Chapter 5: the Theatre of the Mind

‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.’

These are the words of Hume , the beginning of the 18^th century. It stems back from the days op Plato and his allegory of the cave. If you don’t know the allegory, look it up on YouTube, there are some pretty good videos on it.

But Hume did usher a word of caution, not to let the theatre mislead us. The idea of a theatre is very simplistic, while in reality, the mind is a very complex, fluent thing.

What is inside the theatre?

If asked where they think they are located, most people answer somewhere in their head or their heart. Most people (about 83%) conceive themselves as ‘the I that perceives’, often located in their head near the eyes.

Most people also feel like their mind is a space, where sensory experiences come and pass, a place where things and thoughts are viewed by the mind. This is exactly like the Cartesian theatre. And while it may feel like that big open space, Daniel Dennett (He’s back people!) argues, like many other theorists, that this space and the mind in that sense of the allegory, do not exist.

The Cartesian look of things is simple. Many materialists still search for that one place where consciousness arises – the Cartesian Theatre – and thus still hold onto a dualist pattern of thinking, where the consciousness has to arise from a single specific place.

Being a Cartesian materialist (CM) has become some type of word for abuse. It implies you cannot pick sides, or are unconsciously not very convinced of your own point. In other words, it’s not very nice.

CM is everywhere if you just look, in common phrases such as ‘snap into consciousness’ or the idea that something happens outside of the consciousness. This chapter examines the evidence of whether or not a theatre of the mind is possible.

Where is the place where consciousness happens?

The biggest question thus far asked is, ‘where the hell is our consciousness located then?’ If you, very attentively, reach out and touch you nose, where do you sit in your theatre and experience this sensation? Realistically, the consciousness should both give orders to the body and receive feedback on what the body does and feels. So, there are two options. 1) There is some kind of neural hierarchy and consciousness is at the top, or 2) something goes out, something goes in.

But the large trouble is that there simply is not space in the brain or body where this theatre can be located, no point where we can say our consciousness is attached to. Of course you could trace a path op input and take the point where the input stops and the output begins, but again, there is no single path for this. Different stimuli take different routes and there is not a single, true way. So no luck there either.

Same goes for the fact that there is not a specific moment where the output happens. It’s not like  you sit in your theatre, examine what happens and then decide on a course of action. Sometimes you’ve already acted before the sensation is finished, and sometimes two reactions come at different speeds and times. There is not a moment where all input changes to output.

What is the mental screen?

In 1971, Roger Shepard came with the mental rotation experiment, where people had to say whether two images were rotated views of the same thing or not. (Exercise 1)

It was found that the time it took to answer was similar to the time it takes to rotate the image in space. The same went for an exercise where they had to guess how long it would take to get from point A to point B on a map.

It suggest that there is some kind of mind’s eye that inspects visual questions. This point of view has been challenged often, but there still isn’t quite a clear answer yet (seriously, the book goes 1.5 page about the fact that there isn’t an answer, it is a little tiring). There are three views to it;

• Pictorialist: the mind depicts things in images
• Propositionalist: the mind portrays things in words
• Enactivitst: the mind engages in the act of depicting things

The problem with thinking there is a screen or stage in your head on which everything, no matter whether it is pictures, words or the act of imagining, are portrayed, is that, if there is someone watching, who also has a body and a brain and thoughts, then they must have an inner-person too. And that inner-person must than also have an inner-person. Do you see how it becomes an infinite row of inner-persons? This is one of the biggest problems the Cartesian Theatre has to offer.

Crick and Koch came with the solution that it is the front part of the brain that looks at the back part. But then it’s just the structure of the brain. Where does consciousness play into this?

If you look at something of a colour, ask yourself, what makes this colour so? If you have yellow, wonder what the qualia are. Is it just the yellowness? Or the warmth of the colour or the things it makes you think of? Where is this yellowness located?

Hard questions, I know, but none the less necessary to understand the magnitude of the problem we are dealing with here.

Are there theatres that are not Cartesian then?

Have you ever been in the car or on the bike and you are going somewhere you have been a hundred times before. You have got some good music on and you become a little too involved in it, belting out the lyrics like you are on some big music show. Then you look up and WOW, you have already arrived, without the slightest recollection that you ever even drove there.

This is the unconscious driving phenomenon and often takes place when you are distracted. In the Cartesian theatre, it is easily explained, your inner person inside was occupied with something else that was on stage and let your body do the work. But what if there isn’t a Cartesian theatre? Or what if there is but it simply is just a theatre, nothing Cartesian about it. How do you explain that then?

Here, Bernard Baars’ General Workspace Theory (hereafter GWT) comes into play. Important to the foundation of this theory is the dramatic contrast between the little amount of items that are available in consciousness at any one time and the large number of unconscious neural processes going on at the exact same moment. The best way to understand this, according to Baars, is in terms of a theatre. Focal consciousness acts as a bright spot, which is the stage, on which the spotlight of attention moves to different actors and settings. Around the spotlight – on the stage but in the shadows, possibly is a fringe of events that are only vaguely or potentially conscious. Meanwhile, the rest of the theatre is dark and unconscious. The unconscious audience sitting in the dark receives information from the bright spot, while behind the scenes there are numerous unconscious contextual systems that shape the events happening in the light.

The GWT theory only becomes more plausible when looking at previously proven theories in the fields of psychology and neuro science. The stage is similar to the working memory, which can hold up to 7 ± 2 items at the same time. Which item is truly at the centre is dependent on what the, also proven, spotlight of attention is directed at. And the background unconscious systems are very similar to the way our previous experiences influence what we are currently seeing and feeling, even if we are not aware of it.

Baars thus also argues consciousness is nothing mysterious, it simply is a fully integrated part of our cognitive functioning, a gateway to our nervous systems. What makes a thought or occurrence conscious is the fact that it is being processed in this global workspace. If a lot of other things occupy this workspace, then the first thought is thus neglected to the fringe or the darkness.

What differs the GWT from a Cartesian theatre is that it does not require an actual space somewhere where everything comes together. Thanks to the spotlight of attention, everything can stay and be processed in their own sensory region or brain area.

However, one could argue that the GWT is still, in fact a Cartesian theatre, by making us of the following two points; 1) the theory still holds onto the idea that sometimes things are in the conscious and sometimes they are not, and 2) when does a thing have that extra bit of something that makes it appear in the GWT?

Now the last part is easily explained. When something occurs in the consciousness of the GMT, it is something that needs the attention for the perceived survival, thus making it important for it to be conscious.

For the first issue, remind yourself that in GWT, consciousness is practically equal to attention. And that something is in your attention suddenly doesn’t seem that Cartesian at all.

Are there theories without theatres?

It’s hard to come up with a theory without any distinction of things being in and out of consciousness, but a good example is the identity theory by Paul and Pat Churchland. They correlate consciousness with cognitive electrical brainwaves. Taking the example that electromagnetic waves do not cause light, they are light, the pull the same distinction when it comes to consciousness. The activity of our brain, in waves and impulses and connections, that is what consciousness is.

However, it doesn’t explain how a distracted driver might not notice a red light even though he is still looking and doesn’t explain a single thing about how experience and brainwaves equal to consciousness.

Then there are also reductionists like Crick, who came with the ‘astonishing theory’, which reduces all a person is to a bunch of nerves and impulses. However, even though he does not speak of a theatre or stage, he still speaks of the thalamus as the spotlight of directing attention. In a way, thus, it is still Cartesian.

When it comes to the red light, Crick (and later joined by Koch) brought forwards a number of neural theories, such as thalamocortical loops, that determined whether the light was currently being perceived or not.

Then there are also other theories. Dutch neuroscientist Cyriel Pennartz, for example, called consciousness the solution to ‘the brain’s representational problem’: how to integrate multiple pieces of sensory information into a coherent whole that can be immediately recognized, rapidly understood, and acted upon. He started by splitting up the requirements for consciousness into ‘hard’, or also called non-optional, and ‘soft’, optional and common. The ‘hard’ prerequisite of consciousness is an ability to interpret multiple sensory inputs as having particular qualities, meaning, or content – in our example, interpreting all the visual qualities of the red light at the same time as surrounding stimuli, and attributing the meaning ‘stop’ to the scenario. The ‘soft’ requirements include projection of interpreted sensory inputs into an external, perspectival space (as in vision) or body map (as in somatosensation), and the construction of an illusion of ‘unity’ in consciousness and self-awareness. The brain, according to Pennartz, is capable of making a multi-dimensional representatation, and each new sensory experience adds a dimension.

(Honestly, the list of theories goes on and on, my god!)

This view of the importance of multidimensional integration bears some resemblance to the cross-brain broadcasting of information in GWT, which, in turn, also resembles what is currently probably the most popular of all theories of consciousness, integrated information theory (IIT). IIT was originally proposed by Giulio Tononi in 2004, and has evolved from there. The basic principle is that the more ‘integrated information’ there is in a physical system, the more conscious that system is, and the amount of integrated information is measured by a mathematical variable, Φ (phi).

Important in all these theories, but especially in IIT and GWT, is that consciousness is a continuous variable. You can have some of it, a little or a lot, different amounts of it are possible in different scenarios.

In the case of IIT, a system becomes conscious (and has free will) if it has a large value of Φ, and a system is more conscious the higher its Φ value (aka the continuous variable of consciousness). The fact of having a large value of Φ can also help explain the specific qualities of a given conscious experience compared to all the other possible ones: because generating a large amount of integrated information entails having a highly structured set of mechanisms that allow us to make many nested discriminations (choices) as a single entity. We experience the red light not simply as the opposite of no light, or of green, but as different from any other possible experience we might have. For IIT, consciousness is integrated information, and its quality (Φ) is given by the informational relationships generated by a complex of elements. This means that IIT does not need to even allude to a Cartesian theatre, because any part of the nervous system can in theory contain integrated information, and thus be part of the consciousness.

Another attempt to bridge the explanatory gap without the help of a theatre appeals to quantum-level processes – that is, processes involving the smallest possible amount of a given physical entity (like a photon or an electron). Now, I will discuss the most elaborately explained researcher in the book, but many small examples are mentioned, so if you want to read about those, check page 120, okay?

Roger Penrose, British physicist and mathematician, said that to solve the hard problem we need to understand the problem of incompatible explanatory levels. There are two levels of explanation in physics: the ‘classical’ level used to describe large-scale objects (such as ‘red’ or ’20 km/h’, and the quantum level used to describe very small things and governed by the Schrödinger equation (Look it up on YouTube!). Both these levels are completely deterministic and computable. The trouble starts when you move from one to the other. At the quantum level superposed states are possible – that is, two possibilities can exist at the same time – but at the classical level either one or other (seeing the light as red or green) must be the case. When we make an observation (working at the classical level), the superposed states have to collapse into one or other possibility, a process known as the collapse of the wave function. (yay)

The biggest issue of this entire theory has always been whether quantum coherence could survive in a warm, wet brain. Hameroff and Penrose argue that biology can use thermal energy to drive coherence, while physicist Matthew Fisher (2015) has proposed that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms in the brain could allow it to function as a quantum computer. But if the brain is a quantum computer, does this tell us anything about consciousness? Are we made of the same data our technology is?

So what is the point?

Back to Dennet. The man tells us many things that are certainly not true, but then fails to completely promote a cohesive theory himself. He did come up with the ‘multiple drafts theory’. In multiple drafts theory, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and all kinds of cognitive activity are accomplished in the brain by multitrack parallel processes that interpret and elaborate sensory inputs, and all are under continuous revision. Like the many drafts of a book or article, perceptions and thoughts are constantly revised and altered, and at any point in time there are multiple drafts of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain.

But the one question you should not ask, according to Dennett, is which one are conscious. The thing is, none of them are conscious and yet all of them are. There is not inner person, no inner-you to judge what is conscious and what is not.

Now here is what the books tells us about MDT; ‘If you find multiple drafts difficult and worrying, then you are probably beginning to understand it. It is difficult to understand because doing so means throwing out many of our usual habits of thought concerning our own consciousness.’ So, eh, I guess we’re on the right track.

For how great Dennett is at criticising, he kind of fails to see his own theory lacks the same things he judges others on. For example, the role of the brain and the extend of it is entirely unclear and the issue remains.

So obviously, the MDT is not the perfect theory either. Obviously, because otherwise this summary would be about MDT and not about consciousness as a whole.

Exercises

5.1. Find yourself a version of the rotation experiment. Ask yourself, where am I rotating this image? Where in my mind am I doing this?