their own data storage. That this is the case should be clear: the automatic use of a certain muscle in tennis is different from the use of the same muscle in, say, snooker.

[m] A secondary image shows an approximation by cognition of the disturbance in the initial primary image. After a successful adaptation procedure, the disturbance in the primary image is suppressed but is then accurately shown in the secondary image.

[n] The adaptive regulator published previously [17,18] makes use of a cross-correlation function to determine the magnitude of the component in the sensory signal which matches the solution cognition has developed to counteract the disturbance. This approach works very well in the mathematical model described there. It is a matter of speculation whether this method is also utilized in actual biological adaptation processes; there may be other or better methods.