psmv4: A further update on seeing red rectangles

When I retired, more than ten years ago now, I spent the first few years working on a computer program which aped some of the brain-centric activities that us humans get up to. From there I moved into the armchair and started pondering about the mystery of consciousness, a mystery which people have been pondering about for a very long time. Just how, for example, do you give a computer a soul in addition to its body? How would you know when you had succeeded?

Much of this pondering has come to revolve around what I have called the local workspace (LWS) hypothesis. The hypothesis that consciousness arises from the organised activation of the neurons in a small patch of cortex, perhaps five square centimetres, probably located in one of the central structures (rather than in the cerebral cortex) and perhaps containing 100 million neurons. This in contrast to the popular global workspace (GWS) hypothesis which has it that consciousness arises from activity spanning large parts of the brain – activity which I grant is needed to build LWS – but not to deliver it. Of late, I have been more interested in how the brain does it, which, for the moment anyway, seems more accessible than why it does it.

In this, I might say, I have been greatly helped by the move, at least of this sort of science, to open access. Most of the time I do not have to pay for access to stuff, despite having no academic affiliation.

Blogging has been another hobby and, just presently, I have nine blogs: three retired, one active and five yet to come, these last only existing so as to reserve their names. The first four blogs are large and miscellaneous collections of material, most of it nothing to do with consciousness at all. And indeed, much of the material might well be described as trivia. By default, these blogs are all displayed most recent post at the top and they are to be found at:

http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/. Around 1,800 posts. October 2006 to October 2012. Retired.

http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/. Around 2,000 posts. October 2012 to February 2016. Retired.

http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/. Around 2,500 posts. February 2016 to November 2018. Retired.

http://psmv4.blogspot.co.uk/. Around 600 posts. November 2018 to present. Active.

But about 150 of all these thousands of posts are about consciousness or something close, with one of them in pumpkinstrokemarrow, with just about 25 of them in psmv2, with most of the rest in psmv3 and with the balance in psmv4. I posted an updated list of what seemed to me to be the more interesting of these posts in May 2018 at reference 1, with the title of this last post being a nod at the book noticed at reference 2. The present post is mainly a further update to that list.

Figure 1

The blue and grey tree structure, organised by month within year, displayed on the right on the three most recent of these blogs is helpful. By clicking to expand and contract, one can often find what one is looking for by post title. But this does not always work, my custom being to use short titles which seem neat at the time, but which may not be very informative later. While in the oldest blog, history is displayed by month on the left, with no expansion to post, which is not so helpful.

Fortunately, all the blogs include a search feature. I have not dug very deep into this feature, but it does seem, by default, to do a Boolean ‘AND’ on the search terms you type into the box near the top left of the screen, illustrated at Figure 1 above. For example, give me posts containing the words ‘fox’ and ‘trap’. I think that the rule is whole word matches only, so that ‘trap’ would not find any of ‘entrap’, ‘traps’ and ‘trapped’, but there may well be subtleties in the rule which I have missed. In any event, I often know roughly what I am looking for, and this sort of search often works. Better than searching my archive, where the unit of search is the month rather than the post, a rather large unit in the absence of a rather good search term.

Figure 2

However, to be on the safe side, I have also marked those posts which I think particularly relevant to the LWS hypothesis with group search keys, keys which are not otherwise used and which, to coin a phrase, return the whole group and nothing but the group. The key, when present, is to be found at the end of the post, as snapped above in Figure 2. In which some of the blue and grey structure just mentioned is also visible right, with grey possibly marking those links which have been clicked on at some point.

So far there have been four of these search keys, moving from one to the next when there has been some important shift, development or change of direction. The remainder of this post provides some description of these four groups and lists their contents.

The four groups

Sometimes referred to as the four series, thus accounting for the ‘sr’ bits of the four keys; sra, srb, src and srd.

Figure 3

With Figure 3 showing the top left hand corner of an Excel worksheet, a corner which includes a sketch of how the values of the cells of such an array might be used to capture geometry, coloured for comprehension. although these colours would not be part of the data, at least not in the way shown here. Strong on horizontal and vertical lines, in this echoing some of the behaviour of our eyes.

Sra

10 posts, 20161231 to 20170317.

Early thoughts about organising what came to be called the local or layered workspace (LWS). A structure made up of a small number of layers, following in this the example of the computer packages used for describing buildings, their fixtures and fittings, each layer consisting of a large array of cells, after the fashion of an Excel worksheet, illustrated above at Figure 3. Layers, layer objects and column objects. Soft centred patterns. Seeing rectangles. Seeing red.

Srb

6 posts, 20170328 to 20170428.

A regrouping, having bumped into various technical problems. Exploring various ways of coding data on our two-dimensional arrays of real valued cells. The use of layers to code up complex scenes – like a second world war battleship at sea. Parts of objects and their labels.

Src

9 posts, 20170521 to 20170802.

Layers with velocity, to accommodate a steady movement across or of the visual field. Structuring in time with scenes, takes and frames. Background, foreground and other objects. Using high and low valued cells to define parts and their shapes instead of soft centred patterns. Column objects, composite objects and sequence objects. Sinks and sources of activation. Statements of rules.

Srd

22 posts (excluding this one), 20170904 to 20190603.

The move from the Excel workbook flavoured LWS-W to the neuron flavoured LWS-N. Triangulations of surfaces and shapes. Texture nets (green below) and shape nets (blue below). Thinking about other modalities, that is to say other than vision, important though vision is in the vertebrate world. For example, touch, sound and music, all of which depend on time in a way that vision does not.

Figure 4

psmv4

Sunday 9 June 2019

A further update on seeing red rectangles

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