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Collapsing the Consciousness wave
 A Dark Philosopher -
Karl L Le Marcsemail
: adarkphilosopher@aol.com
BBC Horizon – Tuesday 20
th
October 2009 – Marcus du Sautoy – The Secret You“
The search for consciousness, the search for me.
”In this fascinating documentary Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy asks “
where doideas come from? 
” He charmingly continues, “
I can’t remember when I first becameaware of me.
” The suggestion that ideas and inspiration require the subjective senseof self is a long debated one with echoes in the philosophical conundrum of subjectiveconsciousness itself and just when the self is recognised.As part of my ongoing research and writing into Consciousness Studies I created thefollowing post on an online forum of my friend and colleague, Anthony Peake, author of “Is
There Life After Death, the extraordinary science of what happens when we die
”,the discussions within that thread are particularly interesting in light of the commentsmade during the programme.When Does Consciousness Begin?http://www.anthonypeake.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=841What is essential in thinking about Consciousness is a clarity of meaning behind theterms we use, which in itself conjures many problems. What do we mean byconsciousness, sentience, awareness, self-awareness, reflection, reaction etc? Whilstexperimentation such as that outlined in the programme by Prof Gordon Gollop Jnr that “
the only compelling evidence is for chimpanzee, orang-utan and human
” toexperience self-awareness is compelling, are we to extrapolate from this that other forms of life function on a different level of consciousness, a largely reactive sentiencesuch as the children before the Mirror Self Recognition Test? They react to the sensorystimulus but fail to recognise the self aspect of such reaction.As a counter to my “
When Does Consciousness Begin? 
” question, Marcus superblylater suggests, “
Where does Consciousness stop? Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps it’s agradation
”, and it is this Scale of Consciousness that requires the fine definitions for whilst a child below 18 months obviously does have consciousness, it equallyobviously has no sense of identity and self, which appears to be an evolutionarylearned skill within the subjectivity of consciousness. Indeed if we look at plants andsingle cell life-form, no-one would suggest they have consciousness, at least not howwe think of consciousness, but a plant responds to light and heat with a reactionarysentience that surely must be placed along this gradation of consciousness.From the MSRT we see the repeated experiments that such self-awareness developsaround the 18-24 month stage. This leads to what I term the “
Reflexive Self Consciousness
” taken from the writings of the polymath, Eugene Halliday. Asevidenced by Prof Gallop’s assertion that “
the only compelling evidence is for chimpanzee, orang-utan and human
” to experience self-awareness, the biologicalevolution of man and the corresponding neurological evolution of our brain hasenabled such self-awareness to develop with the aid of cultural and societal influence.Prior to this stage the infant is largely a reactive sentience but also learns via repetitionand copying. When the self-awareness is attained this sense of “I” develops thepsyche and the subjective consciousness itself. Effectively this places the “I” of thesubjective consciousness in a frame of time and space and to quote Prof Gallopdirectly from the programme:“
To be self-aware means that you can engage in mental time travel, you can think about yourself in relationship to things that happened in the past, the present, and may even happen in the future.
”
 A Dark Philosopher 
 Page 1
21/10/2009
Karl L Le Marcs
 
Collapsing the Consciousness wave
 A Dark Philosopher -
Karl L Le Marcsemail
: adarkphilosopher@aol.com
Thus the evolutionary benefits of a corresponding evolution of consciousness areevident as Marcus himself states, “
our heightened level of self-awareness hasbestowed upon mankind an evolutionary advantage that’s allowed us to shape theworld according to our vision.
”However, what also comes with a realisation of self is a question about the externalreality; the objectivity of consciousness, “
but the ability to envision the future has a profoundly unsettling consequence.
”“
Death awareness is the price we pay for self awareness.
” (Gordon Gallop Jnr)Therefore does an infant below 18 months old, with no (
or very little
) sense of self-awareness, have any comprehension of death? What of fear? Can consciousnesswithout a self-aware element experience fear? And fear of what exactly?Can the same question be applied to lower level consciousness, such as that withinplants etc:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33400752/ns/technology_and_science-science/The above article suggests that plants can recognise rivals and fight for survival.“
Plants can't see or hear, but they can recognize their siblings - They use chemical signals secreted from their roots.
”This again suggests a reactionary sentience rather than a self-reflexive awareness butclearly shows that the gradation of consciousness has to be far greater than commonbelief suggests.Biological and Neurological evolution therefore combine to bring humanconsciousness to where it lies today on the gradation of consciousness. Dr StephenGentleman confirmed that, “
in the brain we estimate there are something like 100 billion nerve cells
” and the substantially developed cortex in the human brain“
 probably allows us to be self aware
”, but can the whole of consciousness be reducedto just the firing of individual neurons within the brain? In the brain stem it is theReticular Activating System which projects to the Thalamus and in-turn out to all theCortex much in a similar way that a computer’s memory functions and certainly in linewith the latest holographic theories of brain functionality to Dr Gentleman’s conclusionthat consciousness depends upon “
constant activation of the cortex 
”.This suggestion is supported by the evidence of Prof Marcelo Massimini and theexperiment that Marcus du Sautoy underwent with the Transcranial MagneticStimulation (TMS). Massimini suggests that consciousness is caused by the“
interconnectivity among different elements
” with the brain and that during sleep, andpresumably certain parasomnias, such interconnectivity is significantly subdued.Marcus contentiously asked, “
scientists already know that the brain remains activeduring sleeping so what does happen when we doze off and lose consciousness
?”Is consciousness “
lost 
” during sleep or is the functionality merely reduced andquietened? We all dream and phenomena such as Lucid Dreaming, Astral Travel etcsuggest a functioning state of consciousness during certain periods of the sleep cycle.If we look at the parasomnias from the hypnogogic state on dozing to thehypnopompic state on waking and the myriad of altered states of consciousnessbetween, which are beautifully described in Jeff Warren’s excellent book “
Head Trip
”,such as somnambulism, sleep paralysis, sleep terrors, bruxism etc then thesuggestion is that consciousness is far from “
lost 
” during sleep and any altered stateof consciousness, even to coma states.
 A Dark Philosopher 
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Karl L Le Marcs
 
Collapsing the Consciousness wave
 A Dark Philosopher -
Karl L Le Marcsemail
: adarkphilosopher@aol.com
So, is a coma just a punctuation of Consciousness?In the programme, Dr Adrian Owen suggested to Marcus that patients in a vegetativestate still respond to certain external stimuli but lack the degree of consciousnesswhich one would usually attribute to having consciousness. This is similar in conceptto the Zombie idea of David Chalmers and Philosophy that suggest a hypotheticalbeing that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacksconscious experience, qualia or sentience but in this experiment Dr Owen wasinterested in the neuronal activity within the pre-mortar cortex, responsible for activityplanning movements of limbs. Again it was demonstrated that during sleep theinterconnectivity of individual neurons was diminished to substantially lower levelsthan those during waking consciousness, but further suggestive that consciousness isnot lost during sleep.Dr Anthony Absalom discussed anaesthesia and how this affects consciousness. Thissubject is of great interest to one of the leading exponents in the whole field of Consciousness Studies, Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of Quantum Coherence in theMicrotubules of the brain is amongst the highest regarded. Hameroff was ananaestheologist who took Roger Penrose’s original suggestion that consciousness isa form of Objective Reduction. Penrose came to the problem from the view point of mathematics and in particular Godel’s theorem. Hameroff approached it from a career in cancer research and anaesthesia gave him an interest in brain structures.Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) thus combines approaches tothe problem of consciousness from the radically different angles of mathematics,physics and anaesthesia.Different anaesthetics work in different ways upon different parts of the brain so aconclusion as to how anaesthetics affect consciousness is far more wide ranging thaninitial inspection would suggest.Dr Absalom suggested that the consciousness of self is largely produced through thebasal ganglia, a group of nuclei at the base of the forebrain connected to the cerebralcortex and the thalamus and a resonant loop neurologically which begins and ends inthe cortex. If this indeed is the home of the self then this reflects what Descartesdescribed as the “
seat of the soul 
”, although Descartes suggested the Pineal Gland for such a location.Marcus de Sautoy raised another interesting philosophical question when discussinghis atheism and the nature of the soul with his meeting with Dr Henrik Ehrsson, whoseexperiments into the “I” feeling are empirically very powerful. Indeed I reflected justhow many atheists believed in the self, as opposed to the oneness of consciousness?“
 According to Henrik, my sense of a separate I is an illusion created by my brain processing data from my senses
”, said du Sautoy. But we are constantly shown thatthe data from our senses is far from trustworthy, so just how fragile and tenuous our connection to “I” seems to be is startling as that data is changed.Prof Christof Koch, author of the magnificent “
The Quest For Consciousness – ANeurobiological Approach
”, offered the suggestion that consciousness “
emerges froma collection of neurons
”, and questions if an individual neuron is conscious in itself.Again this depends upon the definition of conscious, for if an individual neuron hasany awareness of stimuli then its consciousness would be nothing compared to theconsciousness of the whole being, which again stretches the gradation of consciousness to even wider degrees.“
There are cells deep inside the brain that seems to respond very specifically only tovery specific, very familiar individuals.
” (Christof Koch)
 A Dark Philosopher 
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Karl L Le Marcs
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