Peter Reynolds

email [email protected] Current ideas.... .........A simple definition of consciousness grounded in real events, realising a new interpretation of human history which also explains life and music, all as spandrels of language.(PR Newci.Let.1999-2011) Peter Reynolds (Reflectogenesis.com ([email protected]), Runcorn, Cheshire United Kingdom) P

Last year I posed useful hand held mirrors (UHM) in the age of metals frame new and amplify inter and self-sensory feedback igniting a big bang of synesthetic and mirror neurosystems to produce this echo of 'none-prairie dog' human language; spacetime, writing, and monotheism, an orgasmic vibe of consciousness spread as a Spandrel of evolving neural correlate of this new language striking Jaynes' chord of recent rapid origin and harmonizing perspectives of separate individual senses into a robust minima Self perspective; a resonant neural Nietzscherian Perspectivism (RNNP); this infectious harmony. I posit our 'explanatory gap' as evidence - evolving language - unable by definition - to access its own 'spandrels'. The idea, 'Reflectogenesis', cited also monkeys given UHM on Youtube, which by their overt orgasm like reactions, (perhaps mesolimbic in origin) had never seen themself before resonate conscious in the moment, rather than delocalised, implicitly, through the eyes of their troop, despite generations reflected in water, - In contrast, 'Thought' has been posed in pan global paleolithic Ice Age art. Nick Humphrey rather the artists not Think as modern human but to behave as Nadia - a speechless autistic savant. I think this a stretch; mistaking Autism for deafness and cite H.G Wells' legend of 'The Country of the 'Blind''. Sightless people isolated by natural events adapted using ability derived through evolution of remaining senses, cave artists parting from relatives, when they developed the ability to support the deaf & blind, 'Ice Age derived volcanism', as legend, might see off megafauna and the Neanderthals and cause these disabilities. Indeed recent studies show the sense of space and movement enhanced in remnant senses of the deaf and blind. As this disability became tolerable to a society of hominids some offspring would be fully sensate whilst retaining synesthetic derived ability which could only have evolved in parents, not perceiving light or sound, evidence in the primary traits of the 'cultural climactical explosion' about 40,000 years ago; parietal cave art, with perspectival movement and spatial acuity, not appearing again until the Greeks (post mirror): 'Venus figurines' ,also; most of which had no eyes - and thus I now pose most simply - to represent the 'blind'; and previously unrelated musical flutes, all of which I suggest would have originated in synesthetic synergism between the enhanced sense of space and movement in/between the remnant senses of the deaf & blind and rewarding feedback with pattern in their dextral efferents. The insertion of UHM in this feedback loop ended a stasis in synesthesia, causing an orgasm, starting a fire which could no longer be suppressed by the clinical militarism evolved for survival in a stressed desertified Africa derived from the same ice age which produced super volcanoes. UHM unlocked coiled impressions, encoded in a universe of entropic microtubular springs, genes and the cogs of bioactive resonant prestressed tensegrity structures of the brain, to unwind like a clockwork robot as I pose prior first sparking prematurely, painting and playing flutes in Ice Age caves, but now, unwinding -'literally'- in the orgasmochemically rewarding resonances of consciousness.

Consciousness a Spandrel of evolving language; unconscious origin in past missing senses; life music language also their own reward ; 'literally' orgasmic clockwork robot; mirror orgasm FOXP2exps . ....................................................................................................................................1... Prepresentational theory of perception.........................................................................................................................................................................................................So we would have Precept - Percept and Postcept......I guess therefore this gives us a clue about consciousness itself. It must be subtended by PRECEPTS which would be sub or none conscious predictions.(5 Nov 010)..(I suggest perception is largely based upon prediction - so that the percept arises largely before sense data is presented) [Contra - a Representational theory of perception.]..................It might be noted that the structure of the hippocampus is arranged organisationally and structurally - with its afferent and efferent connectivity - in such a way that it would allow this sequense of information processing corresponding to its structural organisation. So that a precept could be formed in one structural domain, a percept in another and postcept in another......... etc.................................................................................................................................................. ''''''''''''''''2'''''Current Reply to Robin Faichney''''''''''Entitled 'LOWER ORDER THOUGHTS''''''''''''''''' in discussion ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''Vagueness and context''''''''''''''''''''

Grayling is using a false dichotomy as a rhetorical device to separate out and moreover, falsely instantiate, the otherwise unprovable, possibilty of there existing - of its own right - a 'zombie-like' person, devoid of the ability to emotively contextualise the word 'fire' as uttered, from 'mere mortals' (who would of course use emotive context to judge meaning and let this context override a logical analysis of the situation). In allowing emotion, mere mortals would analyse events from a singular perspectival view of probability rather than allow, as a zombie might. the juxtaposition of a number of possible perspectival views which might embrace the possiblities engendered by the prima facie facts devoid of emotion in a Nietzscherian fashion. This false dichotomy is however logically plausible if unprovable, justified on the grounds that 'feelings' or emotions have (for example see Harnad elsewhere) no causal effects in the physical world andthus the situation can (in this context) be analyzed from a purely logical rather than contextual point of view. Thus cleverly emphasising the role of vagueness as distinct from context in this situation. Thus Grayling is attempting to focus upon the concept of vagueness as it might arise as an entity, unchallenged as a 'concept in itself', in the normal world so to make it an object of discussion uncluttered by 'people' and their opinions. This is a bit like a man not understanding a womans logic. For example - a man drowning after his plane crashes into the sea might grab at a mirror and use it to signal for help whilst a woman, more accepting of the logical fact of herself likely to drown, might use the mirror to adjust her make up so that she looks good dead. To the man - the womans logic might appear vague - possibly due to the mental stress of the plane crash resulting in her not thinking clearly and in a none focussed manner, whereas he is infact seeing the situation from the emotional charged probability of his own death given the circumstance and is thus not thinking of the possibliities of the situation.. ...................................................................................................................................................................................As an addendum to this last point - even if Grayling didn't do this consciously - I think it was what he was trying to do. Perhaps this suggests that in discussing vagueness - then vagueness itself perfuses the discussion. Perhaps its an example of an ancient meme thats so old and so fundamental to the evolution of language that it can't be bounded by language - perhaps because its metaphorical connotations are so widely spread that they permeate the evolution of all language. Raising the possibility that vagueness is a fundamental component of language and so perhaps cannot be pinned down by language (except artificially and by using false assumptions) One might think of it as a 'LOWER ORDER THOUGHT' (LOT) or one that subtends any conscious notion. A thought that we are never aware of. In contradistinction to a 'Higher Order Thought' Or as a 'NONE CONSCIOUS THOUGHT' This way of looking at it might allow that logic is 'a mechanism of the unconscious'. ..........................................................................................................................

I have a PhD in materials science from the university of Bath UK and have previously published in this field although have been actively unemployed since 1992 and have no affiliation.(recently have proposed a 'Universal' slip line field solution explaining the hexagons becoming apparent on planets (including Australia). Ive just come across Stuart Kaufman's 'adjacent possible' and I interpret this as being a renaming of Sheldrake's 'Morphic Field' 14 oct. I think my main claim to fame is to have identified mirrors as the crucial component of the human extended phenotype.............so as dams are to beavers - mirrors are to humans ................... Related to this idea, most recently I have published this.-http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727790.300-philosophical-sense.html.......................................................{[unfortunatley this website won't let me reply to Nigel Thomas' reply to my letter].........My reply is that at the time of Gorgias, language and consciousness itself were - following Julian Jaynes - new developments, and the reason Gorgias could conclude that language was a separate faculty to other sense modalities and did not have access to them - was because this was the case for a majority of individuals at the time - before the advent of metallurgy and widespread use of mirrors....The majority of humans could not read or write at the time of Gorgias and lacked the required conscious state to represent information from their senses using a complex language. I posit that the synesthetic connectivity required to give separate sense modalities access to each other - (and develop the required mirror neuron system through positive feedback of proprioceptive senses with external movements and sense inputs) - only arose with the use of mirrors. (Hubert Damisch, - utilising Lacans' hypothesis - likewise argued that mirrors gave us perspective)(My argument again being (see below)different to the uninformed reasoning of Damisch, in that I relate the instigation of synesthesia through portable mirrors to produce a parallel perspective within different sense modalities) So Gorgias statement was- in the round -true at the time he said it and perhaps Plato also took it as self evident.}.eg from Plato ....From the allegory of the cave.................. Socrates ....But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes. and from Gorgias........“How can anyone communicate the idea of color by means of words since the ear does not hear colours but only sounds?” ............................................................................

....... Since 1999 I also have a series of (I think entertaining) other letters in Newscientist, which I think have proved prophetic as well..............I have an idea that consciousness as we think of it today arose from the technology of mirrors. (having presented this simple and elegant idea at 'Tucson conference' 2010.. based upon the observations of monkeys given small portable mirrors on Youtube)..( The idea is in historical agreement with Julian Jaynes observations concerning the accompinament of consciousness with the increasing complexity of language - but rather pointing to the advent of mirrors (at the time Jaynes says consciousness emerged -i.e the age of metals)) which I am suggesting caused this linguistic ability in part by tuning mouth movement with sound)[whilst at the same time seeing themselves ''as they are'' - as distinct from - ''as seen through the eyes of the troop'' - for the first time] ....The thesis is distinct from that of Jacques Lacan because it relies upon the suggestion that humans first discovered small mirrors - which they could hold. Thus they were jolted into consciousness through the synesthetic connectivity between the act of holding the mirror and their visual interpretation of the mirror image. They did not need to deduce that the image in the mirror belonged to themselves purely from a visual stimulus and thus aquired a theory of mind through (perhaps unconscious -inadvertant or accidental) synesthesia rather than through an an evolutionary emergent property of pure brute computation. (As outlined below - (I use the word 'jolted' because I think that there was not a great distance between the conscious and none conscious state, but evolution had suppressed consciousness - selecting against it - as the self-awareness which accompanied it would have been detrimental to 'survival in the wild' because it would prove divisive within the troop or group and would have been a source of anxiety in difficult times of high mortality ....Therefore it required the discovery of portable mirrors and their utility to overcome this barrier to the utilisation of self-awareness and consciousness) I think complex language arose simultaneously {as well as mouth movement - facial gestures which often accompany implicitly evolved communication can also be seen accurately for the first time in a mirror]) Also I am interested in the idea that consciousness is a spandrel of the language created by this encounter with mirrors. In particular, a spandrel of the neural correlates of language. (language having evolved must have spandrels as alluded to by Lewontin and Gould) (This isn't to say that consciousness necessarily solely arises in the brain)(This explains the perception of an 'Expanatory Gap' as championed by Chalmers, Harnad et al. because it means that language brings with it a sequenced organisation of memories and 'events' distilled from a process of symbolic representation of the environment. Hence language itself cannot access or explain this construct. (and therefore there is a 'Gap' in consciousness itself which can also be considered an 'Explanatory Gap') Consciousness however appears within a background of - or 'a priori' - 'film' of 'sense impressions' whose apparent seamless connection with conscious process is an illusion but whose form allows the brain to stitch together its perception of the world into an apparent continuum). i.e. consciousness is stitched together with unconscious representations by sampling data at the periphery of focus slower so that the brain smears these data points to cover the lack of data in the periphery of focus. This being the formation and integration of 'a-priori' sense).{One could say that consciousness is only so by virtue of existing within this unconscious frame). [This has parallel in 'field' theories' in physics - as if there were a Higgs field which can be drawn upon constantly to give inertia to the linguistic or thinking process][Is the Higgs field the field of consciousness] {It might be noted that these ideas are the opposite to those of Steven Pinker who asserts that the mind creates language - whereas I am saying the opposite}[Pinker saying that a child thinks but does not have the capacity for language - Whereas I would say rather that this is naive and a denial of 'inner speech' and that a baby has not developed the mechanical machinery to express inner speech] Furthermore it appears that the precursors to consciousness derived from the distillation of symbolism from cave art. I suggest this being achieved by deaf hominids, because of their increased 'dexterity' in 'handling' visual data. i.e. art was a kind of reflex for deaf hominids in the same way that gestures are a reflex for normally sensed humans. Likewise they had the greater capacity for handling visual data and abstracting information from it. - a crucial component and advantage - in a task which took many tens of thousands of years and must be regarded as the pinnacle of human endeavour. As cave art and symbolism evolved by the needs of the deaf, so it would have become the basis of all language because it would be the only accurate way of transmitting data through time. Similarly music would have been developed by the blind in the same caves because of their increased synesthetic connectivity and ability to manipulate sound. Caves being particularly used because of their acoustic properties.(flutes being some of the oldest artifacts from caves in existence) In both the case of the deaf and blind the vacant functionality due to the missing sense modality leads to a heightened perception of movement and direction in the remaining sense modalities (Bavalier et al) and one would therefore think that this also would tie directly into a synesthetic mirror neuron system which could both express art and music as a reflex and empathise with and extract visual and auditory symbolism from art and nature. The particular characteristic of cave art being the naturalistic expression of movement which did not emerge again until the Greeks. This explains the simultaneous occurrence in geographically isolated regions of the cultural explosion of about 50000 years ago because it was the first time societies had evolved to tolerate disabilities such as deafness and blindness. Because the progenitors of language were deaf, one can see the importance of the discovery and use of mirrors in translating their visually based language into a spoken one through gaining control of the movement of their mouth, accurately enough to reproduce complex sounds. This having a synergistic effect on proprioceptive senses as it might be expected to tune mirror neuron systems according to language.- Being requisite for accessing memories and coordinating long and short term memory rapidly. - A prerequisite for consciousness. (When the mirror neuron system had become tuned to language - this would spread like a disease (through mimicry) and the artistic abilities of the cave artists would be replaced with a symbolic form of communication - giving rise to the use of tallies and cuneiform - and trade as a means of overcoming disability)(This 'tuning' would also account for Chomsky's 'poverty of the stimulus' argument for the hyper aquistion of language by human infants). It is interesting to draw the analogy between a baby and human kind. Babies are cognitively like humans before the advent of written or spoken language. Recent developments in the vOICe device of Peter Meijer suggest that dreams derive from the stimulation of visual memories by other sense modalities (at least by sound and touch) whilst for example sleeping. So that the users of this device can overlay their visual dream state upon a canvas of sound. Just as in dreams, visual consciousness is elicited and controlled from different sense modalities. Whilst those sense modalities sink into the unconscious. (this is why dreaming is accompanied by movement as these movements are scanning the other sense modalities). My email is [email protected] I also publish under the kimrathbone channel on Youtube. I live in Runcorn Cheshire UK (updated Sept 2010) For my explanation of the extinction of the Neanderthals in terms of the emergence of human consciousness see http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/09/did-volcanoes-really-kill-off.html.........................................................................................I had a thought whilst writing this ...Is consciousness an unconscious explanation? So as things are explained using language - so they enter consciousness.,,(just a thought) The above paper presented at Tucson also seems a little prophetic if you see this weeks newscientist website about monkeys /mirrors/ and self awareness. ..........................................................................................One could conclude ----With due respect to Nagel and Frank Jackson......that the added directional abilities due to a lack of a sense modalitiy in the blind and deaf, let one know, using vOICe, what its like to be a bat. Likewise there must be varying degrees of this 'becoming like a batness'.(7 Oct 2010) So in effect there isn't really anything special to 'being like a bat' - so there is really only one thing which it is 'like being'. Batness only differeing by degree from humanness. My comments above are finding support in this 10 Oct. 2010 paper http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=deaf-cats-have-enhanced-vision-10-10-11&posted=1#comments........Also the recent Horizon film 'Is seeing believing' shows fluent users of the 'Feelspace' device to be unable to describe the qualitative 'feel' of the device. This I contend supports Gorgias tenet that the senses are separate to language...and demonstrates an 'Explanatory Gap'....................................................I have come to realise that there must be behavioural analoges to memes. I suggest calling them 'be-mes'. In particular in one manifestation they behave so as to be the physical mechanism of memes but unlike memes - rather they are constrained by the physical environment of the brain, the organism and its environment and the ways it is connected to and within its environment. Such behavioural elements would connect molecular and macroscopic behaviour including the geno and phenotypic and would provide the necessary plasticity of biochemical, neural, social, environmental and universal behaviours required for the coevolution of biological and inorganic systems. (updated 20th October) Memes only having existence by virtue of their association with their physical Be-me...For example in the case of memes, they are a spandrel of the neural correlates of language...............................................................Does it make sense to think of consciousness as a dimension in its own right?.A brane in parallel with time............Be-mes in contrast to memes have nothing to do with the mental. They are the physical behavioural units of the evolving universe. is language the process whereby the external world is attributed to specific structures within the brain.