Gobierno de la ciudad de Buenos Aires
Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico
"Dr. José Tiburcio Borda"
Laboratorio de Investigaciones Electroneurobiológicas
y
Revista
Electroneurobiología
ISSN: 0328-0446
Effects of Relativistic Motions in the Brain
and
Their Physiological Relevance
by
Mariela Szirko
Electroneurobiología
2003; 11 (2), pp. 14-65; URL <http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/index2.htm>
Also a chapter in Helmut Wautischer, ed., Ontology of Consciousness:
Percipient Action, A Bradford Book, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.; forthcoming.
(References in this file have been brought up to the date of the The MIT Press edition)
Copyright ©2004 del autor / by the author. Esta es una investigación de acceso público; su copia exacta y redistribución por cualquier medio están permitidas bajo la condición de preservar esta noticia y la referencia completa a su publicación incluyendo la URL original. / This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article’s full citation and original URL
Contacto: Postmaster
[-yat--] neurobiol.cyt.edu.ar
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ABSTRACT:
On scales small
enough, cerebral biophysics is not an exception to established laws of physics
applicable to all other occurrences of condensed matter: brains, too, include
microphysical components in their tissue that move close to light-speed. The
critical question, if and how such motions bring about physiological effects
and how this relates to psychological realms, has come to noteworthy results:
extended research in our neurobiological tradition suggests an affirmative
answer and also describes the formation of psychological features. Neurobiology
in Argentine has started in the second half of the eighteenth century and
specially focused on electroneurobiology. The angle has proven to be specially
suitable for revealing any such effects and, along with older results, this
tradition developed more than three decades ago a scientific view about
brain-mind issues involved in recovery from swoon, coma, vegetative states, hibernation,
general anesthesia, or ordinary sleep. This view assumes that the uncoupling
pathologies which disconnect persons from their circumstances share with sleep
and the variations of inattention a common mechanism, namely changes in a physiological
time-dilation, which is a relativistic effect of motions from the tissue’s microphysical
components, and is physiologically operated through coupling with the
electroneurobiological states of that tissue. This explanatory model from
neurobiology is also of special interest to physicists, since the coupling that
operates such a mechanism instances a dynamical mass-variation in some action
carriers of a force-field brought forth by way of overlapping variation in the
intensity of another force-field. Supported by clinical and neurobiological
facts, research related to these findings has been taught in Argentine for many
decades; it is only recently that this research comes to the attention of the
international scientific community. Valuable for neurobiologists, psychophysiologists,
and humanists working on brain-mind issues, also scientists investigating
biological dynamical systems, biophysics, mathematical biology, computer
biology, or molecular biology can recognize these findings and their clinical applications
as relevant data for comprehensive research in their area of specialization .
____________
1. Preliminary Observations
This
article examines neurobiological and clinical observations that may be
considered direct – rather than biologically mediated – consequences coming
from the physical instant’s ability of compounding changes that generates the
flow of time. Placing such observations into this context offers original
results. The basis for the entire schema is the validity of special-relativity transformations even for the smallest
time scale: it allows, for moving observers, dilatability both of intervals of
any duration, even so brief that forces could not yet make a change in it, and
also of the actual instant itself. Its interest is scientific, humanistic, and
clinical. Supported by evidence expounded hereby, the range of downright
validity for relativistic transformations (from long intervals down to the most
fleeting possible one) also disproves the belief that the physical instant is
interval-unlike, namely infinitesimal in the specific sense of being not integrable
into intervals. These intervals resulting from the dilation of the instant –
although they are time-resolvable or divisible and measurable by a clock at
rest outside the observer – for an observer (mind) whose operative interactions are localized at microphysical
components moving within the brain tissue with speeds close to light velocity
remain unresolvable, as undivisible moduli of her time acuity.
This
motion state, of the microphysical components at which the brain-mind interactions
are localized, thus transforms a physical instant – which is a very minute
period considered the ultimate modulus of transformational change, namely the
minimal interval over which a causal transformation is at all possible or might
be marked off by two different instants – into the minimal transformational
resolution or time acuity of minds, which is observed to stay in the order of
one hundredth of a second. We do not live and remember physical instants; we
live and remember moments, and the difference between an instant and a moment
is a dilation that stretches physical instants an ascertainable number of
times.
The
particular number of times affords precious information about the entire
process, and also about the role of the relativistic transframing as biological
tool, employed for varying the time graining (minimal resolution) of
experiences and recall and, as a byproduct, for varying also their attentional
features. Generally not connected with psychology, this transframing is a
motion effect naturally expected in the current state of our physical science,
except where it is disqualified by the belief that the physical instant is interval-unlike
– a belief that I shall briefly address here.
As it is
known in history of ideas, even if not particularly discussed in this article,
this empirically disproven belief that the physical instant is interval-unlike
arose in disparate epochs and cultures – pre-Columbian American, Eastern,
African, European ancient and contemporary contexts – that may be fairly unrelated
but are similar in certain characteristics. One of these is a compelling
interest in holding illusory the irreparable time elapsing. The assignation to
the physical instant of the aforementioned infinitesimality, or inability to
compose (or integrate) into real time or non-interval-like character that is
called the “Chrysippus-Newton-Sommerfeld notion of instant,” supplies the
reasoning for a latent desire to find illusive the irrevocability of time. In
other words, this antichronic or time-discounting belief in the
interval-unlikeness of the physical instant requires to assign a lowest limit
for the validity of the Lorentz-FitzGerald transforms which are at the basis of
special relativity. Let me briefly explain this point. For durations that can
be measured, one can empirically verify that a certain number of physical instants,
i.e. a sequence of possible causal
transformations, must appear dilated if the total duration is assessed from the
sequence recorder (a clock) of moving observers. The antichronic outlook
entails assuming some impediment that stops this dilational effect for smaller
numbers of physical instants. In its view short intervals ought not to get
dilated, a ban specially applied onto the single instant.
The
groundlessness in conjecturing this impediment becomes apparent when we consider
that no force in the observable universe is efficient to cause a transformation
in less than about 10-25 second (imagine 0.000 000 000 000 000 000
000 000 1 of a second), a duration that may also be expressed as its
equivalent, namely as some 1019 Planck
instants. Every transformation in time is, thus, currently ticked on intervals
always larger than this one. Such a brief interval is accidentally unmeasurable
(because any recording-change in a clock must be caused by some physical force,
but no observed physical force could so quickly give rise to any effect).
Nevertheless, nothing suggests that this ~10-25 second interval or a
fraction of it is intrinsically noncompliant with the Lorentz-FitzGerald transforms.
Put
differently, nothing suggests that this ~10-25 second interval or a
fraction of it be refractory to become dilated and expand in due proportion any
eventual marking sequence that subdivides it, revealing even the duration of
those of its fractions (physical instants) in which no subdividing mark could
ever be set – which if dilated are to appear as a still discrete, causally
impenetrable blank when appraised by moving observers. Where and why might any
such hindrance to dilation be expected to begin, barring the special-relativity
transforms’ validity for fleeting intervals? The antichronic outlook demands
this impediment in order to judge the physical instant unreal. In contrast, it
is often thought that the Planck instant or Planck time (ħG/c5)1/2
= 5.3916... x 10-44 second, a minute fraction of a second
(actually requiring forty-three zeros after the decimal point before starting
with the mentioned numbers), may name a limit for any possible physical force
to be efficient in causing a causal transformation; namely, that the Planck instant
denotes the interval-like thickness of actuality, whose causal transformations
– always taking many of such instants because of the cosmologically acquired
weakness of efficient forces – make real time. But this prospect is dismaying
for an outlook that struggles against time. It rather wishes for a “block”
universe where all intervals were simultaneously real, the actually present instant
in no way different from the past and future ones, and time elapsing just
subjective or illusory.
Historically,
such yearning appears to be linked to the same societal stratification wherefrom
the physico-mathematical grounds of modern science emerged, fostering the
non-intervalic notion of instant. Scientific observations contradict this
notion. They occur in the study of very complex systems, namely in neurobiology
and its supporting clinical research, whose study belongs to a separate branch
of learning and forces a scientist to depart from relativity physics. For this
reason the context and observations presented in this article are rarely made
available for physicists and biophysicists, notwithstanding their primary
interest in features of, and hypotheses about, the physical instant. This
article is written to remedy this situation.
Mind-brain
research in
Originally
staged in private and university laboratories, our research programs moved to
general hospitals in the 1880’s, and by 1899 were mostly conducted in
neuropsychiatric hospitals. These beginnings bequeathed to the Argentinian
mind-brain research a combination of natural-scientific and humanistic aspects,
a blend inspired by the recognition of every mind’s intrinsic value. There is
also a cultural dimension to our research and outlook regarding minds, whose conceptual
articulation has been consistently dubbed abroad “the tango theory.” Eventually
we found it perceptive and, like erstwhile the first propounders of the “big
bang theory,” we got used to the label. In our research “consciousness” is not
seen as a freely exchangeable material, replaceable in whole or in part for
another portion of a similar nature – the nature of a “fungible material,” such
as a physical field or a body of water dividable in homogeneous portions. Thus
every mind is defined not as mere intellectual performance but rather as
synonymous to a psyche or finite existentiality, and to stress this
all-important point, in what follows, mind or psyche will be referred to as
“her,” not as “it.”
Every
mind is found to be primarily an unconnected, and unmergeable, eclosion or
“pop-out” of “existential finitude.” Although rare, the word “eclosion” will
nevertheless appear often in this article. The phrase “existential finitude” denotes
for natural scientists every reality able to sense and move a portion of nature
while altering herself by sedimenting those causal involvements away from
temporality – this refers to an “instant” and not a time sequence. The
designation “away from temporality” thus means “not on a time course but inside
the instant,” specifying where such reality occurs and simultaneizes the
sedimented sequences (“memories”) of her reactions to her causal interactions.
This is why any reality that knows itself ought to possess memory: since nature
vacates itself outside actuality and consequently every thing in nature,
including each mind, exists only within the physical instant, the preservation
of memories is an effect due to absence of time course rather than the presence
of brain engrams.
By way
of the brain organ, memories are made to include a representation of the time
course that affected the surrounding circumstances. A most remarkable feature,
each eclosion of existential finitude is found at a fixed circumstance (i.e., some brain, body, family, epoch)
and possibilities of interpersonal relationships, wherefrom every circumstanced
existentiality sensoperceptually apprehends reality as differently centered.
This makes a well-defined or precisely determined sorting that, nonetheless,
cannot be determined by the boundary conditions or historical path which led to
compose such circumstance and formed the brain in it – rather than another
sorting, in which this existential finitude has not eclosed at all or instead
“popped out” at another circumstance. More simply, no brain can determine who
will be the person to sense its states or to exert active ownership of it.
Consequently,
the ontic makeup of minds or psyches is not to be confused with their mental
contents. Mental contents are those distinctions, in the ontic makeup or
constitution of minds or psyches, that only the incumbent individual mind can
respectively know and distinguish, despite the fact that some of these mental
contents can also be shaped by non-exclusive, fungible means. Such means are
based on the action of physical force fields, used by every brain organ only to
demarcate mental contents in any a mind eclosed at it; no brain can specify
which existential finitude is to interact with itself rather than with some
other brain. This organic incapacity becomes undetectable when every mind is
supposed to consist only of her mental contents – whose generative making is misjudged
as the full entirety of brain-mind relationships. As a remedy to this oversight,
the word “existentiality” serves also for designating a mind without special
regard to the acquired contents this mind differentiates in her own reality or
ontic consistency. This reality is ontic and also ontological, i.e. also directly knowable to itself
both with regards to its state and the causal generation of its inner contrasts
and their demarcations, thus making those contents observable. These mental
contents are the acquired availabilities found in everyone’s mental world, and
are made up of structural (structure-possessing) and structureless elements.
Mental contents’ structureless element comes as the mind’s reaction either to
outer actions (intonation, phosphene-like phenomenology) or to the own acts
(non-intonative or non-phenomenal reaction); mental contents’ structure also
comes from extramentality or either the mind, i.e. as outer patterning of the sensation-generating causal actions
or as combinations of the mind’s sensation-generating own causal acts. Other availabilities are inherent or primary
and thus are not called contents, but constituents of every existentiality.
In sum,
all minds take advantage of availabilities that can be divided into five kinds:
two inherent abilities, to wit sensing and moving (which compose a “cognoscible
transformability,” whereby a mind knows her state and every causally-efficient
change occurring in it); and three kinds of acquired things or mental contents
(“differentiations”) that are possible to know and handle in the mind.
Differentiations broadly overlap with what many authors call “sensoperceptions,”
“episodic memories,” and “praxias.” These three kinds of mental contents are
known and handled only by the incumbent finite subjective existence, namely by
the existentiality of whose ontic consistency they are disjunctive alterations.
Only one of these three kinds is regularly affected by causal actions emanating
from its surroundings.
Sensoperceptions – comprised of sensations and
perceptions – are the availabilities that the causal series coming from the
surroundings may also directly affect. Inasmuch as such sensoperceptual mental
contents are demarcated by fungible means, their study – viewed as the whole of
psychology where minds are believed to consist only in the so demarcated mental
contents – becomes a natural science, namely a subdivision of neurobiology. The
other two kinds of mental contents, episodic memories and praxias, cannot be
affected in this way. Further, both of them are non-sensorial insofar as they involve
non-phenomenal actions of the mind in extramentality. These actions may in turn
causally feed into the mind fresh sensoperceptions that are hence traceable by
scientific methodologies canvassing the productions of fungible means.
Minds,
therefore, do not become innerly differentiated into mind’s acts and mind’s “objects”
for contemplation, in the vein of languages that presuppose having to deal with
what is signified by verbs and by nouns, or Platonisms that distribute reality
into changing transiences and permanent realities. Objects are particular
combinations of efficient causal actions. Also mental “objects”, or rather
contents that can be made sensoperceptual, are
mind’s acts or causal actions, combined into diverse structures (attentional
motor patterns, which may or may not trigger neural motor patterns), plus their
possible structureless intonation as mind’s reactions to the own acts or to
outer actions; these outer actions may also pattern the reactive origination of
intonations which they induce, thus bringing onto sensations a structural
component coming from outside – yielding patterned sensations. Leaving these
fresh sensations aside, all the remaining, older mental “objects” (episodic
memories and learned praxias), being available
combinations of mind’s acts, may be cognoscitively identified and referred to,
no matter if barely unfolded, inchoatively, or if further unpacked into diverse
degrees of completion. Furthermore, the mind, at her exercise of these
particular combinations of her acts lending completion to her mental “objects,”
may become intonated, whether in full sensation or in some measure of it
(noergy, explained below); and the enacted combinations of mind’s acts or
mental “objects” may either work only upon the own mind, or also on the body,
or even beyond it – in the surroundings. While episodic memories work on the
brain which the mind reacts to, praxias work through this brain beyond it, into
the surroundings that the mind monitors. Thus, episodic memories are
nonsensorial but sensorially imaginable availabilities apt to be reconstructed
in imagined sensoperceptions – i.e.,
sensed as the mind’s reactions to brain states that she generates – as located
in one’s biography and recognized as own. Praxias, in turn, are practical
sequences of one’s actions unpacking a distinct mental content, which in this
way is reconstructable in behavior outside the brain. In this behavioral reconstruction
of a distinct mental content, praxias join sensoperceptions and reimagined
episodic memories to become subjects for study by the subdivision of
neurobiology that studies the mental contents demarcated by fungible or
replaceable means. From another point of view, episodic memories do not significantly
differ from praxias as regards the unpacking itself, a topic explained below.
The
other two kinds of availabilities, namely the inherent abilities (sensing and
moving), are not acquired mental contents, but constitutional or primary
abilities of every mind. One is gnoseological apprehension or knowledgeability:
the ability to experience or have knowledge of one’s own constitutive reality
or ontic consistency, even if only of one’s causal changes, and thus of
differentiating the demarcations acquired by one’s existentiality through
causal efficiency whether of the outer circumstances or of the mind. The other
is semovience, the inherent or primary ability of every mind found in nature (i.e., every circumstanced psyche or
existential finitude compounding in a personal organism) to start new causal
series and not merely continuing causal sequences that are transmitted from elsewhere.
In this
context, the states of the brain organ to which a finite existentiality finds
herself circumstanced only affect the new formation of mental contents of the
first kind of differentiations (i.e.,
sensoperceptions), including sensoperceptions of the new brain states that the
mind laid down for voluntary recall. These availabilities are the only ones
shaped by fungible, or in other words, replaceable, means. These brain states
are thus central to describe what is restored on recovery from swoon, coma,
vegetative states, hibernation, general anesthesia, or ordinary sleep.
Brain states carry out this shaping in compliance with
both causal-series-starting semovience of the finite existentiality that is
circumstanced precisely to this brain organ (not of any other finite mind, or existentiality
circumstanced anywhere else: e.g.,
one cannot directly move another’s body, shape or watch another’s dreams, see
phosphenes by electrostimulating the brain of someone else, or use not one’s
own but another’s brain to picture back one’s memories), as well as
causal-series-continuing causation that is at work extramentally (that is,
independently of being known by any circumstanced mind) and whose lawfulness,
or nomicity, comes from this continuance.
Even though this brain is the site, or tópos,
where the incumbent mind is circumstanced for causal exchanges with the surroundings,
as already mentioned no brain could determine who will be the person to sense
its states or to exert active ownership of them. So, what exactly becomes restored
on recovering the brain support of mental functions?
Brain
functioning, by analogy, is vaguely reminiscent of regulating the proper speed
in playing a soundtrack while simultaneously recording the music – the recording
may or may not keep pace with its playing, “hitching up” or “unhitching” the
music’s source. Likewise, every brain organ, in its constituents that are
immediately knowable and affectable by the mind (or psyche) circumstanced to
it, can only lose or recover its aptitude (which is electroneurobiologically
mediated) to provide adequate time resolution for the recording (a surroundings-depicting
activity which is another electroneurobiological function of the same brain) of
such forthcoming events of which a notice, knowledge, or gnoseological grasp
has acquired evolutionary relevance, inasmuch as assigning it is conducive to
nourishment or reproduction. Thus, the first aptitude or function gates the
proper time resolution of the physiological hand-overs (which are the second
function’s products, and not immediately knowable themselves) that come from
the sense organs and depict relevant events.
Contrary
to this second function (surroundings-depicting brain activity) and in order to
adjust the time resolution of the second function’s products, the first function
(gating) makes use of relativistic time-dilation effects that demand the
coupling of a physical field’s action carriers by another field. Just like two
parties are needed for tango, also gating sensoperceptions requires two
distinct fungible physical fields, both overlapping and interacting yet diverse
and segregated. No single field alone suffices. Application of these
relativistic time-dilation effects is the core of the interaction of top-down
corticocortical influences with bottom-up sensory entries. The gating function,
far from “losing consciousness,” instead enacts the modifications in selective
disattention and at its peak values “switches off” and “on” the body, as explained
below.
2. Synopsis of the Major Themes
Any
comprehensive theory about the minds or psyches found in nature needs to account
for basic issues including those in the following questions and answers. The
answers draw upon the concepts of our tradition and will be discussed in more
detail later in the article. The present synoptic exposition is very compact
and some specialized concepts are introduced fairly pithily, simply to
introduce a previously unfamiliar neurobiological picture.
(1) What are minds?
The realities transforming in time based on
a selection of their antecedents rather than all of them.
(2) What precisely is it
that minds do?
A semovient refocusing of
attention. When this refocusing is causally linked with the body, voluntary
behavior occurs.
(3)
Where are the actions of minds localized in nature?
In the force carriers of a
physical field, whence minds can start behavior and sensorily react to changes
in these force carriers.
(4) In what kind of
physical building blocks do minds find their most immediate localization?
In the physical force
carriers whose characteristics generate the observed relativistic dilations of
interval units, or time “graining.”
(5) Can brain changes
erase episodic and praxical memories, regardless of their time “graining” or
patterning interval units?
No, because things with
memory (minds) and anything else in nature co-occur in time but for one single
instant. As within such instantaneous co-occurrence no causal transformation
(time) elapses, and time changes macroscopic situations because of certain
physical circumstances (connected with the acquisition of inertial mass) that
are not known to take place in the minds, no thing with knowledge of its inner
differentiations (memories) may lose their availability as a result of a causal
transformation (time) obliterating or erasing them.
(6) By what means do
sleep, swoon, comas, and similar states disconnect minds from their
surroundings?
By varying the mind’s
time-resolution of the brain’s neurodynamical sequences. The brain generates
this disconnecting variation by altering the relativistic dilations created by
the speed of the force carriers where minds find their most immediate
extramental localization.
(7)
For what reason are dreamt sensations perceived while simultaneous sensations
coming from the sense organs are not perceived?
Because the first ones are
patterned with the resolution of extramental time sequences of a dreaming mind,
while the second ones remain patterned with the resolution of extramental time
employed to keep track of the outer processes of biological relevance.
(8) How do perceived
features fade due to inattention?
By altering the
relativistic dilations created by the speed of those force carriers in the
brain areas that are generating features of which the mind is to become inattentive.
(9) How are voluntary
movements attentionally determined?
By attentional refocusing
that alters the density of force carriers – of the physical field where one’s
existentiality finds its most immediate extramental localization; all
force-fields redistribute their potentials by way of altering the local density
of its carriers – in the brain areas that are causally linked to one’s selected
organs.
(10)
Once they have been recalled and given attention to, where do memories again
fade into?
When no longer re-imagined
(i.e., no longer replicated in imagination)
and also while their reimagining was neurophysiologically enacted, memories remain
as operational combinations differentiated in the mind’s ontic consistency, and
as such are constitutive segments of it.
(11) How does
inattention cause amnesia?
By texturing the mind’s
ontic consistency with contents whose time “graining” is not resolvable in the
time-resolution of the mind’s available operational combinations that conserve
the object.
(12) When is
neuroactivity non-conscious?
When the time-sequence of
its (electromagnetic) patterns is not conserved also in the dynamics of the
(other, non-electromagnetic) physical field in whose force carriers minds find
their most immediate localization.
(13) How are memories
semoviently recalled and recognized as one’s own?
By semoviently combining
equilibrable operations, until arriving to focus attention on the same
possibility to combine equilibrable operations that one had during an
originally lived episode. Inasmuch as this recalling operation is defined by
one’s constitutive operatory possibilities that make its elements recognizable
or understandable for oneself, it may be replicated in imagination any number
of times.
(14) Why sleeping right
after learning is better for retention than remaining awake?
Because the organization of
memories reflects the time-resolution in which the original experiences were
lived: every time-resolution allows reimagining the experiences from different
time-resolutions, but just as unattended context. Thus, sleep prevents the ensuing
waking life from intervening, and sleep mentation – physiologically supported
on a different time resolution – does not itself interfere, thereby providing a
protection of studied content that is unavailable for contents learnt without
sleep interlude.
(15) What
is imparted when one pays attention to something?
The operationalizing of its
sensations. Thereby one applies to a sector of one’s sensory field the acquired
system of equilibrable operations sedimented in one’s ontic-ontological consistency.
(16) Does the overlap of
time resolutions automatically generate recall?
No; the effect of time
acuity on memory is not direct. It affects recall only inasmuch as the proper
matching of the time acuities – those of the original acquisition and its
current knowledge – allows applying the
system of equilibrable operations included at recall time in the mind’s
ontological consistency. Such application can be forestalled by other
circumstances; for example, if the original acquisition occurred before the
system of equilibrable operations is developed (infantile amnesia).
(17) What is voluntary
recall?
Voluntary recall, also
called conative recall, is the semovient act of retrieving a particular memory
originally acquired at a previous time. On gnoseologically recognizing its
operational structure, the intended memory is reimagined by setting up, most
likely with intervention of the frontal lobes, a dynamic electroneurobiological
state whose tuning normally involves different brain structures than these
lobes. This electroneurobiological state first is to match the time acuity with
which the memory was originally experienced; then secondly generate, in the
circumstanced mind and through coupling with the physical field where all
circumstanced minds find their immediate localization, sensory reactions
(intonations, phosphene-like phenomenology) structured to match the particular
memory as it was previously identified in her “visio generalis” (when selecting
it for recall); and thirdly, is then semoviently used to modify the reimagination
process upon operative equilibria that conserve the particular memory as object
of these modifications, thus recognizable through them.
(18) What is
gnoseological apprehension?
Gnoseological apprehension
in general, i.e., any act of knowing or noetic act independently of who
the performing mind is, is the feature of efficiently causal interactions
whereby the enacted structureless reactions intonate the reacting entity on
ranges whose manifestation exhausts these interactions’ causal efficiency.
(19) Assuming a
plausible understanding of causation, how can privately accessible mental
events cause or be caused by non-privately accessible physical events?
Because efficient causation
for and across mental and physical events is the very same. The mind-brain
causally-efficient interaction is not more perplexing than the field generation
of variations in local potentials. To set in motion a course of regular extramental
effects usually called “voluntary behavior,” minds establish, as initial causal
link, the local potentials of the non-electromagnetic field whose carriers are
utilized to start extramental actions. In so launching this causal series,
every circunstanced mind does the same that all segregated fields do when, from
an unlocalizable set of determinations, make themselves to “pop out” more, or
either less, of its force carriers at
every spot of volume, thereby changing the spatial distribution of their potential.
In turn, on the same efficient causality, in setting up sensations this
immediate field generates intonative reactions in the circumstanced mind. The
actual problem does not consist in the interactions, but in why a mind ecloses
to sense and move her brain rather than another.
(20)
What is restored on recovery from ordinary sleep, hibernation, general anesthesia,
“absence,” swoon, coma, or vegetative states?
While the preservation of
memories is an effect of the absence of time course, their modifiable
reimagining is an effect that exploits the presence of brain structures
(utilized to “flesh” memories with new sensory intonations). For clinical
practice, this means that the issue of “impaired consciousness” amounts to
controlling the tissue’s electroneurobiological activity that gates the proper
acuity and thus restores the time-resolutive matching. This allows for
“coupling” or “switching on” the body in order to “awaken” the finite mind who
had eclosed there.
3. Summary Exposition of These Major Themes
Let me
expand this score of nutshells that condense the basic themes:
What are Minds? Past and future situations only rise in the context
of minds. They do not exist outside of psyches: extramentally, i.e.
outside of minds, only present situations occur; not past and future ones. Past
and future situations are only imagined, in a simplified way and diversely for
sure. In this way – namely, by their being imagined now – their reality or ontic
consistency is in fact a part of the present situation; in this it exhausts
itself. In other words, past and future situations lack any other relevance for
extramental reality, since they are neither found, nor do they cause effects,
except as assemblages of mental contents envisaged by minds. Thus, all nature
is actual only at a given instant, and each present situation determines its
own time transformation; nonexistent situations cannot causally determine any
transformation whatsoever. In this context, a cornerstone of familiar-scale
physics is that, because aside from quantum concerns any indeterminacy in it is
found to apply to future events, when determining each next transformation the
actual or last situation is tantamount to its entire preceding history. In
contrast, minds change quite differently: minds, existentialities or psyches
are the realities that transform themselves only on a selection of their respective
antecedents, not necessarily on all of them. This is the objective definition of minds in general, as it is accepted in
the Argentine neurobiological tradition. In contrast, the things situated amid
finite minds (or things that compound the hylozoic hiatus, namely all extramentalities
such as winds, rocks, fungi, trees, and computers, for which a variation in
quantity or distribution of motion cannot occur as an effect of internal
forces) inevitably use all of their history, tantamount to the last situation,
to transform themselves as time elapses. Thus while all their yesterdays pack
into their now, all our tomorrows are ours to shape. In finding the brute fact
of this selection, physics finds in nature the gnoseological apprehension and
semovience enacting it. Both are found to come conjointly, in discrete circumstanced
eclosions, whose efficient actions and reactions become set as the natural
phenomena we as natural scientists are trying to describe and understand.
As
remarked below, this knowledge or gnoseological apprehension grasps certain phenomenal
reactions, namely intonations of the self-knowing being, which cause to
discontinue the outer causal series that had led to them. Such a series of
efficient causal determinations comes to an end by producing intonative
reactions, i.e. phosphene-like
manifestations that are both phenomenal (that is, in which a sensation is
known) and inefficient to continue the series. Therefore, the emplacement of
circumstanced existentialities in nature is found whenever a break affects some
efficient causal chain. The last link of this chain phenomenizes as the
reaction of a self-knowing being, a reaction that becomes gnoseologically
apprehended but lacks causal efficiency to further its preceding causal series.
One aptitude excludes the other, both being discrete capabilities featured by
efficient causation. As empirically found, outer causal efficiency can work out
intonative reactions in psychisms, but it cannot cause psychisms to be affected
in such a way as to instrumentally transmit the outer efficiency. Minds do not
behave as billiard balls. Any causal consequence from this outer efficiency is
thus to be a new causal string semoviently originated by the causal efficiency
of the same self-knowing being that did the gnoseological apprehension, and selected
it as causal antecedent rather than deselecting it, or else adjusted it contextually
to posit it as causal antecedent. Such events do not happen in the hylozoic
hiatus, where all of the causal series continue (i.e., all causal efficiency is transeunt, matter-energy is
conserved over effects) but, in trade, there is no gnoseological apprehension.
In other words, by coming to gnoseological apprehension, the causal series
that led toward the intonative reaction cannot continue any longer; a semovient
enactment of the efficient causality of the same self-knowing reality is now
needed to start another causal series, which may enact continuity with or departure
from the route of the former causal series.
What
precisely is it that minds do? Classical
– not quantum – physics, accordingly, finds minds as those realities that
affirm, for their own transformation in time, a selection of nonexistent (past
and future) situations. The finding occurs in view of the fact that noticing
these nonexistent situations, a noticing which is gnoseological apprehension,
is a prerequisite for such a selection. The affirmation of a selection is
“semovient,” a term so far barely outlined. It means that such affirmation
starts a novo, or from scratch, new
causal series that transform the ontic makeup or consistency of the selecting
and affirming mind, thereby also transformatively affecting and changing its
causally linked extramentalities – i. e.,
brain, body (or a neuroprosthesis, discussed below), and some of its
surroundings. Because of that semovience, minds active at a break in efficient
causal chains have been evolutionarily selected as a means to achieve determinations
in mechanically undecidable situations. Nevertheless, this singularity (namely,
the inauguration of new causal series of events instead of merely continuing
older series, as mindless things do) is not relevant for attempting to localize
in brains the actions of finite minds.
Where are the Actions of Minds Localized in Nature? Semovient action is causally as efficacious in nature
as the nomic or regular actions of mindless entities, such as rocks and
chemicals, that continue transformative series instead of inaugurating them. In
the physical sciences’ description of the universe, a basic piece of
information is that all efficaciously transforming causal agents in nature (
In What Kind of
Such a
dilation is observed to be ~1041 times, a magnitude specified by the
velocity of these particles. (Of course, in case that the modulus of
transformational change is taken to be different from that of the Planck instant
– e.g. taking as “primitive” the
transition time of some modality of interaction, all of which in the currently
observable universe take more than ~1019 Planck instants – this specification of absolute speeds for
achieving the proper time dilations will proportionally vary: a dilation of
about 1020 times would suffice. The scenario, and the
physical means at play, are nevertheless to subsist, and so to avoid
needless complications this article will provisionally assume the Planck
instant as modulus of transformational change.) This speed, slightly less than
light’s, is determined by the very small inertial mass or invariant bulkiness
of these particles, which makes them slower than light, and the dynamical mass-modulating,
coupling effect of the overlapping electromagnetic field, whose potentials are
diversely modulated by the physiological state in the diverse brain regions
and, correspondingly, modulate the speed of these particles where the
observer’s interactions are localized. To be precise, the velocity that creates
this dilation corresponds to subtracting from light speed an extremely tiny
fraction, only about 1/1082 of light speed; I will use from now on
the standard notation, indicating that it subtracts from light speed a 10-82
fraction. This speed may be further changed – by coupling with an even less
efficiently-coupled mode of electroneurobiological operation over considerable
regions of the brain tissue – into a new velocity that only subtracts a 10-96
fraction from light speed and so turns the observer’s acuity into a time
resolution unable to resolve less than dozens of minutes. It is a much coarser
time-resolution or time-acuity (sometimes called “time-graining”) than the one
with which the formations offered by the brain organ keep track of the
transformations of surrounding relevancies to “read” the environment in a
biologically useful “tempo.”
By
analogy, such a condition resembles playing a musical recording at a speed many
thousand times slower than the proper rate – stretching any musicality beyond
recognition, forfeiting any ability to resolve (identify) single sounds or
recognize the musical performance. However, the observer’s “local” acuity stays
unaltered and, whenever such an observer is awakened from any sleep stage
(whether dreaming or not), she breaks off some course of mentation which “at
the precise time” was entertaining. Between the two subtracted values, proper
of deep sleep and wakefulness, a full range of attention-disattention is
established, and each degree set in it may affect all or instead some of the
brain’s sensable productions.
Can brain changes erase episodic and praxical memories, regardless of
their time “graining” or patterning interval units? No, because no brain engraving of them
exists. Like as impetus is superfluous to keep unperturbed bodies in
rectilinear motion, engraving such memories in brain is superfluous to keep
them in mind. Since nature is actual only one physical instant at a time, only
the changed realities are actual in nature and the very antecedent making of
all extramental changes is completely lost extramentally: i. e., past
does no longer exist. This follows from the discreteness of physically efficient
changes (Planck’s observation) and from their setting time on macroscopic
scales. Thus, from the above definition of mind, it follows that the changes inside
minds (i. e., sensoperceptions as well as episodic and praxical memories)
lack a further, causally efficient multi-instant course structure that could
vanish its former states inside the single instant actuality of the mind’s
changes causal-efficiently achieved. Thus they “remain” available and make the
three sorts of acquired availabilities.
More
adageously, our tradition states that memories cannot succumb to time: the simultaneous
availability of the full autobiographical sequence is to be expected in the
sheer availing self-knowledge of one’s ontic reality. Circumstanced
existentialities are not confined to occupy processes in sequential time, such
as operating machines are – although minds’ biological function is concerned
with those processes, which solely have place beyond minds. In still other
words, every thing that knows of itself (mind) cannot lose its sequences of
changes as inner differentiations of its ontic consistency (which thus become
“acquired availabilities”), because minds do not exist in more than one instant
and their causal efficiency does not establish (by way of action discreteness,
exhausting efficient action in its doing causal change) another time inside
them. Observers’ ontology can become differentiated into containing calendars,
but not into containing causally real intervals.
Minds
exist only as present, in the same way as on time-transformation courses the
whole nature exists a single physical instant at a time (singuli): thus
neither extramentalities keep time-transformation courses in their present
actuality, nor minds keep time-transformation courses inside the single instant
in which their ontology gnoseologically apprehends themselves. For this reason
a mind’s diversifications – or ontic differentiations or mental contents, which
introduce inner variety in her reality – as acquired availabilities can be
variably paid heed by her own semovient-gnoseological reality, but cannot be
obliterated by action of extramental means. Another extramental time would be
intramentally needed in order to achieve it, so that time could “perish in time
and the now in other now,” to draw on a sixth century wording by Damascius.
In such
circumstances, like as Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion in
Euclidean nature builds on his recognition that the “natural” motion or prosecution
of unperturbed movements is the rectilinear one, so that a body left to its
state of translative motion continues moving on a straight line rather than slowing
down and coming to a halt or pursuing any bent or circular path, our tradition
builds on a similar recognition. We take into account that the natural fate of
the differentiations (memories), in those realities that know themselves while
existing inside the instant, is the conservation of all of these differentiations
– rather than these memories becoming “erased,” affected by a time elapsing
(“time”) that occurs where they do not exist (since the observer’s
differentiations exist outside of the course of transformations, a course whose
existence in the relevant scale depend on certain early cosmological event,
namely the acquisition of inertial mass by certain species of “particles” but
not all of them) or pursuing any oblivion process path. There is no time within
time. It is the “inside instant” feature of such ontic-gnoseological realities,
the observers’ minds, what turns superfluous all extramental engraving or
script-like recording of memories, like as impetus is also superfluous to keep
unperturbed bodies in rectilinear motion.
The
“inside instant” existence of sentient agencies also thrusts itself into
attention as the foremost characteristic in the subjective phenomenology of
time. This characteristic is that time does not elapse for the experiencer – el
alma nunca pierde su lozanía, i. e. the fact observable at any age
that one’s existentiality never loses her freshness – whereas time does manifestly
elapse, instead, for one’s novel experiences, whose presentation is inescapably
sequential, as well as for the perceivable extramental things, such as one’s
oldening body. Remarkably, though, such a conspicuous phenomenological trait of
existentialities remains neglected by phenomenologists and by all the
researchers that take the mental contents for minds. The neglect might
nevertheless have been instigated by culture, for example by the bracketing of
diachronies in the yearning for a “block” universe, or by inducing not to
discern in old age between the deterioration of some performances and the
integrity of one’s unacquired or primary constituents; to stress the latter is
as much unusual as trite is to remark that outer behavior, imagination and reimagination
are affected by brain pathology. On the other hand memories, although because
of their not being retained in time transformability cannot be erased, may
however just fail to be understood in terms of some operative scheme of
semovient operations – and, thus, fail to be reimagined by inchoatively
re-enacting such schemes, even while the brain organ works flawlessly. This
makes for an important variety of oblivion, of psychogenic nature. Its basis is
related to the very means whereby first disattention, then sleep and then other
“losses of consciousness,” disconnect
minds more and more from their surroundings.
By What Means do Sleep, Swoon, Comas, and Similar
States Disconnect Minds from their Surroundings? By now it should be clear
that minds act in nature: all action
in nature comes in packets, the packets of some species have a certain inertial
mass that turns their speed slower than c, their coupling with the
variable intensities of a surrounding field makes certain speed changes
effective – tenuously similar to what a variably refractive medium does to the
effective value of light’s speed – and, so, minds localizing on them their interactions
obtain a peculiar time-condensed view of the events in which they causally
participate. As a brain reduces its braking on those causal carriers where the
action of the mind that senses and acts through such a brain inserts itself in
extramentalities, the braking reduction speeds up the traveling localization
(namely, such carriers) of the mind’s exchanges with extramentality. Pursuing
the optical analogy, one might imagine a reduction in the medium’s refractive
index. If of sufficient intensity, this reduction, shifting from one system of
constraints to another the force carriers that provide a mind’s immediate
circumstance, puts to sleep the mind circumstanced at this brain: in the new
state of motion, she will no longer be able to resolve the brain’s surroundings-depicting
activity. The brain itself, of course, does not stop its electroneurobiological
depictional activity during sleep, but this physiological activity (all of it
carried out in the electromagnetic modality of interaction, i.e. by exchanging the species of force
carriers called photons) is not directly knowable by the mind circumstanced
therein. Or, in other words, this process “switches off” the awareness of the
body, by putting the sequences of brain’s activities out of resolutive reach of
the circumstanced psyche. Her actions, too, become mismatched with
brain-mediated behavioral articulations, a matter discussed below.
The
“switching off” may come to the sequences of the activities of some brain
portion, since sleep may not affect at once an entire brain but only half of
it, or a sizable region, as occurs in many reptiles, almost all birds, and a
number of mammals. This is why human snorers, who do sleep with the entire
brain, cannot hear themselves snore – though a mother might re-attune the
time-resolution of her sensory input, or “awake,” at her baby’s slight uneasiness,
because of neural reactions (probably involving limbic activation of the
startle response) that stir a re-increase in the field-mediated braking. The
same means is at play whenever electroneurodynamic activities become impaired
and fail to provide alert time-acuity, failing (“loss of consciousness,”
fainting fit) to keep time-acuity sufficiently fine-grained as to resolve their
imitative outlining of the biologically relevant sequences of events.
For
what reason are dreamt sensations perceived while simultaneous sensations coming
from the sense organs are not perceived? The converse, namely mind’s causal action in
extramentality, thus also occurs across different relativistic reference frames
(“is also transframed”). As mentioned, the healthy brain is always “on” and
sensory neuroactivity does not cease with sleep. This fact is routinely
verified in laboratories and also in the very remarkable, revealing convenience
of closing eyelids to sleep, even of tucking the head beneath a wing to nap –
as birds do. It is a key fact. This convenience would not arise if
neuroactivity would stop, or if, as certain accounts put it, some “curtain”
firing of thalamic and cortical cells occluded the transmission of sensory
information through the thalamus and cortex, sustaining sleep by innerly
clogging up the inflow of sense data: that is, by already doing the job of a
sort of “neurodynamic palpebra” or “intracerebral eyelids.” Nor, in those
scenarios, would inattention be a step toward sleep – as it is.
Routine
verification of such key fact exposes an acute contradiction in the neuroscientific
opinions purporting to localize mental occurrences at the physiology that takes
place in the tissue’s reference frame. A dream-originated fa note is sensed but the same dreamer does not sense a fa
note from the external world enacted in the same brain.
A deathblow
to single motion-frame “neurophilosophies,” this crucial fact simply comes from
the both-ways nature of relativistic transframing. Dreaming minds are usually
asleep. These dreaming minds, which during deep sleep interact with
extramentality from additionally accelerated force carriers (less slowed ones,
whose motion may only subtract up to a scant 10‑96 fraction from light speed), put the brain in
electroneurobiological states (to which the mind then reacts by intonating
herself with oneiric sensations) through a slower, yet not very much slower,
time resolution. From the mentioned range of dilations, which on the above assumptions
correspond to subtracted fractions between 10‑82 and 10‑96
of light speed, the time dilations during dreaming are those that barely
suffice to leave unresolved the sensory sequences, delivered for awake acuity.
Such small yet sufficient excursions away from awake acuity are implied by the
dreaming control of neural tissue and also by the not inordinate time that
every dream takes; whence one might predict that, when the duration of dreamt
module performances such as a walking step could be accurately compared with
extramental time, it would show only a moderate stretching. The moderateness of
such excursions is also implied by the oneiric interpretation of environmental
occurrences, such as alarm activation or thingamabobs found in the bed.
The
dreaming dilations thus constitute a deep inattention that does not result from
the greater dilations, or larger deceleration loosenings, proper of “nondreaming”
or “deep” sleep: in fact, when these dilations do not confine a dreamt episode
to reasonable clock time, it is said that the sleeper “does not dream.” In
turn, during dreaming the sense organs are putting the brain into electroneurobiological
states which could be resolved if the mind had been circumstanced to carriers
whose motion subtracted from light speed a far greater fraction, namely 10‑82
– but which the dreaming mind cannot time-resolve so as to react at those
states intonatively. Instead the mind’s own causal action, transferred via
those faster-moving sources, is transframed with the resolution proper to
generate superposed brain states (states for the two fa notes are in the same brain region) to which the mind circumstanced
to faster-moving force carriers reacts, as mentioned, intonating herself with
the oneiric sensations. She operates, so to speak, her own domain of contiguous
phosphenes with the extramental time resolution which she is currently availing
of. Thus we do not sense the extramental occurrences while dreaming because the
sensory input stays in a transiently unresolvable motion reference frame, which
does not prevent minds from using the same brain regions in order to generate
dreamt sensations.
How do Perceived Features Fade due to Inattention? As the crucial observation of monohemispheric sleep
(Mukhametov 1984) shows, the reduction, in the braking that the brain imparts
to the causal carriers through which mind’s action inserts itself in extramentalities,
is regional. Brakening loosens and these force carriers gain speed in some
brain regions, not necessarily in all of them. In other words, although the
process can be extended to the entirety of the brain gray, basically it is on
certain brain regions that the force carriers providing a mind’s immediate
circumstance move from one system of constraints to another. Things occur as if
less dynamical electric states (i.e.,
simpler courses of the potential’s variations) of the brain tissue, associated
in mammals – but not in reptiles – with sleep and distraction, took less
dynamical mass from the force carriers traversing through them, which for
traversing every milimeter (refringency assumed) take some 1032
Planck instants. As this short period amply accommodates the characteristic
time of electromagnetic interactions, the carriers can be regionally “freed”
from brakening, namely gradually allowed to reduce the fraction of their dynamical
mass claimed by the dynamic state of the coupling electric field which they go
across in such regions. So, before exiting the brain and being substituted by
others (like as also do, if far more leisurely and circuitously, the molecular
components of metabolism), these carriers speed up – gradually losing the
circumstanced mind’s resolution as regards the sensory formations built in
these particular brain regions.
In this
way, before the new speed becomes so fast that it wholly impedes to resolve
sense notices (as it occurs in sleep), the regional sensory productions fade
“into inattention” around other features kept in one’s attention focus, without
loss of their availability for semoviently-steerable attention. In other words
this fading sensory “complement,” which surrounds what one is attending to,
loses affective prominence or force of imposition (Zubiri’s noergy)
because of the slight speeding up of the mentioned carriers in the brain
portions that generate the voluntarily neglected sensory features. This mechanical
“reddening” (more on this designation in a moment) is why inattention is a step
toward sleep, in this issue another crucial observation. It is probably linked
with ketamine’s mimicring schizophrenias as a step toward its acting as
anesthetic; anesthetics as well as oneirogens, substances that increase
dreaming time such as those in the leaves of Salvia divinorum, must act
by way of altering the field-coupled neurodynamics. This mechanical “reddening”
also prevents recalling the experiences lived under it, another topic discussed
soon. Focusing attention thus consists in selecting (“esemplastically,” a term
that denotes the way featured, e. g., in selecting one or rather another
finger to move), on some regions of brain volume, a limited sector of brain
states that continue inducing optimal braking to the causal-action carriers
where one is circumstanced to.
Thus the
selected sector of brain productions is “put in the focus of attention,” namely
these brain productions impose themselves in full noergy: they cause, in the
mind’s ontology, intonative reactions that blossom in full affective
prominence, operative interpretation and sensory intensity. One might say that
they take full roots in the mind, or fully radicate in it. At the same time,
conversely, their encasing sensory complement is perceived with weaker force of
imposition or fainter affective prominence (less noergy, a process that at
times is labeled absent-mindedness, and considering its productive mechanism
would be dubbed “reddening” if speaking of extramental actions rather than of
intramental reactions). Such attenuated noergy or lesser radication prevents
the progress of its detailed operative interpretation yet without loss of all
its sensory intensity and availability. This occurs because the modulus of time
acuity of the unattended complement differs from that of the far-previously
memorized operations through which one can recognize its contents. In the
limit, as a result of this process, neither consciousness is a part of every
sensation nor every sensation is necessarily conscious, though it always is a
mental differentiation and, so, is gnoseologically apprehended.
Attenuated
noergy differs from the habituative blurring of the experiences had in the very
focus of attention, whereby e. g. one cannot easily distinguish
(because of reiteration and not of inattentiveness, as discussed below) between
the memories of the greetings had when one came back home, as habitual in the
night, a hundred days ago and ninety nine days ago. Yet these memories exist,
as their blurring is remediable (and one might extricate the reimagining attempt
from the predicament) if simply one also finds attended-to marks to tell between
both events. Likewise if shown a photo a busy salesclerk may recall things
otherwise unrememberable about the unique visit to the shop made days ago by a
particular customer. In contrast, the unavailability of a lecture’s short
section, finished a minute ago but “unheard” while enthralled by another
pursuit, is irremediable. Let me outline this particular point.
Noergy is not an action whose
energy might be measured or transformed in a manner observable by the public
(or minds other than the incumbent), released by the brakening of noematic
carriers. Noergy is, instead, a reaction whose effects re-texture the ontic consistency
of the circumstanced mind, wherein by lack of time course her past stays
unerasable, i. e. causally efficient for gnoseological grasp. But
no dimensional mirroring of actions with reactions is conserved across the
brain-mind interface. This is why one could only arrive to, eventually, assess
noergy in other minds in terms of transframing’s departure from the focal
attention value (zero departure makes a hundred percent noergy), losing its
intonative dimensions. Where no minds are circunstanced, actions and reactions
characterize each another with features from the same set. But in a nature that
includes circumstanced minds, intonations are found to result from extramental
actions that are depicted with a certain set of features whereas (those
actions) generate reactions depicted with another set of features.
This symmetry breaking is a
very fundamental datum, of the natural science which ambitions to describe a
nature where minds are encountered. Force in nature appears diversified or
segregated fivefold: we observe four “basic forces” or modalities of causal
interaction – by name the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic
force, and the gravitational force – in its actions outside us, and a further
segregated modality of causal interaction or “basic force,” namely the one
whose action carriers undergo the speed variations that tune the circumstanced
mind’s time acuity, likewise from its actions outside of us (e. g. its
effects in biological evolution) but moreover from our reactions to the
variations of its states. These reactions are the mind’s subjective
intonations, or sensational phenomena.
The identification of this
additional segregated physical force in our neurobiological tradition (whose
earlier consideration of it had been misconstrued abroad as vitalism) as the modality
of causal interaction in which the dimensional mirroring of actions with
reactions is not conserved across the brain-mind interface, arose in the frame
of a comparative research work completed here between 1964 and 1971 (Crocco 1963,
1971: see Source List). However this general force does not enact its mental
effects in an experiential void. Each circumstanced mind is ontically textured
by the sedimentation of her biographical experiences (“rememberings”) and
undergoes a re-texturing because of her noergic reactions to local variations
of this extramental force (“sensations”). This re-texturing can be properly
rendered in terms of her previously sedimented semovient operations
(“perceptions”) only in case that the time-acuities of both match.
In this process it plays a
part the developmentally-built set of semovient actions that a mind recognizes
in herself as available for applying onto certain sensed content once neuroactivity
delivered it to sentience, as non-structural sensations and their structural
patterns; e. g., as a certain array
of phosphenes. This particular set of the mind’s possible actions is the subset
that gathers those of her operations which “conserve”, i. e. keep identifiable, the phosphenes’ sensational patterns across
operative re-equilibrations, e. g.,
combining mental operations themselves plus their reverse executions. This allows
to “recognize” the sensations and their patterns in the operational terms that
render them perceptions. They no longer just display meaningless phosphenes.
What in all this does matter to noergy is that the full articulation of those
sedimented operations cannot be applied onto poorly time-resolvable or
time-unresolvable sensations. In this case, their texture inserts itself feebly
into what the mind knows as semoviently doable. Noergy’s other names, “force of imposition” or
“affective prominence,” refer to this imposition of each sensory or
(reimagined) mnesic mental contents onto the equilibrable structures of
semovient operations in which the mind’s ontic-ontological consistency has
become constituted with development, i. e. since a long time ago. (“Affective,”
in “affective prominence,” does not point to sentimental affairs. It refers to
the affecting of the equilibrable structures of semovient operations by
each sensory or reimagined content, namely the degree of detail in which it
admits the application of the mind’s constitutive structure of semovient
operations.) Throughout the successive stages of the growth, the mental operations
attain a particular structure, called intelligence, whose specialized or
“factorial” articulations establish how one “sees” the surroundings and oneself
in them.
These
acquired structures of operations, coming from way back in life, were of course
originally acquired with the intrinsic time graining of the attentional focus.
So their execution, even incipient, requires an additional operation – which
would create a new esemplastic reclustering, regrouping elements into new
accidental units – to be matched with the time acuity of the contents of the
unattended, encasing sensory complement so as to interpret its contents in operational
terms.
If these
unattended contents are not put into the focus of attention, by way of this
esemplastic reclustering, in operational terms they remain interpreted in low
detail, outside of the organizational scheme being considered; that is to say,
“folded-up” in the vein of the complicated combinations of logic-mathematical
operations substituted in mental treatment by a simple indicator (or by a
single sign in writing). This condition of abreviated scheme is called
“unattended.” The name means that, operationally, the sensations are
undetailedly sorted out: just sketchily categorized.
This
links up sensory time resolution with mnesic operational resolution. Attention
grants full objecthood because, for categorizing its sensory content, the
combinable operations sedimented in the sensing mind are not blurred either by
fusion (as it occurs when these operations’s time structure results too tight
to become resolved in the frame that presents the sensory content) or by
scattering over time (as it occurs when these operations’s time structure
results too lax to be encompassed as a group in the frame that presents the sensory
content). This is also why the attentional reclustering, as it re-structures
into new figure-background terms the focal “field of attention,” often disrupts
other operations that might being made.
Yet
before a voluntary refocusing of attention allows recognizing unattended occurrences,
a mechanical arrangement or “machinamentum” sets up the scene, and then becomes
intentionally implemented. Unheeded sequences, e. g. a song to which little or no attention is given while
reading, become impositively fainter (affectively less prominent) rather than
slower because their pattern is embodied by modulations of cycle warpings, or
hysteresis losses, in the brain’s electric field oscillations whose cycles
become partly included in the mind’s modulus of acuity.
Basically,
shifting attention slows a number of the noematic carriers that form a mind’s
immediate circumstance. Shifting attention slows the particular “volley” or
cast of action carriers whose states thereby generate in such a mind intonative
reactions with full noergy (“in the focus of attention”), by increasing their
coupling to the brain electric field. In more familiar terms, every voluntary
shift of attention generates a new local or regional dynamism of the brain
electric field which allows the next cast, of those action carriers which form
a mind’s immediate circumstance, to “affix” or “absorb” more of their dynamical
mass into the coupled, electromagnetic field (whose action they do not carry);
involuntary, physiologically originated shifts of attention proceed in reverse,
starting at the electromagnetic field’s state rather than at those other force
carriers that form the mind’s immediate circumstance. This “absorptive
redistribution” keeps those carriers’ inertial mass (and their absolute
dynamical mass) unchanged, but decreases their speed. This occurs, e. g.,
in regional hysteresis losses when a voluntarily shifted, regional change –
which might compose the electroencephalographic pattern – increases or
decreases the causal modifications (“inflections”) of this field’s dynamic,
while proceeding conversely (respectively, decreasing or increasing them) for
its occasional “neglected” background. What matters is the course of the
coupled inflections, not the electroencephalographic synchronization or
desynchronization itself: as commented, reptiles and mammals keep paying
attention on opposite electroencephalographic regimes; moreover, electroencephalographic
activity includes a great deal of potential variations concomitant but
unrelated to the mind’s actions and reactions; cf., e. g., De Vera et al.
(2005). Thus, whether stirred by the circumstanced mind (voluntary attentional
shift) or by her brain’s physiology (involuntary attentional shift), the
brain’s resulting regular action upon its circumstanced mind enacts, in her,
intonated reactions with variable noergy, i. e. more or less
interpretable in operational terms.
By a single causal means, the mind’s semovient action on the