Consciousness explained at the hand of the Xzistor Concept brain model.
I often use the trendy, yet elusive, concept of ‘consciousness’ to explain the advantages of using a simple functional model to explain the brain.
As a courtesy to my readers, I will write this blog entry in the form of a simple story – and in plain English.
The story is about three kids that grew up in London and end up together at the ‘International Symposium on Consciousness’ thirty years after attending the same primary school class.
The story goes like this.
When Amy was 9 years old, she asked her mother, a neurobiologist, what the word ‘consciousness’ meant. Her mother tried to explain to her daughter what her personal understanding of consciousness was: ‘It’s that part of your brain that generates your understanding of yourself and the world – it is what makes you different from an animal.’
Amy now had a definition of ‘consciousness’.
When Bongi was 10 he asked his dad what ‘consciousness’ was. His dad, a pastor who had immigrated to the UK from Africa, took out a book about ‘Black Consciousness’ and told the boy: ‘This is what consciousness is. It is what you believe in – your conviction of your place in the world and how you should be treated by others.’
Bongi now had a definition of ‘consciousness’.
Ryan grew up under difficult circumstances with his father – a drug addict – and one day, hoping to strike up a conversation with his father, asked him what the meaning of ‘consciousness’ was. His dad was high again and just laughed as he stared at the boy through clouds of blue smoke: ‘Mate, it is just all the crap in your head!’
Ryan now had a definition of ‘consciousness’.
Life was kind to all three of them and Amy, Bongi and Ryan made it through school and later all got degrees. Amy became a neuroscientist, Bongi a psychiatrist and Ryan an AI professor.
By some fluke, they all became interested in studying consciousness for their own personal reasons. Apart from coming across explanations of consciousness as part of their studies, they also spoke to many people along the way and read many scholarly articles and books covering different theories of consciousness.
They all met each other again 30 years later at the ‘International Symposium on Consciousness’. At this prestigious event there were many distinguished academics – experts from different fields that put forward their views on what consciousness was and how it was generated in the brain.
And again by some coincidence all three of them ended up at a breakout session where some of the world experts were debating the meaning of consciousness and giving each participant a chance to put forward their own understanding of what consciousness meant.
Amy’s understanding of consciousness had matured over the years, and she was now able to eloquently verbalize her thoughts around its meaning in scholarly terms, but she had always retained some aspect of what her mom had told her all those year ago. Bongi equally could quote all the prominent theories by hailed academics, but never forgot about what his dad told him – the idea that consciousness includes a level of conviction. Ryan had done a PhD in computational neurobiology and was looking at biological mechanisms to explain what consciousness was and where it could physically reside in the brain. After long discussions with colleagues or students he would always just smile and come back to what his dad had told him many years ago: ‘In the end it is just all the crap in your head!’
So who got it right? Whose explanation of consciousness is the best?
Amy, Bongi and Ryan had all formed different understandings over time with all of them retaining some ‘element’ of what they were originally told by their parents.
They had spoken to many people over the years who in turn had heard explanations from their parents and other people. Some explanations came from books written by people who had done research and spoken to other people who in turn had spoken to other people. All of these people must at some stage early in their lives have heard an explanation by someone else of what consciousness meant. And the person from whom they had heard it, would also have heard an original explanation from someone else early on in their lives. At no time did any of the experts at the symposium deliver concrete evidence of a mechanism in the mind to which the phenomenon of consciousness could be attributed to.
During their primary school days, Amy, Bongi and Ryan all came to know what a red ladybird was. They all had the same understanding of what the little creature was and how it looked. But that never happened with consciousness – because consciousness is invisible.
Even while neuroscientists are admitting that they do not yet have agreed explanations for how emotions and intelligence work in the brain, classes on consciousness are being offered, symposia are being organised and books are being published by so-called experts in the field claiming to have an explanation for the concept of consciousness.
All in the absence of evidence.
We all just heard about consciousness from others, different versions of what happens in our brains as we go about our lives. It is in effect just folklore.
This is where the functional brain model comes in.
As unlikely as it might seem, the correct functional model of the brain can offer something better – something concrete that could provide a simple definition of consciousness.
The Xzistor Concept is such a functional brain model. It introduces the concept of a ‘nexus area’ in the brain. A simple way to think about this is to envisage a central or focal area where all brain states required for decision-making are brought together at the same time – almost like calling out key members from an audience onto a stage to make a collective decision.
These brain states are the things we are constantly aware of like what we see, hear, feel, smell, our needs, our fears, how we move, what we think about – even what we dream about. The functional model processes a lot of sensory inputs and internal information, but only the pertinent results of those processes make it to the ‘nexus area’ where they are used to calculate the next behavior. For instance, in the human mind we are not aware of blood pressure regulating mechanisms or endocrine system corrections, but we are aware of what we are looking at, what we recognize, our emotions and what we are thinking about. The Xzistor Concept provides functional explanations for all of these processes that can be written in mathematics and turned into computer code. Unlike the biological brain where behaviors are generated from the simultaneous processing of incoming brain states in a parallel fashion, the computer program based on the Xzistor Concept functional model will process this information using a sequential algorithm – we will call it the ‘nexus area’ algorithm. The only parameters entering this algorithm, cycle after cycle, are the final results from all the different simulated brain processes – the key parameters required to calculate behaviors. These parameters represent brain states that the instantiation (e.g. as the digital brain of a robot) constantly needs to be aware of. And it is here in this ‘nexus area’ algorithm where we find the brain states we often like to list as part of consciousness – the things we as humans can ‘feel’ and are constantly being made ‘aware’ of…
So, where does consciousness live inside the human brain?
Don’t know – but we should search for the equivalence of a ‘nexus area’ algorithm within the brain’s biological structures, and who knows, maybe one day we will find out where consciousness is hiding.
In the meantime, I suggest we just stick with Ryan’s dad’s definition – that consciousness is just all the uhm…‘stuff’ in our heads…
Recent paper on the Xzistor Concept brain model here: Xzistor Concept
