The Conscious Dimension

by Allan Chubb

Perceptions, Concepts, Beliefs and Models

The way in which we perceive the world around us depends on the perceptions of our senses. All the different modalities contribute but for the vast majority of us, sight is by far the most important. When we look at our environment in full daylight the appearance is so complete that the impression is almost magical. Indeed, visual perception is something of a mystery. Darwin found present human vision perplexing from an evolutionary perspective, but assumed it must have evolved although all the intermediate stages are unclear.

Although this following exercise does not recapitulate the evolutionary stages through which our vision passed we can gain an insight into the way that the eye and brain create an impression of the world around us by viewing our surroundings as they gradually change from complete darkness to normal daylight. A good way to do this is to observe our vision in a room with the curtains drawn but which allow increasing amounts of light to pass through, starting from darkness. There will be some variation in exactly what we see according to our situation and as suggested in the chapter on relativity of consciousness there is a certain amount of variation due to differences in visual acuity and genetic differences. However a sequence like this is likely to be observed during the transition:

In complete darkness virtually nothing can be seen.
As the first trace of light enters the room there are slight variations in the light reflected from the walls and ceiling, which suggest their presence.
Against the walls variations in lighter and darker areas become apparent with lighter areas appearing first. Binocular vision cuts in at an early stage although detail is at first indistinct.
Light and dark features occur as amorphous shapes.
Soon all the objects in the room become more obvious, with borders and light objects appearing more clearly first.
With increasing light and greater clarity the three dimensional appearance of objects becomes clear with shadows and differences in light intensity reflected from various surfaces.
Until now everything has appeared in tones of black and white. Increasing illumination suggests the first hints of colour, light colours appearing first.
The highlights on curved surfaces appear, suggesting their rounded nature.
About this stage colours emerge as pastel shades, the definition of the colours increasing as the light level rises.
Colour increases the definition of objects and binocular vision becomes more important than other clues as to three dimensionality.
As full light comes objects are clearly visible and full colour is apparent.

The precise functions of different cells in the visual cortex is still being investigated, but in 1981 a Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to David H. Hubel and Torsten N. Weisel of Harvard University who demonstrated that certain cells in the visual cortex are responsible for detecting the borders of shapes. If you try the observations in a room from dark to light you will find the complexity of the scene makes it necessary to simplify the information entering the eyes. The brain in combination with the eye does this in two ways. First it concentrates on one part of the visual field at a time and then further simplifies things by recognising any patterns in view. Some shapes are simple and can be viewed as such, but when shapes are understood as patterns the eye first responds to the overall pattern. It may then pause to consider the individual components, especially when simple. Patterns are the brain’s way of handling complex information.

The brain also responds to movement. A good example of this is the outward moving rings on the surface of water when a stone has been dropped into it. Some movement is less patterned than this as the following sequences of cloud movement show.

As a result of changes in patterns and movement we develop a sense of time.

Sometimes two or more objects meet and impact each other. Michotte’s work on what we perceive to be happening when two or more objects collides considered in the chapter on the view of the psychologist.

At the classical level we may view a plant, a bush or a tree and note that it is covered with leaves. If we look at a leaf under magnification we can see that it is composed of cells and a network of communicating vessels. Further powers of magnification reveal the structure of the cells. There are, of course many other things that we could look at under magnification and the same principle would be true. Alternatively we can use magnification to observe the sky, particularly at night, and again we would see that there is more detail than can be seen by the naked eye.

The human eye and brain are able to interpret the image on a photograph. Children have to learn this skill but again we interpret the image at the classical level. Magnification of a digital photograph would reveal the pixels. Even in silver bromide prints we interpret the image on the picture but magnification reveals that it is actually composed of a lot of aggregates of silver deposits. Natural selection must have determined that the classical level of vision is the most useful level of magnification for the human eye.

Man is predominantly a visual animal but most people recognise sound waves as well, both individual and patterns of sounds. We recognise notes of a certain pitch and also combinations of notes. For example, we recognise the song of a bird and some people recognise the songs and cries of individual species of birds. Our recognition of sound patterns is used in the form of police and ambulance sirens and fire alarms. Some sounds have an alarming effect on us while others, such as much music, have a calming effect. To put it succinctly, sound affects us in many ways, often emotionally as do the other senses of smell, taste and touch.

To complete our view of the perception of patterns we should consider patterns in sequences. These are mainly patterns of behaviour. Some are fundamental such as walking, running, flying and swimming or eating and mating. These tend to be fairly basic and necessary but we all develop behavioural sequences which we do habitually, such as washing and looking at the time. In fact it has been said that if you wish to break a habit you have to put another habit in its place. Patterns of behaviour and habits are true of all vertebrate animals.

Most human beings acquire a large amount of specific information formed from patterns and observations. A short poem says this well:

‘A man stood and the more he stood the more his wonder grew
That his small brain could contain all the things that he knew.’

The poem suggests that our brains hold a lot more information than just perceptions.

Speech and it’s Encoding

Hearing combined with speech led to to the development of language.

Many written forms of language developed. The alphabet that we use today in the west achieved general use with each sound being represented by a letter, or combination of letters. The Russians and Greeks have developed their own alphabet using the same principal. However, languages such as Chinese and Japanese developed from pictograms.

Several attempts to encode numbers with symbols were tried, the Greeks and Romans developing a system of numerals, but it was the Indian system which we use today which achieved general recognition because of simplicity and ease of use. The imperial method of measurement eventually gave way to the metric system because of ease of calculation.

Language and counting have increased human mental capacity considerably. Indeed linguistic philosophers consider that language is essential to thinking, though non verbal thought is possible.

Development of Habits and Concepts.

From our perceptual observations we develop concepts. In the home the child will see a table, or perhaps even more than one table. With wider experience they will see other tables and these usually vary in size and shape so eventually a concept of a table develops. The dictionary defines a table as ‘a piece of furniture with a flat top and one or more legs, providing a level surface for eating, writing or working at.’ Concepts of chairs develops as do concepts of houses. A house is defined as ‘a building for human habitation.’ The process continues until we have concepts of many things.

Humans form many concepts such as what foods are good to eat and which are not. We develop concepts of good and bad, of kindness, wisdom and of danger, a concept of family and a concept of mankind. Colour plays an important part in our lives and we generalise colour. Observations like the sun, the moon, the rainbow and the spectrum lead to a concept of light.

It is instructive to see how these concepts can develop into higher order concepts. The animal kingdom is a good example of this. A family may have a dog and after seeing various types of dog a concept of ‘dog’ develops. Later concepts of animals develop and concepts of living things, including plants, form. In this way higher order concepts develop from simple concepts. This is an ongoing process and eventually leads to concepts which show how simpler concepts are connected.

A theory which illustrates this well, and with which we are all familiar, is the theory of evolution. Most people recognise that plants and animals are different things and that plants are in a different category from animals. The fact that fungi are in a separate kingdom requires specialist knowledge. Most people recognise that vertebrates and invertebrates are animals but that they are in separate groups. Vertebrates are familiar to us, and we would recognise the group which we call fish. Amphibians may be a group that children might have some difficulty with, but many people recognise frogs, toads and newts as members of that group. Some children might confuse some reptiles with amphibians but most of us would recognise lizards, snakes and crocodiles as a separate group. Feathered creatures, the birds, are recognisable and people realise that a ground living bird such as the kiwi is also a member of that family. When we leave school most of us have developed a concept of mammals including man.

Mammals are, perhaps, the group of animals that we are most familiar with, and it simply remains for us to recognise the different types of mammals; the cat family, the dog family, the cow family, the horse family, and the monkeys, apes and human beings. We do, of course, further divide each group into individual species and breeds. Apes are recognised as orang-utans, gorillas and chimpanzees and the special group, human beings or homo-sapiens.

It took the minds of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Alfred Wallace (1832-1913) to realise how the groups were all connected. The plant group are perhaps not so obvious to classify and education may be necessary to clarify the five main groups: The algae, mosses and liverworts, the ferns, the conifers and the flowering plants. However it is realised that a continuous chain of evolution exists here as well.

Theories like evolution attempt to make a coherent picture of a collection of concepts which might be termed higher order concepts. Evolutionary theory deals with one set of these higher order concepts but there are other examples with which we are familiar. Dmitry Mendeleyev’s (1834-1907) periodic table of the relationship of the elements, and Einstein’s theory of relativity are classic theories but each of us may have some kind of theory about the world around us.

Major theories are arrived at by outstanding minds and have to be communicated by teachers.

Choice and Attention

The human mind is complex and develops in many ways, indeed as we develop we all have to make choices about what we are doing and what we are interested in. If, for example, we live in the UK we cannot at the same time live in India or Australia and if we live on a farm we cannot live in the centre of a large town. We are constantly required to make choices at all levels. The senses are continually bombarded by information, too much for us to process simultaneously, so the human brain has developed the capacity to attend to a limited amount of that information at one time. Human attention is a study in its own right.

The fact that our minds concentrate on a limited amount of information from our environment is clearly demonstrated to us in the approach of scientists. It has been said that good scientists excel in just what they choose to study for a particular project. Gregor Mendel, in 1865, chose the pea for his genetic experiments mainly because it was self fertilising in the natural situation. Thomas Morgan (1866 – 1945) beat his contemporary working on irradiating maize by choosing Drosphila, the fruit fly, for his experiments on mutations caused by radiation. The fruit fly produces more generations in a set time than maize and so gave quicker results. You will observe that when most experiments are undertaken they are of an analytical type. Pierre Teilhard observed that when we select a certain subject for an experiment we are in effect putting a ring round what we study and mostly disregarding the nature of surrounding influences. He said that this is a dodge.

We are now using some more holistic approaches to scientific investigation, a good example being ecology where the natural interactions of organisms are studied. Although more holistic approaches are likely to be used the perceptive reader will observe that even with a subject like ecology our scope is limited. Clearly a study of the universe at one time is beyond human capacity. In an attempt to overcome this limitation intelligent people have tried to look for key information. There are many examples of this but the way that we locate the causes of disease illustrates this well. Important advances were made when bacteria and viruses were discovered. Single cell parasites like malaria and sleeping sickness added to the picture, as did deficiency diseases. This knowledge cut down the range of the search for cures. However most scientists are humble enough to recognise that nature often has surprises for us and it has become a saying among intellectuals that living with uncertainty is a strength.

Most of the concepts that we have been thinking about are of a fairly concrete nature. Even the theories of evolution and relativity and Mendeleyev’s periodic table have a very practical side to them. Some thinking is of a more abstract kind, for example, most people have concepts of good and bad, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly. Concepts like this develop when we are young and become more complex as we get older. These can be coloured by cultural influences. The study of epistemics has been developed to study how the mind classifies things.It has been suggested that the main categories are natural things like water, rocks, air sun and moon, then the subdivision of living things, plants and animals, and finally man – made things and ideas. It is not that we have special locations in the brain for such categories but rather that this is how we organise them and retrieve them in our minds.

Beliefs

So far we have concentrated on concepts and theories which can be tested but the human mind is inquisitive and restless and tries to think beyond what is known and proven. The dictionary defines a belief as ‘an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof’. Beliefs are important since children and adults act on them. Practical examples include the different reactions seen to objects believed to be hot or cold. In the desert a mirage of an oasis has been known to deceive the traveller. Some early explorers, acting on their belief that they would not fall off the edge of the world if they sailed over the horizon, ended up circumnavigating the world.

Not all beliefs are as concrete as these and an example of one which cannot be proved is a religious conviction of whether there is a god or not. However, observation shows that it can make an important difference in a person’s behaviour if they believe in God or no God. This may be seen in extreme form in the lives of Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King compared with those of Stalin, or Pol Pot. In between are many who are undecided about belief, the agnostic position. Political beliefs and beliefs about national characteristics also affect people’s attitudes and behaviour. We have surveyed and analysed the way that we handle information arriving at our senses and the mental processes that we perform with this, eventually leading to the formation of beliefs. From the information we receive from our external and internal environment our mind form models of various kinds.

Mental Models

The basic models are perceptual ones such as rooms, furniture, houses, people, animals and plants. Many of these models are dynamic, they move, some collide and we are able to manipulate them in our mind’s eye, as it were. Most people have done a jigsaw puzzle and it is a common experience to see a piece of the jigsaw in an orientation other than the correct one for the picture in the puzzle. In their mind’s eye they realise that if the piece were rotated through a certain angle it would fit into the correct space in the picture. Another experience involves looking at a map while travelling in a north to south direction. If you orientate the map in the direction that you are travelling you find that the information in writing is upside down. Many people are able to read this information despite this fact. With a lot of three dimensional objects, some people, in their minds, are able to rotate them and visualise what the far side of them may be like. Mental perceptual models are dynamic and from them we develop concepts and beliefs.

For the majority of people the world out there is very real and indeed such a world exists but the human mind is capable of perceiving virtual reality and making virtual models as in the case of a three dimensional film. The film ‘The Matrix’ took this to the logical conclusion by isolating the brain as far as possible from the real world and replacing it by a virtual environment. This is possible because senses can be stimulated artificially to simulate the model making systems of brain and mind. Psychologists are interested in how many of these model making systems are innate and how many have to be learned.

The philosopher, David Hume (1711 – 1776) put forward the idea that the stimulation from the environment creates impressions in our minds which form the basis of further thinking. It was a philosophy which suggested that the mind was at the mercy of the incoming information and in a sense passive in response. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724 -1804) then pointed out that far from responding in a relatively passive way to stimulation from the environment the mind was often already prepared for the way in which it should respond. An admirable illustration of Kant’s point, that minds are often prepared to respond, is the three dimensional film of a western, where the arrows appear to come directly at the audience and they instinctively duck. You will find it instructive to observe your own behaviour and note instances where your mind is already prepared to react to incoming information or experience. The mind is not a ‘tabula rasa’; a blank slate.

It is worth reflecting on why we see the world ‘out there’. It may seem obvious to us that the world should appear ‘out there’ but since the visual areas of the brain are at the back of the brain and it is brain damage here that affects visual perception, that opinion turns out to be not so obvious. The traditional explanation, that we have binocular vision because the right and left eyes receive slightly different impressions of the environment and that the brain uses these to create a three dimensional image, begs the question which is not about functioning but about consciousness. In fact it remains something of a mystery why the world appears as a coherent scene ‘out there’. We can, of course, verify the impression that the world is out there with closer things by reaching for them or walking to them, but to claim that this is how we verify the impression is to put the cart before the horse. We reach for the world out there because it appears to be out there and not the other way round.

You may be beginning to realise that the way in which we see the world is more in terms of models rather than impressions. For example, if you look at an apple it may appear roundish and red and green, and indeed such an object does exist. Then we have to realise that we know this because light reflected from the apple, travelling in virtually straight lines, reaches the eye and forms images on the retina of each eye. We do not perceive the apple directly but as the result of transmitted light. Further, most see the apple in shades of red and green. Now, as far as we know, different colours are transmitted to us as different wavelengths of light although different bands of light are interpreted by us as various colours of the spectrum. In fact there is a complete continuum in wavelengths of the spectrum. It appears, therefore, that our conscious minds impose colour on an otherwise continually varying sequence of wavelengths. In short, from incoming wavelengths of light our conscious minds construct a model of the apple, and so it is with all objects and scenery ‘out there’. It is not only colour that we impose on objects but with hearing we impose sounds on a continuous range of air vibrations of various kinds. In fact, the Zen Buddhists have a saying “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it go ’Bang’?” The imposition of sensory impressions does not end there and even the sensations of smell, taste, touch, pain and space orientation are added to the electrical signals which the nervous system relays to the brain. The question remains, where do the various qualities of conscious perception such as sound, taste, smell, etc. come from?

We can conclude that although our experiences appear real enough and are located ‘out there’, we are, in fact, making mental models in our minds. Even the perception of the brain is a mental model of the brain. Consider what the brain surgeon sees while performing an operation. When a patient’s brain is exposed during an operation the patient is often conscious in order to assist the surgeon and describe progress. The brain does not experience pain during the operation and the patient can tell the surgeon what conscious changes have taken place as the operation proceeds. The surgeon, however, observes a glistening white mass, the appearance of which belies the conscious activity which is going on before their eyes. Only by the report of the patient is the surgeon aware that this brain is conscious, though the instruments may tell the surgeon the types of electrical activity going on in the brain. The point to note is that the surgeons only know about the conscious activity by deduction from the collected evidence available to them. Consciousness is not directly observable and certainly the appearance of the brain does not directly reveal it.

Indirect Models of Reality

The brain surgeon has a situation at the normal level of observation, the classical level. However, quantum physics considers nature at a level too small to be observed directly. Human beings find it difficult to think in terms other than the classical level, hence when thinking about the minute objects at the quantum level of the atom and radiation it is not unnatural to think in terms of particles, clouds, waves and strings. These resemble objects which exist at the classical level such as grains of sand, clouds of steam and waves on the sea or ripples on water. Whether nature at the quantum level performs exactly in these ways is a matter for consideration. Quantum scientists handle a lot of quantum information as formulae or equations and this enables them to handle this difficult problem.

There is such a diversity of knowledge now that individuals have to make choices about what courses of learning they wish to pursue although such specialisation creates its own limitations.

We see some of our most advanced thinking in subjects where mathematics is involved.

Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2, where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light, illustrates how advanced thinking has become. It may look like a mathematical equation composed of letters but it tells us about an amazing relationship. It was Einsteins genius which realised that mass and energy are interchangeable. This became clear to the man in the street with the advent of the atomic bomb. Collectively people have understood and achieved a vast amount. Although we have been using mathematics and physics as an example here, the same could be said of other areas of knowledge.

We have seen how from mental perceptions the mind builds concepts and theories. While perceptions may be limited by our senses and the instruments that we use to aid them, theories have been improving during our history. The theory of static land formation has been replaced by the theory of continental drift. New archaeological evidence is challenging traditional understanding about how and where civilisations originated. The theory of a steady state universe has been superseded by the evidence for an expanding universe. The question remains, therefore, how good can we make our theories? Scientists still try to reconcile quantum theory and relativity.

We have made a survey of perception and various forms of thinking. As we shall see in the chapter on ‘Reductionist and the Epiphenominal Opinion’ there are some theories about what thinking is, but as J Z Young observes, we really do not understand this.