About this website
From around 2000
philosophers and scientists began in earnest to
explore theories of mind based on the idea that
consciousness - and the stream of subjective
experience that comes with consciousness - can arise
from neurological genesis of self-models. Foremost has been Thomas Metzinger, who
has referred specifically to a "phenomenal
self-model".*
Given those developments I felt it worthwhile in 2011
to post here some speculative work I completed in the
1990s founded on a self-model approach, but that goes
further to propose a form of information processing
system within a person that could enable them to
experience a subjective, moment-by-moment sense of
themselves as a physical being interacting with a
physical world.
The aim of that work - and of the more recent
material posted here - is development of an
encompassing conceptual framework to aid
understanding of how ideas in philosophy, cognitive
science and neuroscience might be formed into a
general theory of consciousness.
One of the most important aspects of the work remains
that it speculates as to a real-time
mechanism
- and an overarching information processing
architecture - by which a self-model, and with it
moment-by-moment subjective experience, might be
generated. To my knowledge - even up to 2023 - other
approaches have not speculated as to an
overarching
mechanism for real-time genesis of subjective
states, although the centrality of sensory-motor
coordination, and the related need for predictive
capability, have been increasingly recognized.
In the Introductory Summary I provide extracts from a
series of posts I published in late 1997 to early 1998
to the moderated web forum Psyche-D.
(The
full series of these posts to Psyche-D is available
here.) Importantly -
along with a set of fundamental ideas about
self-models - the Introductory Summary introduces a
notation to give those ideas definition. This notation
is applied in all later work posted to this site. In
my view a simple notation of the type provided in the
Introductory Summary is likely to prove crucial to
allowing the philosophy of consciousness to
successfully evolve and converge with related fields,
such as cognitive science and neurophysiology, to
properly form a science of consciousness.
Beyond the Introductory Summary, I provide an essay
(Main Essay) which I believe sketches a powerful,
albeit highly speculative and illustrative, approach
to explaining consciousness as it manifests in the
here and now. It integrates a phenomenal self-model
approach, a rudimentary form of predictive processing
architecture, and a real-time mechanism for delivering
moment-by-moment subjective states. Although it is now
in certain ways dated, I believe a number of the
deeper intuitions expressed through the Main Essay
remain important. These are recast and carried forward
in a more contemporary form through the material
discussed below.
Some of this more recent material is provided at links
in the right margin under Free Will and Time.
The note exploring the nature of time
was developed because
one way to test a
theory of consciousness is to see if it has
sufficient explanatory power to clarify how, in
certain cases, phenomenal experience seems at odds
with physical reality. How we perceive time, versus
how physicists understand time, is one of the
starkest examples of this. I believe the approach
provided in the note meets this challenge at least
as well as any other available as of May 2020. Again, with respect to understanding the
nature of phenomenal time, there is a heavy emphasis
on mechanism, which I continue to see as an
essential part of the way forward in the study of
consciousness and of how subjective experience can
be generated.
I have also added considerable material at the right
margin links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. These each
go to one of three parts of an extensive suite of
new conjectures brought together under the rubric
Working Note A.
A link to an index of Definitions has also been added.
This index forms an appendix to Working Note A, but
its contents apply to all material posted on this
website.
The link at Metaphysics goes to a note: Deconstructing
the Physical World, posted in 2023. The note describes
in detail - then explores, extends and defends - the
metaphysical framework underpinning the work presented
on this site. This framework was first described in
claims and notation introduced in the Psyche-D posts
referred to above (available
here)
and also given under Definitions.
The links at
DPW A, DPW B and DPW C go
to appendices that extend and further situate the
conceptual framework - call this CF1 - developed in
Deconstructing the Physical World (DPW).
- DPW A describes the
relationship between Russellian Monisms and CF1,
and shows that CF1 has all of the advantages of
Russellian Monisms but can defeat their
disadvantages.
- DPW B will describe in more
detail what is meant in DPW by phrases such as,
‘language learning operations’, and will further
explore the relationship between the contents of
any person’s W[i] and those of their language
using group’s W[z], where these terms are as
defined within CF1.
Readers
most interested in general philosophical issues
should read Metaphysics first.
Otherwise, the reading order I recommend is the
Introductory Summary, Free Will and then
Time. After that, Part 1 in
conjunction with the Main Essay, then Parts 2 and 3,
followed by Metaphysics.
Readers unconvinced by metaphysical claims made in the
Introductory Summary - or who are more interested in
the traditional riddles of the Mind Body Problem than
in 'explaining consciousness' - may wish to read
Metaphysics straight after reading the
Introductory
Summary.
As an overarching qualifier I wish to emphasize that
across much of the material referred to above I have
not been concerned to get everything right at the
level of detail. That's too daunting a challenge for
any project as encompassing as this, particularly
given the difficulty across the
field in establishing key neurological facts and
germane, scientifically demonstrated theories of
brain function. But I have tried to be as
definitive, self-critical and searching in my
underlying thinking as possible - particularly
regarding Metaphysics - and hope that the ideas and
conjectures presented will still prove worthwhile to
other researchers, and other interested readers,
particularly at the level of conceptual frameworks.
Comments and questions are most welcome.
I'm at brendon.hammer@gmail.com
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons by
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