psmv5: Silent consciousness

I was recently reminded by Academia, not for the first time, of the paper by Bernard Baars at reference 1, chap better known to me for his global workspace theory of consciousness. A paper which I now find makes a plea for a fourth sort of consciousness – silent consciousness – to be added to the other three sorts, that is to say, waking consciousness, dreaming and deep sleep.

Consciousness which might be defined as consciousness without content, or at least without readily reportable content, like lions or tigers, the achievement of which is sought in many contemplative practises, for example in those of the Buddhists. A sort of consciousness which was very much in the book noticed back at reference 2, although I do not appear to have sparked on it at the time: perhaps I was diverted by its focus on dreaming. But a practise, a phenomenon, which ought indeed to be of interest to those trying to fathom out consciousness. Even if, so far at least, it does not seem to diagram very well.

Where the lines indicate the possibility of transition in either direction, giving us a fully connected graph. One can get to everywhere from anywhere. With the two red, secondary boxes being transitional states between the blue, primary circles. Maybe it would work better in three dimensions as a double tetrahedron, with arousal being the link between silent consciousness and nodding consciousness, but I did not have much success with that in Powerpoint.

I note in passing the formal difficulty with the phrase ‘no reportable content’, given that one can, after all, always report that one is conscious of the great white void, or perhaps something else of that sort, more or less equivalent to nothing. I associate to the logical paradoxes – for example the Russell set – which kept logicians busy in the first years of the twentieth century.

Baars offers a number of related matters in support, then offers a technique which might give an experimenter a way into all this.

The related matters

One Herbert Benson was on the scene fifty years ago, inspired by the same Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who got mixed up with the Beatles, and he published the best-selling self-help book about what he called the relaxation response at reference 3, as snapped above. Lots of other editions about. Amongst other things, he noted that achieving this relaxation response resulted in various physiological changes, such as reduced blood pressure, which in combination countered the stress reactions, particularly those of the HPA (Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal) axis.

His technique is very briefly summarised at reference 4 – where I was amused by the advice not to do it after meals as it interferes with the digestion.

I wondered about the likely tendency to fall asleep while doing this sort of thing, which does not seem to fit very well with silent consciousness. But it made me wonder about there being consciousness without reportable content while asleep. Dreaming about being in such a state does present any difficulty; perhaps being silently conscious while asleep does.

The use of repetition, the use of mantras, as in the relaxation response and elsewhere, links to the auditory illusions studied by Warren and others around fifty years ago, but not, as far as I can make out, much studied since. Relatives of the visual illusions which have had much more attention. Summarised at reference 5, which is snapped in additional information below. The gist seems to be that if you hear a suitable word repeated over and over all kinds of odd things start to happen to your perception of that word. With the addition of a suitable amount of noise to the signal amplifying the effect. Part of which is the loss of its meaning, leaving just a raw lump of sound, and another is the involuntary slips to nearby words, slips which do not seem to be mentioned in the context of mantras, where they would be a hindrance rather than interesting.

My experiments with the ‘read aloud’ feature of Microsoft Word were interesting, but did not produce the desired effects. Part of the problem was the insertion of short pauses from time to time, as if the computer were taking a breath, pauses which rather broke the flow. Another was Word’s rather unnatural reading voice.

There was a link here to something called the Sensation Seeking Scale, described at reference 7. A questionnaire based psychological testing procedure which looks rather crude, at which it would be easy enough to cheat, but which appears to be widely used, so presumably it works, at least after a fashion. And on the evidence that I saw, being a sensation seeker did not seem to be correlated with a propensity to hear the wrong word among all the repetitions. And presumably not with a propensity to see all kinds of animals among the coloured dots above.

In any event, a reminder that the ability to experience silent consciousness might well need to be trained, but also might very well vary from person to person.

Other sorts of repetition may also be used, for example repeating a physical action, perhaps the repetitive shooting of arrows by a Zen archer. Hours and hours of it. Maybe something simpler would do, say just moving a full mug of tea from one side of the table in front of you to another – without making a mess. Which links to redundancy, which at the limit reduces to nothing, as in the visual ganzfeld of reference 6, which seems to be somehow mixed up with para-psychics and their experiments with ESP and telepathy. Baars reminds us that a lot of perception depends on change and contrast, and that an image which is stabilised on the retinas – a rather contrived proceeding, given the way that eyes usually flicker about – results in that image fading from consciousness.

Which means that gazing at a uniform unchanging scene can be used to help induce silent consciousness, with various artists having tried to create spaces of this sort with coloured sheets, which, while I have found them a bit confusing to be in, do not generate silent consciousness – although to be fair, I was not approaching these spaces with that in mind. All rather a long time ago now. Maybe a lying down facing a clear blue sky or sitting in a thick mist on top of a mountain would do better. Baars goes on to tell of a variant called near-threshold attending, where one attends to a stimulus near or dropping towards the threshold of perception.

[From one Andril Tokarchuk, who appears to specialise in images of dots of various sorts, but who is careful about his copyright]

Very different from this absence of contrast are images which contain no large scale structure, but lots of low level noise. For me at least, these work like clouds in the sky, prompting all sorts of images; not silent at all. Perhaps the trick would be to gradually turn down the contrast, to achieve the near threshold attending, just mentioned.

I associate to the work of Jackson Pollock. Not aware of it prompting all kinds of projections, but then I have yet to give it a proper try. But if not,, why not? Sampled above.

Baars writes at some length of the role of surprise in silent consciousness, which I found much less convincing. And his reading of the east Asian koans seems some way from that offered by Wikipedia at reference 8.

Lastly, there was a link to pleasure, with pleasure sometimes accompanying silent states, if not silent consciousness. Pleasure, and perhaps other states. I remember being able, as a child at least, being able to achieve a rather strange inner state, not exactly silent consciousness, but a state which was more apt to prompt fear or anxiety rather than pleasure. Sadly, a state which I can no longer reach. In any event, consciousness without any ordinary content, apart from emotional valence.

The technique

One of the features of silent consciousness is lack of awareness of at least some of the stimuli as there might be, in particular lapses of hearing. Baars suggests that this might be detected using the EEG machinery used in an experiment to do with the perception of short gaps in sound stimuli at reference 9. Which might be used to detect false positives – absence of perceived sound when sound was present – in the present context.

A ‘might’ which seems to make an assumption about exactly where on the pathway between the ear and consciousness the blocking of a sound takes place during silent consciousness.

On the other hand, EEG can also be used to identify gaps which are actually microsleeps – these last being the subject of much work, not least because of the danger they represent when driving cars or other machinery. A bad thing, rather than the on-balance-good-thing of reference 10.

He argues that this might be used to explore the relationship between silent consciousness and the relaxation response identified by Benson.

In the margins, I read of the ears’ remarkable sensitivity – in health anyway – to these gaps, say of the order of 50ms in length, a twentieth of a second. A sensitivity which one might take as a proxy for the ears’ capacity to detect change in time and synchrony – or diachrony – generally.

Other matters

In connection with repetition, I note that repetition of short prayers or phrases features in both Catholic and Muslim practise. And imagine that meditation, at least of a sort, features in Quaker practise.

The famous Blue Cliff Record of Zen Buddhism (reference 11), with its selection of 100 koans and dating from around 1,000 years ago, look interesting enough - but I fail to see the connection with silent consciousness. At least so far. But I can say was that one of the points of interest was the notion, possibly Buddhist, that one could not put something into words without damaging it, and so writing stuff down was dangerous. Which, putting a rather crude gloss on the matter, seems to fit rather well with current theory that perception is the product of stimuli coming in from below interacting with the words coming down from above.

My own working hypothesis (the LWS-R of reference 12) is that consciousness is the product of electrical activation of a layered data structure embedded in a small patch of neuron rich cortex. To be more precise, electrical activation of the shape nets and texture nets which define the contents of consciousness. The present paper makes it of interest to think about what happens here when there are no contents, at least no reportable contents. What do our nets degenerate to? What does the activation process degenerate to?

Put another way, I see consciousness as decomposable into two parts: a data part which is the contents of consciousness and a process part which bites on the data part. So what happens to the process part, when the data part degenerates or perhaps vanishes?

Searching for silent consciousness on the Internet mainly turns up this very paper. But it also turns up some philosophical stuff, for example references 13 and 14 – both no doubt relevant, but both too dense and too expensive for me.

Then just yesterday, in a train from Victoria, a man of middle years in a nearby seat was sharing his music with the rest of us. Music which might have been rapping. But whatever the case, it struck me that it might function as white noise, perhaps serving, oxymoronically, to produce silent consciousness. He might have been challenging me to challenge him, but luckily he got off at Clapham Junction so I did not have to think too hard about that one.

Conclusions

Interesting stuff, but all a bit of a mess at the moment. Maybe some clarity will come in the days to come.

PS: fulfilment works! A touch of festive red ordered from Waitrose early yesterday evening arrived from Coulsdon at around 08:30 this morning, a little more than twelve hours later. Right in the middle of what appeared yesterday to be the penultimate delivery slot available here at Epsom before the holiday. Plus, echoing Amazon practise, the delivery charge of £4 was more than offset by a special offer on the price of the merchandise.

References

Reference 1: A scientific approach to silent consciousness – Bernard J. Baars – 2013.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/03/buddha-rules.html.

Reference 3: The relaxation response – Herbert Benson – 1976.

Reference 4: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/heart-and-soul-healing/201303/dr-herbert-benson-s-relaxation-response.

Reference 5: An auditory analogue of the visual reversible figure – Warren, R. M., & Gregory, R. L. – 1958.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect.

Reference 7: https://arc.psych.wisc.edu/self-report/sensation-seeking-scale-sss/.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan.

Reference 9: Gap Detection measured with electrically evoked auditory event–related potentials and speech–perception abilities in children with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder – He, S., Grose, J. H., Teagle, H. F., Woodard, J., Park, L. R., Hatch, D. R., et al. – 2013.

Reference 10: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-snoozing-of-penguins.html.

Reference 11: The Blue Cliff Record - Ch'ung-hsien, K'o-ch'in, Thomas Cleary - 960-1276 C.E, 1998. 100 koans from the Chan school of Buddhism.

Reference 12: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html.

Reference 13: Silence, Attention, Body – Rosales, D.I – 2023.

Reference 14: Silence: The phenomenon and its ontological significance – Dauenhauer, Bernard P – 1980.

Additional information