I. Conceiving the instantiation [cont'd]

Copyright © Charles H. Carver; Eye and Mind Studio 2005; edited version of JCS submission (1/05).

 

II b. A Gorilla In The Midst

With regard to our last points, let's consider how inattentional-blindness and change blindness studies relate to the ideas presented. Inattentional blindness refers to psychological studies that reveal subjects to be at times unaware of very conspicuous details in depicted scenes they are viewing (A. Mack and I. Rock, 1998; R. Rensink et al., 1997). Confronting what was at the time the common interpretation (in the literature) that preattentive perceptual processing occurs without attention, Mack and Rock claimed that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it (1998). Change blindness and cases of Sustained Inattentional Blindness refer to the potential for subjects to be “blind” to overt movements within a visually apprehended scene or video-clip while subjects are engaged in observing other activities within the scene. A famous study by Simons and Chabris discloses a classic example of sustained inattentional blindness (1999). Subjects watch a video of two teams, one in black and one in white, passing basketballs to members of their team. Viewers are asked to count the number of successful passes made by the white team (for instance). In one variation of the study, some time into the task an intruder in a gorilla suit moves in amongst the filmed action and makes conspicuous gestures toward the camera. For subjects engaged in the visual task of counting successful basketball exchanges, up to 70% or more may fail to see the gorilla upon initial viewing while engaged in the task (1999). Simons interprets this by stating that we are mistaken with regard to how important events will automatically draw our attention away from current tasks or goals (Simons, 2000).

One set of discussions these studies have generated are inquiries into the relationship between attentional brain processes and actual phenomenal awareness experienced. Commentators seek to discover the relationship between the brain's processing of perceptual information, what is considered the apprehended visual “scene”, and the potential for a real perceptual experience attended to. By way of this very inquiry, we may note a splitting of what I have described as a single trajectory that is a perceptual context developing. In one common interpretation, investigators presuppose that ‘perception’ takes place in and for the brain (i.e. ‘the organism’) regardless of what may or may not be achieved in the phenomenal awareness we experience. To many investigators, the potential for a perceptual experience is considered a late ‘reflection’ of what is thought to be happening at the level of the brain. In our example, the gorilla-form is considered fully contructed by the brain's perceptual apparatus, though perception is only a possibility, depending upon our level of awareness. Thus the lack of apprehension of certain features in the visual experience is considered no real problem, in fact, a “proof” that the brain goes about its perceptual mechanisms without phenomenal experience. It is often assumed that the visual scene will be fully represented in its details by the brain if the information falls on the retina. It is this data that is thought to initiate the full range of necessary routines that must be executed or sent for processing to other regions by the brain. Therefore, only after the construction of a complete representation is it thought possible for mental awareness to survey discreet portions of what the brain has already attended to via sensory connections to other regions associated with the planning and executing of motor behaviors already underway. Contrary to this somewhat entrenched view, some investigators have interpreted studies such as these to disclose the necessity for phenomenal attention with regard to not only the achievement of perceptually-aware experiences, but also the brain’s necessary work of reacting appropriately to the information disclosed therein.

In my view, neither description goes far enough in granting to the phenomenological “correlates” their integral functioning within this physical (causal) matrix of perceptions and actions. Because the brain cannot step outside its representations any more than ‘the organism’ can if it does not instantiate a process of awareness by the very structure and fruition of that ‘representational’ complex, I am suggesting that even ‘the brain’ does not have a proper representation of the details to execute the full sweep of necessary reactions without the scene becoming embedded, or rather, coming to form according to a situational relevance. That "coming to form" (as we understand from visual processing), is a relational process that positions foreground-attended objects and actions against background objects and the body’s poise in relation to them. I am arguing, therefore, that in cases of inattention, there was not even for the subject’s brain a completed gorilla-form in the midst of the basketball passing – there was only a background to the basketball movement. That is the very situation the brain perceptually constituted and gathered into a phenomenal experience upon its completion. I am not suggesting that we are perceptually aware of everything falling on the retina, I am suggeesting that 'the data' falling on the retina is not in and of itself a high resolution map of 'things' and 'events' that can be immediately utilized by the brain, but which, however, has need of a surveying process to attend to that 'bitmap' in order that perceptual awareness occur. The goal of 'the data' instead, right at the level of the retinal processing, is to construct a situation: i.e, a set of objects in a context. Visual processes require time because their fundamental goal is the 'gestalt' of a set of objects in a background, not a set of high resolution data to invoke some hypothetical 'real' stratum of goings on performed by the brain independent of its fundamental achievement of an experienced visual perception. In our example above, had the retinal data present a fully formed 'gorilla' for brain processing but no real perceptual experience, would not that form act within the matrix of the body’s reflexes in a way that clarifies the “gorilla-situation” for overt awareness? If not, would it not then take it upon itself, to at least begin to act upon it nonconsciously or reflexively in the interest of survival? I suspect that subjects in a real environment with the potential for real gorillas would be poised with a very different phenomenology – one which could not give over to a comfortable research study the same measure of attentional commitment to an otherwise trivial task capable of pulling attentional resources from a gorilla in the midst.

I am not arguing that in a real world situation, pre-perceptual precursors would not initiate reflexive action even prior to the full completion of our aware perceptions. I am suggesting that that activity, however, would not occur in a separate stratum of causality – it would occur in a single trajectory which begins with the clarifying of a visual perception over time, and subsequently, based on that perception, necessary action would be initiated upon the heels of reflexive action. In fact, I argue that the brain’s very tool in the service of that overall survival situation would be precisely a perceived and motivated experience capable of enabling the organism to develop subsequent actions on the heels of the unconscious reflexes which might be required to instigate immediate actions.

III. The Context of Phenomenology

The organism’s sentient experiences are embedded in the overall construction of a situational context by which it must ever inquire of its environment as to the current state of relevance to its survival and well-being. The human organism does this by experiencing its own achievement of an ongoing contextual situation with the full range of motivated behaviors incited from such a first-person concern. In the current debate over the existence of free-will or volitional causation, the emerging view is that the volitional freedom we feel is not causally embedded in the physics which underlies the actual initiation of our acts. Modern neurobiology and psychology have discovered that the process of the conceptually aware subject is not always the presiding power over the behaviorial choices initiated by the organism.

Benjamin Libet’s oft cited data reveal that a subject’s overt awareness to report the onset of a volitional intention (even to oneself) – or to engage in a volitional act – actually lags some 350 milliseconds or so behind the body’s real initiation of these acts (B. Libet 1992). Because of a delay in the conscious acquisition of what is now interpreted as our already engaged acts - neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers often address their general discussions to the 'false' feelings of volition that we believe to be our own sense of initiating all of our bodies responses. Certainly, we are often blind to the fact that much of the time, the actions we embark upon behaviorally (as an organism) have already been initiated for our own belated consciousness ‘beneath’ our feelings of executive power – in the stratum of the body’s reflexive actions and the precursors to our subsequent experiences. In our tardy conscious experiences, we can and do automatically exaggerate the volitional command we feel before a range of possible behaviors. In fact, it has been suggested that consciousness is, to some degree, the selection process which determines not only our subsequent choices (for action and behavior), but the feeling generated after a set of responses has been initiated. For our purposes, we should remember that a range of choices are determined according to the self-centered perspective by which our phenomenology operates. In fact, even for our automatic actions, it is often an earlier phase of phenomenology that has helped to constitute that range of concerned choices (for the organism) by in fact being the prior set of phenomenal experiences which condition the motivated responses we often develop. Indeed, there would be no motivating for the model that considers consciousness a causally mediating function for appropriate action on the part of the animal (for its gene-centered interests), if that experience were not wholly and fully the very manifestation of that motivation in all its specific richness and actively creative “instigating power” addressed to a particular context from the particular perspective of an experiencing organism. It is thus contradictory for our models to consider mental articulations to be fully motivating from the perspective of generating the proper actions but only ‘virtual’ experiences – that is only “seemingly” physical happenings which have been discharged well after the “real” work undertaken by the body in an exclusively mechanical manner. By denying a real causal role to phenomenology, such models would have need to posit purely anticipatory mechanical reflexes or pattern recognizing reactions executed to address an infinite range of possible real world situations. The sheer number of ‘pre-wired’ automatic reactions needed to anticipate the proper output for real world situations would be far in excess of those the system could develop, store, and execute in the face of the number of potential real world survival threats that the organism faces. What then would be the need for a phenomenological domain? Indeed, motivated conscious experiences cannot be both in the realm of physics when our models need them and outside of its causal efficacy when our models seek to stress a purely mechanical nature.

The fact that Benjamin Libet’s data reveal a subject’s overt awareness to report the onset of a volitional intention actually lags some 350 milliseconds or so behind the body’s initiation of these acts, does not preclude the fact that awareness requires a real temporal genesis and duration for its completion. The denial of volitional causation may be misguided on two fronts, the first being the notion that phenomenal states are mental ‘states’ – that is, sequential “qualia” moments represented instead of a gathering physical momentum functionally and causally organized over real spans of time. The second misapplied consideration of the Libet data is, in my view, the common discussion that is most often offered as the interpretation – the proclamation that Libet’s empirical evidence “proves” there is a more primary and antecedent physical matrix of non-conscious mechanisms which are separate from the so-called epi-phenomenal ‘feeling’ of volition discharged later to dupe the organism into performing the necessary actions. This interpretation, I have pointed out, is internally conflicted the moment one realizes that a non-causally embedded phenomenal realm will have no power to function in the manner it is said to mediate functionally, and cannot thereby organize subsequent actions.

In the second part of this two-part paper I will be expanding upon the alternative suggestion that recurrent network connections may physically underlie and organize the self-determined causation of our experiences by way of a momentum stabilizing process. This would necessarily occur in a duration – over the time of a budding “cycle” of intentional momentum that is indeed functionally directed, but organized precisely by way of affective or perceptual phenomenology (the emotion and feeling we bring to each context). For now, we can take note that according to neurologist Victor Lamme, the timing for an initial non-conscious feedforward “sweep” extending even to the ‘executive’ areas of motor and frontal cortices takes under and up to 100ms to complete (V. Lamme, 2004). While this initial firing sequence includes attentional ‘tuning properties’ such as orientation, and while automatic visually-guided reflexes may be discharged at this level, the intentional-process does not yet achieve a phenomenal experience. For that achievement, reentrant cycling is perhaps required, not just ‘feedback’ in the linear sequential sense of the term (2004). Perhaps that same set of overall cycling can be interpreted to have an initiatory biasing and priming stage for what will be subsequently organized phenomenologically once relevant stimuli have been selected and stabilized according to a budding situational context in process. The somatosensory or perceptual ‘situation’ begins developing according to the early priming of the initial sweep. But perhaps its completion is the fruition of an organizing experience ever in creation.

Conclusion, next essay and references