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. Published April 1st, 2003. 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 ©2002 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 Argentina got underway in the second half of the eighteenth century and
specially focused on electroneurobiology. The angle has proved especially useful
for revealing any such effects and, along with older results, more than three decades ago it developed a scientific view about brain-mind issues involved in recovery from fainting, comas, vegetative states, hibernation, general anesthesia, or ordinary sleep. This view assumes that the uncoupling pathologies that disconnect persons from their circumstances share with sleep and the various forms 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 made available in Argentina for many
decades but it has only recently come to the attention of the
international scientific community. These reserch results are valuable for neurobiologists, psychophysiologists,
and humanists working on brain-mind issues. Scientists investigating
biological dynamical systems, biophysics, mathematical biology, computer
biology, or molecular biology can also 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 to compound changes that generate the
flow of time. Placing such observations in 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 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 their attentional
features as well. 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 will briefly address here.
As is
known in the history of ideas, even if not particularly discussed in this article,
this empirically disproven belief that the physical instant is interval-unlike
has arisen in disparate epochs and cultures – pre-Columbian American, Eastern,
African, ancient and contemporary European 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 the real time or non-interval-like character 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 us to assign a lowest limit
for the validity of the Lorentz-FitzGerald transforms which are 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 – that is 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 applied to the single instant in particular.
The
groundlessness in conjecturing this impediment becomes apparent when we consider
that no force in the observable universe can 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 give rise to any effect so quickly).
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 fractions, 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. That is, it is thought that the Planck instant
denotes the interval-like thickness of actuality, whose causal transformations
– always taking many such instants because of the cosmologically acquired
weakness of efficient forces – make real time. But this prospect is disturbing
for an outlook that struggles against time. It rather wishes for a “block”
universe where all intervals are 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 divisible in homogeneous portions. Thus
every mind is initially defined not as mere intellectual performance but rather as
synonymous with 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
psyche 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, being in turn erroneous the Aeschylus-Plato theory that envisaged brain-engraved memory traces, namely the never found "engrams". Or, in other words: 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 the 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 that 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. Even, in this special regard, every mind can no longer be defined as synonymous with a psyche or finite existentiality. Each psyche ecloses well determined as not another and as capable of sensing and moving (by no means as a tabula rasa), but mindless or without mind - that is to say, not yet innerly differentiated into mental contents, which psyches may acquire only later, along their existence. Mental contents are those distinctions, in the ontic makeup or
constitution of psyches, that only the incumbent individual psyche 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 psyche 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 psyche 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” also serves to designate a psyche without special
regard to the acquired contents (which, strictly speaking, compose its mind) this psyche differentiates in her own reality or
ontic consistency. This reality is ontic and also ontological, that is, 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 psyche’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 either extramentality or the psyche – that is, as outer patterning of the sensation-generating causal actions
or as combinations of the psyche’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 psyches eclose featured as an existentiality, i.e. well determined as not another (this determination is called cadacualtez, explained below), and 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 psyche 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 psyche, and collectively are called her 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 or psyche 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 psyches 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 psyche in extramentality. These actions may in turn
causally feed into the psyche's set of mental contents (namely, add to its already differentiated mind) fresh sensoperceptions that are hence traceable by scientific methodologies canvassing the productions of fungible means.
Psyches or existentialities,
therefore, do not become innerly differentiated into psyche’s acts and psyche’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
psyche’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 the acting psyche’s reactions to her own acts or to
outer actions; these outer actions may also pattern the reactive origination of
intonations that 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 the psyche’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 psyche, 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 the psyche’s acts or
mental “objects” may either work only on one's own mind, or also on the body,
or even beyond it – in the surroundings. While episodic memories, at their being reenacted or "recalled" by the incumbent psyche, work on the
brain that the psyche reacts to (thus providing innerly determined sensory input to modify her mind), praxias work through this brain beyond it, into
the surroundings that the psyche monitors through the extramentally determined sensory changes being imposed to her mind. Thus, episodic memories are
nonsensorial but sensorially imaginable availabilities apt to be reconstructed
in imagined sensoperceptions – that is,
sensed as the psyche’s reactions to brain states that she generates – as located
in one’s biography and recognized as one's 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 psyche. 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 psyche. The other
is semovience, the inherent or primary ability of every psyche found in nature (i.e., every circumstanced existentiality 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
psyche 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 describing what is restored on recovery from fainting, comas,
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 psyche, or existentiality circumstanced anywhere else: for example,
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 recall one’s memories), as well as
causal-series-continuing causation that is at work extramentally (that is,
independently of being known by any circumstanced psyche) and whose lawfulness,
or nomicity, comes from this continuance.
Even though this brain is the site, or tópos,
where the incumbent psyche 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 existentiality 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 that 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 as two
parties are needed for the tango, gating sensoperceptions also 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 psyches found in nature needs to account
for basic issues, including those in the following list of questions and answers. For the sake of simplicity, this succinct list will often indulge in calling such psyches "minds", thus taking a part as the whole. The answers draw on 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. Because 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, faintings, 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 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 also conserved 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 of combining 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 is sleeping right
after learning 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 learned 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 second 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 third, 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, that is, 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, they make themselves either “pop out” more, or
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,” fainting, 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 Psyches? Past and future situations only arise in the context
of minds. They do not exist outside of psyches, namely out of what is envisaged or represented by means of differentiations (minds) acquired by "consciousnesses" or psyches: extramentally, that is, 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 psyches. 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: souls, 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 the mind-including "consciousnesses" or psyches in general, as it is accepted in
the Argentine neurobiological tradition. In contrast, the things situated amid
finite "consciousnesses" or psyches (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, that is, 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 to be 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 that 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 psyche, thereby also transformatively affecting and changing its
causally linked extramentalities – that is,
brain, body (or a neuroprosthesis, discussed below), and some of its
surroundings. Because of that semovience, mind-differentiating psyches 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 consciousnesses or psyches.
Where are the Actions of Psyches 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 Physical Building Blocks
do Psyches Find Their Most Immediate Localization? Like all other force carriers, the
mind-exchanges-localizing “particles” are to possess specific speed-determining
features. A key one is bulkiness. Without a small inertial mass, each force
carrier would be forced to move at exactly light speed, being completely unable to
vary its rapidity. Bulkiness limits the force carriers’ speed and makes it different
from c. Speed is crucial, because the magnitude taken by the speed of these
“particles” expands relativistically (that is, spreads according to relativity
physics) the “thickness” of the physical instant – the interval-like span
“during” which all causation ought to stay non-transformative – into the time
resolution or acuity of the individual gnoseological apprehension whose causal
exchanges are localized in such quickly propagating “particles” or action
packets. In other words, a minimal extramental interval unit (or “instant”) is,
in this way, dilated into a minimal experienced interval unit (or “moment”).
This relativistic dilation, technically expressed by the Lorentz-FitzGerald and
the Valatin-Bogoljubov transforms, delivers across different motion-frames the
features of a unique causal efficiency.
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
– for example, taking as “primitive” the
transition time of some modality of interaction, all of which modalities 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, subsist nevertheless anyway, 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, that “at
the precise time” was entertaining. Between the two subtracted values, respectively appropriate to deep sleep and to 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. Just as impetus is superfluous in keeping unperturbed bodies in
rectilinear motion, engraving such memories in the brain is superfluous in keeping
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: that is, the past
no longer exists. 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 psyches, it follows that the changes inside their
minds (i. e., sensoperceptions as well as episodic and praxical memories)
lack a further, causally efficient multi-instant course structure that could
make its former states vanish: it cannot occur 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.
Closer to an adage, 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 limited to occupying processes in sequential time, such
as operating machines are – although the biological function of mind-differentiating psyches is concerned with those processes, which are located solely beyond psyches. In still other
words, every thing that knows of itself (psyche) cannot lose its sequences of
changes as inner differentiations of its ontic consistency (which thus become
“acquired availabilities”), because psyches 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.
Psyches, experiencers, or existentialities, and consequently also their inner differentiations or 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
extramentalities neither keep time-transformation courses in their present
actuality, nor do psyches keep time-transformation courses inside the single present
in which their ontology gnoseologically apprehends themselves. For this reason
a psyche’s diversifications – her mind, 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 the sixth century wording of Damascius.
In such
circumstances, just 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 rectilinear, so that a body left to its
state of translative motion continues moving in a straight line rather than slowing
down and coming to a halt or pursuing a curved 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 what outside is named the instant, is the conservation of all of these differentiations – rather than these memories becoming “erased,” namely, pursuing any oblivion process path as affected by a time elapsing (“time”) that occurs where they do not exist. (As mentioned, this is so because the observer’s differentiations exist outside the course of transformations in three-dimensional space, a course whose
possibility and installation in the relevant scale of such space depends, in turn, on certain early cosmological events, namely the acquisition of inertial mass by certain species of “particles” but not all of them.) There is no time within
time. It is the “inside instant” feature of such ontic-gnoseological realities,
the observers’ minds, that turns superfluous all extramental engraving or
script like recording of memories, just as impetus is also superfluous in keeping
unperturbed bodies in rectilinear motion.
The
“inside instant” existence of sentient agencies also thrusts itself into
attention as the foremost characteristic of 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 aging 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 psyches. 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 making it difficult in old age to distinguish between the deterioration of some kinds of performance and the
integrity of one’s unacquired or primary constituents; to stress the latter is
as unusual as it would be trite to remark that outer behavior, imagination, and reimagination
are affected by brain pathology. On the other hand, although memories cannot be erased because
of not being retained in time transformability, they 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, Fainting, Comas, and Similar
States Disconnect Minds from their Surroundings? By now it should be clear
that psyches 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 effective certain speed changes – tenuously similar to what a variably refractive medium does to the
effective value of light’s speed – and, so, psyches or existentialities 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 psyche 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 psyche’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 psyche’s immediate
circumstance, puts to sleep the existentiality 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, that is, by exchanging force carriers of the species called photons) is not directly knowable by changes in the mind of the psyche circumstanced therein. Or, in other words, this process “switches off” the awareness of the body, by putting the sequences of brain 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 “awaken,” 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 spell) 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 psyche’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 facts 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 music 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. Dreamers are usually
asleep. The minds of these dreaming psyches, 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 psyche or existentiality 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 that could be resolved if the existentiality or psyche had been circumstanced to carriers
whose motion subtracted from light speed a far greater fraction, namely 10‑82
– but which the dreaming psyche cannot time-resolve so as to react at those
states intonatively. Instead the psyche’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 existentiality 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 that she is currently availing herself
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 psyches 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 psyche’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's gray, basically it is in
certain brain regions that the force carriers providing a psyche or existentiality’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 to
traverse every millimeter (refringency assumed) take some 1032
Planck instants. Because this short period amply accommodates the characteristic
time of electromagnetic interactions, the carriers can be regionally “freed”
from braking, namely gradually allowed to reduce the fraction of their dynamical
mass claimed by the dynamic state of the coupling electric field that they go
across in such regions. So, before exiting the brain and being replaced by
others (just as the molecular
components of metabolism do, if in a much more leisurely way and far circuitously), these carriers speed up – gradually losing the
circumstanced psyche’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 completely blocks the resolution of sensory notices (as occurs during sleep), the regional sensory output fades
“into inattention” around other features kept in one’s attentional focus, without
loss of its 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
areas 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, another crucial observation. It is probably linked
with ketamine’s mimicking schizophrenias as a step toward its acting as an 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 action featured, e. g., in selecting one or rather another
finger to move), in 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
existentiality or psyche’s ontology, intonative reactions that blossom in full affective
prominence, operative interpretation and sensory intensity. One might say that
they take full root 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, consciousness is neither a part of every
sensation nor is every sensation 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,
because 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 psyches 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 psyche, wherein by lack of time course her past stays
unerasable, that is, 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 at, eventually, assess
noergy in other minds in terms of transframing’s departure from the focal
attention value (zero departure makes a 100 percent noergy), comparing force of imposition but losing its
intonative dimensions. Where no psyches are circunstanced, actions and reactions
characterize each another with features from the same set. But in a nature that
includes circumstanced existentialities, 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 that strives to describe a
nature where psyches 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 psyche’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 existentiality or psyche’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 comparative research 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 psyche 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 if the time-acuities of both match.
In this process it plays a
part the developmentally-built set of semovient actions that an existentiality 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; for example, as a certain array
of phosphenes. This particular set of the psyche’s possible actions is the subset
that gathers those of her operations that “conserve” (i. e. keep identifiable) the phosphenes’ sensational patterns across
operative re-equilibrations, e. g.,
combining mental operations themselves plus their reverse executions. This makes it possible 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 existentiality or psyche 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 content onto the equilibrable structures of
semovient operations in which the psyche’s ontic-ontological consistency has
become constituted with development, that is, 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 existentiality are not blurred either by
fusion (as occurs when these operations’ time structure results too tight
to become resolved in the frame that presents the sensory content) or by
scattering over time (as occurs when these operations’ 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, that is, 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 the
immediate circumstance of the psyche that, along her intellectual development, innerly differentiated itself into such a mind or set of mental contents. Shifting attention slows the particular “volley” or
cast of action carriers whose states thereby generate, in this psyche or existentiality, 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 that form
a psyche’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 existentiality’s immediate circumstance. This “absorptive
redistribution” keeps those carriers’ inertial mass (and their absolute
dynamical mass) unchanged, but decreases their speed. This occurs, for example,
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; see, e. g., De Vera et al.
(2005). Thus, whether stirred by the circumstanced psyche (voluntary attentional
shift) or by her brain’s physiology (involuntary attentional shift), the
brain’s resulting regular action upon its circumstanced psyche enacts, in her,
intonated reactions with variable noergy, that is, more or less
interpretable in operational terms.
By a
single causal means, the psyche’s semovient action on the brain tissue in turn
enacts
(1)
displacements
of the focus of attention (described here as “esemplastic reclustering” or
shiftings of the accidental unity attentionally conferred on some objects,
whether over one’s mind extant ontology – for example, searching for a memory before recalling it, the existentiality or psyche being active in one
respect and passive in another – or over the sensible presentations currently
offered by the brain, as while reading these lines a good deal of the surrounding
events becomes sidelined by weakening their phenomenicity’s impositive force);
(2)
bodily
motions, for instance, moving a finger
rather than another (in which what is shifted is the electroneurobiological
state modulating the neuronal activity that generates the finger’s
displacement) or opposing resistance to sleep (in which what is shifted is the
electroneurobiological state modulating the neuronal activity which generates
the electroneurobiological state that slackens time acuity); and
(3)
the
psyche-facing, feature-determining brain states generated by the existentiality or psyche herself, to
which she reacts with dreamt sensations while escaping from sensationally
reacting to the feature-determining brain states established by the sense
organs.
How are Voluntary Movements Attentionally Determined? Likewise, the attentional selection of a particular
portion of the mind’s corporal scheme for moving the related body part – say, a
certain finger – puts in the background the mental images of other bodily
parts. Namely, of those parts that are not to be voluntarily moved, or moved
differently, as in juggling. This makes the psyche’s causal action effective only
for those segments of brain architecture – in fact, non-static ones and varying
with practice – that, through acuity-matching electroneurodynamics and the
causally-related biochemical processes spatially arranged within it, trigger
outward the willed movement.
This
intentional process generates a voluntary modulation of neocortical electric
dynamics accomplished in everyday behavior, such as in waving a hand. Bypassing
the hand, the resulting neurodynamic modulation, or its metabolic/hemodynamic
concomitants, makes it possible to communicate or activate external devices without muscle
activity, using electric brain signals – nothing more “mind reading” or
thought transducing than reading the results of any other willful communication
or activity, such as properly “waving” the hand on a keyboard, or talking into a
telephone or into the air in front of a face-to-face interlocutor. So, for
example, the voluntary modulation of neocortical electrical dynamics is also
used to gain control over a motor imagery-based system in the coupling of
electroencephalogram-based brain-computer interfaces with a neuroprosthesis.
The neuroprosthesis is thus operated by voluntary generation of distinctive
EEG patterns, which usually are power decreases in specific frequency bands, at
imagining consecutive movements of a paralyzed limb, so that the patient is
able to move a simple object from one real place to another, or navigating in a
virtual environment; see e.g.
Muller-Putz et al. 2005; Leeb
et al. 2005, and Kubler et al.
2005. Several types of brain signals have been explored for this use, among
them slow cortical potentials, cortical neuronal activity, and beta and mu
rhythms (cf. Santana et al., 2004; Yamawaki, 2005), whether
through systems fully implanted in the brain or still invasive microminiaturized
“neuroports” (Patterson et al. 2004),
or noninvasively (Wolpaw and McFarland 2004, Hinterberger et al., 2004; cf. Yoo et al., 2004)
such as in EEG-biofeedback. The latter, also called neurofeedback, is a rather
trivial training technique – frequently accompanied by commercial or
superstitious claims, too – designed to teach people, by trial and error, how
to increase specific frequency bands of their brain waves upon receiving
real-time feedback of their scalp-recorded electroencephalographic rhythms; cf. Egner et al., 2004; Weiskopf et al.
2004; Weiler et al. 2002; Congedo, Lubar, and Joffe, 2004. All these
examples point that shifting attention is a part of every voluntary modulation
of neocortical electric dynamics, independently of the causal chains appended
afterwards, such as vocalization, writing, manipulation of external devices, or
any other motor action.
Specifically, it makes the psyche’s causal action effective only for
those brain segments that have developmentally turned up as such, themselves
not thought about – because no brain segments are intended, but their action’s outer
result – but operatively identified by the individual only in terms of this
connection. We might note in passing that the voluntary reimagining of a
certain memory does not greatly differ from the voluntary waving of a certain
finger. Rather than using the anatomical connection to a particular body part,
the segments of brain architecture enact the electroneurodynamic states that
put the psyche’s immediate extramentality in the state that makes her nomically
react by such reimagining. More on this below.
Once
they have been recalled and given attention to, where do memories again fade
into? Mnesic localization, aimed
to find an episodic memory already known as available (“known as known,” although
not yet remembered), is carried out in the current inattention domain. This
inattention or inoperativeness domain is also where memories recede, or are
“re-forgotten,” when no longer imagined. This is an inattention in which they
are “folded up” as abreviated operational
schemes. This means that do not stir, in any degree of detail, the
application of the equilibrable structure of semovient causal operations that
constitutes them. In their inattention domain, the only operative articulations
available are the attention-focusing operations that navigate the biographical
sedimentation through its larger posts. These navigating attention-focusing
operations are external to the operations that imaginatively unfold the
remembering’s individual units; the former merely specify the latter in
biographical context.
From
this inattention domain every memory arises, when it is reimagined after so having
been “localized” (rather, operationally specified) in the operational
availabilities of the observer’s biographical sedimentation. There, experienced
reactions cannot elapse because the observer’s ontic reality lacks a causally
efficient multi-instant course consistency, which could vanish its former
states inside the psyche’s single-instant actuality that, with causal efficiency,
is achieving inner and outer changes. But her memory is far from being any
laying down of archival data, or sedimentation of news that in future times
is to be merely contemplated, “unoperatively.” Memory is the sedimentation of
nonsensorial habits of motor schemes whose sensorily intonated reimagination,
though it allows believing that certain features stay in it awaiting discovery by exploration of the completed mental image, in fact receives these
features when one adds them to the reimagination with the mere act of thinking
them, one after another.
Thus
this operational specification (“localization”) among other availabilities (“visio generalis”) is not
intrinsically different from that of the proper fingers when, having crossed
(say) the second under the fourth finger of a hand, one is summoned to move a
certain one of both fingers, without looking at them. This kind of mentally led extrication, instead,
becomes ineffective when a patient with small areas of brain damage, despite
great efforts, could neither name nor describe the function of a glass of water
that he, a little later, reaches for and from which he takes a drink – by
using undamaged brain portions whose performance is not coupled with the attentional
focus. One’s corporal scheme includes the sedimentation in one’s ontic
consistency of one’s causal involvements, which are to find their respective
neuroactivity to produce their reimagination just as, using the bodily scheme,
one is to find the respective neuroactivity to produce the proper action.
The
conditions of this neuroactivity are, organically, quite specific (e. g.,
activity of the CA3 region of the hippocampus is key for recalling our memories
from fragmentary representations) and it may easily become inadequate because
of factors extraneous to the attentional selection, such as finger “braiding”
or cerebral dysfunction. Thus, recalling one’s memories and moving one’s limbs
employ an attentional reclustering of one’s sedimented operations in order to
put such particular availabilities into conditions of reenactment – that involve
reattending to them, i. e. their proper time resolution.
How
does Inattention cause Amnesia?
The same specific mechanism also prevents remembering most sleep mentation
after awakening; dissociates the handiness of awake rememberings from oneiric
threads (and of oneiric episodes from awake decisions); puts distractions
before forgetting in the beginning of dementedness processes; turns status
epilepticus with more of a propensity to anterograde than to retrograde amnesia; and, in
traumatic memory deficits, makes the recall of the pretraumatic
(retrograde) portion of life, forgotten in a mnesic lacuna or memory “lagoon,”
depend on the same lacuna’s posttraumatic (anterograde) portion or “amnesia of fixation”
period.
In all
these cases, the biographical episodes lived from a certain time dilation (say,
dreamt; or perceived through a sane brain tissue long before a dementia’s
initial stages; or lived and memorized before the brain tissue became concussed
and later recovered leaving a posttraumatic “amnesia of fixation,” to consider
three examples) can no longer be operatively categorized when the relativistic
speed state, of the biophysical components that form their experiencer’s immediate
circumstance, changes into another relativistic speed state (respectively for
those three examples: (1) in awake life; (2) sensed through a deteriorating
brain tissue, in a dementia’s initial stages; and (3) recalled through a reimagining
context that should have included the episodes forgotten by “amnesia of
fixation”).
During
the attempted recall, when the relativistic speed state of the psyche’s immediate
circumstance differs from either the speed state through which the episode was
lived or from the speed state through which temporally neighboring episodes
were lived that should have been included to reimagine the context by drawing
closer – backward in memories’ sequence – to the sought episode, the difference
hampers the arrangement, by voluntary recall, of the brain physiology so as to generate
phenomena that might be recognized, in operational categories, as the aimed-at
memory. On this attempt act the physiological abnormalities that head blows
bring about.
For a
time after the encephalic concussion, the brain does not tune its electroneurobiology
so as to furnish proper time dilation to sensory experiences. So these
experiences lose impositive force, or noergy. It results in a condition similar
to that involved in the fading, into “distraction,” of many memories of the
habitual life lived in the months or years after bereavement. Thus at their
occurrence one perceives the sensory experiences just as one perceives scarcely
attended-to vehicle and foot traffic around the bus in which one travels. These
scarcely attended-to vehicles and footers are well seen, heard and identified
in some incipient detail but soon, even perhaps before one goes out of the bus,
one cannot put their perceptions in any order so as to recall their
presentation. The same occurs to all the life episodes in some (often
transient) postconcussive stages.
Such a
process is called “distraction” when it intrudes on one´s plans, as when, while reading, one plays a music disc with many songs and sometimes find
that the themes that one most wanted to hear are finishing, have been
“heard,” yet their memory – though recent – is irretrievable. To stir the
affects and emotions one wished to draw from the audition (in this case more
obviously called “affective prominence,” though always stirred after operational
categorization) they should be played anew – and listened without reading.
Preventing it is why, illustratively, theaters impose silence and darken the
seating precisely when performances commence.
As it
should now be plain, this “distraction” is what in clinical contexts is called
“fixation amnesia” or anterograde amnesia, namely difficulties in learning new
informations. In the beginning of dementias it precedes the older memories’
unreimaginability (forgetting), and the same mechanism also conditions the
possibilities of awake and dreaming states for reciprocal recall. In sleep
mentation it also brings about the “attentional narrowing,” the thematic or experiential
reduction that impoverishes one’s full experience, shrinkening the menu of
other experiences that one keeps available to be collated with the actual contents
of an oneiric thread in such a way that – above and beyond more specific cognitional
effects – while dreaming we are habitually unaware that we are in fact in a
dreamworld. On the same basis, it also sets the distribution, over the sleep period,
of the dreams that include “diurnal rests.”
Noergy
disparities reflect not absolute but proportional disparities in resolution, as
shown by the common observation that the experiences that closely precede powerful
emotions, although acquired with unweakened noergy, are as likely to be
forgotten as those of the enthralling emotional event’s experiential margin,
which, instead, faded into “distraction” at acquisition time. They cause people awakened after having slept more than a very short while to
typically be unable to recall the last few minutes before they fell asleep, and also make
people prone to forgetting phone calls or exchanges they have had in the
middle of the night, or the alarm’s ringing in the morning if one went right
back to sleep after turning it off. Acquisition with decreased noergy is too
why, of the memories “diluted” by anterograde amnesia, no recovery is observed
similar to the gradual reinstatement of pretrauma memories common with retrograde
amnesia.
When
is Neuroactivity Non-Conscious?
By way of establishing mental contents, segments of neurodynamics became linked
– through, therefore, a psyche or existentiality functionally positioned in a
superior level of organic regulation, which addresses molarly its objects and
lets in semovience and tunable motivation – with the novelties from the
environment and other neuroactivities. At the same time, other segments of
neuroactivity remain just substratally connected, processed through microphysical
causality. In fact they evolved quite apart and upon parallel processes of
natural selection, a topic not studied in this article.
Brain-mind
relationships display a fundamental form of locality, which sets a foregoing
bearing on which neuroactivity might be experienced: while the electromagnetic
field is continuous all over nature (spatially, every physical field replet
orbem terrarum, or in modern terms it fills the whole universe), not all
minds react to a brain’s electrodynamic patterns (even when these patterns
become to structure the nonstructural, intonative reactions of some
existentiality’s experience). Only does so the mind or set of mental contents in which has become innerly diferentiated the particular psyche whose extramental immediacy is locally coupled to those electromagnetic patterns, on a determination more substantial and basic than these physical exchanges. For every psychism, therefore, all foreign
neuroactivity is forever nonconscious.
Yet,
even for this particular psyche, not all of the “local” neuroactivity specifies
new mental contents. Through reduction in the reactions’ force of imposition, a
variable amount of local neuroactivities is for her as much unconscious as it
is for all the minds circumstanced to different drifting localities (or
parcels) of the same field. This nonconscious condition is also to affect neuroactivity
by way of unsuitable transframings. Excessive “neglect”, preventing to demarcate
mental contents, is to happen when, in loosening up the brakening electrodynamically
forced onto the causal carriers which a psyche reacts to and where the psyche’s action
inserts itself in extramentalities (by loosening the electromagnetic
field absorption of their dynamical mass), the patterns that neuroactivity might
form (in the mentioned hysteresis losses of the brain electroactivity coupled
to the causal carriers) turn up transframed with a time dilation that so much
weakens the force of imposition, of the intonative reactions to these patterns
in the existentiality’s ontic consistency, that those intonative reactions
merely compound in the sensational background noise of this existentiality.
Neuroactivity
nonconscious by noergy unproductiveness may include many physiological
processes. Some of these, coming chiefly from genetic determinations,
participate in the determination of “instinctive behaviors” such as prey
capture, nesting, flying, and involved courtships that in many species may go
on without psychism. Others, in empsyched animals, come from the inner needs of
ongoing courses of action (such as the loss into inattention underwent by the
routine details of learned abilities, or by equilibration in “instinctive”
flying or walking) and from current stimuli (“tacit” processing).
Cerebral
architectures may optimize the addition, onto some regional function, of its
gnoseological apprehension with adaptive time acuity – or either, moving on a
workable physical range, may leave such cerebral operation uncharted in mental
differentiations, namely unsuspected by the psyche that senses and controls other
activities of the same brain: unbeknownst to the circumstanced existentiality.
The time dilation that when spread over the whole tissue knocks out noergy to
all of the brain’s possible productions is that of deep sleep. It is a ligamentum
sensus which nevertheless leaves for mentation all of the psyche’s availabilities
and her memories in the visio generalis – so one can explore them and, when in
some brain areas the time dilation comes closer to that of the awake state,
such exploration cannot help but reimagine them with aspects not very removed
from the ones which the episodes presented in awake life. In the middle of this
workable range, diverse levels of inattention are available to apply onto the
mental products of such cerebral operation.
In this
way, that is, spatially diversified as regard the transframing-inflicted
time resolution of its patterns, a great and variable deal of neuroactivity is
often nonconscious: it remains “unconscious” and, so, foreign to any
existentiality, not specifying new mental contents. Many electrodynamic
leakages from the functioning of intracerebral ganglia stay unrelated to the generation
of mental reactions. Other segments of neural processing induce low-noergy, unattended
sensoperceptions. A case in point, the control of low-frequency cortical
electrical activity by respiratory activity in a lizard, has been worked out by
De Vera et al. (2005 and previous
research work; cf. references
therein); the evidence is not at hand to enable determining whether or not
reactions to this induced activity are present to the experience of the incumbent
existentiality. Still other segments of neuroactivity induce, in the focus of
attention, sensoperceptions whether semoviently fancied or, instead, continuing
environmental causality (namely, sensorially acquired sensoperceptions).
How
are Memories Semoviently Recalled and Recognized as One’s Own? Situating in autobiographical context one’s memory of
an episode, whose reconstruction is being voluntarily “recalled,” means
semoviently arriving to focuse attention on the same possibility, of combining
equilibrable operations, which one had when the episode occurred. As Aristotle
(-384 to -322) described it in Perì Mnéemees
kaì Anamnéeseoos (“On Memory and Reminiscence”) 451b30, “When one wills
calling to mind, what one should do is this: one will try to obtain an
initiation of motion whose follow-up be the movement that he wishes to experience
again.”
One’s
conception of the results of such actions is the entirety of our concept of the
object, which even if unrepeatable as a unique biographical episode is to be
replicated in imagination, any number of times, just as defined by
one’s operatory possibilities that make its elements recognizable or
understandable for oneself. Hitherto my discussion of what is known in nature
considered intonations, which are mind reactions, and now I should put an important
addition in. Also
semovience is perspicuous: the will provides its own certainty. This is what
allows to mnesically sediment the patterns of our semovient actions.
The motor effort is grasped through an
inner immediate apperception: one’s causal act unfolds itself on
gnoseologically apprehended dimensions constitutive of its agent, that is, of
oneself. In our tradition’s view, this postdecisional apperception is that of a
reaction, which is unintonated or non-phenomenal (some also label it “nonsensory”)
as the enactment exhausts itself in the extramental act. When the causal
efficiency of the semovient action causes a modification in the hylozoic
hiatus, it directly enacts a real modification of the immediate circumstances
but not of the mind. We do not feel it. What thus we grasp is our having closed
a situation open-ended at its conditions. We react to our doing, not to its
outside-exhausted causal efficiency. The subjective evidence that semovience is
perspicuous includes, among the multifarious actions that one originates, the
production of our inner voice. In addition to subjective evidence, we objectively
observe that semovience is perspicuous in two situations. First, the knowledge
that animals developmentally gain become adequate to deal with extramentalities
(and thus the acquisition of this knowledge was evolutionarily
selected) and to successfully handle extramental causation, though this latter
eludes observers forever. Second, as François P.-G. Maine de Biran first observed, within the knowledges
that psyches or existentialities gain a quite exact line demarcates what there is of passive and of
active: habitual repetition contrasts the notices about psyches’ reactions and
the notices about psyches' actions. This turns particular procedures into particular memories.
Particular
memories, therefore, are particular procedures to generate the mentioned
meanings in the context of the biographical texturing of an existentiality’s ontological
consistency. Although procedures always differ, their meanings can be shared.
How to pinpoint at any later time, in order to reimagine some memory, which
these possibilities were?
These
operatory possibilities are of course filtered through the difference in time
resolution between the time acuity with which the episode was lived and the
time acuity which one is installed on at recall time. This filtering compels to
progress in imagination probing a range of such differences until one arrives
to reimagine the set of operatory possibilities established by the
sensoperceptual contents of such a past moment. This set provides the famous
“associative links” that glue special groups of interarticulated memories.
Sharing in relativistic dilation is thus an essential component of memories
“association.” Nothing to wonder about, actually, because the sharing is required
to spot, as a unique performance, the operations that constitute every calling
to mind.
These
grouped memory elements to be “associatedly” recalled share in the time acuity
under which their extramental occurrences had been resolved. This is why one
can arrive to recall a particular object that compounds in a past situation,
from the reconstruction of other elements in the situation’s group delineated
with its same relativistic dilation or, instead, contemporary elements
memorized from a different time acuity – but in the latter case an additional
operation is to be carried out.
The
additional operation should transform the original situation, e. g.,
into paying attention to components primitively unattended in the memorized
situation. One first reconstructs the biophysical time acuity in which one was
when one lived the episode to be recalled: for example, awake or asleep;
focusing on the episode’s accomplishment or only marginally attending it,
detached perhaps by grief; stuporose, or chemically influenced. Like moving a
finger, the semovient operation modifies the brain state. In the case of a
ground-gaining retrieval, it puts the brain into the states outlined below,
which the circumstanced psyche reacts to intonatively by imagining the autobiographical
episode. Then, within such a time acuity, one attentionally reclusters the elements,
regrouping them into new accidental units until finding some component of the
sought situation, thereby finding the operatory possibilities that define in it
the searched for memory.
These
operatory possibilities again become available as the object that they conserve
(the past situation) is reimagined. That is to say, the availing of this
particular set of operatory possibilities defines the searched-for memory and
such operatory definition squares with the “associated” context in the
time-resolution reference frame. This squaring of one’s sedimented
operationality with the reimagined elements (and not any special emotion
serving to tag recognition) is what provides recognition to the reimagined memory
as one’s own, namely that an episode is being imagined because it has already
been happening to one earlier: as a recall, then, and not as a fancy.
Definitely
such a resource is fallible. With a little experimental ingenuity it may be
cheated. Nevertheless, in evolutionarily typical situations it is reliable
since it depends on the real system of Piagetian-equilibrable operations built
by probing the reactions of similar situations to one’s semovience.
Yet, to be voluntarily recalled, biographical experiences must have been
sensed; but, had they been sensed with deficient force of imposition, they
could not inchoate their understanding in praxical terms. Put differently, had
they been originally sensed out of the focus of attention, their full categorization
by the concerned individual was hampered. This, later, hinders forever their
recall. Namely, for reimagining them, a large amount of operational
categorization is to be added that did not enter the original experiences and,
if at all appended, is rightly recognized as purely fanciful, or non-original.
This is why the head-concussion clinic shows, as mentioned, that in contrast with
the gradual reinstatement of pretrauma memories unrememberable as they fell in
the retrograde segment of amnesia, no recoveries are observed of the
experiences unrenewable as they came under the anterograde segment of amnesia.
Along
these lines, noergy enters in the conditions of possibility for recall. With
it, noergy brings in non-personal (or, mechanical) issues about time acuity. Before
lack of fine-enough time acuity lays sensed events into unresolvability,
subresolvability comes as noergy debilitation. The life experiences that one
leaves go past with such enfeebled impositive force – as forgettable, undealt
with minutiae out of the focus of attention – remain thus unrelated with the
biographical thread attended to. In other words, they remain deprived of the
workability hermeneusis: namely, of their noûs
poieetikós construal in terms of what one is capable of doing with them
through one’s own mental maturity and means at hand. This workability
hermeneusis would have been needed to categorize each of such lived experiences
in terms of one’s semovient operations which by enacting causally efficient
actions turn its schema cognoscible, so as to effortlessly localize it in the
simultaneized sequence of one’s past doings and, therewith, reimagine it in
voluntary recall.
Why is Sleeping Right After Learning Better for Retention than Remaining Awake? In sum, the organization of memories reflects the
reference frame in which the original experiences were lived. This reference
frame determined the time resolution of the referred-to extramental
occurrences. As shown by dissociative disorders and hypnotic suggestion as well
as regular experience, one can alternate recall from groups, for example, one
can pass from memories of awake life to memories of oneiric life. Yet this
passing is an additional operation – one not called for by the recalled content
itself.
Although
the pace of the observer’s “own time” - i.e., in any attentional state, the not intervalic but operational resolution of one's own operations after a psyche has become innerly differentiated into them, or textured by them; see below - never changes, oneiric experiences are lived on a time dilation (which stretches any observed outer intervals or
dilutes the pace of the observed extramental courses, including those of brain
processes) differing from that in awake state. So, regarding oneiric
experiences, a previous learning achieved in awake life (before leaving its
items aside the attentional focus, then going into more generalized inattention
and sleep, and then dreaming) remains in a different reference frame. Each reference
frame allows reimagining the experiences from the other frames with improper
noergy or force of imposition, namely unattended. Thus sleep prevents the
ensuing awake life from interfering – turning elusive the study materials
learned just before the sleep interlude – so much as the ensuing awake life
interferes on study materials learnt without sleep interlude. Whence people
tend to remember things better if they sleep after learning them.
This
occurs as interference affects organized and well-recognized contents but not
their brute mémoire or unrequested raw memory, a passive remembering in
which events come to mind unbidden, or intrusively. Retention and recognition
happen in such blocks, whose organizational schemes are operationally deployed
and need the said additional operation in order to integrate contents lived in
different frames. Or, memories are retained and recognized in blocks whose
compounding operations are grasped as a unified performance, and every block includes
the contents of experience had either in the focus of attention or, with less
operational recognition, outside it.
When the
recall is being done from the same original time dilation, these unrequested
contents may reappear as brute mémoire. (As explained above, the
unattended elements in it often become undistinguishable from fancy,
contaminating the recognition of the originally attended ones.) Similarly,
other contents fade away also in block. This makes the orientation reactions to
surprise and the background interceptions detrimental, causing the unexpected
failure to rediscover the thread of thoughts that a minute ago one was fluently
developing, a feature so much familiar to schizoids as affrighting for anxious
lecturers. Likewise, conversely, the better retention of materials studied
before sleeping builds on the lack of interference from the same motion frame.
Since recalling demands being made from a time dilation that matches the
original acquisition, any crossing the contents’ borders to include materials
from unattended sectors, or from oneiric experiences, demands from the
remembering person a special operation to transport the reimagining process
into the same reference frame in which the memories were originally made.
What
is Imparted When One Pays Attention to Something? That which is contributed is the operationalizing of
its sensations. In other words, one thereby applies, to a sector of one’s
sensory field, the acquired system of equilibrable operations sedimented in
one’s ontic-ontological consistency. This system allows to operationally
categorize sensory contents with some particular detail. This, in the case of
memories, is the mentioned workability hermeneusis, but applies also on
sensations stirred by the ongoing activity of the sense organs.
Such a
system of equilibrable operations, which one avails of all at once by their sedimentation
in one’s reality, integrates the current ontic-ontological consistency of the
circumstanced existentiality and makes known to her what she could do with the
entities referred to by those sensations. Instead, the sensations outside the
attended-to focus remain less detailedly categorized (namely, less “operationalized”),
although operationalizable, which means operationally categorizable.
This, had it taken place, would mean that these sensations were put into the
focus of attention and remain no longer in its fringe. Those sensations that
stay in the less operationally categorized fringe nonetheless receive a
preliminary, automatic categorical distinction as, without mental
discrimination, it is provided by nonconscious activity of neural analyzers,
but if the attentional focus never worked on them they stay as almost unretrievable
memories (anterograde amnesia). They are forgotten and, inasmuch as uncategorized
in operational terms, are almost unrememberable because cannot be defined and
identified in operational terms (infantile amnesia). Away of the current focus
of attention, this fringe is continuous with the availability of operationally
categorized rememberings that are to be localized in the quasi-spatial
distribution of acquired differentiations and, then, reimagined in voluntary
recall.
Does
the overlap of time resolutions automatically generate recall? No, because the evolutionarily selected development is
efficient and most psyches do not stay for long untextured. In most cases, before
long bodily interactions become functional, and the psyche starts to differentiate
her initiatives as linked with her reactive intonations arising at her
undergoing the surrounding’s feedback to such initiatives. (This feedback from the psyche's surroundings includes the bodily's feedback, as much early in maturational terms as in the fetal exploration of finger sucking in primates). So, with the
successive developmental periods, her living reality becomes differentiated
into the system of her possible, equilibrable semovient operations. The
structure of this system of operations establishes how she sees the sensations
being stirred by the surroundings and the sensations that she might herself
stir to reimagine her memories.
Had an
existentiality’s ontic-ontological consistency remained untextured (tabula
rasa, as the untextured condition
is traditionally referred to in Aristotelianisms and Philo), no possible
change in mental contents could arise from changing the magnitude of the time
acuity with which, at any rate, she (such a tabula rasa) could not
discern within herself anything in semovient-operational terms. In other words,
coarsening or either refining her time acuity (by way of varying the speed of
her moving operative localizations, as this speed is counted from some outer
reference frame) would not vary any experience (which always is experience of
changes in herself) referable to processes in the outer frame – because, this
existentiality still being a tabula rasa, such outer processes are not
yet reflected into her mental differentiations. She is already not-another
mind, i.e. not-another’s experiencing
reality, and is apt to sense and move, but stays sensibly as well as
intellectually undifferentiated. She not yet has acquired contents: no acquired
content contributes to her buildup.
Yet, with development, a mind’s
ontic-ontological consistency becomes textured into some particular shape. She
finds herself innerly “differentiated.” This differentiation in operational terms, or
intellectual differentiation or mind’s live texture, is supplied by the sequential
sedimentation of her past causal involvements (“biography”) whose experienced
reactions cannot elapse. Thus the experienced reactions of her past causal
involvements stay simultaneized (“memory”) while successively added with new biographical
experiences (Jakob’s frente matesomnémico
de registro; for didactics,
Jakob’s followers sometimes compare it with a – time-thin – onion nonetheless developing
its structure with leaves of diverse thickness). After such developmental
texturing comes about, it becomes possible for its causal-process acuity to
match or not to match the time acuity proper for referring a particular set of
mental differentiations to processes of biological relevance occurring in the
other reference frame.
In the
same way, the time acuity of the equilibrable operatory system might, or might
not, allow the application of the available semovient operations to the differentiations
that become revealed as the current time acuity varies. And the inchoate,
“embryonic” or very preliminary application of those semovient operations – with their
possible development in view – is what identifies, categorizes and recognizes all memories.
Thus a matching with the current time acuity does not mechanically generate
recall. It does this 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 in which at this time the existentiality’s
ontological consistency consists.
What is Voluntary Recall?
Voluntary or conative recall is the semovient act of retrieving a
particular memory originally acquired at a time in the past. On recognizing its
operational structure, such a memory is reimagined by setting up, the most
likely with intervention of the frontal lobes, a dynamic electroneurobiological
state whose tuning normally involves the hippocampi, the dorsomedial thalamic
nuclei, and other brain structures. These, if damaged or lost, might
occasionally be learnt to be replaced with other cerebral tracts, though less
efficiently and after hard exercitation.
The said
electroneurobiological state is first to match the time acuity which the memory
was originally experienced with, then to generate, in the circumstanced mind,
intonative reactions structured to match the particular memory as it was previously
identified in her visio generalis
(when selecting it for recall), then to modify the reimagination process upon
operative equilibria that conserve the particular memory as object of these
modifications, recognizable through them. Assuming that some pharmaceuticals have potential
effects and therapeutic use on learning and memory deficits is, thus, assuming
that those drugs may improve the brain control of the regional speeds of noematic
causal carriers, attenuating or protecting against the brain dysfunction – what
only improperly lets labeling those drugs “cognitive enhancers.”
Conative or
voluntary recall does not differ in enactive mechanism from the semovient act
of moving a finger, as we saw. Yet conative recall entails more complexity in the production of the physiological
conditions to handle the segment of the “bodily schema” that, through
sedimentation of the existentiality’s past causal involvements, includes the
relations of the mentioned particular memory with the remaining
differentiations (which comprise those of the finger) in the existentiality’s
experience-textured ontic-ontological consistency.
Through as yet unknown
mechanisms, injury to the hippocampi and dorsomedial thalamic nuclei is
observed to put new experiences into the fringe of low noergy, which comprises
the not-to-be-retained perceptions, such as the mentioned ones of passersby and
vehicles when one is driving. This allows the contemporary handling of these
experiences (thereby one steers clear of traffic accidents) while hindering
their subsequent recall (anterograde amnesia). It yet does not hinder that
other brain structures remain in conditions of generating, though multiple
combinations, the dynamic electroneurobiological state proper to reimagine the
memories that, in contrast, were originally acquired in the focus of attention
– thus shunning retrograde amnesia.
Retrograde amnesia, which
always is a failure in remembering the so-called long-term memories, instead
takes place when injury to less specific or architectonically more basic brain
structures disrupts the fine control of the electroneurobiological state’s
dynamics, preventing to set it up as to produce in the circumstanced psyche the
reactions recognizable as matching the visio
generalis of the particular memory sought to be reimagined. Short-term
memory does not require that the hippocampi, dorsomedial thalamic nuclei or any
related structures build a dynamic electroneurobiological state in reaction to
which the psyche reimagines an old memory, this being why the loss of both hippocampi
does not impair short-term memory.
As full, reviviscent recall is
reimagining, it involves both active and passive roles important to tell
between. Sensing is always passive, whether the intonative reaction underwent
by the psyche was caused by extramentality or by the psyche’s operations. And those
intellectual operations generating the brain states that intonatively flesh
such a mnesic reimagination are of course active, like those intellectual
operations generating a finger waving that makes some signal. The fact that the
gnoseological apprehension of these “of course active” operations is a noetic
act might mislead one into mistaking it as wholly active, while in fact it passively
undergoes being determined into cognoscitively apprehending some such
combination of operations (that generate a recall) rather than any other. Just as one may passively notice the involuntary growth of one’s hair, one also may
passively notice the effect on the brain of one’s voluntary acts. And, before
this effect on the brain is produced, one may passively notice the
yet-to-be-enacted operatory combination as one’s gnoseological object. This
apprehension is thus not the termination of the psyche’s act of shaping her
object, but another going through her being passively determined. Our psyche
mentally behaves as it was developmentally learnt through bodily behavior: as
she operatively shapes the mental content which she originates, she becomes
bound to understand it passively. In this act she ontically proportions itself
toward undergoing the intellection of her own act; in regard to this
intellection she is entirely passive, just as she also is in regard to any
sensation whether mentally or extramentally caused: she cannot cognoscitively
apprehend any other thing than what she really is to operate. This apprehension
is that of the operative sequence learnt as the one capable of shaping the
object, a shaping sequence that is apprehended as a whole and inasmuch as
repeatable: that is to say, inasmuch as reimaginable (“rememberable”) at any
time by repeating the whole sequence. It is thus noticed as able to put the
brain in states that produce the mental intonative reactions fleshing
sensorially the object (which may be a remembered episode, biographically
unique) without any loss of the said repeatability or generalization.
What is Gnoseological
Apprehension? The above outlined facts offer a stark contrast
with the Peripatetic understanding of knowledge as a sector of metabolism, a
view of knowledge that leaves aside both its cognizableness and this
cognizableness’ unbarterability. By its referring to different realities
through one broad term, this Aristotle-stemmed understanding is the source of
the familiar conflation of “knowledge” and “information.”
The Peripatetic tradition in
gnoseology understands “knowledge” as such acceptance in the knower – of the
“Form” supplying full inner-and-outer shaping or “conformation” to another
thing – that does not thereby trans-form the knower into the known
thing, an assimilation which instead occurs in other metabolic incorporations, for example,
as food becomes the fed organism. In this way, by knowing one escapes
transforming oneself into, say, apple in (just) becoming acquainted with an
apple, despite receiving in oneself the apple-forming Form. This standing back,
or ability to receive the Form yet escaping the pernicious transformation that
it might otherwise bring about, is knowledge’s distinctive feature in the
metabolic descriptions of the Peripatetic tradition. It includes a vigorous
branch of Scholastics active since the thirteenth century and non-confessional
scholars such as Maturana, Varela, and followers who call knowledge “cognition”
and conflate it with “life.” Clearly this classical, informatic conception of
knowledge as a biological topic (“Biologie de la Connaissance”) neither
intends nor approaches the issue of what the gnoseological apprehension is; that is, what the cognoscitive event or noetic act does itself consist in.
As a result, the Peripatetic
understanding of knowledge has been extremely valuable as a conceptual tool,
precisely because it applies to non-empsyched organizations such as the sensitive
soul of corals and worms, or the compliant mutual accommodation
of the “castes” of eusocial insects, as well as to the mental contents differentiated
by existentialities and, also, to the informatic content of data processing
machines – whose conceptual developments have been of particular importance to
our current life style. “Knows,” so, means that some passive entity, which may
or may not be an existentiality, “acquires notices” or “gets informed.” Yet
this Peripatetic-derived metabolic conception of knowledge, despite
its soundness and worth for specific uses, leaves aside what precisely matters
for understanding knowledge in both ontic and existential terms. This
relinquishing squares with the conflation of nonempsyched organisms and circumstanced
existentialities in the Peripatetic concept of sensitive soul.
In actual fact, when
nonempsyched realities “acquire notices” or “get
informed” there is shaping, or conformational action, but not gnoseological
apprehension. In contrast, the acts of knowledge elicited by circumstanced existentialities, or gnoseological apprehension
found in nature, apply onto the reactive intonation and unintonated
proportioning of these very circumstanced existentialities. Gnoseological apprehension
can operate, that is, can intellectually get the change in mental
contents, without using the operatory understanding – an avenue that yields the
“nude” intonation. Yet there are others. The differentiations or mental
contents of all the circumstanced existentialities are made up of structureless
elements coming from this sensational intonation, plus structural elements; the latter come from the gnoseological apprehension and intrinsic observability of one’s
efficient actions in context or from the neurobiological distribution that
brings the said sensational intonations about. Thereby semovient observers who
distinguish, among a diversity of previously met structureless variations, such
a structureless reactive intonation of themselves and its structure-generating
boundaries, may developmentally learn to recognize and directly intend the
extramentalities whose interaction causally-efficiently enacts a particular set
of those intonations.
To barely hint a key point:
this application of the knowing act can take place because time does course for
structurally-reacting causal exchanges but does not course for structurelessly-reacting
ones. The causal exchanges yielding structural reactions, say the collisions
and relocation of sand grains under a blowing wind, transform things in
extramental dispersivity; such causal exchanges do this by spatially
translocating or reshaping things (i. e., reshaping situations or
reshaping these things) as the previous state of affairs loses all actuality because
the discrete carriers of causal action become such effect themselves. The
resulting state of affairs, so, still keeps causal efficiency to nomically
continue the causal series. Instead the causal exchanges yielding structureless
reactions intonate existentialities. These causal exchanges modify the
structureless intonations in existentialities who differentiate those intonations
and whose sequences of modifications do not lose actuality, a state of affairs
that does not keep any causal efficiency to continue a causal series. As
empirically found, therefore, the sensible gnoseological apprehension – that is,
the act of knowing what is sensed, or sensory noetic act – is thus the feature
of efficiently causal interactions whereby the enacted structureless reactions
intonate the reacting entity on ranges whose manifestation exhausts the causal
efficiency. And the non-sensible or intellectual gnoseological apprehension is
ontically the same with the sole difference that no specific intonation gets
made to phenomenize.
Assuming
a plausible understanding of causation, how can privately accessible mental
events cause or be caused by non-privately accessible physical events? This question is the causal
relationship’s one, the issue that bears on the interaction between mental and
physical events. “Physical” in this corny
dichotomy should only mean everything whose causal courses run on discreteness
of efficient action, a feature not
expressed by the term “mental.” Yet it is not difficult to see how mental
events, despite their being unlocated and often unformable (shapeless) in the
space of the laboratory as well as lacking in size and mass, could nonetheless
cause or be caused by extramentally spatial physical events located and possessed
with mass-energy. How can they interact? A short answer is: not through their
ontological condition, but through their ontic consistency – which phenomenisms
are steadfastly purposed to snub. Let me spell it out here.
Privately accessibility or lack of it are unrelated
with the performance of this causal process. More to the point, observation
shows extramental space’s derivativeness. It is observed in the formation of
new space in preexisting extensions of older space, a process now thought to
occur everywhere, as well between galaxies as inside our brain and body – themselves
more than 99.999999999 percent empty space. The basic physical determinations
that generate space appear as unlocalizable
and, as a rule, the origin of actions results unlocalizable in space: as well
for extramental changes coming from psyches as for those coming from any physical
field. No source of efficient causality is confinable to a spatial location.
These determinations not even
run on discreteness of efficient action, so that in the present state of the
science one must say that the eclosion of every physical subparticle is not
physical itself, at least if one wishes to keep in the sentence the same
meaning for both uses of “physical”; a related point is familiar in big-bang
discussions. (Big bang, a key concept in cosmological theories that aspire to
model the astrophysical evolution and detected expansion of the observable
universe, is a swift outflow of all its material – unpacking it from a teensy,
physically minimal dot of the heaviest, physically maximal density and largest
energy – that while evolving generates space, whether or not amid preexisting space as we nowadays observe, and so provides itself with the
room to bloat.) What psyches or existentialities do, in establishing the local potentials of the
field whose carriers psyches utilize as the first causal link for triggering the
sequence of nomic extramental effects, is the same that fields do when from an
unlocalizable set of determinations they make themselves or another segregated
field to eclose more, or either less, of its force carriers at every spot of
volume, thereby changing the spatial distribution of their local potential.
In this
way all interactions occur. Therefore, mind-brain interaction is by no means
more thorny or problematic than the field generation of variations in local
potentials; the latter simply is still less well known in brain-mind studies.
And the reverse process, not yet more familiar in physics studies, is also
illustratively observed in the said brain-mind research: as commented above,
extramental causal efficiency is found to work out in psychisms just intonative
reactions, not causing psychisms – whose sole operative presence is spatially localized – to be affected in such
a way as to instrumentally transmit the extramental efficiency with mechanical
effects. As an aftermath, the space localization of minds (not of psyches'
local causal exchanges with extramentality, that is, the places of
termination where a psyche’s causal action inheres in extramentality, also called the presence
of her immediate operation, or operative presence; but, the space localization of the ontic consistency of mental contents, which always are acquired differentiations of a certain psyche) as well as the space localization of the field determinations that
cause every virtual or real elementary particle to materialize where it in fact
ecloses, is inexistent. Both of them occur foregoing the conditions that make
space eventuate. The really problematical issue is why an existentiality or psyche ecloses to sense and move her brain rather than another.
What
is restored on recovery from ordinary sleep, hibernation, general anesthesia,
“absence,” fainting, comas, or vegetative states? A pair
of essential components of every psyche cannot be supplied by the brain that becomes
hers (rather than availing, instead, to another person). Namely,
for every subjective existence, psyche, or personal existentiality found in nature,
her ontic consistency and her cadacualtez (defined hereafter) cannot be provided
by the brain itself or by its functioning.
Her
ontic consistency, that is every psyche’s semovient-sensing makeup, is the extramental
actuality availed by each personal existence. This extramental actuality is
also availed by her intramentality which – finite existentialities being plural and their
respective actions being kept mutually apart by extramentalities – never
relinquishes its extramental condition and could never exhaust itself in sheer
appearing or phenomenicity (as, in contrast, phenomenisms assert, true to their
onticity-emptying belief that psyches and mental contents are, by definition,
only and no more than subjective).
In turn,
her cadacualtez manifests itself as the constitutive determination of each
finite existentiality to both causally affect and be causally affected by no other parcel
of nature – namely, such and such a brain and its bodily and outer
circumstances – than the parcel that, because of this determination, acquired
the status that is called “her.” It prevents pronouncing psyches “productive
creations” whether of the mere complexity (hodologies) or the mere simplicity
(immateriality). The bodily dispositions that enable her body to stay empsyched
by an existentiality (aliveness), or prevent it (death of that body), cannot discriminate between
existentialities. Yet the neurodynamical patterns arising from anatomofunctional
complexity, supplied by differential recruitment of elementary (molecular)
neurobiological mechanisms, when they get eventually transduced into potentials
of the immediately reactionable-to field, do not indiscriminately enter
experience.
They do
not do it except if they belong with the brain organ that the experience of
the case is circumstanced to, whose actions in turn work on no other organ to
start extramental causal chains. It it thus apparent that, even apart from (i.
e. not counting, and refraining from considering) the nomic causal
interactions involving body as well as mind which consistently vary the
elements composing their successive states, existentialities or psyches are in no way unrelated to
their respective bodies. In fact, sustaining this relationship, rather than
enacting some executable/forbearable operation involving psychosomatic
concourse, is the primary act of every body that might be empsyched (see
Ávila and Crocco 1996.) In other words, cadacualtez is one’s determination as
not-another enabling one to sustain constitutive causal exchanges with a fixed
parcel of nature, rather than one’s existentiality having, instead, eclosed to
any other constitutive brain or circumstance. Its observation shows that
everything is not made of the same set of truly elementary types of components, as a
giant meccano.
In the
outlined context, all these particulars afford important insights for clinical
practice. They are especially notable in regard to one of the central issues in
the neurobiology of the (so-called) impaired consciousness. There, the outlined
factual landscape is not consistent with the envisaged strategy of “activating
engrams.”
But
engrams are an ideological fact, not a scientific fact. Such engrams are
notional creatures, belonging in the Æschylus-Plato fantastic view of memories
as extramental sources of mental retention. On account of engrams, the causal
continuity of two facts of an individual’s experience, namely any original
experience and its later remembering, is attributed to an intervention external
to the experience so as to elude recognizing, to the individuals’ experience,
efficient causal aptitude to operate by itself, specially in time. Engrams are
thus “bodily impressions” envisioned as tagged extramental settings of mental
data, stored out of the mind – a nonsemovient mind whose ontology, thanks to
the engrams’s purifying role, remains unspoiled with sensual and contingent
experiences.
Engrams
are variably imagined, as complete material traces to realistically reproduce
the original experience, for example by Plato (-427 to -347), or as
fragmentary functional ones to reconstruct it, if somehow confusely. The latter
is the case of, for instance, Descartes (1596-1650) and Malebranche
(1638-1715), who viewed memories as patterned motions of animal spirits through
brain pores, later reenacted though running the risk of mutual interference.
Engrams, however, are always impersonal and intrinsically unrelated to one’s
developmentally acquired systems of equilibrable semovient operations.
These
engrams etched and re-sketched on the brain do not exist. It does not matter if
their nonexistence flabbergasts some neuroscientists in cultures whose science,
commonsense, and language expressions assumed their reality for at least three millennia.
Engrams are a purely fictional concept. It is conclusively shown by the
amnesiacs’ recuperations, which are incompatible with a
“data-losing-and-recovering” naive construal of autobiographical memories as
foreign to one’s particular set of choices for equilibrable semovient operations.
Engrams
not even could exist, since memories (rather than the non-memorizable series of
extramental events, whose causation is too tight to be usefully memorized)
acquire their “coarse graining,” and on it their forms recognizable in terms
of one´s possible operations, from the
dilation of the (otherwise unresolvable) sequence of their causal making. This
sequence is stretched by the very relativistic transframing that
provides biologically adaptive acuity to the depiction of their episodes. Only
in this way can episodic and praxical memories be availed in minds’ ontology,
namely in the ontic consistency or extramental actuality of each personal
existence, where those mental contents inhere. Rememberings cannot linger in the brain “stored” as “data,” namely
in the condition in which their episodes occurred before their sequence was
transframed, because their transframing is unrepeatable: it occurs as each
segment of a biographical sequence comes about, and thus takes place just on
one occasion for each remembered episode.
Memories
or rememberings thus differ from and contrast with their mnesic reimagination,
an ability to reconstruct them as cerebrally provided present sensations and,
so, profit by their modifiability and ensuing capability of generating new
experiences, in turn memorizable. (Mnesic reimaginations also differ from every
other new sensation in that their apperception preexists rather than follows
their arrival on the scene.) This ability, like flying and deep diving, was
probably selected on Earth a number of times – although it took a paleontologically
recent part in the natural selection of the psychological governance of
cerebral performance.
Such a
brain-depending ability – mente fingere
per cerebrum – makes a significant contrast with memories. While the
preservation of memories is an effect of the absence of time course, their
modifiable reimagining exploits the presence of brain structures. Thus this
issue of “impaired consciousness,” for clinical practice, amounts to controlling
the tissue’s electroneurobiological activity that gates the proper acuity, so
“coupling” or “switching on” the body in order to “awaken” the finite psyche
who – on other grounds – remains incumbent rather than any other.
Notes
The author heartily thanks
to Mario Crocco, who contributed to our tradition the original
discoveries in relativistic biophysics and neurobiology of memory, attention,
and sleep referred to in this essay, as well as to Antoine Courban MD,
Anatomy Dept., St. Joseph University in Beirut (Lebanon), for their revision of
the piece and editing of my concepts; an earlier version was revised by Paul
Bains of Murdoch University (Australia). I remain most grateful for
their intelligent analyses and valuable remarks; any conceptual wrongdoing
perpetrated with them is of course mine. Several sections of the text are
borrowed with autorization from classroom materials by Prof. Crocco. An earlier
version of this essay, including further topics, was prepared in December 1999
for a seminar. It was presented in March 2000 at the Hellenic-Argentinian
Meeting of Psychiatry organized by the Hellenic Psychiatric Association jointly
with the Asociación Argentina de Psiquíatras, and thereafter (April 20, 2000)
communicated to the National Academy of Sciences of the Argentine Republic.
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Short Source List
on the Argentine-German neurobiological tradition
Ávila,
Alicia, and Crocco, Mario (1996), Sensing:
A New Fundamental Action of Nature (Folia Neurobiológica
Crocco,
Mario, Alicia Ávila, Luis Roberto Pache and Mariela Szirko (1996), “The ciliary
stage in the phylogeny of neurocognitive physiology,” I (XI) Megdunarodnoe Soveschanie I Shkola Po Evolutionnoi Fiziologii,
April 22-26; Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Evolutionary Physiology
and Biochemistry, Saint-Petersburg, Russia.
Crocco,
Mario (1963), “La cilia de las neuronas centrales, reliquia
Crocco,
Mario (1971) “Filogénesis de los mecanismos intraencefálicos de posicionamiento
objetal,” communication to the Asociación Argentina para el Progreso de las
Ciencias (pr. D. Goytía, August) and the National Council of Scientific &
Technical lnvestigations, Presidency of the Nation, Argentine Republic (February
1972).
Crocco,
Mario (1976), U. K. Patent 1.582.301,
filed 16 February; available in U. K. Official Journal – Patents, 7 January
1981.
Crocco,
Mario (1988), “Struggling against time: The folk precedents of modern science’s
mathematizing tradition and the differentiation of the Pythagoric-Parmenidean
worldview”, Folia Neurobiológica Argentina VI, 12-76.
Crocco,
Mario, and Contreras, Norberto (1986), “Oscuridades, enigmas, y el aporte
fundamental de Ricardo Sudnik (1880/4) en el origen de la neurobiología argentina,”
La Semana Médica 168, # 5376 (12
March 1986); “El contexto histórico y los descubrimientos de Alberto Alberti en
las localizaciones cerebrales,” La Semana Médica 168, # 5378 (5 April 1986), 217-230; “Andrés Francisco Llobet y
Christofredo Jakob en la primigenia neurobiología argentina,” La Semana Médica 168, # 5380 (5 May 1986); the series
was summarized as “Alberto Alberti: 1883, el primer mapeo con electricidad en
todo el mundo – durante ocho meses! – de un cerebro humano consciente,
realizado en San Nicolás, Provincia de Buenos Aires,” 1994 Buenos Aires City
Historic Institute Congress on “La Modernidad” (Buenos Aires City Government,
in print).
Jakob,
Christfried (1900), Curso de neurobiología - Año lectivo 1900, Hospicio de las
Mercedes (now Hospital Borda,
Jakob,
Christfried (1906, 1907, 1908), “Localización del alma y de la inteligencia,”
El Libro (
Jakob,
Christfried (1910), “La célula cortical en la locura, Segunda Parte,” Anales de
la Administración Sanitaria y Asistencia Pública de Buenos Aires, p. 263.
Jakob,
Christfried (1911a), Das Menschenhirn.
Eine Studie über den Aufbau und die Bedeutung seine grauen Kerne und Rinde (J.
F. Lehmann’s Verlag, München).
Jakob,
Christfried (1911b), Vom
Tierhirn zum Menschenhirn, I Teil: Tafelwerk nebst Einführung in die Geschichte
der Hirnrinde (J. F. Lehmann’s
Verlag, München).
Jakob,
Christfried and Onelli, Clemente (1913), Atlas
Jakob,
Christfried (1915-1918), Tratado de Biología General y Especial para el uso de la enseñanza elemental,
secundaria y superior en la República Argentina, vols. I (Kraft,
Buenos Aires, 1915, pp. 1-650) and 2 (Fascicles I-IV, 1917-1918, pp. 651-854:
Kraft, Buenos Aires, y Revista del Jardín Zoológico, separatae)
Jakob,
Christfried (1918), “Del mecanismo al dinamismo del pensamiento,” Anales de la
Facultad de Derecho, University of Buenos Aires, XVIII, 195-238.
Jakob,
Christfried (1922), “Del Tropismo a la Teoría General de la Relatividad,” Humanidades
(
Jakob,
Christfried (1923), Elementos de Neurobiología - Vol. I - Parte Teórica (Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la
Educación,
Jakob,
Christfried (1935), “La filogenia de las kinesias: sobre su organización y dinamismo
evolutivo,” Anales del Instituto de
Psicologia de la facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de
Jakob,
Christfried (1941), Neurobiología General (Primera parte de Elementos de
Neurobiología, pp. 1-213 texto), Folia Neurobiológica Argentina I,
chapter five, “La Organización de las Funciones Conmemorativas.” (A previous
version of this chapter appeared as “Sobre las bases orgánicas de la memoria,”
Revista de Criminología, Psiquiatría y Medicina Legal XXII, 84-117, 1935.)
Jakob,
Christfried (1939-1941) El cerebro humano (Atlas): I, Su anatomía sistemática y topográfica:
II, Su filogenia y ontogenia, III, Su anatomía patológica en relación con la
clínica (pp. 1-1364) (López,
Jakob,
Christfried (1932-1944), Die Apotheose der Null. Ein Zyqlus vom Locus Pictus
von Dr. Aussenseiter (Verlag
Stammtisch „Alte Knochen,” Buenos Aires 1932 - Nachdruck unter Quellenangabe
gestattet): Zur Psychologie, Zur Philosophie, Moderne Weise, Lenini divini
cerebralis pastae Lymnus, Freud’sche inspirationem, Inter Faeces et Urinas nascimur,
Zur Psychopathologie, etc.; Die Apotheose des Unendliches. Exlibus et copiss
Dr. Aussenseiter (Verfasser der «Apotheose der Null,” Buenos Aires,
1944): Vom Genius der Welt (1. Teil), An Goethe: Der Wahrheit Wertung, An
Schiller: Die Erschaffung der Welt, Der Tronador, Erdemlos und Himmelschilfe,
Das Weltgericht, Bergopfer, An den Genius der Welt (II. Teil).
Jakob,
Christfried (1946), Documenta Biofilosófica (Folia Neurobiológica
Jakob,
Christfried (1946), “El trígono cerebral. Su significación neurobiológica (vía
central eferente para la musculatura lisa víscerovascular de la esfera gnósica
emotiva),” Revista Neurológica de Buenos Aires 11, 2-21.
Jakob,
Christfried (1945) “El yacaré (Caiman
latirostris) y el origen
Jakob,
Christfried and Copello, Andrés R. (1948), “La psicointegración introyento-ambiental
orgánica y sus problemas para la neuropsiquiatría y psicología (Primera parte:
Su filogenia constructiva),” Revista Neurológica de Buenos Aires XIII # 3, 63-79.
Jakob,
Christfried and Pedace, E. A. (1949), “La misión
Jakob,
Christfried and Copello, Andrés R. (1949), “La cuantificación neuronal de la
región límbica en su relación con la esfera introyental-afectiva,” Archivos de
Neurocirugía, 475-482.
Orlando,
Jacinto Carlos (1964), “Sobre el cerebro visceral; documentación histórica de
una prioridad científica,” Revista Argentina
de Neurología y Psiquiatría 1, 297-201.
Petrolli,
Giovanni (1989), “Da Aldeno all’Argentina, uno scienziato dimenticato, Alberto
Alberti: Intuí e studió la complessitá
Petrolli, Giovanni
(2001), Alberto
Alberti, neurochirurgo ítalo-argentino (Edizioni Stella,
Nicolodi Editore, Roveretto, Italia).
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SOCIOLOGÍA DE LAS NEUROCIENCIAS
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Metaphors at odds in conceiving organismal-societal government: The Political Structure of the Brain: Cerebral Localization in Bismarckian Germany (English)
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ELECTRONEUROBIOLOGÍA
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SUMARIO Y PÁRRAFOS INICIALES EN CASTELLANO
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Cálculo de potenciales dentro de las células
Calcule intensidades eléctricas y magnéticas en cada compartimiento neuronal: The nervous principle: active versus passive electric processes in neurons (Explains how to calculate electric and magnetic field strengths inside different neuronal compartments) (LONG FILE IN ENGLISH with Bulgarian, Russian and Spanish abstracts/TOCs)
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NOCIONES GENERALES
Conceptos:
Comentando una "ilusión óptica" / Commenting an "optical illusion": A visual yet non-optical subjective intonation: una entonación subjetiva visual pero no óptica (English and Spanish)
Historia de las experimentaciones:
Table of Contents (partial) of "Sensing: a new fundamental action of nature" (English) -- Índices
Recepción de los aportes de Chr. Jakob en la neurobiología germana
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Recepción de los aportes de Chr. Jakob en la neurobiología y la sociedad argentina
Piva y Virasoro - Christofredo Jakob, neurobiólogo: científico en diálogo filosófico (Spanish)
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Panorama evolutivo:
FILOSOFÍA DE LA CIENCIA - CONCEPTO DE TIEMPO EN NEUROBIOFÍSICA
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RESUMEN DIVULGATORIO Y PARA ESTUDIANTES EN CASTELLANO
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“ANTAGONISMO ENTRE CIENCIAS DURAS Y HUMANIDADES BLANDAS”
MALFORMACIONES Y PAPEL DEL ÓRGANO CEREBRAL
Christofredo Jakob: “Los Monstruos Anencéfalos” (Spanish)
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BIOÉTICA
Éthique de la Bio-Éthique (français) ¡Nuevo!
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EL PRESUNTO DUALISMO CUERPO - ALMA
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PSICOANÁLISIS Y FACILITACIóN PSICOSOMÁTICA DE LA ENF. DE ALZHEIMER
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PERICIAS JUDICIALES Y CASUÍSTICA
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NUESTRA GENTE
Reseña biográfica: Ramón Carrillo, el Gran Sanitarista Argentino (Spanish)