By Dr Simon Robin.

Part 2: Qualities.

Part 3: Observation.

Part 4: Time.

Part 5: Other contents of Experience.

Part 6: Mind.

Our Reality

Most of us know that the world is not much like what we see, hear and feel. The world itself beyond our body is different from our sensations.  Our sensations are used to locate and describe objects in the world but they are different from those things. 

The things in our experience are not only different from the actual objects around us but they are arranged differently.  A tree usually appears to us as a tree-like image in a view but we know that a tree itself is a collection of atoms at a particular place in the world.  The tree-like image in our experience has an entirely different arrangement from the trees themselves because the image in our experience only has one side and occurs in a peculiar arrangement of things that we call a "view".

It is astonishing that the majority of philosophers and neuroscientists have convinced themselves that there can be no images in the brain despite the evidence of their own experience.  This false belief is responsible for the lack of progress in explaining our reality.

Our experience "of the world" is information about the world that is built into a useful model.  In other words our Experience is a virtual reality, a model, based on the world around us.  This model is our mind and our sensation.  It spreads out its content of sights, feelings, thoughts etc. in what appears to be some sort of space and time in our brains. Everything we currently experience is in our Experience.  When we move the model of our body in our Experience our actual body moves in the world around us.

The model extends through time.  It allows us to hear whole words and bars of tunes.  It is this extension in time that allows the model to experience itself.  The extension in time connects each object in Experience to the whole of Experience and the whole of Experience connects to each object.  This page becomes an immediate part of the whole of your current Experience, now. 

Our Experience contains a model of the world.  All that we know now is our current Experience and this is located in our bodies, in our brains.  From our perspective the function of our bodies is to maintain our Experience.  Our Experience is the end point of what our bodies do.  This might sound esoteric but just look and walk around, what is happening is your Experience.  The continuance of this is what your body does.  Our primary choice is to nurture the form of our Experience, to choose between chaos and calm, love and hate.

This is investigated in depth below.

Where in the world is our Experience?

If we have a sound, sight or smell it exists while it is happening but where is it happening?

Most people assume that when they look at a page of text they are seeing the page directly.  That the image they see is on the page.  If this were true then how do the grey dots where the black lines cross in the image below get seen as "on" the page?

Of course, the grey dots are created by your brain (CNS) and are not actually on the page outside your body.  If the grey dots are not on the page then where are the black lines? It is most likely that the lines in our Experience are information about the lines on the physical page and are also held in the brain like the dots. This may seem a minor point but if we are looking at a mental copy of the page held in some way in the brain rather than what is directly on the page there are serious consequences.

Here is another example of something that is not actually on the page outside your body, or is it?

All the horizontal lines in the image are parallel to each other on the physical page so where are the lines that we actually have in our Experience? In our “minds”?  Where is that?

In reality there are four concentric circles in the image below:

Look at the image obliquely to confirm that the image on the page outside your body has four concentric circles on it. 

We have events in our Experience that do not correspond exactly to events in the world outside our bodies.  As scientists we are not entitled to declare that these events can be dismissed as "just" illusions because almost everything in our Experience is like that - there is no pain in a stubbed toe, the pain happens in Experience and even colours and sounds occur as waves in the world outside our bodies that are different in many ways from the colours and sounds in Experience.

But where in the world are these mental images of spirals? Let’s take a look. We will find that our Experience is in our brains and our brains are far more subtle than we currently understand.

(There is a theory that we do not really have any content in Experience, See Appendix for how "Illusionism" is now known to be false).

How do we see anything?

The sight of the page in front of you is a visual image. It is called a ‘visual image’ because there appears to be an image in front of your eyes.  Images are not found everywhere, we have to use a lens or a pinhole to create an image on a sheet of paper.  We can see this is true when we pick up a white piece of paper and hold it up to the light , it has no images on it.

Lenses make images by redirecting and selecting light.  Without lenses or pinholes the light that is reflected from the objects around us goes everywhere and ends up as the plain white light reflected from a sheet of paper.

Our visual image is projected onto our retinas by lenses.  The images on our two retinas are slightly different because each eye has a different view. The images on the retinas are also upside down.

It is hard to believe, but a lot of people have never noticed that when they look through one eye they get a slightly different image compared with when they look through the other eye. If we open both eyes and apply slight pressure to the side of an eyelid it is possible to see the single image break into two overlaid images. As these images rejoin on the release of pressure any differences are merged.

The retina is actually an extruded part of the central nervous system and so we must either accept that our visual image is somewhere in our brain or declare that we are blind.

We can check that our eyes have different images by holding a finger up to this page about 20 cm in front of the nose and looking at the page, first through one eye then the next. If we do this manoeuvre we notice that the image of our finger jumps from one place to another relative to the page. Try doing this now. Place a finger 20 cm in front of your nose and look at the page through one eye then the next. The image of the finger jumps because it is different from one eye to another.

If the images in each of our eyes are different then what does a finger look like when seen through both eyes at the same time? If we keep our finger in place, 20 cm from our nose, then look at the page with two eyes we will find that the image of the finger goes transparent. We can still read the text of this page looking through the finger. Bits of text that are covered by the finger when viewed from one eye are "filled in" using text from the image in the other eye. This shows that what we see as a visual image is made further back in our brain than our eyes because the whole image is not to be found in either eye. Neither eye contains an image with all of the text present and neither eye contains an image of a transparent finger!

Our visual image is in our brain. At this stage some people might think “I am only imagining my visual image, it is an illusion” but nowadays we have all seen television cameras and the images they make on screens so the idea that our eyes act as video cameras that gather images that are processed and displayed elsewhere should not surprise us. That what we see is not directly the things we sense should be expected. Our visual images are no more to be dismissed as illusions than the image on a video screen. If you were using a video camera to monitor the world around about, you would not say that the video image on the screen is “just an illusion”, its an image, a bit like our visual image.

The image in our Experience is bright and dull, has colours and its parts occur simultaneously, being laid out as if seen from a point. I am using the word "Experience" because the image, the observation point, the colours etc. all compose a special form, a geometry, Experience is a geometrical form.

Somewhere in our brains there are some physical events that create the geometry of stuff laid out around a point (the viewing point) and with all of the image present simultaneously. We cannot see anything flowing into the apparent central point, it is just a point that visual stuff surrounds. Nothing flows into the point.  That is what it is like, we might argue that it is not really like that or quibble over words like "simultaneous" but our Experience is as described above.

There is no accepted scientific theory of Experience.  Terms such as "emergentism" are expressions of this lack of a theory.  One day there will be a theory.

But is the visual image imaginary or illusory?   If "imaginary" means there is truly nothing there then we can see that those who say our Experience is imaginary are lying.  If "imaginary" means that the view is in our brains then we must agree.  An image in our brains is still an image and leaves us with the problem of how the view that is Experience is created. 

The word “imaginary” might also mean that it is believed that the visual image is not real. We can check the reality of our visual images by moving objects around us, the relative positions of the objects in the world correspond to the relative positions of the objects in our visual images. We have real visual images in our brains containing data about the world outside our bodies. The content of our visual images is closely based on real events in the world. It is not the same as those real events outside our bodies (for instance we saw transparent fingers in our visual image) but it is closely related to those events.

We have looked at our visual image and figured out that it is a brilliant image of the world that occurs in our heads. It has the geometry of objects projected around a point so it seems to overlay the real world. It is such a good model that most people believe it IS the world itself. We all act as if our visual image is the world itself whatever we know about the brain.

Our visual image is stranger still. It is more cunningly constructed than simple optical images such as those captured by simple cameras. Our visual images are usually stable even when we move our eyes but the images produced by a simple camera are not. As an example, if you move a simple camera unevenly whilst recording a movie the recording becomes chaotic and the scene jumps around, however, if you look around you with your eyes the scene is stable with only your direction of view changing.

How is the image in our brain held stable? It turns out that the image is mainly updated when our eyes stop moving. When our eyes are moving the image stays as it was. Our nice, stable view depends on a separate, stable model of the world existing in our brain that is carefully updated with information from our eyes.

The rapid movement of our eyes from one point to another in the view is known as a “saccade”. Our image of the world is updated at the end of each saccade. Our eyes must perform many of these rapid movements because they take in very little crisp information every time they stop.

Look at this page through one eye while striving to keep the eye fixed on viewing a letter in a single word.  Most people can only see one or two words clearly on a line unless they move their eye. Each eye has only a small area of the world as a clear image on its retina.

Our full visual image is generated by large numbers of saccades and a lot of filling in of missing information. A map of how saccades criss-cross a photo to allow the eye to gather information for a mental image in the brain is shown above.

You can see the combined effect of the small area of detailed vision collected by your eyes and the way your visual image is not updated during eye movements (saccadic suppression) by looking at yourself in the mirror. You cannot see your eyes move in the mirror! This experiment of looking at your eyes in a mirror is well worth doing because it is so uncanny.  Give it a try.

Let’s return to our actual Experience. When we look at this page it is obvious that light enters our eyes and, as we discussed above, something is created by the brain that is the immediate image in our Experience. If there were further processes happening the image would contain the results of these further processes. Our latest Experience is the terminus, the end point of all the processes that start with light being emitted or reflected from the page and the last bit of brain activity that composes the Experience containing the page.  We like to think of our Experience as the raw input that our minds can work on but our Experience is a current output of our brain.

Experience is an observation.  It is what an observation is like.  Measurements are changes in state that can be expressed as numbers but an observation has information mounted in a space and time so that many of its relations are present.  A tree is immediately to the left of a house, a dog runs along a path - the relations of tree to house and dog to path are simply there, in the space and time of Experience.

If our Experience is the terminus, the end point of the transfer of information from our eyes, then at some place in our brains there is a set of events that observe themselves. How can a set of events observe itself? One thing is certain, because the image and content in our Experience is the end of the line, the terminus, there cannot be any further processes that contribute to our current observation. 

T he technical objection to a viewing point

The viewing point appears to be in conflict with simple physical explanations, for example it cannot be due to the flow of light into a point that "sees" the world because there is no room in a simple geometrical point for "seeing".  However even simple physics has no dictum that all phenomena must be flows from place to place in space.  Certainly the viewing point cannot be explained by simple physics but we can say for certain that there is an observation, made by seven billion people, that the world is viewed so that it appears to be distributed around a viewing point.  This has no explanation in simple physics.  There are conceivable explanations in more advanced physics but whether these can be applied or not is an open question - see Appendix.

Advanced physics is needed because simple physics cannotbe used to model the phenomenon of seeing.  If seeing is entirely due to flows from place to place then we end up with a little man, an homunculus, looking at a picture in our brains.  The homunculus would have a picture in his brain so a further homunculus would be needed and so on. 

This does not prove that seeing is impossible but it does show that seeing cannot be explained by simple flows from place to place.  Neither does the homunculus argument prove that science has been defeated. It shows that more advanced scientific theories are needed.  

The homunculus argument expresses how simply having a pattern of colours on a page or electric impulses in a network of wires is not enough to create Experience.  Experience has the form of visual stuff seen as if from a point with the point separate from the stuff.  We have Experience but a photograph or hologram does not have Experience, no matter how many times it is copied from place to place. 

The most crucial aspect of the "viewing point" is that nothing flows into it.  This is obvious in Experience.  The view is out there in our Experience in our brain, it is the end point of processing so nothing needs to flow from it to elsewhere.  If we touch an object in the view with a finger the feeling is at the apparent object and this has a definite position in Experience.  The sense of touch shows that, although we can fool ourselves into thinking that something might flow from the visual objects within Experience, there are no "touch waves" flowing through space in Experience direct to the observation point.  If touch can be positioned in Experience without anything flowing into an observation point then the visual image in Experience is also not required to transmit any flow into a viewing point to create a view.  The view is accomplished without flow from the content of Experience into the apparent observation point, it is a geometrical phenomenon in our brains.  Experience is a special arrangement of things, a phenomenon in itself.

  W hat time in Experience is like - sound

The sounds in Experience are not like sound waves in the world outside our bodies. Sound in the world is lots of pulses of pressure in the air whereas the sound in our Experience is noises. Although the sound in Experience is linked with (correlates with) pressure waves in the world it is not very much like pressure waves.

Imagine a smooth sound or say “Aah”, a constant sound lasting for a couple of seconds. If it lasted for a thousandth of a second we could not hear it or imagine it. How much of the sound would we hear at an instant? An instant is no time at all, it is the boundary between the past and the future and has no duration (no length of time). At each instant we could hear no sound at all. For a sound to exist it must have a duration in our Experience. Our auditory Experience extends for the time of the sound in Experience. Just listen, you hear whole words and bars of tunes. Our Experience contains whole words extended in time. Were words not extended in time they would not be sounds in Experience.

You may be surprised that the sounds in our Experience extend in time. This surprise comes from our science lessons at school where sound is represented as a wave in the air which is treated as having an effect at an instant.  Of course, what we call sound is what we have as sound in our Experience, not pressure waves in the air which only correlate with what happens to our ear drums and with the electrical impulses generated in our brain. The sound in our Experience is different from it's physical correlates outside our body.

Sounds need time. At the moment a sound wave strikes our eardrum the eardrum is stretched to a particular position. If we were able to fix this position, holding the eardrum stationary, we would hear no sound at all. The sound only happens as the eardrum changes over time: sound happens in time. The vibrating of our eardrums becomes a pitch, or musical note in our Experience but a musical note is not like a vibrating eardrum or a wiggly wave in the air. It is only correlated with wiggling air waves and vibrating ear drums.

The existence of sounds in Experience as objects that stretch through time is obvious to all of us yet most of us live as if only the instant between the past and the future exists. Which is peculiar because an instant contains no time at all.

When we have a sound in our Experience extending in time, the parts of the sound are separate and do not overlap each other. Time is like another independent direction for arranging things that is separate from the three independent directions in space (up-down, left-right, forward-back). 

At this stage it should be stressed that sound in Experience is like events arranged in time.  This is what it is like.  It is possible that sound in Experience is an arrangement in space or some other, unknown, direction for arranging things but this book is about what Experience is like.

Lets listen more closely.

A bird’s song is conventionally supposed to be entirely in the past yet we hear the bird song now. The listening point is now and the song is spread out in time over there, at the position of the image that is like a bird’s head in our Experience.

Sound in Experience is modelled by our brains to create a “virtual reality” in almost the same way as we model vision. As we found with vision, what we call "sound" is a model in our brain.  This auditory clip shows how we fill in missing sounds and misplace the order of events:

Sound Test:  Clip of Phonemic Restoration.

(Warren, R. M. (1970) Perceptual Restoration of Missing Speech Sounds. Science 167, 392–393).

(Sound Test: click on the icon above to hear the clip demonstrating phonemic restoration and attend in particular to the temporal position of the cough).

Our brains take in the data about pressure waves in the air around us and create short clips of sound in Experience. The brain process that makes these clips can involve filling in sounds that are not actually in the data that stimulates our eardrums and can also involve changing the order of sounds. Each clip that our brains create as Experience containing sound is about half a second to a second long. Longer sounds involve successions of clips. Notice that in the sound clip of the word “legislate” in the “Sound Test” above the missing phoneme is inserted at the correct position in the word which entails knowing how the word ends (when the missing phoneme occurs the word could still be legi--late or legi--timate, legi--ble etc). To do this insertion the clip in Experience must be delayed by about half a second. Our model of the world, our Experience, is about half a second behind the real, physical now.

In the same way as we can simultaneously have events distributed over space as a view in Experience at a viewing point we can simultaneously hear sounds distributed through time at a listening point:

Where more than one sense is involved the viewing point should be called an “Observation Point”.  (Like the "viewing point" the observation point is a geometrical phenomenon, not a point that receives a flow).

T he technical objection to time extension

Time extension has been recognised since the birth of psychology but has been labelled the "specious" present.  Specious means fallacious, misleading, deceptive etc., time extension is thought to be so daft that we should not even think about it with our time extended thoughts.  Originally the term "specious" in this context meant "apparently impossible" but it has stuck because most philosophers and psychologists believe time extension to be impossible. The argument that scuppered the observation of time extension for generations of philosophers and psychologists runs as follows:

"...what we perceive, we perceive as present—as going on right now. Can we perceive a relation between two events without also perceiving the events themselves? If not, then it seems we perceive both events as present, in which case we must perceive them as simultaneous, and so not as successive after all. There is then a paradox.." (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

In other words successive events cannot be perceived simultaneously ie: at the same time.  The logical case seems open and shut, that is until we actually consider our observation.  Our observation consists of a geometric form in which sounds and other events are spread out in space and time around an observation point that is now.  The geometry of our time perception is not that of successive batches of events arranged in 3D space but is that of a peculiar view arranged around a point in space and time.

There is no simple "logical" rebuttal to time extension because extensions in the time and space of Experience are angular separations in the view.  All we can say for certain is that we don't know enough about space and time to explain how events can be out there but also at a point. 

What we do know is that we have time extension in our experience and observation usually trumps theory. It is the idea of time in the classical argument, in which events are in an opaque, 3D sandwich with a layer for each moment of time, that is wrong, not our observation (physics abandoned the "classical" view of time over a century ago). 

 

Imagination and Experience

When we look at this page then shut our eyes most of us can imagine the page fairly well, or at least the general layout of the page on the screen or paper. If we reach out to touch where we imagine the text to be we find that our finger is near to the text on the screen. The space of our imaginary images overlaps the space of our visual experience. If we say “hello” then say “hello” using our inner speech without actually verbalising the word we notice that the two “hellos” are at the same place in our Experience, the space used by verbal thoughts can overlie the space in sensory Experience that contains the organs of speech (but see box below).   Everything that we think or sense is out there in Experience which is a model of the world held in our brains.

Suppose we decide to think about a particular apple that we can see. If we then shut our eyes and imagine the apple with its green and red skin and small stem it is out there in Experience.  The apple is modelled in our visual experience and when our eyes are shut we can model it as a mental image in Experience. Nothing flows through the observation point into our mind to be thought about, what actually happens is that the visual image of an apple is replaced by a mental image of the apple. Our thoughts (inner speech) are similarly in Experience.

When we shut our eyes to imagine an image the image occurs in our Experience where visual sensation has been. This is a crucial observation when trying to understand our Experience: our thoughts, imaginations and sensations occupy the same space.  We are in our Experience and are not behind an observation point. 

T he stable Field of Experience (Consciousness Field)

The discussion above of visual illusions, the two, different, upside-down images in our eyes and how the constant visual image is maintained by intermittent saccades showed us that our visual images are in our brains, not on the things that provide data to create those images.  We make a visual model about the world in our brains.  A similar process occurs in the case of sound where what we hear is also a model of events that happened in the world.

All that occurs for us is in the model, in the internal model that is Experience. The model has a geometry that incorporates what we call "depth". Our observation point is not the centre of any flow, it is a geometrical phenomenon, it is a point and nothing is in it. Actions, thoughts and all of our current experience are out there in the model, in Experience.

This description of what actually happens is different from the way most people believe things happen. The conventional story is that when we see an apple there is an apple shaped image in the fruit bowl and when we think about the apple we transfer information about it from the image in the bowl through an impossible, single optical focal point inside our two eyes into our mind which generates words and reactions in some sort of psychical space. The common belief about how Experience occurs bears little relation to our observation.

When we examine what actually happens we find that our experience, both sensory and internal, is laid out somewhere in our heads and becomes a simultaneous observation, as if from a point, due to some as yet unknown physics that creates a geometry. The key feature of Experience is that everything we see, think or compute happens “out there” in the model. Events are in the world and Experience is a model of these events created in our brains. Even our mind and thoughts are in the space and time of Experience. The observation point is separate from Experience but contains nothing, being a geometrical phenomenon.

We separate the sensory from the mental by shutting our eyes and suppressing what we hear to give ourselves the peace to think. However, both the sensory and mental happen in Experience.

The observation point is no more than a connection between the different times and places of Experience.  We are in our Experience and not something behind our observation point.

Many people have spotted that the prime feature of Experience is the way that all the sensory and mental modalities are arranged to overlie each other and simultaneously positioned relative to each other so that they provide an excellent model of the world around us.  The chaos of the highly convoluted and fragmented brain somehow produces our Experience.  But how is this done?  How can this chaos and fragmentation produce a unified Experience?  The speculation below is intended to show how such a unified Experience is physically conceivable, not as a definitive explanation. 

How a field of events could be created in the brain to host Experience.

Experience is an active model of the world. It is the output of the brain.  Whatever hosts Experience is not hard wired but is actively adjusted to produce the appropriate form and content of Experience.  Most of the output of the brain is directed to the Thalamus, this output comes from all of the specialised processing engines that are found in the cerebral cortex, both sensory and motor.  This huge output might be refined to the activation of relatively few neurons to provide the definition found in Experience, perhaps less than 2 million, and a million neurons occupy less than a cubic mm sphere of brain volume.  As an active space it could be moved around inside a zone such as the Thalamus or thalamic nuclei.

This probably tiny field of activity in the brain that we call Experience has an amazing property.  We can literally gaze out along its connections to elsewhere in the brain.  When our sense organs linger on a stimulus it is like the sources of the connections of that area of Experience are available.  (Although not shown in the illustration above the stable field extends in time).

The analysis above shows why no-one has yet found the location of Experience in the brain. It is almost certainly extremely small (a few cubic millimetres) and it can be moved around within the volume of brain where it is located. This movement might involve rotation or translation.  What is fairly certain is that the Experience Field does not reside in the cerebral cortex. The cortex is composed of specialised processors that provide a huge output to the Thalamus.  Finding this field is quite literally going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.

How the brain can rotate and move a field of activity within a volume of neurons and still maintain the original connections to the ultimate sources of this activity in the brain is a mystery but it is a tractable problem.

Of course, there are other physical possibilities for a theory of Experience in the brain but it is a physical problem, not something beyond scientific enquiry.

More meditations

A Meditation on Motion

Try standing and very gently doing a quarter spin with a sway.  Your body is clearly detached from the rest of the view.  Close your eyes and continue the slow movement. The swirl extends for a half second or so.  Bodily motion is the perfect brother of music because they have a similar time extension.  Your bodily motion is extended in time and space, it is a four dimensional object in your Experience.  It is this four dimensional nature of experience that separates your body from the rest of the model of the world around it. Your body can swirl within a seemingly fixed background.  Without this four dimensional body within Experience our bodies would just be fixed on a fixed background at an instant.

Time again

A Reflection on Time

There are two ideas of time.  In the first events are arranged in a direction that is different from, and usually independent of, the three directions of space.  In the second idea of time events make records on physical things and we mysteriously see or hear these records. The first idea is most like our Experience because we can have whole words emanating from a single place within it, such as the mouth of a person speaking.  The succession of events is not laid out in space in our Experience, it is laid out in time. The first idea is also consistent with current physical theory in which time is a dimension - a separate, independent direction for arranging events.  If time exists this implies that we always exist: there is life before death.  There will be much more about time in the following articles in this series.

What are we?

In this section we found that our Experience contains things that are simultaneous such as patches of colour.  This means they all occur at the same time, referred to the observation point.  Don't get too hung up on this observation point, it is just a cute bit of geometry - see Appendix.  Our Experience also contains things extending through time and although these events occur extending in time, out there, in Experience, they are also simultaneous at the observation point.  Whatever we are, time is crucial to our being.

If our Experience extends in time then time exists.  Could our Experience only "appear" to extend in time?  Every measurement of the brain shows that all of our sensations from colour to smell consist of processes evolving over time and that at any instant nothing happens.  If our observation were evolving with no more than the tiniest amount of time available then it would only be like our observation if another observer put it all together as something extended in time, but then we would be that second observer.  The idea of a real, time extended Experience seems unavoidable.

Part 2: Qualities and how its all connected.

Part 3: Observation.

Part 4: Time.

Part 5: Other contents of Experience.

Part 6: Mind.

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