Lost science on rescue: First-Person Science of Consciousness

Consciousness in First-Person

“What we think about the world or people determines what we actually perceive.”

-Johannes Wagemann

    Our 21st century, materialistic and progressive senses are incorporated / crusted / rooted in the act of do and thinking. If we look at the reflection of cinematic manifestations, such as "Altered Carbon", "Transcendence", "Ex Machine" about consciousness, it is common to find the scientific extrapolation of consciousness as an object, a phenomenon of unitary nature. In these worlds, it easily isolates itself as a consciousness material, transferring itself as a data diskette, perpetuating an immutable information of "I"  of each person's as it were an HD (a computer memory).

    Part of this influence is ancestral, and another of the recent analogies of every logical or non-logical system (linear and non-linear) works in a comparison with machines, which we call the silicon valley culture. To imagine a body as a machine, its mind as software, and in this comparative simplicity ignores the knowledge of 3.5 billion years of evolution of nature to bring the anthropocentrism close to the feeling of mastering what consciousness is.

    But, have you stopped to think what consciousness is?

    Scientifically this is a challenge !!! And recent studies ^[2-3] already show how so wrong the materialistic extrapolation of "being" in these films is. Consciousness is more for dynamic than static system! That is, it is not immutable, but rather fluid! It happens all the time in different states in several complex manifestations of their system (non-linear).

     Studying, exploring the secrets that govern the phenomenon / nature of consciousness is difficult! So much so that he earned a term especially for this in science: "Hard problem of consciousness" ^[4].

    But what is so difficult about this phenomenon in counterpart of other cognitive brain capacities?

    The hard problem of consciouness lies in the difficulty of drawing relations of "qualia" (beautiful term that we can trace a equivalent translate into a mind, but carries some other deeper meanings) with matter, the brain. We know that if I tear off pieces of your brain, your mind (qualia) will be weakened, that is, consciousness resides only there somehow (for now for explanatory purposes, but this is partially false). However find the explanation of how cells, neurons (physical agents) are able to generate, to emerge the mind (an abstract agent), is what the scientists call hard problem of consciousness.

    The truth is that science as we know it today is rooted and sustained by two central pillars: reductionism and empiricity. Yet these currents of thought have failed grotesquely in explaining complex phenomena of nature, as the best example, consciousness.

    But let us briefly understand what this means and how we came to this system of thought, almost an imperial imposition on how we think to solve, discover, and build knowledge.

     In a summary, jumping some important names and processes of thought evolution, we can say that all confusion began with Plato and Aristotle, when separating mind and body. In this sense there is not only a idea-physical distinction, body and consciousness are separate things, but also the impossibility of studying abstract phenomena (psychological, for example) in the physical plane (body). With the development of human history, thinking improves and we come to the conclusion that to understand the universe it is necessary to quantify, without quantification there is no proof, there is no empiricity. It is there, as Galileo would say, that we find the first black side of modern science. Extrapolation of rationalism, of materialism. The main criticism is that this method, when transferred to biology, psychology and sociology, for example, perhaps blinds us to understanding the ontology (metaphysics) of these fields, because it transports us into a frenzy of wanting to observe, measure, measure, measure ...

“What can be measured, must be measured, what cannot be measured, must be made measurable.”

- Kleinert

    The second power of modern science has consecrated itself with Newton and Galileo, bringing the approach of the fragmentation of any problem into small parts, into particles, thus generating reductionism thinking.

     For a brief period we had the reencounter of the scientific investigation of what one thinks (qualia) of what one perceives (body) together with the birth of the sciences of the psyche with great names like Freud, Charles Darwin and Wundt. If we were to make an abstraction of all this history of scientific thought until today it would be something like the figure below.

Image extracted from The Confluence of Perceiving and Thinking in Consciousness Phenomenology ^[1]

" All explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, to physics"

- Weinberg

    But is it really truth, all problems we can solve by reducing the systems?

     The truth is that for complex problems we need a lot more arrows pointing upwards than arrows pointing down.

     In this sense there is a need to reformulate the thinking of how we set up scientific experiments to answer the modern questions or questions that accompany us from the beginning of thinking.

     We can find in new fronts of elaboration of the scientific methodology, the constructivism (complex systems are a milestone), the enativism and what I will focus in this blog, the phenomenological structure.

“Structure Phenomenology offers an epistemological conception and method to observe states that are normally pre-subjective and pre-objective in the ongoing genesis of individual consciousness. These processual states can be accessed by becoming increasingly aware of the separating and integrating forms of mental action that we are constantly performing in our everyday thinking and perceiving.”

- Johannes Wagemann

    Thus the phenomenological structure combined with the exploration of consciousness retains a science of inner exploration, which despite having a variation from person to person, all help to understand characteristics about consciousness.

     Before any pre-conceptualization is formed, this first-person consciousness science, is far from to become some kind of pseudo-coach who studied "N" years and created a new method that nobody knows. There is a need for scientific rigor and the true effects in this field.

     It is known that it is possible to perceive different forms of mental processes of thinking, but the simply external exposure, the randomization of blind events is not capable of awakening perceptions of human consciousness. In this sense a methodological guide of introspection of the recognition of itself is necessary and it is there reborn the science in the first person in the study of the consciousness^[1].

    Reborn because this was already was focus of Spinoza and Damasio. This exploration of perceiving the inner leads to a grasp of feeling and how consciousness is anchored in multiple feelings to find its balance. When we enter into this subject in the first attempt to formalize this neuroscientifically we are called domains of feelings: basic sensations (hunger, thirst, warmth), emotional feelings (joy, sadness, fear), cognitive feelings (beliefs about a certain knowledge) and perceptual feelings (sensory modalities: sound in the hearing, color in the sight, odor in the nos…). Previously for Espinosa the networks of feelings for emotions consisted of more than 60 mental states as in the example of the image below. According to Max Velmans, and that number currently up to 1000 mental states (described in the book Understanding Consciousness, 2900, Routledge).

Image extracted from Triple Monism Appearance [4]

    The perception and mastery of attention empowers being in the investigation of self and its ruling universe. For this, new cognitive tools, structured in the introspective method, reopen this field of scientific methodology.

   The field has interesting techniques that are not limited to just meditation forms to access mindfulness in breathing and thinking about the environment ^[6].

    The quest is to expand awareness, to discover that in introspection we have different states of consciousness, different forms "I's" awakes. Understand how semantics can be well used to activate neural patterns. An interesting relation on states of consciousness and body, is the figure below made by Wilfried Belshner what he called "Topography of states of consciousness".

Codifications above refer to the feeling of the body and below possible analogues of the consciousness experience. Extracted image of Meditation - research as development ^[6]

    It is expected that the investigation will clarify not only aspects of consciousness, but serve as a tool of cognitive utility, since its perception of reality can be altered drastically, abandoning binary logic 0 and 1 and understanding that the "or" may be in this equation when it comes from the functioning of the mind:

It is possible to observe a duck or rabbit. The image is an optical illusion of perception that can coexist once it accesses the consciousness in two planes of reality in the same image. Image extracted from The Confluence of Perceiving and Thinking in Consciouness Phenomenology ^[1]

"... Nature (or totality of the real) consists of three potential aspects: matter / energy, form / information and feeling / consciousness. These three aspects are progressively updated: initially, in matter / energy elements in the space-time, when there is transmission of forms between material systems, information emerges, and when information affects the material structure of a system, sentiment emerges. "

- Alfredo Pereira Júnior

    This introspective method refers to Wundt's "structuralist" school is again a recurring subject and will be the subject of an edition of a famous scientific journal Elsevier: First-Person Science of Consciousness. Theories, Methods, Applications.

 References:

[1] The Confluence of Perceiving and Thinking in Consciouness Phenomenology; Johannas Wagemann; Frontiers in Psychology; 2018.

[2] Consciouness: here, there and everywhere ?; Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch; Philosophical Transactions; 2016.

[3] Keisuke Suzuki, Anil K. Seth et al , A Deep-Dream Virtual Reality Platform for Studying Altered Perceptual Phenomenology, Keisuke Suzuki, Anil K. Seth et al, Nature Scientific Reports, 2017.

[4] Monismo de Triplo Aspecto; Pereira Junior, Alfredo; UNESP; 10.13140/RG.2.1.4157.2729;2016.

[5] The Structure-Phenomenological Concepto f Brain-Consciouness Correlation; Johannas Wagemann; Mind & Matter; 2011.

[6] Meditation – research as development; Johannes Wagemann; RoSE; 2011.