A Blueprint for the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Hidden pathways allow the emergence of subjective experiences from matter, for the emergence of something out of nothing. David Chalmers aptly named the attempt to unveil such pathways as the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Qualia are the subjective characteristics of experiences, such as the experience of “greenness” elicited by the green color. The Hard Problem of Consciousness corresponds to the search for the origin of qualia. This book divides the Hard Problem in two complementary components: an operation for the realization of awareness and the actual content of this awareness. Although the brains of different species might meet different conditions for the development of species-specific consciousness, all conscious brains share a mechanism that turns matter into experience. This book emphasizes the epistemological distinction between descriptions of the neurological landscapes of species-specific conscious experiences, and a theory that explains consciousness in all kinds of conscious brains.

Popular theories of consciousness convey the notion that traces of consciousness exist even below the level of single-celled organisms. Alternatively, consciousness may emerge from the informational nature of life. Fundamental processes that, when scaled up, might give origin to the “mind” must transit from biological mechanisms to information. Portraying the subject-world dialectic of singlecelled organisms as the first exchange that makes this transition possible does not constitute a hypothesis, but a description. Qualia refer to subjective phenomena, and not to something objectively present or to the human brain processes from which such phenomena arise. Nonetheless, qualia can still provide tailored adaptive information about reality from the perspective of the organism. One can reconcile this notion with the illusory nature of qualia by recognizing a variable “Q”. This variable represents an abstraction of the processes that transform evolutionarily relevant information into the subject experience. Q represents adaptive inference processes that incorporate the state and the causal architecture of the environment. These inference processes at some point became human consciousness.

The computability issue provides a pivot for understanding the origin of consciousness. A noncomputable origin of consciousness implies that analogic processing of information supported by real numbers and relying on the laws of physics gives rise to subjectivity. In contrast, a computable origin would mean that processing of information relies on algorithms such as those governing digital computing. Neither binary logic nor formal mathematical systems govern the evolution of biological systems. Kurt Gödel formally demonstrated that axiomatic systems do not prove the truth and consistency of all theorems, thus providing evidence that formal mathematical systems cannot fully capture the creative processes that take place in the human brain. However, computational approaches to brain function yield extraordinarily successful results. The operations that underlie the realization of awareness should capture algorithmically compressible regularities. Crucially, silicon and brain computation share a fundamental characteristic: large complex systems must rely on a hierarchical organization where each level becomes increasingly more abstract. Nonetheless, as of yet, no theory has explained how qualia arise from neuro computation. Altogether, these considerations support dividing the Hard Problem into symbiotic computational and non-computational aspects.

Two of the most popular theories that address the Hard Problem suggest that the minimal unit of consciousness could emerge from subcellular structures. Both theories neglect the importance of the subject and its agency. Both disregard the basic phenomenological definition of consciousness: there must be someone for someone to be conscious. According to the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), consciousness emanates from integrated information. The axioms at the basis of the IIT speak to the phenomenology of consciousness: consciousness exists, it is structured, it is informative, it is irreducible and it is unique or exclusive. However, the phenomenology of consciousness can only spring from the subject-object dialectic. Thus, the subject must exist a priori, as a premise, not as a conclusion. Integrated information does not provide a general cause of consciousness, but something implicit to it. The main IIT hypothesis is hopelessly flawed. A second popular theory, the Orchestrated Objective Reduction of quantum states postulates that a proto-element of consciousness accompanies any quantum reduction process. It anthropomorphizes quantum information.

Cellular organization provides the fundamental platform for exchanges between life’s integrated processes and the environment. Cellular processes convey adaptive information about the environment. Time-organized processes and information contained within living organisms are a source of fitness. The energy flow between single cells and the world forms a communication channel indissociably made of organic matter and information. This flow occurs under the informational principles of natural selection. However, the information built up into biological systems needs to become information informing about itself to transcend across levels of abstraction, such as described in Hofstadter’s strange loops. A working car engine expresses the “processual” expectation of its human designers: gas flows, then ignites, pistons move and so forth. The engine has no awareness of these expectations. The expectations are implicit to the designed physical structure. The processes that mediate physical and informational relationships of living organisms also have expectations built into them. Such expectations result from a selective natural history based on evolutionary constraints.

Classical information theory ties information with physical representations. Subcellular processes generate and store information, but only integrated cellular life actually transforms these processes into biologically meaningful information. Living organisms, as open systems, extract biological order from the predictably increased disorder of their environment. They transform energy into a new form of energy with higher thermodynamic value. The negative entropy results from the accumulation of information within the living system. More information translates into greater molecular complexity and functional dynamic behavior. Time-organized nonlinear processes lead to the expansion of expectations. Natural selection necessarily results in the buildup, within cellular processes, of information about environmental states and their inferred causal architecture. Such information increases the likelihood that a given organism will navigate and react more efficiently within its environment. The same holds true for brain functions that organize adaptive global behaviors. Inferential brain systems statistically minimize surprise, or “free-energy,” by generating sensory samples, optimizing perception and/or improving adaptive action. Free-energy minimization intrinsically connects perception and action, supporting an early origin for top-down generative paradigms of brain function. Q consciousness-information agrees with the concept of ensemble density, i.e. the probability of identifying hidden causes in the environment.

Complex systems that handle information follow a hierarchical order. The realization of information in hierarchical systems occurs as feedback loops that break the hierarchical order and generate self-referential information. The violation of hierarchical order defines a paradoxical level-crossing strange loop. This pattern lies at the origin of an “I”. It can be depicted as a mathematical phrase composed of ‘subject’predicate that undergoes a loop through which the predicate becomes its own subject: ‘predicate’predicate. Processual information includes present and potential information expressed as information.expectation that becomes realized as the strange loop ‘information.expectation’information.expectation. In fact, expectations drive this strange loop, which can thus be expressed as ‘expectation.information’expectation.information. Conscious experiences constitute running models (expectations) that simulate reality. As multiple levels of strange loops realize expectation.information across the hierarchical organization of the brain, consciousness becomes a higher-level abstraction that supplants and integrates other abstraction levels. Perception inversely maps or generates hidden causes from sensations. Abstractions arise from seen and unseen actions of the organism, which become the source of expectations across multiple levels of nested brain oscillations. Actions provide the basis for this generative model of consciousness. Neural correlates of consciousness do not necessarily explain the origin of consciousness but may simply describe regions implicated in its realization.

Natural selection acts on emergent informational relationships that govern the physical processes in living organisms. As complexity increases, and processes affect other processes under the constraints imposed by natural selection, referential information can become relational and abstract. Single-celled organisms do not experience meaning. They have no consciousness. Nothing appears to their consciousness in a phenomenological sense. The information that accumulates as these organisms dialogue with the environment has a referential relationship with the processes of natural selection. Classical Shannon’s information theory (SIT) addresses conditions for something to convey information, but not the meaning of information. Meaning emerges from decoding of information, which, in turn, can only occur in reference to something external to Shannon’s information. Natural selection may provide meaning because the processes that living organisms carry out become or contain metainformation about natural selection itself. Meaning and abstract awareness share the same fundamental mechanism. These considerations suggest that the loop ‘expectation.information’expectation.information realizes meaning and provides a path towards the solution of the “aboutness” problem. The organization of information as abstract and referential may allow for partial decoupling from underlying thermodynamics.

Natural selection does not start de novo with each new species; it uses the information contained in organisms that have come earlier in evolutionary history. Evolution is conservative. A self-generated consciousness can only emerge as the product of information realized out of the exchanges between the organism and the world. Cells provide the original platform that first organized this kind of integrated information exchanges. They are not conscious, but their systems biology is a form of knowledge. Cells are the original knowing without a knower. Human consciousness is also abstract, and one cannot directly measure it. Its abstract nature is a description, not a speculation. The IIT relies on the concept of effective information, which represents the entropy of the actual repertoire of a system in relation to its potential repertoire. This aspect of the theory agrees with the notion of information.expectation and renders this blueprint consistent with the empirical support of the IIT. However, the IIT does not address the role of the subject in the realization of information.expectation. The realization of information is an active process. Neurobiology provides no evidence for the production of information by unactivatable systems.

Rodent studies of navigation across single- and two-dimensional environments show patterns of hippocampal pyramidal cell activation characterized by a “place field” in the format of a cone and a highest firing “place cell” neuron in its center. As the animal moves across the environment, the field of neuronal activation concomitantly changes in the hippocampus. The animal realizes knowledge about its location through the relationship between a central neuronal spike and the overall activation of a place field. Awareness of location is signaled by the matching of maps represented in the hippocampus with incoming perceptual information. This pattern supports the idea of subjective experiences as abstract information that transcends specific physical location. It supports a content-independent mechanism for the realization of information into “knowledge”. In two-dimensional mazes, neurons that become active at the crossroads also become tied to different routes, emerging as omnidirectional cells. Multiple episodes of common junctions can free neurons from their physical context. Emergent levels of omnidirectional assemblies have a relational origin and can become part of higher order representations. These results suggest the existence of mechanisms that abstract information from spatial and temporal perspectives. They also indicate that motor actions have a pivotal role in the generation of maps and, ultimately, that actions form the basis for the representation of the physical world and the transition of Shannon to non-Shannon “aboutness” information. Such results counter the IIT premise of awareness generation in systems that cannot be activated.

Humans sense the passage of time as a subtle form of experience defined by an absence. Studies of interval timing often focus on the individual´s assessment of a period with no stimulation between two auditory stimuli. Time is an inherent part of Shannon’s information. Brain function contains an invariant time-dimension. Every cortical circuit seems to have an inherent computational ability for timing regulated by time-dependent changes in synaptic and cellular properties. Local networks affect qualia of time experienced both in visual and auditory experiments. State-dependent local learning and oscillatory phase shifts support a role for early cortical processing in time discrimination. Brain oscillatory phases predict conscious perception. The temporal cortex adjusts its own oscillatory phase, mapping its window of analysis of incoming time-sensitive events. These phase adjustments support the existence of active brain-centric expectations in time perception and other conscious experiences.

Interoception consists of sensing one´s own physiologic conditions, including heartbeats, gastric filling, and bladder fullness. The experience emerges from neuronal activity at the insula. The brain represents primary interoception in the posterior insula and integrates it with emotional salience in a posterior to anterior insula activation pattern. The posterior to anterior instantiation of interoceptive information provides evidence that consciousness indeed represents the product of abstractions across the brain hierarchical levels. Different abstraction patterns refer to distinct levels of representation of tissue-specific and whole-body homeostatic states, from basic interoceptive experiences to a more abstract representation of wellbeing, integration of exteroception, emotional awareness, and cognitive processing. The brain successively realizes these qualitative differences along the axis that links the posterior to the anterior insula. Interoception and its derivative emotional states fit the concept of realized information in the context of potential states represented across system hierarchies. These studies and considerations validate the paradigm of embodied abstractions. Research in the field of interoception often supports a role for strange loops in the realization of information. Interoceptive awareness arises from the fusion of subject and body, where the body plays the role of a building block of the self it represents. This pattern is consistent with consciousness as action, and with Damasio’s views of consciousness as the product of a reaction of the organism to an object as the organism regulates itself to process this object.

Perception is not a direct image of sensorial input, but a hypothesis explaining sensorial information. The brain hallucinates reality. The ability to infer the causes of sensations requires an internal generative model, known as Predictive Coding. The brain tries to minimize prediction error between inputs and models about the causes of these inputs. Top-down connections of the brain convey predictions, whereas bottom-up connections transmit predictive errors. Expectations, from the perspective of Predictive Coding, refer to representations of causes encoded at each level. The same principles apply to interoception. The architecture of the insula allows for successively higher re-representations of interoceptive information, homeostatic significance, emotional salience and hedonic potential. The anterior insula integrates bottom-up interoceptive predictive error with high-level cortical predictions and sends interoceptive predictions to visceral systems. Generative models depend on actions. They actively map from hidden causes to sensory consequences. Perception corresponds to the inverse mapping, from sensations to hidden causes at higher levels of relational abstraction. The experience of body ownership fits a model of conscious selfhood based on interoceptive Predictive Coding underlying multisensorial integration. Predictive Coding supports a subject-centric view whereby actions not only lie at the basis of consciousness, but also provide the building elements of the subject itself. Neural correlates of consciousness represent what the subject is doing. The emergence of abstract phenomenal objects as guides to global adaptive behaviors favors the transition to phenomenological heuristics. Natural environments are characterized by low predictability, small sample sizes relative to the number of available cues, and interdependency among cues. Models based on heuristics are adaptive because predictive-error is difficult to calculate for global actions in an uncertain world.

Late extracellular signals underscore some of the neural signatures of consciousness, which seem to depend on long-range feedback processing. The Visual Awareness Negativity and P300, which denote a variation in awareness, correlate with consciousness and originate from late signals. Mid- and long-distance information sharing provides long-range cortical communication, and also represents a neural correlate of consciousness in humans. In granular sensory cortices, superficial and deep pyramidal cells respectively process feedforward and feedback information, apparently as parallel streams. There is evidence identifying Layer-5 neurons as the main cortical column integrators of information. Layer-5 pyramidal neurons might function as coincidence detectors by signaling feedforward and feedback interactions with a high-frequency spike burst triggered by calcium influx. These spike bursts may give origin to the late extracellular signals observed at superficial cortical layers. The high-bursting model of coincidence detection fits the concept of realization of information: ‘expectation.information’expectation.information can be re-expressed as ‘feedback.feedforward’feedback.feedforward.

The olfactory system provides an especially propitious model for the study of neuronal correlates of consciousness. Olfactory signals mostly bypass thalamic firstorder relay neurons and directly affect the olfactory cortex. In the olfactory cortex, the sparse distribution of odor-induced activity and the selective odor tuning of individual pyramidal cells resembles the hippocampus place field and place cells. In mammals, the olfactory cortex gave origin to the isocortex. The realization of information in this region may play the role of a heuristic process for the realization of information in other cortices. Binding of information in the olfactory cortex results from specific focal signaling in the context of widespread activation. Odorants bind to odorant receptors (OR) on the surface of olfactory sensory cells and activate neural maps in the olfactory bulb (OB). This process happens through the synchronization of localized tufts cells and the wide activation of mitral cells, and it fits with the information.expectation model of realization of information. The OB depicts odorant characteristics in spatiotemporal patterns. The piriform cortex (PC), considered the primary olfactory cortex, generates pattern recognition beyond the OB maps. Much like the hippocampus, PC oscillatory activity establishes cellular synchronicity thorough the ensemble and across the oscillatory phase. The posterior PC integrates structural codes into more highly processed representations of odor qualities, considered odor-object categories. The existence of odor-objects is consistent with the manipulation of information as a focal aspect of subjective experiences. Active mapmaking realizes information that transcends into qualia. The process of mapmaking represents a synthetic de novo phenomenon with a relational origin. Olfactory experiences are abstracted from the binding of specific molecules to olfactory receptors into structurebased categories, and further on into odor-object categories. Transitions happen under feedback input, in agreement with Predictive Coding. The overall process parallels the hierarchy of abstractions instantiated in the insula. The transition of external information into organism-centric encoding supports the idea of qualia as conveyors of adaptive information. The synthesis of low dimensional percepts supports the transition from the Bayesian calculations of Predictive Coding to phenomenal heuristics.

Theories of consciousness share the idea of consciousness realization in neuronal states. Conscious experiences take place in embodied agents that generate an internal model of the external environment and of themselves. Artificial intelligence researchers have focused their efforts on the creation of a multi-level consciousnessbased architecture that follows these precepts. Attention mechanisms can serve as control models on silicon environments with limited resources for information processing. Conversely, attention can emerge when information-processing modules cooperate to solve a given problem. However, computationally responding to a topic does not equal conscious processing. Top-down attention and consciousness are conflated, but not the same. Phenomenal consciousness seems possible with activation of local networks, but it is fully realized only after global ignition. Conscious experiences have their own abstraction level. However, they depend on the dynamic cross coupling of neuronal oscillations across processing levels. Predictive Coding ties efferent copies of corollary discharges to the experience of agency. A system based on monitoring action-based signals may underlie both ownership and awareness. An efferent copy is an extra copy of a given command from a control region. It informs local processors of intentions, allowing these downstream processors to timely match intention with the actual results of motor commands. This voluntary motor model applies to abstract experiences. A generative model depends on actions. It maps hidden causes to sensory consequences of these actions. Perception corresponds to the inverse mapping from sensations to hidden causes. A subject may be inferred from inverse mapping of the hidden causes that underlie seen or unseen globally integrated actions. The subject represents the narrative or scenario that predicts sequences of events. However, caution should be applied against strict localizationism in the interpretation of this model.

The Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theory addresses how the brain enables the coherent self-sustaining states characteristic of conscious experiences. Corticocortical long-range fibers make information available for multiple brain networks through horizontal projections. These neurons are considered the distributed source of a Global Neuronal Workspace. The GNW differs from the IIT because it does not situate integrated information as the cause of consciousness. Instead, it points towards information-sharing mechanisms as the origin of consciousness. A recent update to the theory stresses the functional unity of cortex and thalamus. Information integrated by the cortico-thalamic (C-T) circuitry generates internal representations of the external space through the widespread synchronization of gamma oscillations. The theory also proposes mechanisms to generate abstract states of awareness not traditionally associated with qualia. The Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) describes dynamic states that the brain amplifies and synchronizes during the matching processes between bottom-up and top-down streams of information. The ART predicts that qualia should emerge from the emergent relational properties of these interactions. High-level resonances that support qualia features are described as shrouds and presented as stable invariant dynamic states. As a net effect, free-energy, or uncertainty, decreases across hierarchical systems. The ART fits the concept of conscious experiences as the abstract realization of information by strange loops, connecting top-down and bottom-up information flows. ART shrouds are consistent with the manipulation of information as focal aspects of subjective experiences, such as the odor-objects. Matches between prediction and predictive-error create perceptual representations of the world that can support integrated, goal-directed adaptive behaviors of the organism.

The Default Mode Network is activated when there is no engagement with external experiences, but in experiences of self-awareness and endogenous consciousness. The DMN anticorrelates with Task-Positive networks, such as networks for executive control, stimulus salience, external attentional control, and external perceptual processing. The connectivity of a core self-awareness system overlaps with the DMN, in particular with the posterior cingulate cortex. Neural networks that produce social perception also overlap with the DMN. However, neither Task-Positive networks nor DMN computations directly generate a subject. The thalamus is not part of the DMN. Theories emphasizing the DMN and the GNW theory can be reconciled through phenomenological descriptions reported in classic Zen texts. Anesthesia studies point towards the disruption of signaling at upper cortical layers by general anesthetics with different pharmacological mechanisms. General anesthetics seem to act by disrupting top-down signaling and disabling mechanisms matching top-down and bottom-up informational streams at the apical dendrites of cortical pyramidal cells. According to proponents of the Orch OR, quantum phenomena in tubulin have a causal role in the regulation of synaptic firing. The theory suffers from the same biases of the IIT, as both propose a bottom-up causal origin of conscious experiences. Instead, research with general anesthetics suggests a crucial role for top-down projections and for the signaling that matches top-down and bottom-up streams. Children born without a cortex can display behaviors associated with consciousness. They can smile and laugh, show initiative and instrumental behaviors. Their parents can easily distinguish episodes of loss of consciousness due to absence seizures. In the damaged or cortically deactivated brain, secondary effects in the midbrain contribute to the loss of consciousness. The upper brain stem may support sustained rhythms encoding predictive coding expectations. Subcortical regions can provide an interface with the essential attributes of phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal experiences may conceivably emerge with the onset of sustained oscillatory rhythms depicting sustained expectations in an integrative action-based model. Traces of phenomenal consciousness may thus emerge with the onset of rhythms that sustain an organism’s internal expectations. These observations are consistent with the blueprint presented here.

The problem of records consists of matching neural signals with specific quale. The question does not contemplate why human brains generate subjective experiences, but the archives of the rules that match subjective experiences to objective brain states. Record keeping is a specific non-metaphysical aspect of the Hard Problem that is not algorithmically compressible and therefore non-solvable from a computational perspective. The answer to this question lies in the physics of the universe. Record keeping remains a difficult problem in quantum mechanics. Decoherence can be seen as the loss of information from a system into the environment. It is not clear which property of the environment carries the information from the decohered system. The development of a quantum explanation requires the identification of the property that makes the wave state respond to living things with subjectivity, and not with physical information such as position and momentum. Conscious experiences emerge from spatiotemporal patterns of integrated activity at levels that quantum theory cannot address. Processing of information across hierarchies is consistent with the generation of abstract concepts transcending their conditions of origin. Emergent properties that allow for conscious representation of objects require stable resonance of neuronal activity much beyond the levels of organization addressed by quantum physics. Quantum theories must reconcile recent neuroscience findings that emphasize the role of top-down information in human consciousness. However, strange loops may provide a mechanism for the generation of awareness, but they do not explain the subject who is the experiencer. The relational order I describe in this book is ultimately agency-based. To address the subject and its agency, or their local manifestations, as an “observable” quantum operator is a possible path towards the solution of the Hard Problem.

Consciousness cannot be directly measured. It is not physically present. It is an abstraction that emerges from the relationships between processes. Natural selection transformed structures into processes with informational value. Processes have expectations. Subjectivity is the realization of expectations built into the processes that connect a subject and the world around it. Qualia become possible when a subject realizes locally encoded information. Inferences of causal regularities in the Bayesian sampler brain originated from the structural order of living systems. The realization of awareness of location arises from the matching of maps generated by hippocampal activation. These maps give origin to omnidirectional cell assemblies that can represent abstract meaning. Actions generate concrete and abstract maps. State-dependent hidden expectations in local networks also underlie active expectations in time perception, in other subjective experiences, and mechanisms for conscious perception that trace back to the early components of the brain decision network. Interoception realization arises from the hierarchical architecture of the insula consistently with instantiation of successively higher re-representations. Interoception likely arises from a strange loop merging a represented body with a simple self in which the represented body is a building block of the self it represents. Predictive Coding lends support to a Bayesian inference of hidden causes in the environment. It is a generative model that depends on actions. Within its context, perception corresponds to the inverse mapping of the hidden causes of sensations. Ultimately, being the subject is the realization of inference inversely mapped out of hidden causes of global, integrated actions. Olfactory perception abstracts regularities from the environment into odor-objects of adaptive value through re-representation of structural maps into categories that arise from iterative neuronal assembly oscillations. Strong evidence suggests that human consciousness arises from globally distributed brain activity enabling sustained coherent oscillatory states. The existence of reentrant thalamocortical and corticothalamic oscillations supports the idea of realization of abstract information through re-reading of the strange loop ‘expectation. information’ expectation. information into ‘prediction. predictive-error’prediction. predictive-error and, ultimately, into the ‘top-down. bottom-up’top-down. bottom-up and the ‘feedback. feedforward’feedback. feedforward of cortical and thalamic loops. The ideas contained here are consistent with the empirical evidence provided by the IIT. However, this blueprint moves away from the IIT cryptic intelligent design and panpsychism. The adoption of strange loops as a core component of this blueprint is consistent with the Predictive Coding paradigm, with embodied abstractions generated at the insula, and with a multiple level self-modeling description through which lower levels provide primitives for higher-level modeling. Strange loops reconcile the local and global paradox of consciousness. These ideas are consistent with the resonance principles contained in the ART, whereby resonances supporting qualia arise from the realization of information in the strange loop ‘expectation.information’expectation.information in which ‘expectation.information’ ←→ expectation.information at higher levels of functional organization.