The Source of Searching and Consciousness

Freddy Van Oystaeyen, University of Antwerp UA, Dept. of Mathematics.

My parents told me, that when — as a young kid — I discovered the question “Why?” , I became obsessed by it and kept asking it repeatedly until they gave up and admitted they did not know.

I did that to myself and spent my life creating doubt and solving intermediate problems leading to new questions. There is a Flemish saying which translates to “An idle brain is the devil’s playground” where “idle brain” is replaced by “emptiness”. In my recent work on a generic model for reality — the dynamic interval-moment model, or DIM — I started from existing happening over time intervals ( so not in moments) and existing things evolved from momentary defined pre-things also referred to as “potentials” or germs of existence. So existing things evolve from the existence-void, so from emptiness.

Now here I will sketch the path I followed in trying to find the source of searching, i.e. what kind of unaware deep thinking — or in fact the preceding pre-interactions in the void — results in the search for why?

Any question is a linguistic construction using concepts, meanings and properties expressed in words which are linked together in some logical way. I introduced word-valences as little hooks sticking to a word providing connecting “places” for other words to be linked to the first; each word-valence also provides an insight in the meaning of the word viewed from a certain perspective providing a specific context in which the meaning of the word gets the colour of the hook used. I got the idea from the valences used in chemistry but here the valences are a lot more varied, we consider finitely many, but put no bound on them as fantasy is able to produce new perspectives whatever number of these we considered earlier already. Together with the valences the word has a meaning which may have small deformations depending on the words connected to it through the (coloured if you want to imagine them like that) valences; note that words connected to a valence can do so with one of their valences of the same colour or of any other present colour thus later resulting in different shades of meaning depending on the word-context in messages.

A word is a coding of the brain activity in an idea , to give meaning to it we have to fit it in the knowledge in the memory with all kinds of possible links. On meanings (of words or groups of words describing a concept) we also have meaning-valences then called context-valences related to the meaning of a later complex message. I treated the structure of language from this point of view compactly in the essay “Organic Linguistics”. Let us just retain that the more valences we define the more complex messages can become.

Now when you look up the meaning of “why” in a dictionary you will find something like : for what, reason or purpose. It is clear that purpose is a very relative notion, purpose for whom? On the other hand reason refers to the principle of cause and consequence and — in the world of correlations — that is not as clean cut as one might hope. In the DIM-model every event in reality has intrinsic reasons (causes) in momentary potentials forming strings with respect to the correspondences connecting the potentials over different states of the universe, strings over specific existence time intervals form an existing manifestation of something and the beginning potential is one “without past in the universe”, that means not the end of some string of potentials over earlier time intervals. Such initial potentials are also called “creative” potentials at moments. Hence some abstract meaning of an idea resulting from brain activity is coming from a set of creative potentials in different moments which lead to several manifestations over different existence time intervals of existing components together leading to the realization of the original set of creative potentials; these series of existing components are then to be seen as the “causes” for the event. The pre-interactions between all the potentials (pre-things) used in the strings defining the process may or may not lead to existing interactions between the existing manifestations in the strings, yet they influence the evolving of the event and the characteristics of the existing manifestations involved in it.

In the essay “organic causality” I have studied the relation between observed causality, existing causality, pointing out that the relations between these concepts are not so strict as one could imagine. Moreover the organic causality which has to serve as “causality” in reality is not even a partial order relation (it is not transitive) so that one has to be careful when talking about it not to mix the transitivity of the logic of language we are using with the transitivity — or rather the lack of it — of the organic causality. Thus on one hand the fact that every existing thing or event has a well-defined set of creative potentials from which it evolves via the correspondences on potentials over moments, does not make the system fully determined because the appearance of creative potentials at any moment is unpredictable. We use here only some conclusions mentioned above not the technical detail.

So the starting moment for some new idea is a creative potential at some moment which is defined by the beginning of the brain activity leading to the evolving of the idea. That starting moment is defined by the earlier brain activity processes, but the potential itself has no past in the evolution of reality! In the book “Time Hybrids” I used names for potentials, like pre-interactions, pre-objects, pre-phenomena, pre-things ,…, which refers to the type of existing thing it will evolve to at some existence time interval — what is of course not yet fixed at the moment we associate the name to it — so it uses a posteriori information, but that is harmless here because it is only a formal naming for convenience in talking about them.

So we have a process : brain activity realising an abstract idea, encoding the idea in the memory as a word with valences (or a finite group of such) and then giving meaning and context valences — when the process is a substructure of a more extensive message of several related meanings — to the words or concepts by interactions with the memory existing by further brain activity.

The structural tools we have at hand are earlier knowledge stored in the memory or usable information carriers, the usual logic of our thinking and language, information obtainable from observation experiments on the observable ingredients of the processes which at suitable moments will be present in earlier knowledge, the usual structure of our learning processes and deformations of this into understanding processes. How do we give meaning to a “meaningless idea” resulting from the first part of brain activity?

Giving it a name is indeed trivial but the meaning is constructed by knowing or deriving definitions and properties of things satisfying the definitions as well as links and relations between these. This learning process fits in many of such processes running quasi-simultaneously in the brain and there may be obvious links between some of these which results in a melting together of some of the learning processes or even of the start of a completely new learning process about priorly unsuspected links between older and the new learning processes. Unlike computer action the human brain is very capable of multifunctioning in parallel processing of synchronised processes so the complexity of the foregoing structural activities is not beyond the ability of the average human brain.

The answer to our question is not obvious if we consider the giving meaning to be just an encoded brain activity with a name added to it. However this problem does not evolve as a separate process! At the creative moment the brain activity started to create the idea we want to give meaning to with some momentary potential the need for some type of new idea was clear already, in other words, the new meaning is supposed to fit in a growing net of linked meanings with their context valences. By being a network of linked meanings the context valences of the existing meanings in the growing network are defined, even if we are not aware of what these are, our fuzzy awareness of the consistency of the network provides us with some “intuitive” expectation of the nature of context-valences the new meaning has to have and this intuitive expectation is expressed as a conjectural beginning of the further cognitive analysis which leads to a first proposed meaning of some new concept. Then by trial and error, thus by an evaluation of how the new concept fits the construction as it is at that moment, the meaning is accepted or rejected. When the processes we are studying deal with observations in reality, the correctness of the construction is not guaranteed and depends on the analytic quality and really owned knowledge of the human thinker, the resulting meanings used in the theory later may not fit logically, linguistically or existentially,…, in the whole. However when the study objects are abstract, depending on real brain activity, but with conclusions only on the abstract level, the definitions are unambiguous and properties — and all links between them — are by construction logically defined. Then the evaluation and trial and error analysis is a more simple process mainly a correction check on the logic of the analysis; for example in Mathematics it is indeed only a logic check on the evaluation of the new concept’s fit in the existing — partial — but already verified theory. Yet even the best mathematicians are known to having made some mistake once, the refereeing system for publications in scientific journals is thus a very useful — but boring — thing. What remains to be clarified is which human quality is necessary to be able to “guess” the desired new meaning for the new brain activity? It is not necessary that the guess will immediately be the desired new meaning, but if the obtained structural meaning shows to have some essential property which may be used in a refinement of the process so that other missing properties may be added , that is an important step…making progress in the process! Perhaps it is clear from the appearance of words like trial and error, guess , human mistakes,…, that the way of thinking about giving meaning in a construction of a message, theory, research field ,…, is not so scientific as one would hope. Indeed belief and jumping into the dark play a role but the quality of being able to use creative fantasy in a meaningful way is as important as a formal logical — you could say scientific — thinking strategy.

As a first conclusion we retain that the giving meaning process should be viewed in a growing network of giving meaning processes for related concepts, the earlier ones already defining meaning-valences by the finished part of the theory (development stage of the message).

But there is a more dark side to this story, where dark is as in dark matter, dark energy…,or dark influencing as it appeared in the DIM model. Ideas and the meaning of them are not existing objects in reality, but we can say they “exist abstractly” in the abstract world constructed by our cognitive (creative) activities. The term “existence time interval” can then also be applied to processes of brain activity leading to information stocked in the memory (or information carriers helping it). So there are series of potentials in the universe leading to brain pre-activity leading to existing brain activity…or not! The potentials not leading to existing brain activity but being processes of pre-brain activity may pre-interact with other brain-processes which may well realise to existing brain activity and meanings of ideas, so these influence the existing brain-activity while not existing on the moments of pre-interaction. One may also have a situation where the dark influencer does start to exist long after it pre-interacted with the other one, then we could refer to it as a dark interaction (one which will exist in the future can have influenced in the past one which started to exist earlier).

In a network of processes with linked ingredients and either existing things in reality or abstractly existing notions in the abstract cognitive world, (in fact there are also networks of mixed forms of material and abstract processes , but all types have the same structure of the DIM model!), there are thus many pre-interactions leading to influences on existing or abstractly existing things which have effects before one of the interactors exist while the other does exist. So there is a hidden pre-network of influences as a subnetwork of all pre-interactions which leads to effects while there is no existing interaction at those intervals. We have seen that the network of existing manifestations creates some expected context-valence for the new meanings to be added to the network, the dark influencing in the network thus effects the expected context-valences. Yes, but how much can we know about this dark influence, it seems that no aware knowledge can be gathered about it. This is a problem about unconscious information and how this influences our aware thinking, again this may also be linked to intuitive knowledge, again the value of the intuition depends heavily on the personal characteristics of the thinker, e.g. is it an expert ? If we add such ” intuitive component” to the first conclusion it follows that the spider’s web carrying our message of meanings — with its indications for extension by new fitting meanings — gets added density from the dark influences in the processes.

So, this provides a theoretical background for some thing like “deep pre-thinking”, non-existing yet very active in short time intervals, supporting our system of giving meaning. Here pre-thinking is not meant to be in the “abstract void”, that is in the absence of all abstract ideas we had, but we may see it in the existence-void, that is the same void used in Physics. Thus pre-interactions in brain activity before this giving meaning results in existing brain activities; like in reality all existing things evolve from processes starting in the (existence-)void, all our meanings in the abstract world also started from processes in the same void!

Now let us focus on searching; of course, searching for an object in the universe just comes down checking the possible places where it might be and recognizing it when you see it; it is more difficult to find something you once knew in your memory when you forgot what it was. As we discussed before the structure of things in the memory is like a network of related meanings but the relation need not be defined by the content of the meaning, it can be a place where the idea grew or a smell in that place or the first letter of the name of it; everybody has had experiences where you seek desperately to remember some name or fact and many seemingly unrelated notions come to your mind and the one you seek — even when you feel you could say it any moment — just escapes again and again. Then after a while — and sometimes it can be quite a long while — you suddenly get the idea without looking for it that time.

Well, that is the hidden influencers network in the memory at work, the time that passes is not used in focussed searching for the subject but the memory remembers you are looking for something. In fact the memory is a proof of humans being time hybrids ( we can step in and out of time with the meanings of ideas kept in the memory) as I claimed in the book with that title; if I try to give some mathematical proof and fail but try again later then I can find the exact path of reasoning I followed just as if I am again in the situation I was in before, so I am placing my thinking in the past situation and can go on from there, it is even possible I find a mistake I made in the proof and I can then correct it and finish the proof!

As we observed before, the network of existing meanings related to the construction we are making created some pre-conditions for new meanings to be fitted in the construction and the dark influences network provides an unaware and non-existing web of intuitions (just a name here). But how do we “use” the deep network of dark influences — these stem from pre-interactions between non-existing but evolving things — can these be in the memory too, just like the existing manifestations of some ideas we finished in the past? In the DIM model (see book Time Hybrids) I pointed out that in reality we have existing reality evolving from non-existing processes going on in the void and given by strings (over specific time intervals shorter than existence intervals) of correspondences of potentials at moments in states of the universe … but reality does not care at all about existing or not, there only are processes over time intervals!

*The correct physical theory which results does not depend on existing things but on the ongoing processes over the totally ordered time.*

So is it for the processes in what we call the memory! Hence, in our usual language, the memory not only remembers the manifestations of existing brain activity with given meaning it “remembers” (but not necessarily in the window of our aware thinking) also the non-existing part of the existence processes, thus including the dark influences in the network related to the search for the new meaning to fit in.

Yes, the brain “remembers” the growth of the idea, not only the finished brain activity after giving meaning! It is obvious that our aware “remembering” based on existing brain activity with given abstractly-existing meaning is only a small part of the processes deeply “remembered” by the memory which includes the dark influencing by pre-interactions. There we find the source for searching, one may use the concept unconscious memory but then I have to explain the notion “consciencious” as it fits in the DIM model. I will do so in a moment but perhaps first it is better to call it the micro-memory pointing at the short time intervals — shorter than the existence intervals for the brain activity — because all of this is now unambiguous.

This may not be as strange as it seems, a primitive (mainly mechanical and chemical) memory started to develop in some multicellular beings billions of years ago perhaps together with the germ of a primitive nervous system; there was not much to remember at that primitive level and from thereon the memory developed roughly simultaneously with the brain capacity, so the start with memorising also some short processes (we would not call existing) stayed as an ability of the memory-system.

Now, perhaps surprisingly we also get some other understanding about conscienciousness. In fact that is just the giving meaning to self-observation. As an observation that is just the naked awareness of the Self, there is no understanding of it at the awareness level; only after the cognitive activities described above, for giving meaning and fitting the new meaning in the growing network of meanings in the memory, that the aware self-observation becomes consciousness.

*Conclusion. The ability of the micro-memory of remembering non-existing parts of processes of giving meaning to brain activity, gives birth to consciousness when applied to the meaning of self-observation.*

We will never be able to enter the realm of the non-existing processes in the brain activity, but it should be possible to study some traceable effects of the dark influencing with smartly constructed experiments around the process we call “intuition”; I feel there is a lot to learn about that.