Some curiosities

With what follows having been brought to a pitch in the margins of the outing noticed at reference 1.

First – Three colour printing

A wonder about whether the brain, when it computes the electrical field hypothesised by LWS-R of reference 2 to amount to consciousness, does the equivalent of three colour printing when doing subjective colour?

Maybe the experience of colour over some small patch of the visual field – a point can hardly have colour – is some function of the frequency mix of that field. To the extent that electrical fields can be thought of as being additive, this sounds quite like three colour printing.

But where in the processing stream leading from the eyes and elsewhere to projection into consciousness do we have these three colours? At what point does the RGB colour tuple (or whatever other tuple the brain might use) get aggregated? At the very point of delivery to consciousness or at some earlier stage of the proceedings?

Bearing in mind that the brain is a finite object and any field it generates is going to be an approximation, perhaps to the ideal of a clean mixture of three or four distinct frequencies. There will be noise in the signal. But then, maybe the brain smooths over the noise, rather as it smooths over the dots in the bottom left panel above. Until one gets up real close, when they pop out again, as in bottom right.

But then again, the hypothesis is that the field is the subjective experience. So any noise in that field is going to be part of that experience. 

Is all this saying that the field, oscillating both over a small bit of space and through time, cannot just be the subjective experience, that there has to be something else going on here?

A first speculation

The colour signal arrives in the part of the brain which generates consciousness as an RGB tuple. R, G and B are each assigned their frequency. This is fixed data which is pretty much set once and for all, although it might vary slightly from person to person. A tuple which is associated with a region of a layer object, that is to say a small patch of cortex, often more or less convex. The neurons in that patch, certainly thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them, are then set to fire with frequencies assigned on a probabilistic basis, to correspond with the values of the tuple.

The actual firing might be triggered a short while later, when everything is set up. Or the neurons might start firing as they are set up.

We move, as it were, from a vector representation of a line to a raster representation. With the subjective experience corresponding to the latter: consciousness does not do vectors.

A second speculation

That colour is coded by phase rather than frequency.

So we have a base signal which sets the time. The beat of the conductor or the metronome. Time for the brain as a whole, or just the part of it that is presently of interest?

Then colour – or at least hue – is encoded by phase difference from that base signal, in effect a positive or negative real number which can be mapped onto the interval [0, 2π].

We associate to the fact that the brain seems to be able to distinguish very small differences in timing. Lots of search hits these days for spike timing dependant plasticity (STDP).

We also associate to the work of Winfree (noticed at reference 3) on mappings involving circles and the discontinuities arising therein; the no retraction theorem, a version of which is snapped above. We wonder what sort of a curve in three dimensional space one gets by mapping this circle of hue onto RGB.

An observation

It may that the conscious experience of something, even just a more or less uniform patch of colour, if sustained over time, can evolve a bit in that time. Maybe, for example, the head moves around a bit and gets a better take on the something and is able to update the conscious percept. Maybe more memories are brought into play.

A thought experiment

Suppose we are gazing at some Mach bands on a computer screen, and gradually reduce the contrast between successive columns to zero. What happens to the functions expressing the colours, in this particular case shades of grey.

Winding up

More work to be done here. More work that can be sensibly accommodated in the present post.

PS: and does colour really have to have extent in space? Could the brain not dream or hallucinate a point of arbitrarily small size having colour? In fact, to attach the name, qualities and appurtenances of colour to anything it chooses?

Second – Shadows

The young girl, maybe five or six, in the Wandle, already noticed at reference 1, who had just learned about her shadow – and those of others. She thought that they were absolutely fascinating.

So how does the brain work out that the dark image spread across the floor, climbing across all the obstacles in its way, is somehow both part of the body and part of the floor? Not conforming to one’s idea of persistent, more or less rigid and more or less opaque objects at all. Things like brightly coloured wooden bricks and brightly coloured soft toys.

Not to mention the problem of having several shadows at the same time when there are several strong sources of light.

Thinking about it now, maybe Barrie’s notion in ‘Peter Pan’ of a film of cloth which could be folded up and put in a drawer, is not so far from where some children start off. See reference 5.

PS: looking at the text of the Peter Pan story which followed the play, I was reminded how many successful children’s stories are a cunning mixture of material suitable for adults and material suitable for children. Also that the play was not particularly intended for children at the outset; that came later.

Third – Lost book

Seth’s new book on consciousness – reference 7 – had been lying around my study for some time, partly read but also put aside for some reason. A dew days ago, I wanted to see what he had to say, if anything, about dreams there, but could not find it anywhere in the study. I even went so far as to check with Amazon what it looked like, to be sure that I was looking for the right sort of book.

Still no book. So the search widened to other parts of the house, other bookshelves. Fanciful theories about where it could of got to. Had I left it in the Isle of Wight? But there was a vague thought that the book had been tidied up, and was somewhere on a bookshelf, rather than in one of the heaps of books lying about.

Continue the search this morning. Eventually running it down in the bookcase of reference 8 where I had first looked. The problem seemed to have been two fold. Firstly, from the fact that there was a blue flavoured cover, it did not follow that there was a blue spine, which was what I was looking for. Secondly, the book was far bigger than I remembered, both taller and fatter. The result seemed to be than when checking what turned out to be the right shelf, there was an unconscious sift and this book did not make the cut. So while I thought I was checking the title of every book on the shelf, clearly I was not.

What someone else might simply put down to my having careless habits.

The first bit of good news is that Seth did indeed have something to say about dreaming.

The second bit of good news is that in looking for Seth I turned up Hobson – reference 9 – a book I have had for a long time and had forgotten all about. It has turned up again at a good moment.

Fourth – Stobart

For some reason, I recently started thinking about the distinctive liveries of a haulage firm up north, a haulage firm which was the darling of the media for a while, a few years back now, and which at that time attracted its very own tribe of lorry spotters, groupies if you will. 

It took me about thirty unaided seconds to come up with the name Stovell. And another sixty seconds with Bing to find out that the right answer was actually Stobart. Slowed down for a few seconds by there being more than one Stobart on the books. 

And checking with reference 10 today, I find that the livery is not as smart and distinctive as it once was, as I remember it. Furthermore, the name on the lorries seems to have got much bigger, much more vulgar. While up north turns out to be Warrington in Cheshire.

Checking further, I think that in the snap above what I remember is above and what you get now is below, with the name moving from upper case to mixed case and from yellow shadowed in red to white. To me the old has a tinge of the fairground about it, which I rather liked. While the new somehow contrives both to be more mainstream and more vulgar, this despite the words being more or less the same size.

Fifth – Remembering the stars

As a consumer of detective drama on television, we draw on a fairly small pool of actors and actresses and it often happens that I recognise someone in one drama that I have previously seen in another. Bearing in mind that, as older people, we have watched many episodes of such dramas several times, not to say many times, over. So one might reasonably suppose that the faces and voices in such episodes do eventually find their way to the semantic division of declarative memory, that is to say memories about stuff rather than memories about life and times, about actions.

In which connection, the notion that I have a better memory for voices than faces has gradually been firming up. If HSBC can recognise my voice over a noisy line, why should I not be able to recognise a voice on a television? While I regard myself as bad with faces, be they on television or in real life. I might know that I have seen a face, but often have trouble placing it.

Now a chap called Prince Louis of Battenburg figures quite large in the life of Mrs. Langtry, last noticed at reference 11. For some reason, a few days ago, the actor playing him seemed vaguely familiar, but it was definitely the voice rather than the face that I was remembering.

Eventually it turned out that the actor was one John Castle, whom I had remembered from various episodes of Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse and the Hickson version of Miss. Marple, even if I could not recover the name without the assistance of Bing.

Which went to sharpen up my notion that I am better at voices than faces, even allowing for the disguising beard donned for Prince Louis.

Jennie Linden as Mrs. Cornwallis-West also seemed vaguely familiar, if rather dull, and my guess that she had been Ursula in Ken Russell’s version of  D.H. Lawrence’s novel ‘Women in Love’ turned out to be correct. No idea whether this was voice or face.

On the other hand, I did not spot the late Warren Clarke, an actor whom I rather like and of whom I see a fair bit, as Alwyn in the recently watched ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’, in the Alec Guinness version of 1979. I suppose I have the excuse that it was quite a small part.

While further evidence against the voice notion came from out having just watched the 1977 episode, ‘Gold Plated Delinquents’, of the Thames Television version of ‘Van der Valk’, starring the late Barry Foster, a series never before seen. Whom I recognised as having been the master of an Oxford college in a 1989 episode of Morse, ‘The Last Enemy’. On this occasion, I did not particularly recognise the voice, more the curly hair. I suppose I have the excuse that the two episodes were more than ten years apart.

Notwithstanding, I suppose a better notion would be that any or any combination of face, hair, voice or tricks of manner might elicit a memory. And different people will have different mixes in this regard, so a musician might pay more attention to voice, an artist to face. But without doing some proper work, to say that I do voice rather than face is probably a bit previous.

The splendid illustration being turned up by Bing from somewhere in ebay. The cover, I think, of a paperback.

Conclusions

The mysteries of one’s own mind never fail to catch one’s attention!

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-wallace.html. 

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/05/attention-all-points.html. 

Reference 4: The No Retraction Theorem and a Generalization - Jack Coughlin – 2011. The source of the no-retraction snap.

Reference 5: Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up – J. M. Barrie – 1904. With this play being preceded by the collection ‘The White Bird’ in 1902 and succeeded by the novel ‘Peter and Wendy’ in 1911.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/never-never-land.html. Peter’s last appearance in these pages. As it happens, irrelevant.

Reference 7: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness – Anil Seth – 2021.

Reference 8: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/new-to-me-bookcase.html. The bookcase in question.

Reference 9: Dreaming: An introduction to the science of sleep – J. Allan Hobson – 2002.

Reference 10: https://eddiestobart.com/. 

Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/more-langtry.html.