Things as they are

Hello everyone:

Perhaps one of the strangest, and at the same time most challenging, problems of modern science is what is called “the hard problem of consciousness”. I am sure that if you follow me you will have already understood that mine is a “problem of consciousness” and that I have sometimes commented on this very problem, but following a curious video that I saw on the social network X, it has led me to think a little about this problem and especially about the problem of perception. But to begin with, let us comment on what is the famous hard or difficult problem of consciousness.

The famous “hard or difficult problem of consciousness” was born from the idea of ​​David John Chalmers, an Australian philosopher who, studying consciousness, came to something he could not explain, and that was why the way in which a certain phenomenon affects us depends on our subjectivity with respect to it. We can give a simple example that I am sure everyone will understand if we see what happens when two teams with a great rivalry face each other and a relevant event occurs in the confrontation: for one group of fans the decision taken will be clear and consistent, for another it will be a “real robbery” and for another large group of “indifferent” people neither one nor the other: it will be an event without significance for them.

It is still an unsolvable problem for now, but curiously recently, as I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, I came across a curious video that was not really about consciousness, but about statistics, and if you allow me, I will show it to you before continuing with the argument.

What you are seeing is a series of points that draw different images, but which curiously have several parameters in common: the mean of the X coordinate, the mean of the Y coordinate, the standard deviation of X, the standard deviation of Y and the correlation coefficient between both variables. And I am sure that you will be asking yourself with good judgment: what does this have to do with consciousness and its problem? Well, that is where I wanted to get to: and it is the “sacrosanct” perception.

We think that the reality we live in is a unique reality, but the facts show us the opposite: and it is true, since what we perceive is not reality itself, but as shown in the image above, a way we have of “interpreting” what surrounds us and that depends on many factors, both physical, biological and even psychological. A beautiful landscape can lead us to emotion, as long as we can integrate it into our visual center; but what really happens in the perception process? Well, I think that from now on we enter what we could call “the hypothetical area” because I warn you that from now on what you are going to read is only my opinion. Therefore you have two options, either continue reading or stop doing it… like in a certain very famous movie.

In my opinion, what the perception process really does is integrate information that is collected by the “sensors” of the different senses: whether it be the eyes for vision, the Pacinian corpuscles for pain and pressure, the olfactory cells of the cribriform plate of the ethmoid, etc. In other words, our cortical areas perform an information integration function.

And it is precisely in these places where the “miracle” of perception takes place, since we integrate the information that, as we have said, reaches them from the senses: in a way analogous to the theory of integrated information, our consciousness would be in charge of “integrating” this large amount of information, discarding that which “in its opinion” was not important and keeping that which really is: the mystery now emanates from knowing what it is and how this informative consciousness decides what is relevant, or to put it another way, what part of the message that is transmitted by the sensory pathways has relevant information and what is noise, leaving it therefore as “not relevant” and dispensable:

And now we return to the video I mentioned at the beginning. As I was saying, it was a video where several points formed different figures despite having certain common values ​​(mean, median and correlation coefficient); that is, different images can be “summarized” in the same way; and this point leads me to ask myself, could the opposite occur? Could certain phenomena be capable of being integrated differently depending on how our consciousness decides which part of that information is essential and which is “noise”? In everything paranormal (and anomalous) this duality often appears: two witnesses who observe a phenomenon may “perceive” it differently: using our example, the same mean, standard deviation and correlation coefficient of several points “draws” different images in one witness or another.

And the hard problem of consciousness? In my opinion, it is precisely this capacity for different integration of each phenomenon despite having the same characteristics that would be responsible for this subjectivity of perception. But as always, these ideas end up creating even more questions, because in this case, what decides the “dot drawing” of the phenomenon? Does it depend on our education, our memory, our experiences or our lack of them? As you can see, it is still a fascinating field and unfortunately it is not so striking, at least in our environment. I hope you like it and until next time.