Understanding Consciousness: Nested Time Scales and Resonance

The focus on real-time processes limits understanding. Consciousness spans real-time, creature, self, and animal consciousness, nested over evolutionary time.

### Exploring Time Consciousness Across Multiple Scales: From Micro to Macro
* ⏳ The discussion delves into different theories of consciousness, including IIT and GNWT, focusing on the **role of time** in these models.
* 🧠 IIT emphasizes **continuous neural activity**, while GNWT highlights **discrete bursts of activity**, particularly in the **1-3 second range** for extended consciousness.
* 🕰 The conversation touches on various time scales of consciousness, from milliseconds to evolutionary time, with a particular focus on the **1.5 second bump in perception**.
* The concept of "**nested time scales**" is introduced, suggesting that different levels of consciousness (phenomenal, creature, self, intergenerational, and animal) are **nested within each other**.
* 🔬 The potential role of electromagnetic field frequency bands in understanding consciousness across species is discussed, referencing **Buzsáki's work on mammalian brain resonance**.
* 🌀 The idea of "**resonance speed**" is considered, with questions raised about whether **faster or slower resonance** leads to **more complex or powerful consciousness**.
* 🌌 The potential analogy between changes in **resonance speed** and **acceleration** in general relativity is proposed, suggesting a broader framework for understanding **consciousness dynamics**.
* 🤔 The conversation ends with an invitation for **further discussions and potential future presentations** on the topic.

welcome to the general resonance Theory YouTube channel. Today, we have a discussion with Kent Lachlan on time consciousness. We now join this talk already in progress. The two major series, the two major theories of Consciousness that are again in that adversarial collaboration at the moment IIT and GNWT. Global neuronal workspace Theory only deal with time at sort of the entry point Consciousness. It's all about functional integration and then maybe broadcasting or what has the highest fire Peak at the time. So in response to stimuli, often what we're trying to say is you actually need to expand it out over multiple ignitions, multiple um files in order to get a sense of phenomenological experience. Oh, sorry, Stephen, you can go. So what is the main experimental evidence for this one to three second a range of your um um Extended consciousness? A lot of it's behavioral, a lot of it's how we um synchronize movements. It's a lot of it's how we interact with other people, how we vocalize, how we pass phrases into

you know one to three seconds that's that's definitely not a settled question there's a lot of people a good paper came out. Infinite windows but even in the way people process or perceive time there is a bump at around one and a half seconds that says that after one and a half seconds it's like there's a resetting of the temporal window so that's almost an argument for saying it's discreet that you have uh a point at which you say okay I'll close off that present moment and move to the next and I think there are pathological states where you could say that's what actually happens for some people that there is a discrete boundary between you know the continuity of events but in especially in flow States where there's where people are immersed in activity I think we're we're showing that there's there's definitely no discrete break that people are able to move between representations very smoothly people should would you be able to see this reaction like in Europe for example and say okay this is your window of

consciousness, so it's more about spontaneous activity. So, the dynamics of spontaneous activity, so it's about spectral analysis of autocorrelation, windows, and power spectral analysis. That's the neurological evidence forum. Yeah, I had a question. So, you're kind of assigning consciousness to this middle time frame. Maybe that's like a just feels right to you or something, but I'm just curious if there is any like quantitative or even qualitative differences between these three different modes. It seems like they all involve a brain network and a time scale for integrating information, and maybe they feed into each other hierarchically in some way, but yeah, I'm just curious like they seem to each be comprised of the same units and mechanisms. Like, is there really anything that differentiates them in particular, the center one as sort of being the one associated with consciousness? Yeah, so you've got within experience, you've got things like post-dictive effects. So, you can have a stimulus that's perceived and even

integrated here at the beginning of Consciousness so at the Erp level. But then, due to information that it receives later, it gets updated and changed. So, a post-dictive effect for us is evidence not of, you know, absolute discrete window activity here, but of continuous integration of co-conscious events here. So, that same, but there's definitely a change once something has been synchronized. There's further processing that happens, but the anterior insular, I think, is the point that's like a central Hub. So, that's a central node in the network for creating a sense of synchrony. Beyond that, it needs to be fed forward into, you know, higher nodes in the network. Does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, to some degree. Yeah. So, you're kind of relying on, like, the functional properties of the different regions. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm still, I guess I'm not fully convinced that there's anything special about that one time scale. Yeah, but I, yeah, but I, I like your, your use of, of functional regions and associations.

think that's cool. I think this is very functional. It might be evolutionary. It might be something that's baked into the intrinsic neural time scales of the regions that we're seeing interact. So if you're thinking about like a predictive processing approach, if you've got bottom-up and top-down processes happening simultaneously, there has to be a point at which they intersect, and that intersection has to happen temporally as well. So if bottom-up is fast time scale and top-down is slower time scales in the hierarchy, they have to meet and interact at some point. And yeah, I'm it's a good question, and I think even Mark Whitman says, I don't have an answer, a discrete answer for that, a final answer. But Georg Northov, who's doing a lot of that common currency approach, and he's all about autocorrelation windows, he's saying, We, the challenge is to define within the Neuroscience what these, what this window is. So is your comment that it just seems like it's

it's scale-free so therefore to actually pin it down to one scale is overcooking it. Yeah, I think it just comes down to like I do like your idea that you are tying neural activity to observable behavior or different time scales that are salient to our experience. Which, yeah, on some level, that's all we can really round it to at the phenomenological level. Um, so yeah, I like your thought process. Yeah, I'm just thinking like biologically, is there anything in particular that would make that conscious versus the other ones not conscious? And maybe it's just not there yet. But yeah, I do like the intersection point of the flowing scales. But yeah, interesting. I don't expect you to have an answer, but I'm still formulating that answer. And I think, um, so for depression, if we're saying it's the shift in the hierarchy, I think maybe you've got to look at the hierarchy as a whole in order to figure that out, to say

well, there's probably a logarithmic, um, time scale pattern underneath it. And if you can explain the whole thing, um, not just function but also experience promotion, uh, different aspects of experience and cognition within one model, then that's, that's the proof. Not just, okay, we've isolated one thing and this is what we're going to point to as just that one window. So, Mark and I actually differ on whether there's only one window of conscious experience. He says yes, this is, this is consciousness. I disagree and say, well, actually, there's multiple windows of conscious experience. And in order to point to this one, you need to show those ones within the nested hierarchy. But I can get to that later if I can just kind of a key up out for a second. Um, I'm finishing up right now. Mark's Dom's really good new book called The Hidden Spring, which is, um, his take on a lot of key questions in Consciousness. And it kind of takes off and pankcepts work. He's also Neo-freudians pretty

interesting stuff, but he argues it makes a good case for what I think is, you know, a pretty compelling view. That the reason this, you know, extended moment experience moment is so important is natural selection, right? Survival and reproduction. That's why it's, you know, the present moment and why it's got a special place in our, our own, you know, experiences. It's how we actually got here. Um, does that help answer your question, Justin, or are you looking at a different question? Um, yeah, I mean, I, I get the associations and stuff like that. Like, yeah, I guess, uh, I'm curious if there's any mechanism or like grounded reason for this one being conscious and not the other. I think, I think, yeah, Lachlan, your most recent answer, maybe there's multiple windows. I think is what I was pushing for, but yeah, you got there. You got me this, that's it. I got you there, but yeah, I, I don't know. I, but we have such a, uh, profound experience of being one person. So like, as much as it, it's like more

scientifically sound to have a multitude of Windows every day. I don't know, like me and Jonathan are working on this theory with like nested Windows, maybe nested conscious beings inside of us. But you know, when I'm lying in bed going to sleep, it's like I still feel like I'm one person. And it's like, is it all just uh philosophical musings? And like, I'm scientifically motivated to view myself as a multi-self. But experientially, it's just so hard to get outside of the singular Miss or the wholeness of it. Yeah, but so you're talking about like self-consciousness there. And that gets, that's where it gets really tricky because like phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness, self-consciousness are viewed very differently in the science and IIT and Global neuronal workspace. Just want to talk about phenomenal consciousness, leave the self, leave access. Well, access is kind of buried in there for Global neural workspace, but the way that it's pitched is on aspects of phenomenal consciousness.

so the whole grounding of what what is the self, and when does the self come into the picture. I think that's over time scale as well. That takes a certain amount of time to create a sense of self, and I think we're born or conceived with a sense of self. So there's some good work being done by a lady called Anna Chionica who's working on co-embodiment, co-homeostasis, and the basis of self-consciousness in others in utero. So we need feedback from basically our mother to give us a representation of ourselves. That's to me, that's fascinating work because that sort of bridges that gap between the personal and the impersonal or the non-personal. So though that sort of makes the bridge towards evolutionary time scales. So that's where that nestedness comes in. I think different windows, different processes. This is just phenomenal consciousness makes sense, okay loose answer. All right so really who cares about whether time. Consciousness is extended or not. And this is the um.

at the serial collaboration I was talking about so Global neuronal workspace versus IIT. IIT imagines a so you can see it's time generalized decoding matrices so there's timing in here it's about synchronization so Global neural workspace imagines that there's a burst of activity you know between 300 and 1500 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus whereas IIT will have a continuous unfolding of neural activity in the posterior cortical Hot Zone and that's what they're pitching is their neural correlates of Consciousness and we'll get the data on that I'm pretty sure in the next in the next year or two and surprise surprise this one will be I think will be about report so this will be about something more like access Consciousness whereas this one will be more about uh phenomenal their phenomenal experience itself but the fact that it's set up adversarially is interesting and gives us at least a the vehicle to say time is important if you want to differentiate these theories

get into Noni write a paper saying that uh Consciousness was in visual cortex or something early on. I think maybe maybe to be provocative. Yeah, I'm curious to see how this results. Yeah, there's another paper in the special issue in the nearest Neuroscience of Consciousness about how to do uh Theory comparison and not adversarially but actually to compare and decide which one explains uh what type of experiments better. And that's Simon Vandal pin um. I'd recommend reading that if you're interested in the comparison of theories. That's really good. Did I give so I got maybe a bit sidetracked by um the question. Did I give enough uh context on the paper itself or do you want me to go back over that a little bit more? I think I think you're good. Go keep going. Okay, yeah, you're either half an hour left so okay cool. So I'm collaborating now with this guy Guild northoff um. He's got a temporary spatial Theory Of Consciousness, the TTC. So he is again.

much more interested in continuous activity looking at different frequencies also different areas so he's not just saying it's one part of the brain it's a whole brain uh phenomenon and he's obviously very critical of this approach. He doesn't think it'll amount to anything in terms of fundamental Theory, but I really like his approach. And it's for me, it's about um spontaneous activity. That's the key. So it's not just um the timing of events, it's the spontaneous activity of the brain, spontaneous temporal activity, and how that dynamically interacts with the timing of stimuli. So if you have stimulated onset in Phase or out of phase with that dynamical activity, they get processed differently. So that's highly relevant for General resonance Theory because it's about the ability of stimuli to interact with spontaneous activity. So that's a nice way of it's a dynamical approach. I believe IIT and Global neuronal workspace are Dynamic enough nor are they extended enough. So here you've got time scales of

um 300 to 1500 milliseconds. Again, I don't think that's extended enough in terms of what we would consider to be a single conscious experience, not just a serial unfolding of different events, but what we would count as one event. Yeah, they both seem entirely timeless to me and just totally static. But yeah, yeah. So the point in the paper was that time is static, discrete, too short, unextended, and non-dynamic. So there's a word called diachronic um time. So these theories are very synchronic. So it's all about the synchrony of um neural activity at the time or just after the stimulus, whereas you need to look diachronically. You need to look at multiple windows in order to get a real sense of what's happening, including pre-stimulus activity. There's no consideration given what was the brain doing before that stimulus hit. It just, okay, now we're measuring from here, but surely that pre-stimulus activity has something to do with it.

spontaneous activity that's not stimulus-dependent. So that's what I much prefer George's approach, and he is in dialogue now with people from IIT taking a mathematical approach, looking at category Theory and different um different backgrounding approaches to try and get people on board, and also looking at predictive processing. So he has spoken with Carl Friston about it, so they're probably going to work on a paper at some point looking at free energy as a way of harnessing time in a sense. So I'm probably going to pivot away from the paper here at this point. Do we want to talk about the paper at all more, or do you want me to go on with some more of my other work? I'd have one question there, and I think Colin I want to jump in too, is that you do make some statements in the paper that struck me as a bit too categorical, including uh same as like the all theories of Consciousness, etc., and then I think you acknowledge in the brief intro.

as we did, we're calling mentioned this point that that's just a relation to eight theories that were covered in that particular paper. So I guess my question for you is when you're looking at a bit more broadly, um, what theories or approaches do you think are a bit more on the right track in terms of incorporating a more um, a more ontological basis for time into the theory? Not being, you know, hugely okay with am theories, but I'll take your point that if there is a basis there for time to be dynamically unfolding, to be extended, and resonance for me is very similar to George's approach, dynamical approach. So yeah, I think I'm only I'm I'm kind of new to Consciousness science in a way and looking at a little bit naively. So I'm yeah, I'm open to the dialogue about what what theories are out there because I really don't I really don't know. I'm basically looking at the theories that are circulating a lot at the moment and to me the the bias

in the field is towards is towards short discrete non-dynamic so yeah agreed and certainly the general General View and certainly one that I think we would agree is probably not going to be the place we land as a community of Scholars but we'll see um and I guess Colin is helping it set you up there for your questions yeah I just got one that hit me who's in this class of um sort of a a unitary x uh pronouncement which I find just kind of baffling when my eyes hit it page seven on remedies to shortcomings of theories of consciousness there's a statement which goes along the lines of um the main advantage of studies into time Consciousness over other mythological approaches is that whereas qualia are not at all instantiated in neural activity EG neurons need not recreate the color red in a Cartesian theater time is now that statement qualia not at all instantiated in neural activity just goes bang in my brain like there's nothing else there but neurons

and a Cartesian theater. If there is one in a brain, is made of neuronal behavior. The claim that it's not at all. Now then I try and say, Okay, they've made a typo. Leave the word 'at' out. Uh, qualia are not all instantiated in neural activity has a similar problem. So, I just wondered if you could actually flesh out briefly how that statement can be made, be given that a brain is entirely made of neurons and glia. Yeah, um, and the other miscellany that goes on in there. Uh, yeah, yeah. So, it's basically to say that we experience the color red, but the brain doesn't create the color red. Okay, red. No. Or, I think we're in the middle of a the one of the fundamental um issues down deep in the problems that have been experienced in the past. The concept of redness isn't in nature. Like the flower itself is not red, there's no such thing as red. Uh, and the idea is that our brain is painting the rose red from a palette of qualia.

and uh the thing that is actually doing that there's nothing else there that can be doing that except neuronal activity. Now I don't know what um super added uh physics is involved in excess of what's actually in the brain to cause a redness experience to happen, but being neurons delivers that very thing. That the uh the painting of the palette of colors into the visual uh scene is done by neurons, and we know exactly where it happens in V4. So I'm having that that statement seems at odds with everything I know about the origins of subjective experiences. So these are the words going to leave that there is it the word instantiated that uh in that adverse reaction, because what I meant by instantiated is you see a tree but the the brain doesn't have to create a tree-like form in its brain in neural activity. It can it can code it. Yeah, they're clearly I can see we need to talk later on, but if you can imagine the world outside let's just focus for the minute on on uh visual experience.

the world outside is a colorless, featureless blank palette of space with stuff in it, whose locations in space are innate, and somehow we're interacting with that structure. And then there is an artist in our head who's from multiple sites simultaneously, more than one artist, 100 artists simultaneously coloring in everything in real time or close to real time. Um, then we're going to end up in a bit of a discussion about who the artist is and what the palette is, and whether the palette is actually in the natural world or not. And that's a discussion which we could have, but I think it would take over this whole thing and I don't really want to go into it. But if you can imagine that issue when I run across a sentence like that, I'm just pointing to my notes here. Um, I had real trouble. I could not make it make sense of it from my perspective, which is really interesting, yeah, because I haven't come across so clearly. Your head's in somewhere and I want to find.

out where that is okay to take a while rather okay rather than talk about the world out there. Should we talk about the activity of the retina? The retina receives there's red, blue, and green light cones, is that right? Yeah, yeah. So, the red light cone responds to a certain frequency range of light, yeah, but that activity from the retina gets transcoded in the visual cortex, yeah, so it's no longer in once it's in the visual cortex, it's no longer responsive to that wavelength of light. Well, there's a whole lot of timing issues to do with the decoding and the transmission right through all of the various pathways into the back of the brain. We don't actually see with the retina, we see with the brain, the back of the retina is where it's happening, the back of the sorry, back of the cortex back here is where being is erected, we don't see with our eyes at all. Exactly, so the fact that the fact that you've appealed to time to make sense of that transcoding is the

point that I'm making. Yeah, I, yeah, I'm right on board with the whole time thing. That's great, you know, the chips that I want to build, time, the timing, and the elbowing out of various simultaneous processes within a sort of overarching time scale is central to the operation of these chips. So, we've got from an empirical standpoint, there's a future in this for the examination of time in consciousness. So, but the actual mechanisms, I've actually got a mechanism for generating a redness experience. So it's, and I know where it happens in neurons. So, reading a sentence like that is troublesome for me. Okay, so I'm, I think we can, I think we can find the common point. The distinction I'm making is that we do experience time. It's a, that is a conscious experience as well as well as being the basis for experience. We can also reflect on it and experience time. So, there is a kindness like there's a redness, there's a time.

Ness very hard to articulate, as usual, but there is one. Yeah, I'm on board with that as well. So we call that time perception, and that's something that we're creating at a level above the concrete objects that we're either intercepting or exterocepting. Yeah, so that is an inherent property of the brain. Yeah, the redness is at least in reference to something external. External that's internal. It has the same status in terms of information presentation as an emotion. Um, the very different qualia like sadness is not the same as happiness, whatever. And now if we add timedness to that palette, it's kind of like it fits into the same category as emotion. It's Universal. It floods everything that is you from all directions at once. It's omnidirectional or isotropic and homogeneous, you know, it's the same in every direction as well as being the same everywhere you take it with you as you go. It's a temp. It's the temporal field for lower level conscious content. Yeah.

um, yeah, so I find all this really fascinating, and luckily, I think your work is amazing. And I want to just, um, highlight, we actually did, uh, review in our, in the same Forum, uh, a paper recently by Buzaki. I think 2003, where they did a broad comparison across about 100 different mammal species of what we call the resinome, just looking at the EM field, um, frequencies that predominate, uh, in various mammal brain. And they found, kind of surprisingly, uh, that the EM field frequency bands were conserved pretty remarkably across species from shrews to elephants. There are, of course, differences, but the real remarkable finding was that there's not much difference across all these mammal species. And I'm wondering if you had thought yet about looking to EM field frequency bands and their conservation as a basis for time Consciousness and also in terms of dilation or speeding up. There's certainly some empirical work been done there already that those frequency bands can shift a bit in individuals over time. So what do

you think about that as kind of a fruitful area to you know follow up with your work. They're very, very open to it, and I would need to just make the connection between EEG frequency, which I understand, and how that's structured, and EM field frequency. What's the what's that? Yeah, so EM fields, of course, being measured by EEG energy, other things. EEG is the most common, but easy looking on the electrical fields, right, whereas the EMP field phenomenon is a more complete description of what's going on. Yeah, electromagnetism, yeah, 100% open to it, and I think that very closely aligns with Northoff's temporospatial Theory Of Consciousness, to be honest, that's around EEG spectra. So if there's going to be an EM analog of that, then I think it's going to talk the same, the same language. Was that only in, in mammal species that they looked at? Mammals only, and I don't know if the conservation goes across other species.

imagine it probably does at some degree probably the fishes and birds. I'm guessing to some degree. I don't know that insects have any recognizable equivalent to what we see as an EEG, but there's some resonance processes in there clearly. Um, they're just too small to express, but we do look at one paper recently with um ASA young man first author at um um cephalopod um EEG, and I don't know to right now to what degree um octopi or squid EEG shows the same frequency bands. Acer, do you know off offhand if there's any uh conservation across those EEG bands, you know, between mammals and cephalopods. They have multiple brains. I don't think I think he left the chat a little a little bit, yeah. Okay, okay, disappeared. Yeah, well, yeah, so sorry Lachlan um, please in the last 15 minutes uh, you know, go on what you had uh planned to present, okay. Oh, wait, um, I have three quick comments on the paper, if that's okay, yeah, sure, okay, awesome.

um, so in terms of uh, it was interesting to hear that schizophrenia is one of your areas of focus because uh, there was a comment in the paper about how um, you know, perception of time for schizophrenics is, it's very different, and then there was a comment later that um, you know, an increased sense of awareness of self, and particularly like the autobiographical self, um, correlates within uh, increase in awareness of time, and that totally makes sense, uh, from the perspective of schizophrenics because you have um, you know, this very different sense of the self-other boundary, and so it makes sense, you know, given that that the sense of time would also be very distorted, um, so that's cool, um, another thing, so there was a reference to um, Picard and Craig and their uh, frame rate for the continuous bodily signals at about eight Hertz, and uh, one of my favorite guys is Michael Persinger, like a professor at Laurentian University, and he talks about how yeah, the um, so the first harmonic of

uh, the Schumann resonance is also matched to the rostral caudal sort of waves that go across the quartets. And also, interestingly, the amount of time it takes to add a base to DNA. So, yeah, really, yeah, that's good. Isn't that cool? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, that. And then, um, final thing. So, I thought it was interesting because most sort of discussions of time either kind of fall into one of two camps. It's either presentism, you know, where everything happens in the now, or eternalism, so like the block of time and past, present, and future, you know, all equally viable. It's almost like you kind of take the superposition on the two where, you know, the basis of a lot of your paper is James and Herschel's kind of temporal field from which all these events sort of unfold. But at the same time, you take offense, you know, to something like Consciousness is a snapshot of time. So, I thought that was really interesting. So, McTaggart, the original. I was an Irish.

philosopher back in the early 20th century. So he came up with the idea of the a series in the B series. So the a series is presentism. B series is eternalism is block world and he even talked himself out because no neither of these are sufficient. So he proposed something called A C Series which is like the Consciousness series because there are multiple C series one for each Observer. So he even toyed with the idea of well there has to be something that super poses both of those to explain either of them. So he was even toying with you know a different approach and that's I think that's where we have to get to somehow. And I think part of that is reconciling physical and subjective time absolutely under the same framework. Yeah yeah Transcendent function kind of yeah the stuff with schizophrenia it's it's not around again it's a bit different to depression. It's not around sort of presence or orientation to time. It's very much around temporal processing of stimuli. And it's even more fine-grained than

that there's a good meta-analysis by tones on t-h-o-n-e-s. I think it's tornads and oberfeld. They did a two meta-analysis one of depression mono schizophrenia and it's it's simply around the Precision of temporal processing and schizophrenia that's at issue. Not the accuracy not whether overall they're accurate in a sort of macro sense but how precise they are. There's more standard deviation in their responses. That's in an argument to say that um makes a that's the source of the problem in relating to the external world that there's no consistent external reference that's being targeted that they're kind of all over the place. Yeah, I I have a cousin with schizophrenia and uh his sense of time is very non-linear. Yeah and by the way if we ever need a schizophrenic to like scan for any studies like he's up for that so all right that's good yeah. So how does uh so what do you mean by a sense of time that's non-linear like what does that manifest

as [Music]. Um, sometimes for her for a certain things, you know, he's kind of all over the place and and um, yeah, I probably very similar to certain psychedelic experiences where you kind of pop into like a memory and then like present movement awareness and then some other, you know, you kind of, yeah, I think, I think, I think that's what he's dealing with on a daily basis, yeah. So, there's no linear projection of moment at the moment after moment. They'll take a trip from, you know, the rapid series of now to no. I'll just go into like a daydreaming state up here and lose time for a second and then and then pop back into now, now, and take a trip out, yeah, yeah, with what reminds me of bully is, is like the people and and the sensory processing that's so early, uh, that you see in like predominant symptoms and even relatives of schizophrenics that like it really is tied to time but in a different way and maybe it's downstream like because it's

so early on, and it's so fundamental to the sensory system with p50 gating, for example. It's like there's no novelty, there's no like, because everything, there's no, you know, filtering of, and so if there's like this sense of recognition of even like chunking things within that window, maybe that is like, you know, one second to something like, maybe there's something to that that's more linked to how we integrate and then therefore over the course of many, you know, years or decades perhaps, like start to like, it breaks at some point where it's really linked to time or the process of time. The mismatch negativity is almost diagnosed exactly, yeah, exactly. Um, p50 and and MMN, um, yeah, absolutely, and something called the temporal integration window. So there's some good work by Anne Gersh and Bryce Martin around a longer window of now in schizophrenia that it's just expanded. They don't have a a concise um synchrony of present moment, yeah, cool. Should I keep going? Sure, okay.

so the work that I'm doing now is around the extension of time Consciousness, but sort of the radical extension of time Consciousness. So talking about real-time processes versus evolutionary time. So I don't think we're going to be able to explain conscious experience in the here and now without explaining where it came from and how that nested experience from other people actually feeds back into ours. So phenomenal Consciousness happens in the Here and Now, what we Loosely call real time. So real-time contrast with things that from our typical lived time scale of seconds, hours, and days are not happening here and now, but we would sort of project them and say they happen over decades or Millennia or millions of years, what we would call intergenerational or evolutionary time or even cosmological time. But the problem, as we've said many times, of the Neuroscience of Consciousness is effectively or almost exclusively constrained to real-time processes and neural theories of phenomenal Consciousness that only really deal with a few hundred milliseconds. So again, the

adversarial collaboration. So, in general, resonance Theory, so um, just a quote. So, this allows for significantly higher bandwidth and speed and energy and information flows between the constitute constituents of whatever resonating structure we're looking at. So, the resonating structure for me is uh, that nested hierarchy. So, the resonating waveforms of the micro conscious entities are then coherent in information flows, combined into a larger entity, a larger harmonic, rather than occurring out of phase. And so, that resonating structure I would call a nest for a point. So, you're calling us a nest as a conceptual structure. You're saying this kind of resonating structure you're seeing is a generic label. You're calling it a nest. I can help with that. In hierarchy Theory, there's two ways of describing things. The formal way is a containment hierarchy, and that's usually where each layer is built on the layers underneath, and that's called nesting. So, that's what the nest is actually referring to. Okay, yeah, and I was just I was just asking

quickly about Lochman's nomenclature, and I definitely like that. And I wanted to kind of just analogize it to uh Kessler's whole line um approach, where of course hold ons are basically open, you know, upwards and downwards, and they're both parts and holes simultaneously. So when you say a nest, in this case, in your conceptual structure, is similar to a hold on, hmm, yeah, okay. So yeah, not necessarily knowing what a whole lot is strictly, yeah, it sounds, sounds about right, but I would say it's not just a conceptual structure, that the brain is actually structured this way. The brain is a nested time scale organ. Thank you. So let's go back to Zeki. If we're talking about it's the phenomenal level, you've got micro-consciousness of phenomenal contents. So that's a picture from physique is an overgar 2016, so dimensions of conscious state, so intensity, precision, and also levels, um, uh, of representation. Then let's talk about creature Consciousness, so from Bain Hovey.

Owen, a few years ago, taxonomy of disorders of Consciousness. So we're talking about global States Of Consciousness here, and I would align that with Zeki macro States, but let's go to The evolutionary and talk about animal Consciousness. So you know different species, so dimensions of animal Consciousness, uh, it's Birch at Al. One of them would have been hovi as well, um, so certain there are certainly innate properties of Consciousness. So I think this even goes beyond what Zeki's talking about in terms of unified. This is about interpersonal and evolutionary consciousness foreign. So they have typical dynamical time scale ranges for phenomenal Consciousness that acts on the set of milliseconds to seconds range but create your Consciousness. So we're talking about um Consciousness in sort of the medical terms of whether people are aware while under anesthesia that tends to occur over hours, days, and months and also our sleep. So that has a certain temporal uh Rhythm to it, but then animal Consciousness only really changes over say tens of thousands, hundreds of

thousands of years. So that's the dynamical time scale range. So my question is, how does the narrow focus on real time limit our understanding of Consciousness, and how could we expand our view to grapple with the evolution of different animal Consciousness over extended nested or resonant time scales? So if you talk about temporal nestedness, real-time neural processes associated with phenomenal Consciousness are nested within processes occurring over evolutionary time. So in other words, the relatively short dynamical time scale range of phenomenal Consciousness is connected to that relatively long dynamical time scale range of animal Consciousness, but how? So I think Tammy would say through resonance. I would say the same through nestedness, but along a temporal Continuum of conscious state. So you've got phenomenal creature and animal at sort of the extremes and sort of one in the middle, but I think you can flesh it out even further to say you've got self-consciousness, so being a reflective conscious agent, as you're saying that that's

something that we can't deny. People in dissociative states, or you know, um, multiple, uh, multiple identity states, they would say that that's not a comfortable, uh, uh, state to be in. And of having multiple selves, um, so that lasts a certain time scale as well, that lasts a lifetime. And then within that, you've got intergenerational basis of consciousness. So that first prior that paper I was talking about Anna Chianika talking about co-embodiment and the basis of, uh, a conscious self that comes from someone else, from relating to the external world of the mother's, uh, mother's womb. That's in a predictive processing language, but I think the principle still still holds. And then this is what we mean by nestedness, that you've got phenomenal create yourself intergenerational and animal consciousness all nested and to experience, say, what it's like to be a bat in Nagel's terminology, they all have to be instantiated together. So they will have to be happening at the same time. They have to be present together.

so the paper that I'm working at the moment that's under review is taking this time scale nested hierarchy and turning it on its side. So there's actually two time scales. So you've got a um, along along the bottom, you've got a time scale that we're talking about four of seconds, hours, months, centuries, thousands of years, and that's what's tracking that Nest we're talking about. But then the vertical time scale is around sort of the evolutionary processes that are happening there. So you've got real-time, developmental time, intergenerational time, and evolutionary time. And within that, so you can analogize and talk about different cognitive intelligence processes, emotional intelligence processes having sort of typical time scale ranges of activity. And so it's based on a paper from 2019 that we published that was just the smaller version of that hierarchy and really just talking about three forms of conscious experience. So phenomenal, the wakefulness, which is creature consciousness, and self-consciousness, how that forms a the basis for our hierarchy that we would

also call intelligence from an emotional intelligence so I think the challenge is to explain Consciousness in real time. My feeling is we need to expand that narrow focus on basically repeating myself 100 times here um not only include the time scales of personal conscious States creature and self-consciousness but also the interpersonal basis of conscious experience and the impersonal evolution of animal consciousness so I think yeah to relate that back to General resonance Theory. I think there are there's work being done in the predictive processing and free energy uh realm as well to say that you have resonance encoded you know genetically as well the DNA and epigenetics intergenerational Trauma changes epigenetics that changes the way the brain processes time that you've got a biological basis also for time being encoded or experience you know historical and evolutionary experience being encoded in genetics and epigenetics so I think that's what we're going to need to Grapple with to understand pathological States but also non-pathological States Of Consciousness.

whether that's stimulus-based, you know, processing of environmental stimuli, interceptive bases, or the sort of spontaneous activity, which I think is more that's a better candidate in terms of space and time. That's all I had. Oh, I'm talking about resonance. [Music] Um, so out of the paper, you talk about faster resonance speed is what leads to larger and more complex, uh, conscious entities, and I wondered as a point of discussion, as slower resonance also give you more simple but more powerful. Consciousness is a slower resonance similar to slower EEG profiles that are associated with the loss of consciousness. Um, and then sort of hiking back to general relativity stuff, what about acceleration? What about changes in the speed of residents? Is that greater dynamical range of consciousness, so from personal to impersonal, and that's where I think general relativity would come in because it's about acceleration. Gravity is, you know, an acceleration field on the basis of mass and energy, so I think there's a way to talk about the

changes in speed of resonance as well but that was just a point of uh like a springboard for conversation as well. Yeah, well then we're probably running out of time. We are out of time. Yeah, so I won't actually even attempt to answer your really interesting questions. I don't think I have a very good answer right now. Uh, but you know what I want to say thank you so much and um maybe take one final question for someone else. But I want to also just put out that we'd love to have you back. I think there's a lot more to talk about here. So also want to be in touch with you later about maybe a second presentation. But maybe I don't want to ask you a final question before I wrap up. Thank you too hard any any easy questions here blade exploding on behalf of the entire general residence Theory team. I'd like to thank you for watching. Don't forget to like this video, share it, add a comment, and subscribe for more content. We'll see you next time. Welcome to the general resonance Theory.

YouTube channel. Today, we have a discussion with Kent Lachlan on time consciousness. We now join this talk already in progress.

Time Consciousness -- Kenneth Lachlan

General Resonance Theory

The Debate on Time Consciousness The two major theories of consciousness, IIT and GNWT, are currently in an adversarial collaboration, with a focus on the role of time in consciousness.

Experimental evidence suggests a one to three-second range for extended consciousness, with a potential resetting of the temporal window at around one and a half seconds.

The discussion also involves the qualitative and quantitative differences between different modes of consciousness and the functional properties of the brain's regions.

Some argue that the intersection of different time scales in the brain's hierarchy is crucial for consciousness, but the debate on what makes a certain time scale conscious is still ongoing.

The Debate on Consciousness and the Experience of Self

There is a debate between the existence of one window of conscious experience and the idea of multiple windows of conscious experience.

The concept of self-consciousness and the experience of being one person are being questioned in the scientific community.

Different theories, such as Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theory, offer contrasting perspectives on the nature of consciousness and its relationship to time.

The Significance of Spontaneous Brain Activity

A researcher is critical of the current approach to studying brain activity and emphasizes the importance of spontaneous temporal activity in interaction with stimuli.

The paper argues that existing theories of consciousness are too static and short-sighted, lacking a diachronic perspective.

The researcher prefers a more dynamic approach to consciousness, engaging in dialogue with others to incorporate a broader ontological basis for time.

The Role of Neuronal Activity in Visual Experiences

Neuronal activity is responsible for creating the visual experience, contradicting the idea of a separate "artist" creating the mental image.

The process of transcoding light activity in the retina to the visual cortex is crucial in the formation of visual experiences.

The discussion of time perception and its relationship to conscious experience adds another layer to the understanding of neuronal activity in creating subjective experiences.

The Conservation of EM Field Frequency Bands in Mammals

A 2003 study found that EM field frequency bands are conserved across a wide range of mammal species.

The potential shift of these frequency bands in individuals over time has been linked to the basis of time consciousness.

The conservation of EEG frequency bands between mammals and cephalopods raises the question of whether it extends to other species.

The 20th Century Philosopher's Theories on Time and Consciousness

The philosopher proposed the A, B, and C series to explain time, with the C series focusing on Consciousness.

Schizophrenia is linked to a lack of precision in temporal processing, leading to a non-linear sense of time.

The researcher is exploring the extension of Consciousness through real-time processes and evolutionary time, aiming to explain its origin and nested experiences.

The Concept of Nestedness in Consciousness

Resonance theory allows for higher bandwidth and speed of information flows within a resonating structure.

The term "nest" in this theory refers to a nested hierarchy, specifically a containment hierarchy based on layers underneath.

The concept of nestedness in consciousness extends from phenomenal and creature consciousness to animal and evolutionary consciousness, all operating on different dynamical time scales.

The Dual Time Scale Hierarchy in Consciousness

A 2019 paper introduced a time scale hierarchy for conscious experience, involving real-time, developmental time, intergenerational time, and evolutionary time.

The paper suggests the need to expand the focus on personal conscious states to include interpersonal and impersonal aspects of conscious experience.

The discussion also explores the impact of resonance speed on the complexity and dynamical range of consciousness, relating it to general resonance theory and the concept of acceleration.