Dimensions of consciousness

Peter T. Walling, MD, FRCA, and Kenneth N. Hicks, CETsr, CBET, GROL

From the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Management, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, Texas.

Corresponding author: Peter T. Walling, MD, FRCA, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Management, Baylor University Medical Center, 3500 Gaston Avenue, Dallas, Texas 75246.

The nature and location of consciousness in humans remain a mystery. The presence or absence of conscious awareness throughout the remainder of the animal world is still disputed. Sitting by a pond with rod and reel, anglers may wonder what is going on in the heads of the fishes, frogs, dragonflies, turtles, and other critters that have inhabited the planet virtually unchanged many millions of years before the appearance of Homo sapiens. In Izaak Walton's classic The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653, the pike, for example, is described as “the tyrant of the rivers, or the fresh-water wolf, by reason of his bold, greedy, devouring disposition; which is so keen” (2). An apt description, but is the pike aware of any of these attributes? As John Donne noted in a 1628 sermon, “The beast does but know, but the man knows that he knows” (3). Consciousness is indeed strange, straddling the objective and the subjective with no dimension to call its own. The shape of our thoughts does not quite resemble the configuration of the neurons responsible for them, so where are they?

Two difficult problems remain to be solved before consciousness can be explained. First there is the “phenomenal problem.” The redness of the rose I see exists in a private domain. I cannot communicate to anyone else what redness is like. Redness and other qualia are subjective phenomena which cannot be described to outsiders (4). Second, there is the “binding problem” (5). How can multiple memories and afferent impulses combine simultaneously to produce a moment of lucid conscious awareness when the data are scattered throughout the brain and there appears to be no central station to coordinate the information? Clues that could lead to a solution for this puzzle may be all around us. Many animal species exist today whose structurally similar ancestors have been memorialized as fossils. If changes in their central nervous systems have been as slight as other bodily alterations, the surviving progeny could serve as time capsules for paleoneurologists. Today's fauna could represent examples of living prototypes of central nervous system development. Perhaps a pattern could be seen within these survivors that might help us to unravel the problem of human consciousness.

In a previous article, we hypothesized that consciousness might be related to phase space, a mathematical construct where the geometry of dynamic systems takes place (6). We conjectured that complex neural function developed within a framework of mathematics just as bones developed around the demands of gravity, that objects in physical space are translated into perceptual space within phase space.

A brief overview of dimensions is presented because that understanding leads naturally to the dynamics necessary to comprehend some aspects of the conscious state model.