I read this book a couple of months ago and I thought it was a very easy read for dealing with some rather difficult mathematical topics. According to Walling and Hicks, conscious experience as we know it phenomenologically is correlated with having an EEG whose electrical activity is characterized as having a 3+D attractor in its mathematical phase space. Added to this interpretation is a discussion about the importance of the gamma brain wave being of sufficient power and frequency to chunk our perceptual snapshots into a continuous stream of conscious awareness. All in all, this is a very empirical account of consciousness, studying it from a material/structural perspective.
One thing I wonder about though is how well the observations of humans under anesthesia apply to consciousness as we see and understand it through other information sources. I'm currently reading James Carpenter's book
First Sight, in which he describes the construction of conscious awareness in terms that are more functional than structural. He describes 4 processes, which he names colloquially the prophet, the artist, the scientist, and the person of ordinary consciousness. Working backwards:
D. (Ordinary Consciousness) I see X (an attributed understanding of an experience) and I think about it.
C. (Scientist) Prior to that, I experience a collection of sensations that I attempt to construe.
B. (Artist) Prior to that, sensations register subliminally.
A. (Prophet) Prior to that, an extrasensory anticipation of the event (or a psychokinetic elicitation of the event) initiates the perceptual process.
A great deal of the work of experimental psychology has focused on the processes at step Scientist, how perceptions occur and how they come to be understood. Psychologists studying subliminal perception or "perception without awareness" (PWA) added the preconscious step Artist to the cognitive account. The findings of parapsychologists add step Prophet. In the genesis of a perception, each step links to the next and orients it in a halpful way. Think of these as different parts of a person playing different roles all communicating quickly and efficiently: we might speak colloquially of an inner Prophet, Artist, Scientist, and Person of Ordinary Consciousness. The Prophet (A) knows something is coming, the Artist (B) has a sense of something interesting, the Scientist (C) sees a collection of facts and tries to form an understanding of it, and the Person of Ordinary Consciousness (D) sees X -- all in a fraction of a second.
Pairing this with Gordon Whitehead's process philosophy, construing all things (extant entities, also called actual occasions) as a function of mind, I am pressed to wonder how much of this applies to these entities, and how they differentiate according to Density.
Take 3D for example. According to Walling and Hicks, conscious experience as we know it phenomenologically is correlated with several physical events (+3D attractor, high gamma power). This level of awareness fits squarely with D and C (Ordinary Consciousness and Scientist). Other animals (such as an author's pet dog) were observed to fulfill the requirements of this higher level of consciousness, although humans when performing demanding tasks still out-competed the dog.
Having an EEG attractor of ~2.5D was correlated with delirium, where a person may grasp certain perceptions subliminally, but can't really compose a definite experience out of it the way an attractor of a higher dimension could. I wonder how well this correlates to a 2D experience of the universe, where you have a vague homeostatic awareness (think Strange Order of Things) that constitutes the bulk of an organism's experience, on top of which a more sophisticated neuromuscular system may be built in. Even the distinction pointed out in Strange Order of Things between emotions and feelings points to emotions being more primal, deeper processes (B and A) while feelings are more immediate perceptions (C and D).
My memory fails me now, but I seem to recall someone (I think it was A.I.) mentioning some theory that electrical activity in the brain may operate more to constrain or channel the flow of psychic energy (for lack of a better term) into into a coherent perceptual chain of awareness with definite aims and ends. If 1D matter exits purely only to reflect back what consciousness perceives of it, or "assume form," from the perspective of the above and the notion of electrical activity as constraining the scope of preconscious prehensions (
weighing the material as important or unimportant and
signing the material as a worthy object of focus or unworthy object of focus), then it makes sense that it has no electrical activity distinct from its own external electrochemical concretizations/behavior. This gives it freedom to the point of appearing to behave randomly according to science, but leaving the door open for it to be assembled and organized by information from higher densities.
This is my own rudimentary attempt to synthesize some of the information from Whitehead's process philosophy,
Consciousness: Anatomy of the Soul, and Carpenter's
First Sight book.
It's more or less an open secret that materialistic science has no explanation for consciousness, other than to explain it away or dismiss it outright. Reading some of these books, and trying to see how well it maps to what we observe objectively in parapsychology, our own experience of awareness, and the design/high strangeness component of life and its purpose, it's pretty clear to me we've only barely begun to scratch the surface.