[Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Daniel Böttger, who wrote last year’s review ofOn The Marble Cliffs, has finally taken me up on this and submitted this essay. I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse all guest posts, and I’m still collecting my thoughts (ha!) on this one.]

Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serious claims that not everything is physics. It has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences”1, “the last frontier of brain science”2, and “as important as anything that can possibly exist”3 as well as “core to” all value and ethics.

So, let’s solve that in a blog post.

Don’t worry, Scott hasn’t gone megalomaniacal. My name is Daniel Böttger. A few of you know me as the author of the Seven Secular Sermons. Most of you have seen my review of On the Marble Cliffs , which won me the right to pitch Scott this guest post.

You came here to read Scott. Why would you stay around for this? Three reasons:

  1. Scott has agreed to post this, so he thinks it might be worth your time.

  2. It proposes a new, testable solution to a time-honored, pivotal mystery.

  3. It utilizes a niche of electroencephalography research which is so obscure you’re almost certainly unfamiliar with it, and which as far as I know nobody has ever applied to the problem.

What we talk about when we talk about qualia

The study of consciousness has differentiated its subject matter into the parts that can be studied normally (like wakefulness and complicated information processing juggling multiple bits of information, which in humans seems to require consciousness) from the weird part where there’s no consensus even on what would be the right questions to ask: subjective experience, a.k.a. “phenomenal” consciousness.

Phenomenal consciousness has been further refined into the concept of qualia (singular: quale) which are individual instances of subjective experience, of information (such as the taste of a food) being not only information known and processed, but also experienced, felt consciously. There is much disagreement on how qualia should be defined. There are common shorthands, “what it is like” or “the way things seem to us”, but when two people talk about qualia, these shorthands are too vague to help them to rule out the possibility they’re talking about different things. Still, the concept can be fleshed out with a list of characteristics qualia have.

I would start with a few basic ones that receive little attention in the philosophical literature because they’re so obvious, or because they’re also true of information being processed unconsciously, so they’re not “special”.

  1. Distinguishability: qualia can be distinguished from each other.

  2. Duration:

1. Qualia need some minimum duration to be experienced. The details are well-suited and have turned out to be complex, but you’re not far off if you take 80ms as a bare minimum, for simple perceptions like a blinking light that you’re poised to look for.

2. Detailed self-reflection, noticing that you’re noticing[^4], takes longer. In trained meditators it can go on for hours.

3. The maximum duration is until the next time consciousness is lost.
  1. Simultaneity:
1. There are usually several qualia at the same time.

2. The maximum number is not obvious, although working memory capacity (usually 7 ± 2) provides a lower bound, but there are never billions of qualia perceived at the same time.

3. The [jhāna states](/p/jhanas-and-the-dark-room-problem) seem to indicate that after considerable training in maintaining self-reflection, the minimum number of simultaneous qualia can go down to one. In that case, the remaining one quale will appear to pervade everything. If you don’t have any, you’re unconscious.

Then there are the four special characteristics of qualia that distinguish it from normal unconscious information processing, given by Daniel Dennett4.

  1. Ineffable: qualia cannot be communicated, or apprehended in any way other than direct experience.

  2. Intrinsic: qualia are simple properties, unanalyzable because they’re not composed of relations to other things.

  3. Private: all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.

  4. Directly or immediately apprehensible by consciousness: to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.

And here are another three, given by Thomas Metzinger5 as characteristics of (singular) self-awareness, translated into English and summarized into characteristics of (plural) qualia:

  1. Mine-ness: qualia are experienced and described as one’s own.

  2. Homogeneity: all qualia are felt to be of the same type. While differences between them can be appreciated, they are always experienced as the same kind of thing.

  3. Perspectivity: qualia are experienced “from” somewhere.

Three more are given as “laws of qualia” by Ramachandran and Hirstein6. I’d summarize them as follows:

  1. Irrevocability: qualia can’t be directly overridden by top-down attention.

  2. Flexibility: qualia can be used for different purposes, rather than merely trigger a reflexive response.

  3. Short-term memory: qualia remain available long enough for choices to be made based on them.

Some authors7 have differentiated into several characteristics what I’d call just one, and which Scott has already written about:

  1. Infallibility: qualia cannot be misperceived.

In reaction to my first draft of this post, Scott gave me another one to explain:

  1. Unity: while qualia are multiple, there only ever seems to be one “consciousness” that apprehends them, at least according to itself.

Finally, here is one about the special case where the qualia being experienced happens to be self-referential, which will be obvious to anybody who has tried to ride a bicycle while trying to understand how they’re doing it:

  1. Self-consciousness impedes complex unconscious information processing.

Three bullets to bite

Failed searches for the nature of qualia were based on certain widespread but false assumptions. The following three corollaries of this theory negate these assumptions. So they’ll seem weird.

  1. Humans are not conscious

Only thoughts are conscious, some of the time. The part of you that’s reading this right now and feels itself to be conscious, is a thought.

  1. Consciousness is not a thing

“Consciousness” is a funny word. It takes the adjective “conscious” and makes it into a noun. That noun is then easily mistaken for an actual thing in and of itself, something with a degree of independence, rather than merely an attribute or a characteristic of something else.

In fact, a thought can be conscious much like it can be right or wrong. You can talk about “the consciousness” of a thought if you’re talking about that attribute or characteristic, just like you can talk about “the rightness” or “the wrongness” of a thought. But just like rightness and wrongness aren’t things in and of themselves, so consciousness is not such a thing either.

  1. You are not your consciousness

An additional error is made when people identify themselves with “their” consciousness. Not only do they wrongly assume that there’s a thing there to identify with; this assumed identity also creates false intuitions:

  1. The supposed thing-ness of consciousness seems more real, since people usually believe themselves to be real.

  2. Consciousness seems like there’s only one of it, since people usually believe there’s only one of themselves.

  3. It extends instinctual self-defense into defense of this false concept.

This does not mean a statement like “I am conscious” is always false. The word “I” is a useful shorthand for whatever the sense of self happens to point to at the time. It is imprecise but more convenient to say “That idiot cut me off” rather than “That idiot cut off the car that’s driven by the person that’s saying this”. It is imprecise but more convenient to say “I’m hungry” rather than “the person saying this is experiencing hunger”. In that sense, “I” and “me” just help get to the end of the sentence more quickly. Analogously, it is much more convenient to say “ I am conscious of this moment” rather than “The thought that is directing this mouth to say this sentence is conscious of this moment”.8

Just like “I’m hungry” is okay as a shorthand, so is “I’m conscious”. They take up less space than “I experience hunger” or “I experience consciousness”. But just like “I am this hunger” would be a confused thing to say, so is “I am this consciousness”.

And like when you say “I’m hungry” you’re really talking about the current state of your digestive tract, when you say “I’m conscious” you’re really talking about your current thoughts. So that’s where we’ll start looking.

What are thoughts?

Thoughts are the processes you can introspectively notice in yourself when you deliberate, analyze, evaluate, reason, form concepts and solve problems. You can also notice similar, but simpler and briefer processes when you imagine, remember, notice, recognize or judge something or when you feel an emotion or motivation. These simpler, briefer mental events will also be called “thoughts” here.

Some serious thinkers insist that thoughts are a special category of things experienced from a first-person perspective, categorically and importantly different from the brain activity observable from the third-person perspective of outside observers and brain imaging technologies. I disagree, and use “thoughts” as merely pertaining to a level of functional abstraction of “what the neurons processing this information do”, just like “the mind” overall is merely an abstraction for “what the brain does”. This is a physicalist view. Physicalist theories have two main problems.

  1. Brain imaging tech such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) does not show thoughts.

fMRI shows the slow-changing anatomy of biological neural networks, and how they change on a timeframe of months and years as a nervous system learns, matures and incurs damage. The tiny, milliseconds-long workings of individual neurons and action potentials can also be studied, by isolating them under microscopes and examining the molecules, ions and electrical flows in great detail. Unfortunately, thoughts last from tenths of seconds for the briefest recognitions, to several minutes for the most focused uninterrupted problem-solving. They’re between the timescales that science has great methods for.

But a new method can do it! I’ll describe it in the last section of this post, because it provides hope that much of what I’m about to conjecture will be able to be tested experimentally.

  1. Like all theories of the mind, physicalist theories have trouble bridging what has been termed the “explanatory gap” between

  • subjective experience, the world of qualia, where nothing could be more obvious than the fact that conscious experience is happening,

  • and the world of objective facts, physics and brain imaging technology, where nobody has found these supposed qualia as a thing to point at.

Dualist theories “solve” this by accepting subjective qualia and objective physics as separate worlds. Physicalist theories claim it’s all physics in the end, so they need to show how qualia arise out of physics… but none of the existing theories of how that goes (including denying that qualia even exist, or that they can be meaningfully discussed) have reached consensus.

What follows is a theory of how qualia, with the 16 characteristics listed before, do exist, and necessarily arise out of physics.

An area that does not give physicalism such trouble is how the mind’s information processing (conscious or not) is based on neuronal activity, on neurons firing “spikes” (action potentials) of electricity at each other. There is a lot of good research on this. Mental information processing doesn’t seem possible without these electric spikes.

A living human brain will contain between 9 and 200 billion spikes per second. Humans at peak performance can do many thoughts per second9, but whatever the average number is, it has to be orders of magnitude lower than billions per second. So, assuming the brain doesn’t just waste energy on billions of needless spikes, an average thought should encompass many million or several billion spikes per second10. So these have to be “somehow” organized into a pattern of correlated neuronal firing activity.

Patterns of spikes running through the same brain can meet, when they fire into each other. When that happens, they can merge. You see particular black and white pixels on this screen here (again, “thought” includes such very brief mental events as well) but they get merged into letters, words, this sentence and your understanding of this argument. You can re-focus on the particular pixel, but when you do, you re-perceive it; you can’t recall your previous perception of it, because it has merged into the thought of the letter, the word etc.

But they don’t always merge. You might listen intently, e.g. if you’re waiting on an acoustic signal that you want to react to as quickly as you can. Then when you hear a sound, a thought poised to react meets another thought that comes in from the ears with the signal received there. But while you’re doing that, other neuronal patterns continue to come in from e.g. your mouth, reflecting the perceptions of your tongue. Spikes from the ears and spikes from the tongue even have to pass through the same brain structure, the thalamus. Yet the spikes from the mouth remain uninvolved in your being poised to react, as long as you maintain focus on the modality of sound. This rules out the possibility that all neurons talk to all other neurons indiscriminately.

That’s a crucial problem that requires an explanation! Since

  • billions of bits of neuronal activity, across many neurons in space and many milliseconds in time, can be part of a single pattern,

  • but patterns can also remain separate, even while running into each other,

there has to be a difference between these two states of affairs. And in a physicalist framework, a distinction can’t be only at the level of abstraction of thoughts, where all sorts of rules could be postulated. The distinction must be grounded in the physical neurons that make it.

Neuron ingroups and outgroups

The pattern that holds a lot of spikes together into a thought is a neural oscillation: neurons firing along circular paths in a synchronized rhythm11. These are commonly called brain waves and Scott has already written about them. They arise when neurons enter a circular, self-repeating pattern of activity, and fall apart as their neurons cease to maintain that pattern. A neuron that is part of one oscillation can hardly also be a part of another, so oscillations compete for neurons.

Higher frequency oscillations are smaller, which makes sense because higher frequency means less time for the circular signals to travel, and smaller means less space through which they travel.

Small, high frequency ones arise in response to sensory stimuli. They’re where multiple bits of information that synchronously arrive are bound together into a single representation of an object that those bits describe features of, such as its color and movement. This has been known since people like Francis Crick and Christof Koch researched it in the 1990s, and it is widely accepted, probably because it doesn’t make any claim why there would be anything like experience or qualia involved.

There are also larger and therefore slower oscillations. Neuronal signal propagation has very variable speeds, but the lowest of low estimates still gives it half a meter per second, i.e. much less than a second to travel straight across the entire brain. Every thought that lasts longer than that, such as your understanding of this sentence, has to be at least a bit circular and therefore oscillatory. This includes pieces of information being “stored in working memory” i.e. maintained for seconds or longer.

But the oscillation is just a pattern of interactions between many neurons, so it is itself an abstraction! A truly bottom-up explanation of how thoughts/oscillations can either merge or not merge has to answer how each individual neuron can react differently depending on whether spikes it receives are part of the same oscillation or not.

I think it works like this.

  • Spikes that are part of the same oscillation fire in sync; they have a shared rhythm. For each neuron that is taking part in an oscillation, the time elapsed between its own sending of a spike via its axon, and the arrival at its dendrites of subsequent spikes from neurons it oscillates with, remains constant over multiple such intervals. That is what it means to share a constant rhythm.

  • So when a neuron receives a spike, all the processing ability it needs to decide whether that spike is part of such a rhythm is

    • an ability to measure the interval of time elapsed since its own last spike

    • and an ability to compare this interval with the intervals after previous spikes.

  • The measuring seems trivial. We already know every neuron has a refractory period after it has fired. This constitutes a built-in cellular timer that measures the interval since its last spike.

  • The comparison of such intervals has to be “somewhere” in the dynamics of neuronal membrane potential, which is influenced by many factors and definitely features complicated feedback loops that could be harnessed for computation. I can’t break this down further to the chemical level. But since individual neurons can keep a rhythm all by themselves, this comparison doesn’t seem too much to ask of a single neuron.

  • An ability to make such a comparison makes the neuron able to treat signals it receives in a shared rhythm (and therefore likely from other parts of the same oscillation) differently from signals that are not part of the same rhythm (and are therefore coming from elsewhere).

This physically implements the crucial distinction between neuronal interactions within the same oscillation, and interactions beyond the same oscillation. With this grounding achieved, let’s go back up to the level of abstraction of thoughts, where I’ll call this distinction the difference between the inside and the outside of a thought. We’ll need this difference to explain why thoughts that oscillate give rise to qualia, and sometimes to self-awareness.

Inside conscious thoughts

You can notice your own mental activity. Let various thoughts arise and fall away, without engaging with them, or recognize a few as relevant or examine them for a while. Or drop some and look for new ones, either way is fine.

If you have never done mindfulness meditation, it really helps to keep doing this noticing process for a minute before you go on reading.

Now what is strange about that is: subjectively, it is not obvious that that which is noticing those thoughts… is itself a thought! It’s going on in the same brain as the ones it is noticing. It’s processing information just as they do: to notice something is to process information from it. It’s just as time-limited: there was a time before the noticing started, and there will be a time after. And it’s just as limited in scope, as is evident from the limit to how much it can notice simultaneously. But even examining itself thoroughly, it still seems ,__ subjectively, to itself, very different from them!

What this noticing thought notices about those other thoughts, the information from them it processes, is what they “look like” (i.e. are neurally encoded as) “from outside” (i.e. not in sync with its own rhythm). The inside view of a thought (its internal rhythmic communication) is very different, much like the insides of cars, cartwheels and cardiologists look very different from their outsides. Each thought does not notice its own outside, so it can’t easily notice resemblances to the outsides of other thoughts, so it’s not obvious to itself that it is itself just another thought.

Again, this is just at the level of abstraction. What is really happening is:

  • Since the oscillation/thought is made of neurons receiving and processing information, that’s all it ever does.

  • But the processing of information that is part of the oscillation/thought is handled distinctly from the processing of information that is not. One of the differences between them is that internal processing can maintain bits of information over time by “juggling” them as long as they maintain their circular activity12.

  • Since the distinction between internal and external information is neuronal activity, i.e. the exact kind of information that an oscillation/thought can process, it can notice this distinction and thereby notice itself.

    • This can be provoked deliberately by directing attention on attention itself13.

    • This noticing of itself is again “normal” neuronal information processing, i.e. the way neurons process anything, regardless of consciousness.

    • It is necessarily processed in the rhythmic activities that transmit internal information.

    • It is therefore self-referential and recursive: It notices something that is noticing itself, i.e. noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing itself, i.e. noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing something that is noticing itself etc. A visual metaphor may serve to illustrate this:

Two facing mirrors, recursively reflecting each other.

  • Qualia are nothing but information being processed internally, on their own information channel, encoded in the rhythm of the oscillation. We use special words like “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” to denote this actual, physical and knowable distinction from other neuronal information processing.

If this is the nature of qualia, all their characteristics should follow from it. Time for the payoff!

The first three characteristics follow from how qualia are information being processed.

  1. Distinguishability: qualia have to be distinguishable from each other because they’re bits of information, and bits of information have to be distinguishable or information processing would not work.

  2. Duration:

1. Qualia have to have some minimum duration to be experienced, because the rhythm needs to be established over a couple of cycles, in order for participating neurons to establish the distinction between internal and external information.

2. Detailed self-reflection, noticing that you’re noticing, has to take longer because it needs more cycles: a rhythm needs to be established in order to be noticed, and then the processing of what was noticed needs more such cycles.

3. Qualia have to end when the neurons cease to maintain the oscillation that contains them.
  1. Simultaneity:
1. There have to usually be several qualia at the same time, at least in larger/slower oscillations, because each oscillation has a processing capacity determined by the number of neurons involved, and this capacity has to be filled because otherwise there wouldn’t be the activity that constitutes the oscillation.

2. The number of simultaneous qualia is limited because the processing capacity of the oscillation is limited.

3. After considerable training in maintaining self-reflection, jhāna states fill this capacity with (in the second jhāna as an example):

   * Joy

   * Reflections of itself reflecting on:

     * Joy

     * Reflections of itself reflecting on:

       * Joy

       * Reflections of itself reflecting on:

         * Joy

         * Reflections of itself reflecting on:

           * Joy

           * Reflections of itself reflecting on:

             * Joy

             * …

The aspects of the specialness of qualia follow from how they are processed in their own way.

  1. Ineffable: qualia cannot be communicated because they are processed in their own, locally referenced way, separately from communicable “outside” information.

  2. Intrinsic: qualia have to seem different and have to not seem based on other bits of information, because only this special internal processing can store information over time (bits of “working memory”), while outside information can only be streaming in.

  3. Private: same as 4. Ineffable.

  4. Directly or immediately apprehensible by consciousness: qualia have to be immediately available because they’re part of the thought/oscillation that is experiencing/processing them.

The next three are focused on self-awareness, i.e. the special self-referential and recursive case. Here the oscillation is not just processing qualia, but processing the fact that it is processing the qualia of how it is processing qualia etc. In doing so, it recognizes true aspects of this state of affairs:

  1. Mine-ness: this is the understanding of the qualia truly being part of that which is experiencing them.

  2. Homogeneity: all qualia are felt to be of the same type because that’s what they truly are; they’re all bits of information being processed internally.

  3. Perspectivity: qualia truly can only be experienced “from inside” the oscillation because neurons that aren’t tuned into the rhythm will not process the spikes accordingly.

The “laws of qualia” seem obvious:

  1. Irrevocability: qualia can’t be directly overridden by top-down attention any more than other factual information being processed can.

  2. Flexibility: since qualia are part of the type of processing that has memory, they have to allow deliberation on them.

  3. Short-term memory: same as 2. Duration.

And the last three:

  1. Infallibility: qualia cannot be misperceived, because how they are perceived is all that they are.

  2. Unity: this theory says multiple oscillations can have qualia in separate places in the brain at the same time. This is subjectively not obvious because:

1. All thoughts (even the linear ones that are unconscious because they aren't oscillating) compress/simplify what they're thinking about. When they oscillate and notice themselves, they have to continue to do that, because each thought has to be more complicated than its own internal processing capacity can contain. So their self-representation is also compressed/simplified, usually into a notion called "me". Thoughts don't usually think of themselves "I'm a thought" but "I'm me, I'm a human". So conscious thoughts usually _anthropomorphize themselves_.

2. Each thought has access only to conscious phenomena that are internal to itself[^15], so the contradiction between multiple claims to be “me” cannot be noticed while the oscillations remain separate.

3. Self-representations do meet when two oscillations merge. But in that case, the simplicity of their self-representations[^16] usually makes it easy for those to merge as well, as the oscillations _mistake each other for themselves_ , summoning unity.
  1. Self-consciousness impedes complex unconscious information processing because it competes with it for neurons. Neurons that are tuned into the rhythm aren’t available for other things, and the recursion of self-referentiality can keep these neurons occupied for a long time.

So qualia arise out of neuronal information processing much like biology arises out of chemistry. When chemical reaction chains build each other, they can achieve self-replication. When neuronal activities reflect each other, they can achieve self-reflection. Many processes that know each other become one process that knows itself.

From the information processing angle, oscillations that can maintain bits of information have internal working memory, which is the only thing that non-oscillating neuronal activities lack in order to fit the definition of nondeterministic Turing machines. (The IT people among you should grok this immediately. Everyone else may have to dedicate some study time.) From this angle, there are not one, but two levels of information processing systems. The brain is one, obviously. But running inside the brain, oscillations/thoughts with memory are themselves additional information processing systems. It’s analogous to a physical computer system that has, running inside of it, one or more virtual machines. We have failed to locate qualia by imaging the former, because they happen in the latter.

This theory of qualia applies only to biological neuronal processes. A for loop is self-referential but is not a biological neuronal process, so I don’t claim it has qualia. “Surely” in the vast space of possible AI architectures, some could be designed to have phenomena that are more or less analogous, but I see no reason to believe the current LLMs do.

How to test this theory

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was much hope in the study of consciousness that then-new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tools would let us look into the brain more deeply and thereby let us figure out consciousness. While science did indeed learn much more about the brain, the hope that this would help resolve the puzzle of consciousness did not pan out. But the hope wasn’t crazy: new measuring capabilities are a good reason to expect new data that can hopefully clarify matters.

There is new such hope, due to another new method called EEG source analysis. Electroencephalography (EEG) puts electrodes on the scalp and measures tiny electrical currents between them. EEG is very good at temporal resolution, but for most of the century since its invention in 1924, it had almost no spatial resolution. It could tell you the differences between individual milliseconds in your electrical flow measurements, but it couldn’t tell you where in the brain the signals were coming from14. However, if you hook those EEG electrodes up to the amounts of computational power available these days, you can mathematically reconstruct quite good guesses about where in the brain the electrical signals are coming from. And that’s a game changer. This combined temporal-spatial resolution lets you localize individual neural oscillations, if they’re large enough. And that’s how you get to look at (oscillating) thoughts!

There are multiple EEG source analysis algorithms. Low-Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA) is arguably the best one at the moment. It still has low spatial resolution compared to fMRI, as it says right in the name, and it’ll remain that way. There is a strict physical limit to how much signal this method can ever get out of the noise. But it should suffice for oscillations large enough to exhibit interesting conscious phenomena like self-awareness.

Here are a few falsifiable hypotheses that follow from this theory of what makes thoughts/oscillations produce qualia. Most of them could not have been tested without this new method15.

  1. Measure EEG of subjects who do the classic test paradigm where stimuli are presented very briefly and subjects report whether they experienced conscious awareness of the stimulus. Run EEG source analysis on the measurements. Variations of the threshold of how long a stimulus has to be presented in order to become conscious should be predictable from variations of the frequency of the oscillation that takes in the signal from the respective sensory neurons.

  2. Measure EEG of subjects who see a silent video while hearing an unrelated soundtrack. Their task is to focus on either vision or hearing, and quickly press a button when they see or hear something particular. Run EEG source analysis on the measurements.

1. An oscillation for being poised to react (probably in the prefrontal cortex) should synchronize with either the oscillations evoked by vision or the ones evoked by hearing. EEG data should predict which sense the subjects focused on.

2. The permanence of the synchronization should correlate to reaction times and reaction correctness.
  1. Measure EEG of subjects who are doing forms of meditation where the virtual “space” of conscious attention is given unusually large amounts of its own attention16, deliberately intensifying phenomenal consciousness. Define, control and vary the level of sensory stimulation that distracts the subjects from this meditation. Run EEG source analysis on the measurements.
1. Meditative states should exhibit fewer but larger mental oscillations than normal everyday states.

2. This difference should be more pronounced for more adept meditators, especially at higher levels of distracting stimulation. Some of this [has already been shown](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5614811/), in the form of an amplified default state network, but much higher statistical certainty should be achievable by variance in experimental conditions and by correlating EEG source analysis data with meditator self-reports of what level they got to.

3. Advanced meditative states of extreme focus on a single conscious representation such as [jhānas](/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana) should exhibit even fewer, even larger mental oscillations.

  1. It should be possible to engineer arbitrary nontraditional jhāna-like meditation practices where arbitrary representations fill all conscious awareness.

  2. Inside individual neurons, a mechanism that permits comparison of intervals elapsed between that neuron’s previous spikes (i.e. beginnings of refractory periods) and subsequent signals it received at its dendrites should be there to be found.

  3. Link two brains using technologies such as NeuraLink.

1. Thoughts should be able to be shared across brains if and only if the link transmits oscillatory signals.

2. It should be impossible for a shared oscillation to have qualia according to one subject, but none according to the other.

But honestly, what makes this explanation of qualia persuasive to myself is as subjective as they are. Like my introspection about my information processing makes more sense since I learned about predictive processing, so my introspection about my conscious experiences makes more sense since I understand them this way.

  • For example, while I learn to perform a task it is quite conscious, but once it becomes routine, I can be unsure whether I have just done it. This makes perfect sense now: in accordance with Hebbian learning, the learning process requires repeated synchronous firing, i.e. oscillations, i.e. capacity for conscious phenomena. But the synaptic shortcuts this creates necessarily reduce the bandwidth required for the task, obviating large oscillations with their conscious phenomena.

  • For another example, as I focus on typing this, other parts of my brain monitor the noise of traffic out in the street and the pressure of my buttocks on the chair. There have to be small oscillations there, binding the multitude of sensory neuron spikes into representations of specific cars and buttocks, but they did so separately from my typing and thinking, before I noticed them. Now I’m aware of them and type about them, so the thinking and typing oscillation has merged with the listening and pressure-feeling ones, which feels expansive, more like a mindfulness-like state. The merged oscillation is necessarily bigger, because it now encompasses the auditory cortex for listening and the cerebellum for proprioception. So the internal lines of communication are now longer, so the oscillation frequency has had to go down, and that’s why I’m typing this sentence more slowly than the first one in this paragraph.

  • Even unusual conscious experiences caused by intense meditative practice now seem to me fully describable without resorting to the religious terminologies of the traditions that produced them17.

  • The usual self-anthropomorphization of conscious self-perception is not inescapable. I can resolve to not anthropomorphize myself for once, and let my thoughts see themselves as thoughts. This used to be confusing, since it makes it harder for oscillations to merge, but I’ve gotten used to it. It reveals the dynamics I described above, and they seem to me like a coherent picture.

Will it work this way for anybody else? You tell me!

Philosophically, this explanation seems to obviate alternatives to physicalism, such as idealism and dualism. This feels like a relief, because these alternatives entail metaphysical conceptions that seem to me like they aren’t paying rent. But to fully spell out and defend this general metaphysical claim is beyond the scope of this particular guest post.

Please point out mistakes and how to fix them in the comments or on 𝕏, so I can be less wrong about this. Special thanks to those who have donated most such help so far: Professor Ulrich Hegerl, PhDs Lars Schuster, Idris Riahi and Robert Lehmann, and Eliezer Yudkowsky.

  1. John Searle, Consciousness

  2. Richard Carrier, The Bogus Idea of the Bogus Mysteries of Consciousness

  3. LessWrong user Q Home, The importance of studying subjective experience

  4. Daniel Dennett: Quining Qualia. The summaries are from the Wikipedia page on qualia.

  5. Thomas Metzinger: Subjekt und Selbstmodell.

  6. Ramachandran, V.S., Hirstein, W.: Three laws of qualia: what neurology tells us about the biological functions of consciousness

  7. Such as Sydney Shoemaker and Thomas Szanto.

  8. But it stops being true when the sense of self shifts, when you get out of the car, or when you stop distinguishing yourself from the entire flow of causality that went all the way from the big bang into the experience of this moment.

  9. The best e-Athletes can enter 350 to 400 actions per minute into games like StarCraft, and that doesn’t even count perceptions that do not lead to one of those actions.

  10. Why would the neural coding of a thought require so many spikes? On the one hand, there is a vast number of distinguishable thoughts, so the differences between them need to be encoded. On the other hand, neurons are noisy and unreliable, so any information processing based on them will need error correction, and information theory says that error correction requires redundancy.

  11. Even individual neurons can have rhythmic activity. I’m disregarding that type of neural oscillation here, in favor of oscillations that arise in neuronal ensembles of many neurons, because conscious thoughts can process far more information than single neurons can.

  12. This is a useful function of this special form of processing that explains why such a process would evolve.

  13. Doing this is the core of many meditative traditions.

  14. To be fair, Independent Component Analysis does reveal, roughly, where in the outermost parts of the brain some of the signal is coming from.

  15. There is another new approach that also improves the intersection of spatial and temporal resolution. It combines the millimeter-scale spatial resolution of simultaneous fMRI and positron emission tomography (PET, that’s the one where you inject a radioactive tracer) with improvements of temporal resolution down to as little as 12 seconds using clever tweaks to radiotracer delivery. Currently that temporal resolution is still too long for most thoughts, but there’s ongoing development and the physical limits to improving the temporal resolution of this method are not yet established. This might end up superior to EEG source analysis, especially for studying the center of the brain.

  16. E.g. Vipassana.

  17. That’s a rabbit hole for another day.