My name is Elliot Robert. I'm Professor Emeritus at Monterey Peninsula College, and on behalf of MPC and the Coral Cherry Center for the Arts, I'd like to welcome you to this evening's lecture dialogue on consciousness and essence. This evening's program is made possible in part through generous grants by the Cultural Council of Monterey County and by the MacMahon Foundation. This program is also part of Cherry Fenner's Fall Winter Arts and Lecture Program. And on your way out, if you'd like, there are programs. And it includes, next Saturday, Three Women's Voices, River of Dreams, a benefit reading with Jennifer Lachier, Laura Bayliss, and Bonnie Gartshore. Wonderful, wonderful poets who have this marvel of synchronicity with each other. It also includes a meditation on culture and chaos theory with Paul Lee and Ralph Abraham.

[01:00]

That's on Thursday, November 7th. It's also on Sunday, November 23rd, Kyoto Dreams, Japanese chamber music. And Thursday, December 4th, play a couple of white chicks sitting around talking. It's a wonderful diversity. And then On Saturday, January 17th, Finding the Voice in Poetry, a workshop with Jane Hershfield. So it's a wonderful, wonderful program, and I hope you all get a chance to attend some of the other events. This evening, we're quite fortunate in having Tenshin, Reb Anderson, and Dr. Kai Woller explore, through lecture and dialogue, how science and religion illuminate our understanding of cognitive processes. Tenshin, Reb Anderson. author of Warm Smiles on Cold Mountains, studied Zen Buddhism with Shinri Suzuki Roshi, who ordained him as a priest in 1970. From 1986 to 1995, Fenshin Anderson served as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and is now senior Dharma teacher.

[02:11]

Dr. Kai Wohler, former student of Werner Heisenberg, has degrees from the universities of Vaughan, Auckland, and Munich. As a professor in the physics department of the Native Postgraduate School here in Monterey, Dr. Woolworth specializes in astrophysics, cosmology, and quantum theory. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Kai Woolworth, contention, Red Addison. Thank you very much. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming out. Today is an auspicious anniversary, but we have made arrangements that there will not be an earthquake tonight. So please relax and see what unfolds. Now, last year at our gathering here, we talked about the concept of reality. There were questions asked then by the audience about the relation between reality and consciousness.

[03:14]

We did not feel prepared to... answer these questions and so reduct them. But we promised then that we would come back and talk about consciousness. So today we're here and talk about consciousness in essence. That is the relationship between that which we experience in our consciousness and that which is the nature of that which is. Now, this problem, of course, has been in the center of most of philosophy for the last two and a half thousand years, and perhaps we do not understand this any better today than Aristotle did 340 BC. However, during the last decade, there has been a dramatic upsurge in the science of consciousness and a growing interest. This surge is driven by new technology which control locations of brain activity without invading the brain and killing it.

[04:21]

This has led to a very interesting convergence of views from a wide field of interdisciplinary effort, including neurobiology, psychology, cognitive sciences, philosophy, biophysics, and computer science. So my part today is to report about some key result out of these recent studies that might lead to some insight into the nature of consciousness. To get us started, consciousness, what phenomenon do we mean by that? What experiences are our conscious experiences? Now, of course, there's the immediate perceptual world our immediate sensations. For instance, the sensation of color, the redness of red, as it were, the cleographiness of a trumpet tone, the raspy feeling of sandpaper, the warm inviting smell of fresh brewed coffee, and the tangy taste of lime.

[05:33]

There are also other bodily feelings, pleasure, pain, excitement, surges of rage and fear, but also the internal visual images that we have, and inner dialogue, inner speech, or the fleeting sense of the present, of the now, the fading trace of the immediate memory, then autobiographical memories as they are recalled in our mind. And truly, The clear and immediate intention, expectations, and action. Explicit beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. And finally, abstract concepts as we focus our intention on these concepts. Now many questions can be asked about consciousness when we think about this, questions like this.

[06:39]

How can consciousness arise in the physical universe? Can consciousness experience emerge from purely physical basis? Is it conceivable that subjective sensation and the emergence of an inner perspective of the self and the world, that this is part of nature? Or is it possible that consciousness is an unexplainable phenomena. What is the real problem about consciousness? What exactly do we want to know? Can this subject be at all approached by methods of natural time? How did consciousness come about in this world? What is the history of consciousness in this world? Are there natural processes in our brain that can be related to our conscious experience?

[07:40]

Or which forms of information processing in the brain lead to those states which we call conscious experience? Philosophies about the nature of consciousness seeking to answer some of these questions goes far back as two and a half thousand years to the earliest Greek philosophy. Already then, there emerged two diametrically opposed views about the nature of consciousness. And these are still basically with us. View A, consciousness is an all natural material phenomenon. This view for which Aristotle laid the groundwork is still around. The view B is consciousness reaches beyond the material world, a view that we associate with Plato. Much of Western philosophy was around this debate and has very many branches.

[08:44]

Now, during the last two decades or so, that debate about the nature of consciousness in the Aristotelian camp has converged towards a view that is strongly influenced by the modern neurobiological sciences. Here's a brief summary. of the main points of this view. Human conscious experience is a material biological phenomenon that can be understood eventually. Consciousness is a key biological adaptation of at least our species with multiple functions that make it possible for the brain to interpret, to learn about, to interact with and act upon the world. Conscious contents trigger vast arrays of unconscious processes, and, conversely, conscious contents are shaped by unconscious context.

[09:52]

The working of the brain is a distributed activity of a vast neural network. There are two very small areas in the brain whose proper functioning is absolutely critical for maintaining a conscious, wakeful state. These areas, however, are not seen as the actual seat of consciousness. I will come back to it later. Presently, the best candidate for location of conscious experience appear to be the sensory processing areas in the cortex. where the neural signals from the sensors reach this surface part of the brain. And I will go more into this in a short moment. Now a note of caution. Nobody at this time knows what constant is. Whether the material biological view can in the end explain consciousness or whether agents beyond the material are needed to explain consciousness

[10:59]

is as yet undecided. The material biological view is a working hypothesis, but it is currently the best game in town, and here my Aristotelian bios shows. Some relevant neurobiological and psychological concepts I would like to tell you about so that we have a basis for what we're talking about. There are three characteristics, features of the phenomenon of consciousness, which we can extract from our own personal experience. The first one is the transparency of conscious experiences, and that is their immediacy, their directive. We do not experience... what we see on some kind of a screen, we seem to be directly looking through to what we have.

[12:03]

The second one is the perspectiveness. The conscious experience are always for an experiencing ego. It is you, you yourself, who experience perception qualities. Perceptions are your perceptions experiences for you. The experiencing ego turns a conscious experience into his own. He owns this experience. And the third aspect is the presence of conscious states. I now experience you, my audience, before me. Every conscious experience also contains this nowness. So these three things. Immediacy. me-relatedness, and now-notes are three of these very characteristic features. There are experiences that you might have right now, but which are not in the focus of your attention at this moment.

[13:13]

For example, the touch of the chair on which you are sitting, a background taste of martini in your mouth, the subtle balancing of your body against gravity, a background noise, perhaps that old ringing in your ears, the delicate eye fixations as you follow the events up here, memory of feelings, thoughts from a few minutes ago, and a vast databank of images, feelings, thoughts from your childhood, your school years, and your adult working life. Consciousness then appears like a theater stage on which only a subset of the entire cast steps into the limelight at any one moment. Many players are competing for access to that stage of consciousness in our mind. Let me give you a few facts about the brain, and now I will support that with little pictures.

[14:23]

Now, roughly speaking, the brain has a three-fold structure. There's the brain stem, also sometimes called the reptilian brain, and it houses much of the control of the autonomous body functions, like heartbeat, blood circulation, body temperature control, and so forth. The midbrain, the mammalian brain, houses the control of motor function, like walking and reaching and hitting and making war. And then there is this vast dome over this middle, the neocortex. And the back part of the neocortex was referred to as the primate brain. It contains mainly the sensory processing that which comes in through the senses and gets processed there.

[15:25]

And the front part is that newest part, the frontal cortex, where language abilities, abstract thought, and voluntary actions have their seeds. I brought a little map, and while I talked, you can look at this. Now I have a little problem, okay. A map of the brain with some annotation of functional areas. Now, most of this correlation between location in the brain and what functions these areas serve has been obtained through people who have brain damage. Now, we have new technologies, and that's these new technologies that I talked about that allow us to go in without actually invading the brain to see where during a particular mental task where in the brain this tasking is being operated and where the processing goes on.

[16:30]

I'd like to say some remarkable figures. The brain contains about 100 billion nerve neural cells, 100 billion cells. Each cell has about 10,000 inputs from other neighboring cells. And each of these cells did out about 100 signals to 200 other cells on the output side. This kind of interconnectedness in the brain means that a signal can get from one cell in the brain to any other of the 100 billion in about seven steps. Some nerve cells propagate signals with a speed of up to 100 meters per second. Maybe later on we can dwell on that a little. Now, the main portion that I would like to end up with later on is the surface of the cortisol.

[17:35]

Right under the skull, there is this layer. This layer is about a tenth of an inch thick, called gray matter. It has six layers. Nerve cells in these layers are organized in columns of about 100 nerve cells that form columns that reach through these six layers. They form trees in these layers with side branching out into the layers to the side. These clusters of cells have highly specialized functions For example, in the visual part of the cortex, sort of the back of the head, the surface in the back, one of these columns may be a point light source detector. Another one specializes on short 45-degree lines that it detects.

[18:38]

Another one is a face recognizer. Another one is a sight sound recognizer and coordinator, and so forth. They are highly specialized. The mid-layers of these six-layer cake are the input layers. The top layer is the inter-office communication system. There is vast horizontal connection to other layers in that surface, and they provide the inter-office communication between all these areas that are highly specialized in their function. And the bottom layer is the output layer where the nerve ends go out that go to the motor system and cause reactions. Now, the surface of the cortex is a folded structure, you have seen pictures of that, with ridges and valleys. And if you take this whole thing and stretch it out and flatten it out on the table, it makes about a three feet by three feet area. You will never feel the same about yourself.

[19:49]

That's the purpose of things like that. Now, I want to talk about, for a moment, about essential conditions for consciousness. Large amounts of this upper portion of the brain can be lost and removed from the body without loss of conscious facility. It has been seen many times through brain damage. Half the tide can be awake. On the other hand, there is a tiny, tiny region and small lesions in the reticular formation which sits in the brain stem can cause irreversible coma. The thalamus region are two egg-shaped bodies in the center of the brain. each serving one half dome. The whole brain is sort of half.

[20:51]

There's one left and right half, and there's a mid-plane right through. And these thalamus things sit right next to that dividing line between the two halves. Two X-shaped bodies connected with thick bonds of nerve fibers that go upwards towards the cortex, which we recognize as the so-called white matter. that connects to all regions of the cortex. Now, these sensory fibers, that is, those nerves that come from the center, from the eye, from the ears, from other sensory areas, the sensory fibers run from the sensor first through the thalamus region, and from the thalamus region up to the surface of the cortex where the protesine is done. On the other hand, the motor fibers, those nerves that then stimulate motor responses, muscles, start in the cortex, go down to the thalamus, and from there get switched to the respective muscles that are to be activated.

[21:56]

So it looks like the thalamus appears to be a giant switchyard for communication. Now, in the center of the thalamus, there is the intralaminar nucleus, or nuclei there too, These are small pea-sized areas in the center of the thalamus, and these ILNs send a fine network of fibers all over the cortex area, and these fibers send electrical signals to the cortex, and these signals are distinctive signals of the waking consciousness. When they function right, the person is in a waking conscious state. These fibers... And that is, these centers, these intralaminar nuclei, trigger the arousal, the working processing state of the cortex. Now, loss of blood supply to these tiny little places leads to immediate loss of waking consciousness, and the person goes into coma.

[23:01]

The example that most of you know, many years ago, the case of Karen N. Quinlan, She had a heart attack, followed by a stroke, and that stroke blocked the blood supply to this inner center of the thalamus for some quirky reason. There goes one artery up to both of them and then branches off. So when you get blocked off in the lower part, both parts are out, and that's it. Now, the leading hypothesis about the role of these center, of these ILNs, and the reticular formation, this other sensitive area, is that these two organs serve as the synchronizers for many areas of the cortex. The vast network of neurons in the brain left to itself would fall into a chaotic random firing, creating nearly noise of the brain. similar to the snow on the TV screen when your channel is not synchronized properly to the station.

[24:05]

The ILN signals are regular 40 cycles per second waveforms that set up a coherent feedback loop of oscillation between the sensory cortex and the relay station, back and forth and back and forth. And this gives... sort of a synchronizing pattern of the firing of the neurons. The neurons, when that pattern is set up, tend to fire somehow synchronized. And that synchronization, due to inputs that come in, that synchronization leads to an increase of what engineers call the signal-to-noise ratio. It provides the necessary condition that an image can stabilize on the internal screen of consciousness. Consciousness is a variable function. It undergoes rapid changes, and this insight is derived from the discovery of a vast unconscious content.

[25:07]

There exists now extensive data about this, that most conscious events are accompanied by unconscious processes of a great complexity. Unconscious routines are now believed to be involved in every mental task. There exists a cognitive unconscious. And there are numerous examples of this and experiments that demonstrate the existence of such unconscious process. Most motor control is largely unconscious. Articulation movements of our speech facility during speech are largely unconscious. We don't know how we move the tongue and the lips. This is unconscious. Spontaneous problem solving basis on unconscious processes and recognition of faces basis on unconscious processes. You see a person, Putin, you know just that you know him. I want to zero in now and to

[26:15]

on the sensory perception, because that gives, for me, the best insight what consciousness might be. The visual system is the best understood among the sensor systems, and so I want to talk about the visual system for a moment. The visual information that comes from the eyes goes first to the thalamus, to the center, And from the thalamus up to the cortex into the vision area, which is back here on the brain, down here. And this is sort of the color made to see this. And it arrives first in this area of V1, visual center one. And then the signal is given up to the various to V2, V3, V4, V5, and then further up into the into the cortex to about 40 different areas that are all involved in the visual data processing.

[27:19]

Now, V1 appears to be absolutely essential for visual consciousness. Damage to V1 leads to what is called blindside. The patient shows some visual knowledge. He knows that he must have seen something, but he absolutely denies that he had a conscious visual image. V1 is sensitive to light points and dark contrast. V3 is responsible for shapes. V4 is responsible for color. V5 for motion detection. And the higher functions of vision are all over the backside of the cortex. Some 20 billion nerve cells are involved in the visual processing. The great puzzle is information that is not even represented in V1, like face recognition. It doesn't show. V1 only knows light points and dark contrast.

[28:21]

So information that's not even represented in some form in V1 is lost to consciousness when V1 is damaged. So V1 is the only region whose loss abolishes our ability to consciously see objects or events. Now, we are conscious of points of light and lines, of white and dark, of color, of texture, of shapes, of motion, all at the same time. Yet these separate aspects of vision are processed at separate locations in the brain. The different expert areas, these various visual processing areas, are connected by neurons. And these connections all go in both directions.

[29:25]

The connections, the experts share the information, and stable neural traces, that is, images that we have for seconds or even for minutes, seem to involve always a two-way transport of information, and it is believed that there is evidence, really, that perhaps all conscious events require such loop operation. Now, the separately processed pieces of vision of information must be merged somehow into a stable image that we normally have. The pieces must be combined in such a way that A stable spatially must be, I mean, on TV you see that sometimes it just gets out of shape. We're having a clear spatially organized and coordinated image. It must be spatially coordinated, it must be temporally and time coordinated.

[30:27]

This somehow must also involve the knowledge base in our memory, recognition of an image, recognition of a face, must occur in coordination with previous experience. So how is all this accomplished? And here is where the already mentioned phallum or synchronization machine comes into the egg. We said that already earlier that the visual cortex, that is the V1 region in particular, is essential to visual conscious experience. This V1 region then must be acting as the spatial coordinator holding all the active signal areas, 40 of them, in a single coordinated framework with the thalamus nuclei providing that synchronizing signal that makes that possible. The extension selector in the thalamus may open, so to speak, the visual gates, possibly in connection with the area down in the brain stem, so that the

[31:38]

the information can flow from the eyes to V1, up to the cortex, and then up further, and at the same time, that 40 cycle per second pacing rhythm works the coordination that all this hangs together. So, let me show you in a picture again of this cortex. the layer of these six layers of recordings, in particular the bottom layer, I've traced out a little portion of this cortex surface, a quarter inch by quarter inch area. It has about 40,000 of these neural columns sitting on it. And these pixels, these places where these columns land, these pixels, They can be in an excited state and they can be in a non-excited state. And that may seem similar to the pixels on a black and white TV screen that can be lit up and dark and that way form an image.

[32:45]

And I'm trying to picture this here. There is some information there. Can you read one? Now, there is the temptation to think of the cortex as a three feet by three feet TV screen on which the images appear, which we then view with some sort of an inner eye. This model is most likely wrong. Our conscious image seems to be a distributed image, more like an interference pattern or a hologram that is all over the brain. The hypothesis that has been emerged out of many of the experiments and data that were obtained was new or mean. The hypothesis that is emerging is suggesting the following view. The sensor cortex layers with their sensory input layer in the middle, with the communication to the side and with other parts of the brain, communication with memory parts and goal areas

[34:00]

and with the bottom layer, the motor output layer, together form a continuous feedback loop. And I'm trying with this graph to show you some kind of a round flow of information. In this lower layer, where the processing of incoming sensor data is completed and has established a consistent firing pattern of the nerve cells, where the data have been compared with the relevant other experience from memory, where unconscious goals and contacts have modulated the firing pattern, and where the system now stands ready to send out a motor signal to respond to the incoming perception. Here is where everything comes together. So at this junction of perception, evaluation and action, that stable neuron firing pattern is what we experience as that unique self-consciousness that comprehends itself as an observer, evaluator,

[35:28]

an actor. I have to leave you with this conjecture hanging there. We do not know yet how conscious works. This is a hypothesis. I do believe that with modern techniques, this positron emission tomography scans and the magnetoencephalography, those are the newest methods that let you look into the brain without actually going in there, it will be possible, that's my belief, to test various hypotheses like this one and eventually zero in on a most likely story about the nature of consciousness. Now, I have said nothing about essence to this point, but I think this will come up here in question and answers. And so I'd like to turn it over to Abbott Anderson. who is a lifelong scholar of consciousness.

[36:32]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.81