jan.holmgren@mbox303.swipnet.se
"... we view the world from the point of view of the here and now, not with that large impartiality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it." 1
Basic for this paper is the following idea:
(1) Consciousness is immediate from man's point of view. Any other theory must presume access to superhuman consciousness, which is a fundamental antinomy.
Every human individual is then thought of as a detector, which makes conscious fragments of the world. "Immediate" in the statement means that consciousness cannot in principle be observed by any indirect observational method (e.g. in neurophysiology). It is just experienced directly by one person, the individual in whose brain it falls out.
A "fall-out of consciousness" is thought to have real extensions in the space-time continuum (in the central nervous system and in time), but it is supposed not to be depending on any for a human being in principle observable mediating factor to bridge distances in the continuum. This is not to say that mediating factors do not exist, and the statement should not be judged as essentially mystical.
There is no reason to expect the world to be divided into essentially different parts, e.g. matter and mind. Consciousness should thus be expected to interact with other phenomena, and cannot reasonably be thought of as non-interfering, as an epi-phenomenon. Thus consciousness should be, from man's point of view, potentially expected to act creatively and non-deterministic, without in principle determinable limits, quite independent of whether it is from some "divine" point of view deterministic or not.
Studying a human being in a certain moment there are three entities that should be distinguished:
I The present fall-out of consciousness.
II The underlying structure, i.e. the very limited part of the central nervous system which for the moment, in a certain space-time interval, is directly interacting with consciousness.
III The surrounding world, including the individual's body including most of the central nervous system, which is, in a more extensive space-time interval, interacting with the underlying structure.
Justification of "occultism"
What goes without saying, i.e. what is an accepted intuition, is to a certain extent a matter of tradition. A good example is the concept "force acting at a distance", a central idea in classical, Newtonian, physics. This "occult quality", presupposing absolute simultaneity, was most unwillingly accepted by Newton himself. But as mathematical physics had great success the occult force soon became the new common sense. 2
It was not until Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, clearly formulated the distinction between event and observation that the concepts absolute simultaneity and instantaneous action at a distance could be eliminated. Then it was felt that Einstein maintained a new common sense, while he was in fact, in a new and much more comprehensive frame of reference, reintroducing an old and more directly intuitive view. 3
Since "absolute simultaneity" is strongly intuitively experienced to prevail in consciousness (how can we otherwise be simultaneously aware of different things, structures, etc.?), it seems natural to see what happens if we, hypothetically, let consciousness be characterized by that concept.
The acceptance of an "occult" or "metaphysical" concept, like consciousness, can be felt as a threat against rational science. It must then be questioned if concepts of that character can really be generally avoided. If the proposed hypothesis is essentially correct the best we can do is to localize explicitly the "occultism" (which surely is just seeming, from man's point of view, but unavoidable concerning consciousness) to a specified phenomenon. Then, we can see how far it is possible to purge various theories from other loose concepts.
Quality and distribution
A fall-out of consciousness is thought to exist within a space-time interval, and it is experienced by the individual in whose brain it exists. Let us denote the (structured and dynamic) space-time interval by the term "distribution". Now distribution and experience surely are not independent. Suppose that the experience can be characterized by a certain amount of "qualities" which are arranged in a multi-dimensional pattern. Then the distribution can be thought also to be a pattern, a space-time aspect of the experience, which is in an obscure (mutual) way functionally related to the quality-pattern.
Now suppose that we can put the fall-out of consciousness in front of us and break it in pieces. Every piece may then have some fragment of "quality" and some fragment of "distribution". We choose to sort the pieces according to qualities and put all pieces with the same quality in the same pile. As soon as the pieces are put together they are supposed to restore their former distribution.
The resulting entities will each be characterized by one quality and one distribution. Let us denote qualities A, B, C, ... and distributions Ad, Bd, Cd, ... . Each of our entities will then be characterized by a pair (A, Ad), (B, Bd), etc. A fall-out of consciousness, as stated in I, will be fully characterized by a certain, surely great, amount of pairs (..., M, Md, N, Nd, O, Od, ...).
As we can never list all qualities and distributions in a fall-out of consciousness it will be necessary to use a notation like (A, Ad, B, Bd, C, Cd, context) where "context" contains all non-specified pairs and no specified of the present fall-out of consciousness. Of course the notation can be simplified to (a, b, c, context) where a = A, Ad, etc. A fall-out of consciousness at time t0 can be denoted (a0, b0, c0, context0) where a0 = A, Ad0, etc. Qualities A, B, C, etc. are independent of time (they are distinct from the space-time aspect) and need no index.
It must be made clear that the concepts quality and distribution so far apply only to the event of consciousness, as stated in I. Thus they cannot in principle, according to (1), be studied "from the outside", and must therefore be postulated. The underlying structure, as stated in II, is a very different matter since it in principle must be defined "from the outside", seen with the eyes of neurophysiology.
Thus we postulate:
(2) The concepts quality and distribution have meaning in connection with consciousness.
Concerning quality the postulate seems natural, even if the concept must include many obscure and ethereal sensations, (in our feelings, in art, in mathematics, and in enormously many other contexts), which cannot be identified and named, like red and blue.
Concerning distribution our choice seems to be between giving up rational analysis or accepting an admittedly vague space-time intuition. But as we can hardly think of consciousness as existing in no place at all or everywhere it seems reasonable enough to postulate a distinct space-time distribution. As we find it appropriate to postulate quality and distribution as two distinct concepts we admit that neither of them is derivable from the other.
A human being's situation in the world, being a detector, is "unsymmetrical". Distributions can naturally be thought to exist also outside our consciousness, while qualities, according to our intuition, exist (as far as we know; from man's point of view) just in our fall-outs of consciousness. We find a crucial opportunity to avoid sterile solipsism by postulating:
(3) The concept distribution has meaning also outside consciousness while the concept quality has meaning only in connection with consciousness.
Distributions can now be thought to travel in space-time, often stable in extensive intervals, but very often in complex interaction and transformation. We living creatures can be thought to have evolved "instruments" to let distributions in an ordered way flow into our organisms, transform in some partly controlled way, partly stay stable within the organism as memory, and to some extent leave the organism again, mostly transformed, in form of action. 4
When a fall-out of consciousness is at hand in a human being qualities are somehow attached to a small selection of the distributions that exist in the central nervous system. What we experience is then fragments of an enormously comprehensive world built up of distributions. We interact in that world by flows of distributions into and out from our organisms. Some distributions cause fall-outs of consciousness, which in turn, by a natural interaction, cause some "change" in the distributions, non-deterministic, or subject to "will", as seen from man's point of view.
We experience just fall-outs of consciousness but, as successive fall-outs by and by add (by use of memory) to a rather stable system, we have good reason to believe that what we experience in a way rather truthfully mirrors the world of distributions. But we can of course never, which would presuppose the position of some superhuman mind, judge the exact relations between qualities and distributions.
But we know with some certainty that we should generally make the distinction. It is very misleading e.g. to identify red with a certain range of wavelengths in light. Red colors are distinct qualities in consciousness, while wavelengths are complexes of other fall-outs of consciousness, systematically coordinated in the memory, etc., with a distinct but very remote connection to distributions which systematically coexist with experiences of red colors.
Concept formation
"You do not step down in the same river twice", said Heraclitus. Every fall-out of consciousness is supposedly unique; the distribution in a small space-time interval in the human brain is supposedly so complex that it will never be exactly the same. It seems also that the world of distributions is irreversibly "evolving". 5
The qualities on the other hand seem to be eternal. As the world of distributions seems to have a considerable tendency for cyclic transformations, parts of our fall-outs of consciousness will be very much alike or even exactly alike.
Apparently we are in trouble talking about parts of fall-outs of consciousness, which supposedly should be treated as unique, whole, and indivisible entities. The same difficulty lay of course in the talk about distinct qualities A, B, C, ... and distributions Ad, Bd, Cd, ... . The difficulty may be called the "problem of analysis".
The escape from the difficulty is to be found in the one unquestionably definite borderline, the one between the conscious distributions to which qualities are attached and experienced, and the other distributions, which are just postulated in (3). We need not demand the borderline to be "sharp" in some naive sense.
A certain quality may be represented or not in a present fall-out of consciousness. A series of fall-outs of consciousness at different times can be represented in the following manner:
t1: (a1, b1, context1)
t2: (a2, b2, c2, context2)
t3: (b3, c3, d3, context3)
t4: (c4, d4, context4)
It must remain an open question whether fall-outs of consciousness in some way jump from one state to another as suggested by this, or if the "evolution" of consciousness is continuous. The occurrence of consciousness is unquestionably discontinuous in a macro-scale, since the fall-outs in different individuals apparently are distinct, and even in one individual it seems almost certain that consciousness is wholly absent in times during sleep.
Say that the space-time intervals t1 - t2, t2 - t3, etc. are small, i.e. the fall-outs occur in one individual during a short time. Let us suppose, which is in agreement with our intuition, that in the intervals t1 - t2, t2 - t3, etc. there are infinitely many intermediary states, i.e. consciousness evolves continuously. We will then still see one distinct entity, represented by b2 and b3, with a "beginning" somewhere in the interval t1 - t2 and with an "end" somewhere in the interval t3 - t4. The beginning and the end need not be "sharp". Apparently a2 represents the end of another entity, and d3 the beginning of still another.
The same kind of reasoning will apply in the dimension of quality; we need not presuppose a "sharp" borderline between say qualities A and B. They can be thought of analogously to colors in a continuous spectrum.
This reasoning solves in principle the problem of analysis. We may now freely imagine a very rich interplay of fall-outs of consciousness and distributions as postulated in (3). A fall-out of consciousness can be "stored" in the memory as a distribution and can, directly in successive fall-outs or later on in future introspection, be made conscious again in parts, i.e. analyzed. Synthesis then of course is the possibility to "add" stored distributions, or rather fragments of stored distributions, in later fall-outs of consciousness. The "context" will supply a rather stable frame of reference.
Two parts of different fall-outs of consciousness, which have both qualities and distributions alike, should be looked upon as "identical". Since they will surely occur together with contexts, which are not alike, they will mostly be "indexed" so they will still be possible to distinguish.
A "concept" can now be defined as a complex of qualities and distributions which is rather stable and which can occur almost identical in different individuals. It will naturally have meaning only in a rather comprehensive context.
The process of "concept formation" must then be thought to take place in a comprehensive complex of qualities and distributions where some qualities successively are picked out while other are suppressed. Of course some new qualities may also be added during the "evolutionary process". Spinoza's "Omnis determinatio est negatio" may thus in a way be true but is surely too dogmatic.
A concept should be thought of as an infinite set of potential, virtual, fall-outs of consciousness gathered around some common characters. These "centers of gravitation" may then be thought to have similarities and to be ordered, perhaps very much in agreement with Wittgenstein's notion "family resemblance". 6
A concept need of course not be wholly realized in one "identical" fall-out of consciousness. It may well, which is surely the most common case, be clarified in parts in many different fall-outs, at different times, while other distributions, in writing, drawing, etc. can be used to give the evolutionary process an essential stability. Concepts need not just represent "things" or some entities, but may supposedly be of various types, e.g. rules, i.e. programs for the evolution in some distinct structure or space-time interval.
Reductionism
Concept formation can very generally be thought of as "reduction", i.e. a concept is clarified when irrelevant qualities and distributions are sorted aside, suppressed, or blocked, by some mechanism in the brain. The concept is reduced. Commonly, in ordinary life, we experience "just naturally reduced" fall-outs of consciousness, colored with feelings, joys, pains, complex individualities, which cannot be identified and named in simple language.
We cannot expect these enormously rich structures to occur identical in the brains of different persons. But man has developed many different means for communication between individuals and groups of individuals, i.e. techniques to release in other people fall-outs of consciousness with some similarity or some "intended relation" to a present fall-out in the "sender". We should not expect this similarity to be even nearly perfect. Obviously meaningful communication regularly takes place between people, say e.g. a grown up and a child, who have very different experiences, or amounts of experiences, and thus should be expected to produce very different fall-outs of consciousness. Meaningful communication is certainly something very complex and should not be expected to be possible to formalize in "reduced" language.
Most human activities have as a common feature the, haphazard or systematic, "trying" of possible fall-outs of consciousness within some part of the world, defined by limits in outer distributions or in some rules of behavior. Very often some kind of reduction is applied in the process; e.g. an artist must surely refine his means of expression by rather strict kinds of exclusion. But this does not generally, or even mostly, mean that the color of rich structures of qualities must be disregarded.
Special for science is the very strict aim at abstract, i.e. colorless, concepts, which make possible rather stable fields of knowledge, near unequivocality, near exact reproducibility. Orthodox "reductionism" is a way of thinking based on the belief that everything in principle and ultimately can be reduced to compounds of abstract elementary concepts inside established physics. The above exposition has made probable that such a belief is wholly mistaken. The mechanism of concept formation seems to be such that concepts are produced in fall-outs of consciousness in all fields of experience. Concepts may in principle be ordered according to "family resemblance". The concepts of abstract science may be looked upon as a "family", but they should not be claimed capable of expressing some absolute and complete truth.
Time
So far the concepts consciousness, quality, and distribution have been explicitly postulated. Further are transformations in distributions presupposed. In connection with fall-outs of consciousness we have used the notion time t0, t1, ... to denote states ordered relative to each other according to the implicit notions "now", "before", and "after".
Since quality and distribution are distinct concepts, the "now" of qualities is a different one than the "now" of the corresponding distributions; we must even ask if there is a "now" of distributions. Most easily we can imagine distributions to interact without distinct limits, without presupposing absolute simultaneity, with a maximum speed of effects equal to the speed of light in a vacuum, etc. The only "now" we need is then that of qualities, i.e. fall-out of consciousness. 7
Consciousness and memory give us an instrument to classify distributions relative to (before, after) the present fall-out of consciousness, which is enough for a mechanism behind the concept "time". Cyclic transformations in distributions offer possibilities to define time with appropriate precision for the intended use, e.g. in geology, in history, in astronomy, in relativistic quantum physics.
Apparently the mechanism cannot work within a fall-out of consciousness. This can be phrased "In a fall-out of consciousness absolute simultaneity prevails", "In consciousness space-time analysis breaks down", "Instantaneous action at a distance takes place", etc. This is how it should be expected to look like from man's point of view. As said before, the "occultism is surely just seeming.
Physics
The theory of special relativity was forced upon physics partly on the basis of the following postulate, also established by experiment:
"The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant, independent of the inertial system, the source, and the observer". 8
No signal or particle can move at a speed exceeding the speed of light in a vacuum, c = 3,0 x 108 ms-1. Since c has a finite value, there is no instantaneous action at a distance. The concept absolute simultaneity is not permissible.
These statements can be illustrated by means of the so-called lightcone. 9 A three-dimensional space is then represented as a two-dimensional area, in right angle to a time-axis, moving in time along the time-axis. A particle, a space-time event, in rest will then make a straight line, a space-time path, parallel to the time-axis. Any moving object or signal will change its distance from the time-axis and make a curved or non-parallel space-time path. Especially, a light pulse traveling at the speed c, the highest possible speed, if we choose units of length and time such that the magnitude of c equals 1, will make a space-time path that makes an angle of 45° with respect to the time-axis. Now the diagram of Figure 1 will have a certain physical meaning.
A, being a point with negligible extension in the space-time continuum, the cone before A, in past time, contains any event that might have had an effect on A and the cone after A, in future time, contains any event that A might have an affect on. Any event outside the lightcone cannot have any effect on A or be affected by A.
The concept "point with negligible extension" is of course crucial here. Suppose that a fall-out of consciousness, A', is inserted instead of A. We then must admit that A' has a finite (non-negligible) extension in the space-time continuum, as in the diagram of Figure 2. Inside A' "absolute simultaneity prevails", "instantaneous action at a distance takes place", "the speed of effects may exceed c", etc.
This local introduction of "occultism" does not effect physical theory as such. In agreement with the correspondence principle 10 the present order is reestablished when A' is reduced to A, a point with negligible extension in the space-time continuum. The well-established physical theory will hold for any system where no fall-out of consciousness is at hand.
Set theory
... Cantor's definition of the concept of set. It runs (translated from the German): A set is a collection into a whole of definite, distinct objects of our intuition or of our thought. The objects are called the elements (members) of the set. 11
... about the turn of the nineteenth century contradictions and antinomies of various kinds were discovered which directly or indirectly originate from the notion of set, i.e. from collecting individuals to a unit. ... During many decades the attempts to improve Cantor's definition have remained utterly unsuccessful, and it has become inevitable to renounce a definition of the general concept of set. 12
Apparently physics, as the natural sciences in general, works with reduced concepts. However the reduction in the applied sciences can never be total (which indeed must be generally impossible, since it would mean extinction of consciousness); they must keep contact with the outer world by retaining many precise qualitative distinctions.
According to the present hypothesis on consciousness the "matter" of set theory, of mathematics, of logic, etc. must be thought to be nothing but concepts. These must surely be extremely reduced, though in discernibly various ways; the disciplines may perhaps be thought of as "families" of concepts. The concepts can however not be void of qualities, but the qualities may be ethereal and impossible to identify and name. Explicit contact with the outer world is not demanded.
Concepts are also characterized by distributions; perhaps the named disciplines can best be thought of as systems for the investigation of possible distributions with the least possible involvement of qualities. It is possible, or rather likely, that different mathematicians, logicians, etc. partly employ different qualities in their thinking, but still reach the same results in the realm of distributions.
Let qualities, in agreement with our intuition, be analogous to one-dimensional continua. Distributions are in the space-time continuum distinct "excitations" of qualities. Our mechanism for detection in our interior world is then, from man's point of view, a multi-dimensional continuum, mostly non-conscious, in which distinct distributions emerge in fall-outs of consciousness. The earlier discussed mechanism for concept formation will be at work in the system.
Now a new definition of the concept of set can be formulated:
(4) A set is a concept which defines (contains) a collection of concepts, called the members of the set, which have in common a quality, a distribution, or some complex of qualities and distributions.
The set must of course be characterized by the same characters that are common to its members. Thus, being a concept, the set is in a way always a member of itself. On the other hand the set must always be characterized by some additional character, which is not present in its members. Thus it may always be treated as different from its members. The distinction between these two attitudes is in every case a matter of choice. Antinomies should be expected if the choice is not explicitly made clear. A good convention may be that a set always includes itself as a subset, while it contains neither itself nor its subsets, but just its members. 13
Different "kinds" of set theory can be considered owing to different restrictions ("reductions") in the permitted kinds of members or sets. Often the members are restricted to mathematical concepts. The "theory of abstract sets" 14 may perhaps be characterized as a basic theory on distributions in few qualities, i.e. in a "few-dimensional" continuum.
Set theory exists under the general conditions for human life. Thus consciousness, as in other fields of knowledge, can act creatively and non-deterministic, from man's point of view. In fact, creativity should be expected to be especially evident, since influences from the surrounding world are suppressed.
Due to the creativity and non-predictability of consciousness we can in principle not hope to be able to produce any quality, distribution, or complex of qualities and distributions common to "all sets". Thus "all sets" cannot be treated as a set; "the set of all sets" is not a permissible concept. This does of course not prohibit the existence of infinite sets, continua, etc.
The same applies in principle to the totalities "all cardinals" and "all ordinals". Thus the so-called Russell's, Cantor's and Burali-Forti's antinomies are not forthcoming. 15 The proposed hypothesis on consciousness seems to offer an intuitively satisfactory possibility to justify set theory avoiding the fundamental antinomies.
The present attitude is much different from intuitionism in that the principle of the excluded middle is retained, resting on the clear duality, from man's point of view, between conscious and non-conscious distributions. "Third possibilities" may however, in principle anywhere, occur in future states of a theory.
" Though the arguments have changed, the gap between discrete and continuous is again the weak spot - an eternal point of least resistance and at the same time of overwhelming scientific importance in mathematics, philosophy, and even physics." 16
The present hypothesis gives a consistent and intuitively natural answer: Distributions travel, "evolve", in continuous space-time and seem to be essentially continuous. Qualities seem to be eternal and continuous. The only discrete entities that we know of are fall-outs of consciousness, fragments of distributions colored with qualities.
Consciousness in animals
Since Darwin's theory on evolution was generally accepted it has been customary in science to stress similarities between man and animals. Impressive similarities are of course a fact, but great differences are also striking. Especially the complex and flexible social and cultural behavior of man has no comparable counterpart in animal behavior, nor even the most advanced apes.
It seems most likely that the language of man is a unique phenomenon in the known world. With the here advanced terminology it is supposedly correct to say that man's language has the function to release fall-outs of consciousness in other individuals (and to structure fall-outs of consciousness in oneself), while the signals of animals have the (essentially different) function to release behavior. Unique is certainly also "the development of a conscious and systematic attitude of criticism towards our theories. With this begins the method of science." 17
A special difficulty for the hypothesis that consciousness is uniquely present in man is perhaps the old doctrine "Nature makes no jumps" ("Natura non facit saltum"). Already in Darwin's version it rather means that nature makes just small jumps, which has been confirmed by the discovery of mutations (and in quantum physics; however neither case must mean real discontinuity). The idea that consciousness is a "new" phenomenon, which man has "begun to employ" at a certain state of the evolution of life, may seem incompatible with the idea of a continuous evolution. But many rather analogous situations can certainly be found in the history of evolution. And the only alternative seems to be some omnipresence of consciousness, which is quite mystical.
A strong objection against the hypothesis is the following: Is it possible to imagine an organ, like the central nervous system in man, to evolve to enormous complexity, and then rather suddenly begin to employ a new phenomenon, making advanced use of it, without clearly discernible morphological modifications in the organ?
The difficulty may be less than it seems at first. The central nervous system is in animals a highly advanced system for processing of information, and cannot simply be changed radically, at the risk of inferior function. A computing system can remain rather neutral in relation to the processed information. The greater its capacity the more variable information can it manage without essential change of design or extension. Thus the morphological change may well have taken place in a micro-scale, which we cannot yet investigate; e.g. almost nothing is known about memory engrams today.
It is known that, a couple of millions years ago, the volume of the brain in Homo erectus began to increase at a much greater rate than in earlier hominids. It is certainly a daring guess that the first glimpses of consciousness occurred in our world in those days (or rather the world begun to be observable for man), but still it seems not unreasonable.
Epistemological consequences
If the proposed hypothesis on consciousness should turn out to be essentially correct, a fundamental difference will be strictly established between the natural sciences and the human sciences. In the natural sciences the systems under investigation must never include any fall-out of consciousness (though ultimately observations always take place in fall-outs of consciousness). In the human sciences, on the other hand, fall-outs of consciousness will regularly be present in the studied systems.
This distinction is of course in a way not a new one; e.g. Einstein explicitly referred to psychology matters that could not be treated inside mathematical physics. But surely a belief has since been rather generally established that psychology is in essence nothing but physics. E.g. Thomas S. Kuhn is careful to stress "... I am not suggesting a process that is not potentially fully explicable in terms of neuro-cerebral mechanism." 18
The process suggested by Kuhn, "acquiring from exemplars the ability to recognize a given situation as like some and unlike others that one has seen before" 19, is surely partly potentially explicable in terms of neuro-cerebral mechanism. But it seems that we should also expect fall-outs of consciousness to take an important part in the process.
What Kuhn suggests is very interesting since it draws attention to processes which are just potentially explicable in physical terms. Since our body is very badly provided with internal sense organs in the nervous system we have a poor capability to observe processes inside our own body (which would undoubtedly cause chaos in the brain) in the same manner as we can study events outside it. Further the processes, especially in the nervous system, are so complex that we have little hope to map them in physiological detail and then explain processes like the one suggested by Kuhn.
From this we should not conclude that such processes cannot be studied. A good proof that study is possible with formal rigor within a strictly reductionistic way of thinking is given in the work of Noam Chomsky. 20 He has most interestingly demonstrated that the acquisition and use of language to a large extent takes place in nervous structures which are not open for introspection, i.e., in the present terminology, they are not potentially possible parts of an "underlying structure", as stated in II.
Thus we must also in the human sciences look upon reductionism as a most valuable scientific method. But evidently we are in great need also of somehow different methods in the human sciences, methods which might help us understand and manage more comprehensive fields of experience. Of course great amounts of knowledge are already gathered, far beyond the reach of abstract science, in psychology, in sociology, in history, etc. But we still lack a much-needed understanding of mutual relations in a general field of knowledge, which would hopefully help us to develop strict methodology beyond reductionism.
Possibilities of empirical justification
The immediateness of consciousness from man's point of view, as stated in (1), makes it in principle impossible to study a fall-out of consciousness by any indirect observational method. But it is in principle possible to observe the underlying structure, as stated in II.
In spite of its probably immense influence in the world (or at least on our planet), by the actions of man, the phenomenon consciousness should be expected to be extremely difficult to detect, causing just local and transient irregularities in the finest structures of the human brain. If we had some idea about the function of memory engrams in interaction with consciousness it might be possible in principle to insert a small "sense corpuscle" in a living brain and thus establish some subtle effect. But that possibility seems far away.
More promising are some recent methods of measuring the metabolism in the brain. One such method, developed in Denmark and Sweden, uses a radioactive-isotope technique to observe the amount of blood flowing in areas of the human cerebral cortex, and thus can map rather directly the distribution of activity in the brain. During sensory stimulation, voluntary motor activity, speech, problem solving, etc. various distinctly different types of functional patterns in the cortex have been registered. Even physiological correlates to pure mental events have been systematically observed. 21
Any such method must register physiological activity in the brain irrespective of whether the activity is part of an underlying structure, as stated in II, or not. There is no reason to expect fall-outs of consciousness generally to require a higher (or lower) consumption of energy than other activities in the brain. But a great amount of data, as far as possible correlated to verbal reports on conscious experiences, might expose some regularities and make it possible to discern conscious and unconscious parts of the brain, which would strengthen the present hypothesis. Further comparative studies on material from man and animals might lead to the discovery of systematic differences.
Conclusion
The most alarming feature of the proposed way of thought is perhaps the definite acceptance of absolute and supposedly severe restrictions in man's capability to investigate, understand, and master his own situation in the world. However, this seems to be very much in agreement with how the world of knowledge looks in practice; the proposed attitude seems in a way empirically confirmed. Further, it seems to be exactly what is needed to solve in a natural way some fundamental problems in philosophy, e.g. the intuitive justification of set theory avoiding the fundamental antinomies.
Of course, defeatism or mysticism must not follow if this insight can be confirmed. But it seems wise to maintain that the attitude of man, in nature, on our planet, should generally be more cautious and humble.
We must and will surely constantly aim at increase of knowledge. Perhaps though a more considered choice concerning the desirability of various kinds of knowledge may seem more appropriate if we find ourselves always to be in a situation a bit similar to Newton's, as expressed in these late words of his:
"I know not what I may appear to the world, but to myself I appear to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell then ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." 22
Notes
References
Beveridge, W.I.B. 1961. The Art of Scientific Investigation. London. Heinemann Educational Books.
Chomsky, N. 1972. Language and Mind. New York. Harcourt Brace.
Chomsky, N. 1975. Reflections on Language. New York. Pantheon Books.
Costa de Beauregard. O. 1965. 'Irreversibility Problems', in Bar-Hillel, Y. (ed.) Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, pp. 313-342. Amsterdam. North-Holland.
Einstein, A. 1950. Out of My Later Years. New York. Philosophical Library.
Fraenkel, A.A., Bar-Hillel, Y. And Levy, A. 1973. Foundations of Set Theory. 2nd rev.ed. Amsterdam. North-Holland.
Fraenkel, A.A. 1976. Abstract Set Theory. 4th rev.ed. New York. American Elsevier.
Kuhn, T.S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd enl.ed. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press.
Lassen, N.A., Ingvar, D.H. and Skinhøj, E. 1978. 'Brain Function and Blood Flow' in Scientific American, oct, pp. 50-59.
Popper, K.R. 1972. Objective Knowledge. London. Oxford University Press.
Russell, B. 1959. My Philosophical Development. London. George Allen & Unwin.
Weidner, R.T. and Sells, R.L. 1968. Elementary Modern Physics. Boston. Allyn and Bacon.
Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford. Basil Blackwell