Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness

Selected works of Max Velmans

Max Velmans

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315516752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Mente e corpo in filosofia

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts themselves present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions.

In this volume Max Velmans reflects on his long-spanning and varied career, considers the highs and lows in a brand new introduction and offers reactions to those who have responded to his published work over the years. This book offers a unique and compelling collection of the best publications in consciousness studies from one of the few psychologists to treat the topic systematically and seriously. Velmans' approach is multi-faceted and represents a convergence of numerous fields of study – culminating in fascinating insights that are of interest to philosopher, psychologist and neuroscientist alike.

With continuing contemporary relevance, and significant historical impact, this collection of works is an essential resource for all those engaged or interested in the field of consciousness studies and the philosophy of the mind.

1Introduction

The opacity of reality

At the age of 15 I was already fascinated by the possibility that one could test philosophical questions. I was intrigued, for example, by idealism – that the world only exists if it is perceived to exist – with the consequence (so I thought) that the world behind my back didn’t exist until I turned around to see it. So, maybe, if I turned very quickly, I could catch it flickering into existence – my first unsuccessful experiment!

It’s a long time ago now, but I clearly remember having very little sense of who I was. I felt an isolated conscious being only able to experience the surface appearances of things. Walking the cement-covered streets of Sydney, I felt locked out from any contact with the deeper nature of reality and, more painfully, the deeper nature of other human beings.

Religion didn’t help. And being sceptical and critical of anything not firmly based on logic or sensory evidence just made my existential situation worse. Being firmly “agnostic” at Sydney Boy’s High School made me the scourge of the scripture class, and at College I occasionally took satisfaction in making life difficult for the Evangelical Society. Lying alone in my bed surrounded by the dilapidated walls of my room at St. Andrews College (University of Sydney) I would stare up at the bare, hanging light bulb and wonder “is this all there is?”

Then as now, boys good at maths and physics were encouraged to pursue the “hard” sciences and, inspired by the American space program and the new world being invented by brilliant technology, I had opted to study Electrical Engineering.

But, from Year Two onwards I found much of the material abstract, technical and sometimes difficult to the point of alienation. Useful though the maths and physics clearly were, it also seemed, somehow, removed from conscious life. None of it addressed my existential questions. So I started to read psychology and philosophy in my spare time. And, for my final year thesis, in 1963, I found a way to combine my interests, focusing on how new developments in electronic control systems could be applied to creating minds in machines, for example in cybernetics and early forms of machine intelligence.

As a newly qualified Electrical Engineer I initially worked in the electronics laboratory of EMAIL Ltd., (at that time a major Australasian engineering company) tasked with the design of electrical circuits for household and light engineering applications, and after six months, was moved on to their newly formed Information Technology Department as a systems analyst, focusing on how to run business and industrial systems on the (then state of the art) pride of the Department, a 16Kb memory IBM computer driven by punched cards.

At the same time I longed to continue with my university studies and, hoping to turn my interests in the nature of mind, consciousness, and existence into something practical, I enrolled in a full-time, evening-run, psychology degree. But I found that alienating too. Psychology in Sydney at that time was firmly behaviourist, existential questions were left to philosophers, and consciousness, according to the only tutor who mentioned it, didn’t exist!

After two years of this I had the sense that I was inwardly dying. I had a good job, well on the road to a management position – but the Company devotion to improving profitability by 10 per cent per annum didn’t seem to me the basis for a worthwhile working life. Much as I enjoyed the outdoors life of Sydney, it was at the time deeply conformist, overtly anti-intellectual and geographically remote from the centres of culture. It was time to leave. Like much of my generation I took the boat to Europe. Having been born in Amsterdam, that was also for me a return – although to what I didn’t know.

I left the boat in Naples and hitchhiked for three months looking for somewhere to live and something to do. I was open to whatever the fates might present. Perhaps, so I thought, I could study existentialism at the Sorbonne under Sartre or Beauvoir. But my French wasn’t up to it. It would have to be England, and it was August, 1966. Perhaps I could pick up my psychology studies in September in time for the new term!

I rushed over to London, without any knowledge of UK university entry requirements. But, based on my Engineering degree, two completed years of psychology studies and, perhaps, my enthusiasm about the possibility of doing fundamental psychology research, Joan Reeves, then the Reader in Psychology at Bedford College, accepted me to take a London University (postgraduate) MPhil Qualifying year, with the possibility of going on to do research for a London MPhil. or PhD.

In 1967 I was ready. What to do? I was still very interested in the mysteries of mind and consciousness and wondered whether I could somehow combine my psychological research with electrical engineering. I visited Colin Cherry, then head of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, who had pioneered groundbreaking work on selective attention. He offered to take me on as a research assistant working on human/machine interfaces in electronic communication systems. Interesting – but somehow, I felt, tangential to researching consciousness.

I had another idea. It was already known that human sense organs are not tuned to the same energy ranges, and are quite restricted, compared to those of many other animals. Why might that be? Maybe it would be possible to get beyond the restrictions of everyday conscious experience by altering it or extending it with wearable equipment, thereby revealing something about why normal human conscious experience is designed in the way that it is. It might be possible, for example, to extend vision into the infra-red or ultra-violet region (as in night-vision goggles) although that might be expensive, and not technically easy to incorporate into a general purpose psychological device. However, it might be easier in the auditory domain. From my engineering, I knew of a way to alter the frequency of electrical signals known as “heterodyning”. In this process, two frequencies f ₁ and f ₂ are combined in a nonlinear signal-processing device such as a vacuum tube or transistor (usually called a mixer) which creates two new signals, one the sum of the two frequencies (f ₁ + f ₂), and the other, the difference (f ₁ − f _2.). A filter can then be used to select one of these – and it occurred to me that this principle could be used to extend the range of human hearing in real time. All one needs is a microphone able to detect signals above 20Kz (above the highest frequency human ears can detect), a pre-amplifier, a mixer, a transposing frequency supplied by a frequency oscillator, a filter, an amplifier, and a set of earphones. For example if one mixes an audio frequency of 30Kz with a transposing frequency of 20Kz, one of the products would be an audible frequency of 10Kz. For complex signals around 30Kz, the same frequency shift would be applied to each component of the signal, allowing the entire signal to be shifted into the audible range with its spectral pattern (and most of its original information) intact.

So, with a grant of £200 from Bedford College, a little advice from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, and a Brüel & Kjær microphone able to detect sounds up to 40Kz, I built a portable, general-purpose frequency transposer that could double the range of human hearing. It could also manipulate sound in many other ways, including inverting the sound spectrum of audio signals and so on, and, over the next few months, I explored the effects of such transformations informally, with a view to isolating a field of research suitable for a PhD.

What happened? The effects of lowering the frequency of music were strange but aesthetically interesting (producing a kind of “ghostly” music); the effects on speech were complex, and very different for vowels and consonants (which turned out to be useful). But my main interest was in how doubling the hearing range might extend, or at least provide some understanding, of our more limited range of auditory consciousness. So, equipped with my portable device, I spent quite a bit of time walking around Regents Park, the streets of London, and, occasionally, the animal lab in the Psychology Department of Bedford College.

What could I hear? Environmental sounds like water rushing and the wind in the trees sounded much the same when lowered in frequency, although a teaspoon tapped against a cup sounded more like horse-hooves clopping. The chirping of birds also revealed far more texture and internal variation when transposed from the higher frequency region where birds have maximal discrimination to the lower hearing range where human hearing has maximal discrimination. There were also animal signals above the range of human hearing. For example, in the animal lab I heard a high frequency shriek. One of my fellow PhD students (who had heard nothing) pointed out that a Gerbil was signalling fear by thumping its back feet. I now knew that it was also screaming at around 30Kz.

But, in my random wanderings, such natural signals above the normal hearing range were only occasional – and although I could have increased the sensitivity of the system by using a sound collector to compensate for the limited sensitivity of the microphone, or focused on animals known to use high frequency sound for species-specific purposes, one basic principle was already clear: human hearing is tuned to the frequency range that it normally is, because that’s where the auditory information most useful to human life normally is. That insight wasn’t going to get me a PhD!

However, it occurred to me that frequency transposition might be of use in sensory-neural deafness, where either inner ear and/or auditory nerve damage typically produces a high-frequency hearing loss, which affects the vowels and consonants of speech in different ways. Vowels, produced by the way vocal chord frequencies are affected by resonances in the articulatory system, have their major harmonic energy components in the lower frequencies and are more resistant to such losses. Consonants, produced by sudden releases of air, or air forced through narrow constrictions in the articulatory system, have noisy, higher-frequency components, and are vulnerable to such losses, particularly sibilant and stop consonants such as s, sh and t, as in the words sip, ship and tip – making them difficult to identify and discriminate. The amplification supplied by normal hearing aids doesn’t address this problem because the neural circuits that detect and transmit the relevant higher frequency information no longer function and cannot, therefore, detect the amplified signals.

So after a further period of experimentation using filtered speech to simulate deafness, I designed a two-channel frequency transposing hearing aid and/or speech training aid, that would lower the frequency of badly affected consonant sounds to the residual hearing range while leaving vowel sounds intact. The first channel amplified any vowel information that remained in the low-frequency residual hearing range in the normal way; the second (transposing) channel selected consonant spectra above 4 KHz, lowered these by 4Kz, and then combined them with the normal amplification channel. I found that this configuration of the system had very little effect on vowels, while producing low frequency versions of the transposed consonants in a way that closely resembled the originals, or were, at least, readily identifiable after a short period of learning (to a normal hearing person). The development of the system and its subsequent testing (a) with normal hearing adults under conditions of simulated deafness, and (b) with sensory-neural deaf schoolchildren became the subject of my PhD. Following some promising results the device was adopted by the National Research and Development Corporation (later renamed the British Technology Group) and patented in the UK, the US and Japan (Velmans, 1973).

After receiving my PhD in 1974, I went back to the drawing board. I had by then been awarded a permanent lectureship in the newly formed Psychology Department at Goldsmiths College and had been teaching courses on Perception, Attention, Memory, and the newly emergent field of Psycholinguistics. I had also embarked on what would turn out to be a 10-year research program developing and evaluating the frequency transposing hearing aid, including a multi-centre field trial with sensory-neural deaf adults, externally funded by the National Research and Development Corporation, The Department of Health and Social Security, and, later, the Medical Research Council.

However, I still longed to focus on fundamental theoretical questions. Inspired by how the work of Noam Chomsky had revolutionised psycholinguistics and hammered a deep nail in the coffin of Behaviourism, I thought it might be interesting to do work on semantics. But I was still intrigued by consciousness. Unfortunately, the study of consciousness had been largely banned from Psychology for over 50 years, and although a few scattered theoretical writings about it had appeared within the newly emergent field of Cognitive Psychology, for example, in two chapters in George Miller’s book Psychology: The Science of Mental Life (1962), a field of Consciousness Studies didn’t exist! Nor did I have any idea about whether I might have anything original or of value to say about it. So, early in 1975, rather than search the literature to investigate what had already been written, I decided to start out empty handed, and give myself time to clarify my own initial thoughts.

First thoughts about consciousness

From my teaching on selective attention I was familiar with the literature supporting two stages of input analysis in the brain, then thought of as “pre-attentive” and “focal-attentive” – summarised for example in Donald Norman’s book on Memory and Attention (1969). The evidence at that time suggested that all input stimuli detected by the sense organs initially received a fast, automatic, parallel, pre-attentive analysis that was sufficiently detailed to allow a judgement to be made about their importance. The most important stimuli were then selected for a further, relatively slow, voluntary, sequential form of focal-attentive processing that was more detailed and flexible in ways that could draw on the brain’s distributed processing resources. Only selected stimuli entered short-term memory (a form of “working store”), thereby becoming part of the “psychological present” – and could then be transferred to long-term memory, thereby contributing to learning and becoming part of one’s “psychological past”. Pre-attentive processing was thought to be “preconscious” and focal-attentive processing was thought of as “conscious”.

But what was consciousness and what did it actually do? Having been a systems analyst, it was obvious to me that the operations specified by models of focal-attentive processing could, in principle, be carried out by a suitably designed, electronic, information processing system, whether or not it was conscious – for the simple reason that cognitive models of information processing specify nothing other than information processing, and don’t require anything else to make an implementation of them work. Perhaps, I thought, consciousness was something additional, but nevertheless physical that makes such workings more efficient, giving humans a selective advantage, for example an emergent brain property such as its magnetic field. If so, I knew from my engineering, there might be ways to detect and measure it. Given the way such fields naturally form in a way that responds to the combined electrical activities with which they are associated, perhaps the function of consciousness was to integrate the brain’s electrochemi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 How to define consciousness – and how not to define consciousness (2009)
• 3 Consciousness, brain and the physical world (1990)
• 4 An epistemology for the study of consciousness (2007)
• 5 Reflexive monism: Psychophysical relations among mind, matter and consciousness (2012)
• 6 Extracts from “Is human information processing conscious?” (1991): (Target article for Behavioral and Brain Sciences)
• 7 Extracts from “Consciousness from a first-person perspective” (1991): (Reply to comments on my Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article)
• 8 How could conscious experiences affect brains? (2002): (Target article for Special Issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies)
• 9 Conscious agency and the preconscious/unconscious self (2014)
• 10 The evolution of consciousness (2012)
• 11 How to arrive at an Eastern place from a Western direction: Convergences and divergences among Samkhya Dualism, Advaita Nondualism, the Body–Mind–Consciousness Trident Model and Reflexive Monism (2013)
• Index