How a trippy Nineteen Eighties video effect might help to clarify consciousness

Explaining consciousness is one in all the toughest problems in science and philosophy. Recent neuroscientific discoveries suggest that an answer may very well be nearby – but grasping it’s going to mean rethinking some familiar ideas. Consciousness, I argue in a latest papercould also be attributable to the best way the brain generates loops of energetic feedback, much like the video feedback that “blossoms” when a video camera is pointed at its own output.

I first saw video feedback within the late Nineteen Eighties and was immediately entranced. Someone plugged the signal from a clunky video camera right into a TV and pointed the lens on the screen, making a grainy spiralling tunnel. Then the camera was tilted barely and the tunnel blossomed right into a pulsating organic kaleidoscope.

Video feedback is a classic example of complex dynamical behaviour. It arises from the best way energy circulating within the system interacts chaotically with the electronic components of the hardware.

As an artist and VJ within the Nineties, I might often see this hypnotic effect in galleries and clubs. But it was a memorable if unnerving experience during an LSD-induced trip that got me considering. I hallucinated almost equivalent imagery, only intensely saturated with color. It struck me then there is perhaps a connection between these recurring patterns and the operation of the mind.

Brains, information and energy

Fast forward 25 years and I’m a university professor still trying to grasp how the mind works. Our knowledge of the connection between the mind and brain has advanced hugely for the reason that Nineties when a brand new wave of scientific research into consciousness took off. But a widely accepted scientific theory of consciousness stays elusive.

The two leading contenders – Stanislas Dehaene’s Global Neuronal Workspace Model and Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory – each claim that consciousness results from information processing within the brain, from neural computation of ones and zeros, or bits.

I doubt this claim for several reasons. First, there’s little agreement amongst scientists about exactly what information is. Second, when scientists confer with information they are sometimes actually talking in regards to the way energetic activity is organised in physical systems. Third, brain imaging techniques comparable to fMRI, PET and EEG don’t detect information within the brain, but changes in energy distribution and consumption.

Brains, I argueshould not squishy digital computers – there isn’t a information in a neuron. Brains are delicate organic instruments that turn energy from the world and the body into useful work that allows us to survive. Brains process energynot information.

Recognising that brains are primarily energy processors is step one to understanding how they support consciousness. The next is rethinking energy itself.

What is energy?

We are all acquainted with energy but few of us worry about what it’s. Even physicists tend to not. They treat it as an abstract value in equations describing physical processes, and that suffices. But when Aristotle coined the term he was trying to know the reality of the lived world, why things in nature work in the best way they do (the word “energy” is rooted within the Greek for “work”). This concept of energy is different from, though related to, the abstract concept of energy utilized in contemporary physics.

When we study what energy actually is, it seems to be surprisingly easy: it’s a type of difference. Kinetic energy is a difference as a consequence of change or motion, and potential energy is a difference as a consequence of position or tension. Much of the activity and variety in nature occurs due to these energetic differences and the related actions of forces and work. I call these because they do actual work and cause real effects on the earth, as distinct from abstract differences (like that between 1 and 0) which feature in mathematics and knowledge theory. This conception of energy as actualised difference, I believe, could also be key to explaining consciousness.

The human brain consumes some 20% of the body’s total energy budget, despite accounting for under 2% of its mass. The brain is pricey to run. Most of the associated fee is incurred by neurons firing bursts of energetic difference in unthinkably complex patterns of synchrony and variety across convoluted neural pathways.

What is special in regards to the conscious brain, I propose, is that a few of those pathways and energy flows are turned upon themselves, very like the signal from the camera within the case of video feedback. This causes a self-referential cascade of actualised differences to blossom with astronomical complexity, and it is that this that we experience as consciousness. Video feedback, then, stands out as the nearest we now have to visualising what conscious processing within the brain is like.

The neuroscientific evidence

The suggestion that consciousness depends upon complex neural energy feedback is supported by neuroscientific evidence.

Researchers recently discovered a technique to accurately index the quantity of consciousness someone has. They fired magnetic pulses through healthy, anaesthetised, and severely injured peoples’ brains. Then they measured the complexity of an EEG signal that monitored how the brains reacted. The complexity of the EEG signal predicted the extent of consciousness within the person. And the more complex the signal the more conscious the person was.

The researchers attributed the extent of consciousness to the quantity of data processing occurring in each brain. But what was actually being measured on this study was the organisation of the neural energy flow (EEG measures differences of electricity). Therefore, the complexity of the energy flow within the brain tells us in regards to the level of consciousness an individual has.

Also relevant is evidence from studies of anaesthesia. No-one knows exactly how anaesthetic agents annihilate consciousness. But recent theories suggest that compounds including propofol interfere with the brain’s ability to sustain complex feedback loops in certain brain areas. Without these feedback loops, the functional integration between different brain regions breaks down, and with it the coherence of conscious awareness.

What this, and other neuroscientific work I cite within the paper, suggests is that consciousness depends upon a fancy organisation of energy flow within the brain, and specifically on what the biologist Gerald Edelman called “reentrant” signals. These are recursive feedback loops of neural activity that bind distant brain regions right into a coherent functioning whole.

Explaining consciousness in scientific terms, or in any terms, is a notoriously hard problem. Some have fearful it’s so hard we shouldn’t even try. But while not denying the problem, the duty is made a bit easier, I suggest, if we start by recognising what brains actually do.

The primary function of the brain is to administer the complex flows of energy that we depend on to thrive and survive. Instead of looking contained in the brain for some undiscovered property, or “magic sauce”, to clarify our mental life, we might have to look afresh at what we already know is there.