Does the brain have consciousness or does consciousness have a brain? Qualia formalism…

So, I explored the question of WHY our minds have a structure, but not the question of HOW is that our minds have a structure.

To make progress in the study of consciousness, and reach a satisfying model of how it works, it is essential to consider that the mind may have a structure and behavior that can be measured and well-represented. Consciousness is not the exception to this rule, and our minds are embodied minds in the end, so every given conscious experience is correlated to a physical structure or system. So, the features of that physical system —such as the brain— would correspond to the features of the phenomenology attributed to it, of its “inner movie”, because both are isomorphic. In the same manner, every kind of qualia you can experience is correlated with certain configurations within the structure.

I make a brief emphasis here to mention that according to the model formulated by Qualia Research Institute, our “world simulation” is directly attributed to the activity generated by the brain, because it’s by itself a complex vibrational structure made of nonlinear waves; that is the way in which our brain render our conscious experience —this is addressed at the third part, chapter VI—.

Pleasure and pain can be equally identified as modes of organization of the dynamic structure —Valence structuralism—. There’s an interesting concept called the boundary being/form, and it refers to the idea that consciousness is physics viewed from the outside, so the intimate in-wards nature of physical systems is qualia. This would fit perfectly because actually, the science of physics doesn’t know what the ultimate nature of physics is, due to we can only know the superficial behavior of things, such as particles interacting with one another, reminding us that measure is interact with the system we want to measure, so if there’s something that cannot interact with our tools of measurement, then it can’t be even known, this idea was introduced by Kant with the name of noumenon.

So, it wouldn’t be too crazy, to relate the intrinsic weird quality of consciousness with the internal nature of physics, concluding that physics is in the end the behavior of qualia, as Andrés said once. That statement feels like panpsychism, right? I don’t say that rocks have a soul and that they can perceive or think, obviously not, it would be more complicated than that, and as I mentioned before, perceive basically imply having a complex system generating a model of the world, same with thoughts, you need enough meta-internal representations to do that, and rocks can’t have something like that inside them. If there’s something to be like a rock, it would be like a bunch of raw micro-qualia flickering constantly or something like that, in the first place it wouldn’t be like a unified experience because setting “how much extent of consciousness does an object can have” sounds too arbitrary. But, anyway, there’s not obviously a sophisticated simulation as in our case, happening in a rock.

So, returning to the main topic, thinking of consciousness as physical is called qualia formalism, and this makes a lot of sense because the contents of our conscious experiences have to be somewhere, occupying physical space, energy, and time. This also fits perfectly and reinforces indirect realism, correlating our experience of the world with brain states, so if I’m having the experience of seeing butterflies in a green field, for example, therefore that experience corresponds to a dynamic structure taking place inside the brain. Emphasizing that mentioned lately, it may seem disconcerting for the reader to try to find some likeness between both.

On the one hand we’ve our conscious experience of the world —as we all know it—, and on the other, unrecognizable morphologies of neuronal matrices. We bump again into the famous philosophical dilemma: “The mind-body problem”. We know for sure that both are related, but we don't know how. How is it possible that the “chattering” of some neurons is the same as the highly vivid experience of walking in the street, on a sunny day?, as an example…If it is really the case that our experience is made of neurons, why don't we see the axons and dendrites —parts of a neuron— upholstering the skies, and the sidewalks? From our point of view, as creatures enveloped by this representation that exhibits a volume, might seem quite obvious. Above all, modern science has not found any evidence of this vivid structure of conscious experience within the brain, so, what’s happening? The fact is that our conscious experience has no direct correlation with the biological morphology of neurons, nor of their inner fluctuations of amino acids.

It seems to be more about an indirect correlation, well it has been observed that alterations over certain neuronal populations outcome as specific changes within the subjective experience of the subject. However, we don’t know the process in which our world simulation per se is rendered, the thing that we’re interested in. According to the research of Steven Lehar —Resonance and harmonic theory—, which is explained at chapter VI, the essential bricks that build up our conscious experience of the world —as we all know it— correspond with electromagnetic field excitations.

The pulses emitted by the neurons as they “flicker” continuously generate nonlinear waves —field distortions—, which can move and interact with others throughout the volumetric interneuronal medium. In that way, the brain is capable of sustaining three dimensional and dynamic complex structures of vibrational nature, these being the direct correlation with our world experience. Which, at the same time, fits perfectly with the phenomenological observations from our conscious experience, well this exhibits a nonlinear waves behavior —there are going to be some examples in next chapters—.

These nonlinear waves —which are explained at chapters IV, and VI—, by being able to interact with other waves, can be utilized for a great number of computational purposes, among them are to represent, optimize, and render external stimuli, giving rise to such sophisticated objects and phenomena that appear within our conscious experience —”nonlinear wave computing”—, explained by Andrés Gómez Emilsson, on his YouTube channel, as well as in his official website “qualia-computing”; take a look into the bibliographic references—. In the Qualia Research Institute —scientific organization, headed by Andrés Gómez— there’s this concept named “holistic field behavior” —see also in chapter VI— referring to the evident simultaneous unity of our conscious experience, which reminds of the field behavior studied by physics.

According to my interpretation, is this “intrinsic and holistic property” that makes all of the nonlinear constructs distributed spatially throughout the “brain’s medium” —combined with the harmonic resonance of waves themselves— collapse into significant objects and qualities of the conscious experience, as part of the same entity —our experience of the world; as we know it—.

The intention of this chapter is not to overwhelm the reader with technical words, and abstract concepts, but rather convincing about the inherent relation between our conscious experience, and the brain’s activity. In such a way that is proper to think of our experience of the world —as we all know it— as a volumetric model —something like a diorama— completely designed and controlled by the brain. It would be quite correct for the intentions of this site-web that this premise is imagined by the reader in a literal way, incentivizing a better comprehension of the up-coming chapters.

So we can argue that our world simulation has two sides: The inward side is where we’re, the way in which the system feels like, that is where our experience of the world is happening, just as we experience it, and the outward side, which corresponds to the physical structure of our experience of the world, viewed from a third-person or external agent standpoint, only present out of the object, attributed to “objective” descriptions.

Sketch that barely illustrates the main parts of our world simulation. Author: Aarón T. M.

So, before I close the last topic within this section, I should emphasize that all of the stuff mentioned before can be thought of as the essential blocks or main key assumptions to understand what this model of the mind is claiming. Consequently, I’ll dive into more detail and additional implications of it, splitting up the information into different new subtopics that I’ve found to be interesting.