Theory of Cohesive Electromagnetic Organization of Neurological Experience [CEONE Theory] and Relative Satisfactory Abstraction [RSA]


            Prior to discussing my theory of the organization of neurological experience, there needs to be a sharp distinction made between the separate natures of consciousness, awareness, memory and cognition. In this paper cognition is the computational process of organizing information, be it through instinct or intellect. Consciousness is separate from awareness, which is the specific cognitive process of creating an abstraction of an object of thought and receiving the gratifying sensation of understanding what it is in relation to other concepts we have already stored as gratifying and thus meaningful.

            Memory is the storage of information in the structures of the brain, which is drawn upon by cognition to run various functions of thought before being re-stored in the brain again as memory when the cognitive process is complete. With memory we have concepts of time, concepts of continued existence. Though cognition can process independently without memory, these experiences will not be stored. Those experiences are still experienced momentarily, but they will not be remembered as such at a later time so subjectively it is as if that experience never happened.

            Consciousness itself is nothing more than the raw experience of the subjective kind. It is more fundamental than awareness, which is the understanding of things. One can be conscious without understanding, as is observed in schizophrenics or people on various types of psychedelics. Consciousness can exist without cognition, as can be observed when in a state of extreme hallucination like those experienced on a large dosage of salvia divinorum. Consciousness is the light of the mind, but without cognition to give thought concept and memory to give thought time, we would be little more than a sensation without qualities like light or colour. Without cognition consciousness would just be a subjective experience without qualities, a flash of existence immediately forgotten. In the same regards without consciousness we would be but automatons going about our lives with no inner light, without an illuminated inner world or image of self.

            It is critical that this distinction is made, because the processes of awareness are structural, as is cognition and memory, whereas the process of consciousness is physical, a reaction like a burning fire on a bed of coals or the flash of neon. Though it has been harnessed by our neurology for its useful purposes of self orientation, this should not be considered a purely biological phenomena which will be explained in further detail later. First I will explain the basic insights that lead me to conclude that consciousness is more fundamental than awareness by going over the basic studies that lead me to this conclusion beyond my prior experiences and philosophising that convinced me of this beforehand.

            https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006633
Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity Guohua Shen, Tomoyasu Horikawa, Kei Majima, Yukiyasu Kamitan,Top of FormBottom of Form Published: January 14, 2019

            As shown in the study done in Kyoto University, Japan It can be demonstrated that deep image reconstruction can be achieved through decoding the patterns that exist within the visual cortex of the brain. This proves what was already known about the brain: that the physical intercommunication of neural networks is responsible for the processing of information. It can then be deduced through looking at the structure of the neurons how this might be done, and from that the hard problem of consciousness can be explained through the chemistry and physics of cell membranes and neural networks. The biggest problem to overcome is making a theoretical framework for how the physics of creating a unified experience out of independent neuronal and molecular activity operates. It must be framed in a way that gives rise to a predictive and experimentally valid model of explaining the physical nature of conscious experience.

            All theories begin with an observation, and so it can be observed that two things are pertinent to the operation of cohesive neural activity: The sequential nature of cell interaction and organization in the brain and the electromagnetic and chemical nature of the conscious experience.

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/03/09/1414466112
Breakdown of the brain’s functional network modularity with awareness, Douglass Godwin, Robert L. Barry, and René Marois: PNAS first published March 10, 2015
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2015/03/09/1414466112.full.pdf


It can be observed that no single area of the brain is responsible solely for the projection of conscious experience as described by the above study and various findings like it. As for the sequential nature of cell interaction and organization of the brain, it must be assumed that whatever phenomena we experience as consciousness is doing what we are observing it do: create a coherent and organized experience we call our persona, our identify or our conscious experience. Though we know that various parts of the brain process various kinds of information, the unified operation of all those parts serves the purpose of giving utility to those parts, a matter to be discussed later in my section on Relative Satisfactory Abstraction [RSA].

The mechanism by which these areas of the brain are connected can only be explained by the unique qualities of that system that distinguish it from the other parts of the body. This I can only assume can be the bioelectricity transmitted throughout the nervous system, and the constant integration of all of its parts. All neurons in particular tissues of various regions of the brain are connected with electromagnetic communication to form images and patterns on the cortex needed to reconstruct a sufficient abstraction of the external world for later processing.

The process of interconnection of these areas is a layering of structured images in the various regions of the brain, all processing information through the process of RSA. What needs to be understood is that the illumination of consciousness must be a universal phenomenon to all electrically charged objects; that consciousness is a side effect of electromagnetic fields just as embers are a side effect of the processes of combustion. I will argue then, that the means for conscious integration begins as a natural by-product of charged systems, one that connects every neuron into a whole body cohesion of conscious experience.

This is to say that when a body becomes charged, the intercommunication of the states of each molecule are so rapidly transmitted from one molecule to the next that they are for all intents and purposes merged into a single system of energy exchange; that their states can no longer be understood as separate but only as whole complex systems of interconnected molecules and cellular structures. In the same way a covalent bond joins two atoms, my theory predicts that large systems of shared electrical charges create a state where the whole system is bonded together into a single reaction surface sharing the quality of a uniform charge. This reaction surface is uniformly “observed” by all its parts in concert, which is really just the state of being charged with electricity illuminating pattens on the reaction surface which can be disorganized (non organic systems) or organized (organic systems).

This process is what creates conscious experience on a fundamental level, though without the operations of a living system to observe, it should be expected biologically dead yet electrically charged systems would only experience a meaningless glow of sensation, only to immediately forget the experience without any means of storing memory and go back to not processing anything. Without a means of recording information, it should be impossible that such rudimentary forms of experience could be subject to experiences of time or space. This glow would be without colour or form, that is, it would not be visual or sensory, it would just be a raw, simple experience of electrification across the reaction surface for what would seem like an instant regardless of how long the reaction sustains.

Since the nervous system does not begin and end in the brain, and since the bioelectric field permeates the whole of the body, it can be supposed that we do in fact experience with every part of our body. When our arm burns then, though the impulse for how we should react is stored in the memory and instinctual regions of our brain, we are indeed feeling our arm burn, it is not just a projection of the homunculus in our mind, so it should be a first hand experience of burning. What this suggests is that the whole system is involved in the projection of conscious experience and what we are witnessing is a uniform projection of our experience across the whole of our body, though the functions of the brain undoubtedly give us the most lucid details of the highest potency.

When we start to look at every cell in our body as a screen our neurons are projecting our experiences on, and the rapid rate of communication being sufficient enough for it to be melded together in a unified experience, we then have to look at consciousness much in the same way that we look at a TV screen rapidly projecting an image on a surface. However, in this case our observer is the screen itself, not an eye outside of it. The fact that the observer and the projection surface are one is why consciousness takes on its subjective state, as the interplay between communication, projection and observation are all part of the same process of the rapid electrification of the nervous system.

When we break this down further we come across the hard problem of participating lipids in sustaining the conscious reaction of the body. When we look at how the sodium potassium pump of the cell membranes charge and release charges across the cell, we come to the conclusion that the bioelectricity is a product of ATP, energy stored within the cells being transported through the body as fuel. However, it is not the ATP that is the sole actor in the energy exchange, but the cell membrane and the lipids and proteins that participate in the bioelectric reaction. It is the cell membrane and its lipids that moves the charge, so it is the cell membrane that is lit up and serves as the screen and the observer of these projectors.

It should be noted it is not the energy that is experiencing, it is the atoms, the molecules of the network that experience by virtue of interconnectivity. This global interconnection of cells through the sustained electrical charge of the brain must be what is causing the subjective experience, because I observe no mechanism in the brain for projecting information into the electricity itself, and for what I know such ideas of the “soul” being the electric field fails to explain how consciousness operates, whereas the projection observer hypothesis adequately explains the phenomena. I find the activities of the neurons is well enough established in that all forms of processing should be assumed to be physical in nature, and the interaction between energies and the neurons is a much easier thing to explain or more importantly evolve if we view it as a screen projecting images, which is something we know exists, and not a field witnessing a nervous system, which there is no evidence for.

While the cell membrane itself is only responsible for lighting up the projection on a larger scale, the axon terminals and the neurotransmitters act as the communicator between cells. It should be hypothesized that while the cell membrane can be expressed as the light that gives substance to our subjective experience, it is the neurotransmitters are what give colour and structure to our minds. The neurotransmitters can then be considered the only means of encoding and encryption and I hypothesize that by learning the nature of how these complex networks of neurotransmitters between neurons crate patterns in whole tissues of the brain, we could then start to form a working theory as how memory is stored in the terminals of each axon resulting in the capacity to learn and understand which will be more fully described on my section on RSA.

Since it is the case that the molecules of the cell membranes are together the projector, observer and communicator of the conscious experience, that the rapid communication within an electrically charged system that is observing itself and translating that observation into neurotransmitters and reflections within the system, we must conclude that the consistency of these experiences are built on the material of the nervous system, material that we are constantly shedding and reconstructing.

This brings me to the ship of Theseus problem and the continuous replacement of conscious material through life. In the same manner that we can expect the materials of our embryo being drawn in from the placenta and the nutrients of our mothers body, we can expect that this process continues through the metabolic activity of our lives and that we constantly remove old conscious material of lipids and proteins and replace the charged surfaces of our nervous system. This would mean that the memories that we have that are constantly being passed on are themselves kept intact as we, the illuminating conscious material of our bodies, come and go from the system constantly. I should note in passing that I suspect dreams are really the ruminations of basic blocks of memories in order to condition long-term memories into new neural networks so the process of brain metabolism does not erase essential long-term memories over time. As the neurotransmitters are released to reencode memories, they accidentally trigger random memory blocks that result in dreams.

In regards to the Theseus problem, we are as the observing material a collection of nutrients slowly phased out of the body, exiting the nervous system without any means of observing our own passing. The fluid state of conscious material in the biosphere, and the loss of conscious material to strata are then natural processes that go on every day that we are inevitably subject to. When new material is introduced it is quickly assimilated into the whole system. It becomes absorbed in the system and otherwise cannot realize that it was not always part of the identity of the body. Conscious material is then a resource used and recycled like any other resource in the body, though the persistence of memory as information produces the illusion of an uninterrupted experience going back to out early childhood.

In the same regards the loss of material means that the statistical chances of returning to be reassimilated into another organism are based on where we leave out excrement and what is around it to reprocess it. So, the old conscious material excreted by the body is more likely to be reassimilated into insect or vermin than it is likely to find itself participating in another human experience. It is also likely that this material will eventually be lost into the strata of the earth, never again to partake in the biosphere where it would otherwise cycle between organisms and experience multiple forms of conscious experience. It is worth noting that there is nothing special about birth in this model, as conscious material can enter a living organism from a dead one mid life and be integrated into its nervous system in the same way it can be excreted mid life from a living organism.

The necessity of neural networks in experience and the experience-less state of the transmigration of conscious material is thus a biproduct of inheriting memory from our nervous system and losing memory upon excretion or death. Because of this there is no way for memory to follow the transition from one organism to the next, since memory is structural and breaks down when the lipids and proteins break down upon excretion or death. Without an electromagnetic system that is observing itself and processes abstracting concepts to track things like time, space or quality, there is no experience when there is no reflection of the process. Experience of time, space and concept can only exist in an organized system that communicates, records and replicates the experiences of the conscious material. Without cognition time passes in an instant and no experiences have the value of subjective time.

Now that I have outlined the nature of communication, observation and projection on the neural networks of our body and mind, the problem of why consciousness is a computational necessity of the mind in the first place must be brought into question.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2706303/
Bioelectric mechanisms in regeneration: unique aspects and future perspectives

Michael Levin, Ph.D.

As outlined in Levin’s work, electric gradients have always been a tool for cells to organize and self monitor their shape and structure. It’s a way of creating a means of orienting the cell, knowing in which direction to grow and allowing for a means of intracellular communication. Chemical functions always operate off the transition of electrons between molecules, so it should come as no surprise that the function of cellular organization was built off the use of electric gradients in the organization of cell structure. Rather than it being a biological necessity to have conscious experience, it was more a matter of it being an already existing and useful function. Electric gradients were then incorporated in the rise of conscious networks that observe projections and create a cohesive, scaling neurological experience to organize large systems of information. Because of this it became the bedrock upon which neurological “coding” could be written. Consider it the source language for neurological activity.

The biproduct of subjective experience is less a question of evolutionary necessity, but rather one of physics that the bioelectrical communication of self organizing, self observing and image projecting networks of cells would not result in a cold unconscious reaction but one illuminated by integrated bioelectric fields that would light up the mind into what we would call conscious experience.

Now that we have a basis for how the mind perceives the world through a self observing projection by and on conscious material and how it can organize thought, we must then understand how the mind goes about forming ideas and understands how the world works. Relitive Satisfactory Abstraction is a philosophy of mind that I came up with while grappling with the Chinese Box problem. It came to me that the nature of the mind wasn’t one of simple input output equations, but every notion that we form is measured against what we already know, that we can only understand things as they are relative to other things we already know. Knowledge is then a collection of things we know fit within our already proven model of understanding that we find satisfactory in its predictive value to extrapolate how the world works.

Through testing the nature of reality the mind creates abstract concepts relative to the things we perceive. Through this it creates notions of space, time and concept that define the various objects and phenomena it observes in the world. Through testing the predictive value of those abstractions, it gauges what is real and what is not, and in reward it gets a feeling of satisfaction that we relate to the sensation of understanding. These relative concepts are built on instinctual a priori type knowledge inherited from evolutionary experience. We start out looking for things that demonstrate principles of causality we naturally expect to find in the world. Once we collect facts like this we then seek to measure new, unexpected things off the notions we built up upon our instinctual default expectations of the world in infancy.

The important aspect of this theory is that the feeling of satisfaction is what we relate to understanding, not the actual predictive qualities or value functions of any given understanding. That feeling of gratification tells us we have something, and that is why we find it hard to call a computers’ rendering of the world an “understanding” because it doesn’t “recognize” the concept as a projection of the world outside it. The computer lacks the a priori understanding of the outside world we have, it hasn’t built up a concept of world full of feelings, with each element directly being compared to every relevant fact and so it does not feel that it knows something, IE, it does not have that satisfaction that tells us that the idea represents a reality we can trust is true.

The complexity of the relative collection of understandings in total is immense, yet the mind still manages to label these abstract principles in simple enough terms that they can be remembered and communicated after the fact. These trigger memories which then prime the nervous system with neurotransmitters, setting off a reaction triggering more neurotransmitters until a memory is recovered. However, the conscious perception of memory and sensation and the emotions attached to them go beyond the simple Chinese room problem, since the process of understanding utilizes massively complex networks of relative abstractions and not algorithms of simple input and output. The additional complexity of consciousness, which itself is a projection of abstractions onto the sensory imaging regions of our brains, adds yet another level or complexity into the process of understanding. Once an understanding is formed, we can then visualize using the full rendering of imagination ideas and their qualities such as time, space and concept (Concept being the relative qualities of an idea as they relate to other ideas that are effectively related to any given idea).

To summarize, cells use bioelectricity to organize, and in the form of neurons use that same bioelectricity to rapidly connect networks of neural activity into one cohesive experience. These experiences are built on the projections upon tissues formed of these cells and through replicating these projections and transmitting them throughout the nervous system it creates the cohesive experience we call consciousness. The lipids and proteins used to create this experience are routinely cycled out of and into this system, while the information is kept and passed on through neuroplasticity and possibly the process of dreams, gradually rewriting memories as a constant process of cognition within the organism.

If we can through experiment isolate the various elements involved in this process, from the physics of the conscious material that illuminates the process to the processes of relative satisfactory abstraction that we call understanding, to the encoding of memories through a network of axon terminals, we could in theory replicate the program, and move the conscious material into that new system transferring both consciousness and identity into a new form. On a lesser scale of grandeur, understanding these systems should give us greater insight into psychiatric medicine and how to better treat the human mind.

On a more ethical side of things, knowing that conscious material flows across the earths surface and is shared by many organisms might open the ethical question as to how we should relate to the world around us, to its people and its ecosystems, as the suffering of the whole world is being experienced by a fluid and dynamic system of conscious material. Who knows where our conscious material will wander in a century or a millennia, who knows what technologies will be invented and whether or not we may find ourselves in utopia or dystopia.

The quality of the world must be brought into question when we form a new philosophy of self, because as we change our notion of self, we must also change our notion of the world. However, there is much more science to be done to see if these theories hold merit. We will need to test the effects of electricity on lipid membranes, the nature of memory encoding will need to be tested and computational models mimicking the brains processes of relative satisfactory abstraction will need to be written to see if they can replicate the processes of the mind. In regards to the work that still needs to be done; this theory cannot stand on its own without the attention it is due so it can prompt the work that is necessary to test its validity.

Towards those ends I continue to work on this and other theories.

Jack Neoveris