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Me, I, My and Us, the MIMU of Self
BY LYNARD – SEPTEMBER 2021

Life begins with the first breath. Consciousness begins with the first touch.

Before the plague (that would be the covid-19 virus), did you ever stand in line in a supermarket behind a parent with a one or two year old, a near-toddler on the verge of walking, strapped in the child seat of a grocery cart?

Beyond the usual “what a cute kid”, and “what a lovely child”, and other exercises of social etiquette, there is an opportunity to learn something very significant about human consciousness here.

When a Stare is just a Stare

While you are engaged in the neighborly ritual of praising a relatively new life, you might have noticed the child’s eyes staring at you for a socially unacceptable amount of time. The child glances away, focus again and, maybe, ends with a smile or quizzical frown before finally turning away again to gaze at a parent or bag of potato chips. Of course your natural reaction is to assume the child finds you fascinating, amusing, engaging. It must be you. The toddler has not yet acquired the attribute of three dimensional vision so he or she sees you as a flat, two dimensional interruption of the scenery which may make you more interesting than you might otherwise be. Of interest nonetheless. You however, perceiving child and cart in three dimension, may not be one-hundred percent focused on what you are seeing. Hence, you miss the opportunity to learn something about consciousness.

This bundle of life staring at you is in the biologically necessitated process of shedding some of the trillions of neurons developed before birth. While in the womb, this child was developing neurons at roughly the rate of 5,000 per second. That’s five-thousand per second.

At birth there were about 2,500 connecting synapses between these neurons. By the time the toddler is sitting in a grocery cart with a laser-stare directed at you, the number of neurons has gone down from the billions to the hundred of millions, with 15,000 connecting synapses between those remaining neurons. As the toddler ages, synapses connections will continue to grow. The expansion will continue until the bundle of joy attains the age of twenty-five or so and is carrying around about 120 billion neurons. It all sounds very computerese. Normal, predictable biology at work. A good place to start a science based discussion of human consciousness. But, of course there is “hard” science and there is “soft” science.

Hard science pretty much says that the amount of work nature (mother? god? or otherwise?) puts into developing the brain is truly extraordinary. It goes far beyond anything current human ingenuity is capable of designing or building. Not to belabor the point but to build a computer capable of emulating the human brain, which functions on a measly 3 volts of electricity, would require that computer to have the power capacity of a medium sized city just to power up. Before that goes to your head, humans are not unique in brain complexity or descriptively high-output relative to brain power consumption. Naturally–that is scientifically–it can safely be assumed that the three pounds of brain matter in our heads is the origin of consciousness–the “I” aware of “am”.

Humans excel in frontal lobe brain development. Other animals not so much. The frontal lobe is the executive area of the brain where all evaluative and autonomous activities of the brain merge in either function or oversight. The oversight part may be a bit exaggerated. The involuntary and reflexive areas of the brain are designed to be just that, involuntary and reflexive though there is evidence that the systems are not completely free of executive controls. Which brings us back to the toddler’s delightful although nerve-racking stare.

The toddler’s stare just might fit into the soft science category labeled the scopic (staring) drive. (Yes, in some areas of science, staring is a “drive”). Might. But let’s back up a moment.

Loopholes in the Sciences

The two philosophical paths leading toward a definition of consciousness are generally labeled substance dualism and property dualism. It is grouped under the heading: the mind-body problem. We can classify the substance dualism approach as cloaked in soft-science and tracks quite nicely with Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. Property dualism on the other hand acknowledges the hard science but advocates mental properties as co-existent and equal to the physical. A very good web article on substance dualism is by Howard Robinson in The Standford Encyclopedia¹¹. More specific to our purpose here, Paul Richard Blum’s Chapter 1: Substance Dualism in Descartes published by the Rebus Community ¹² .

Essentially, substance dualism is the belief that the brain and mind originate from different “substances”. Property dualism, the hard science approach combined with a “mystical” off-ramp, is the belief that the mind–thoughts, emotions, memory experiences–emanate from the brain but may not be solely due to properties or attributes of the brain: a physical property and a mental property.

The question is what does substance and property dualism have to do with a definition of consciousness. The answer in short is nothing. The concepts are merely the foam floating atop what ultimately is consciousness. Though it may be difficult to imagine a conscious being without a “mind”, the problem is defining a “mind”. So, if we can define consciousness, we will be well on our way to defining the “mind”–which may fall into neither the substance or property dualism approach. There is always quantum mechanics where hard and soft science rests comfortably together and we can move beyond the basic mind-body problem. There is only the physics of quantum particles.

Quantum mechanics, specifically quantum particle physics, has a few lessons for both the soft and hard science of defining the mind and, to a lesser extent, for defining consciousness. In the hierarchy of the real world, the mind is elementary. Consciousness is of a higher order.

The Standard Model of Elementary Particle physics, The physical world also includes our brains and frontal lobes. From quarks, to protons and neutrons and then the nucleus of atoms and their electrons resulting in molecules pushing against the Higgs Field (defining mass for everything), underpinning a cauldron of biochemical and bio-electrical activity, we eventually wind up at the frontal lobe–the front door of consciousness. It is appealing because it is scientific and essentially predictive. Well, almost.

The property dualism approach to the mind and consciousness concedes that there is an unknowable hovering over the definition of the mind. A physical property and a “mental” property where one may be more a determinate in the independent agency of the human experience than the other. Again, the mind-body problem. Is it biology or beyond physics? Like quantum mechanics, which has yet to fit gravity into its picture of the physical world, there is no explanation for the independent agency of minds–the “I” part of “I am”.

John R. Serale, in his excellent essay Why I am not a Property Dualist¹³, provides a thoroughly clarifying take on the entire body-mind problem. In the essay, he says:

 “I want to say consciousness is a mental and therefore biological and therefore physical feature of the brain.

He wanted to say it. He said it. And then he clarified why the statement does not seem clarifying. Like the baby sitting in the grocery store cart not being able to fully appreciate the three-dimensional world around them, we may all be missing something about consciousness.

You may have noticed, while staring back at the toddler in the grocery cart baby seat, that the child never mentioned “I’ during their staring seizure. Of course the toddler is not at the age of speaking yet. But still . . . what’s so difficult about saying “I think”, let alone, “I”. There is some hard science with a quantum mechanics twists that helps address this.

In 2013, an article by Paul Gabrielsen on the ScienceMag website titled (When Does Your Baby Become Conscious?, April 2013)¹⁴ reported on research done by cognitive neuroscientist Sid Kouider of CNRS (the French national research agency). A child as young as 5 months old shows brain activity reflecting an ability to be aware of stimuli (called event related potentials or ERPs) flashed before their eyes for a fraction of a second. In an adult, the entire process–from ERP to the brain’s first response to the final “late slow wave” response–takes place in less than a third of a second. In the eighty infants not “squirmy” enough for the test to be conducted, Kouider found the same results, except the response times in the babies were slower. It is a rather controversial finding. What makes it controversial is that the recorded prefrontal lobe activity after the event was over indicates that short term memory was involved. For neuroscientists, conscious thought activity requires the involvement of short term memory.

A five month old baby exhibits brain activity indicating a reaction to the environment. Under normal circumstances, a “duh” moment if ever there was one. But if the implications of quantum mechanics teaches us anything it is that there is no such thing as a “duh” moment in real science. It’s just another moment with a question.

Back to the Baby

So, the baby in the grocery store shopping cart is definitely seeing something. It may or may not be you. And the stare just may be a result of an attempt at confirmation that there is something to see–without or without the scopic drive (scopophilia according to Sigmund Freud). We can rightly assume that whatever the toddler sees is being absorbed into short term memory and may blend into other stimuli and sensations which may work itself into long term memory. It is in the murky empyrean of long term memory that the “am” of “I am” is born. The start of consciousness.

The acceptance of short term memory as a prerequisite for “consciousness” is a no-brainer. But short term memory is not a definition of consciousness. Then again, even rats have short term memory. They even have episodic memory (the ability to recall events in context), so long term memory is not a definition of consciousness either. Both types of memory are merely attributes of consciousness. (Does this mean that rats, with their capacity for short and long term memory, also have the underpinnings of consciousness? A very important question that really goes to the essence of a definition of consciousness. We will get back to this).

If you could step back far enough from the scene of you noticing the baby in the cart and all the rest, you would become aware of something rather amazing. You would see a collective mind. But of course, since you are part of the collective, you really do not have an objective perspective. And here is where the body-mind problem becomes a mind-perspective problem. Our mind. Our perspective. Not my mind or your mind. Not my perspective nor your perspective. Our mind. Our perspective.

I think therefore you are.

Sentience: the subjective experience of “what it is like” to be yourself, to experience a sensation, or to do an act. Qualia: the unique experience of “redness” when I see a red object.

© Lynard Barnes, 2020