It's a dog's life

My belief is that a dog, while not particularly good at many human things, is nevertheless conscious in the same sort of way that humans are. A dog knows and remembers pain, a dog is friends with some dogs & not with others (as Amundsen explained in his big book about the South Pole), and a dog knows that a grizzly bear is not a rabbit. My expectation is that a dog’s consciousness will turn out to be organised and implemented in much the same way as ours is.

It is also true that my PC does wide pictures better than tall ones, so a dog as a quadruped makes a better diagram than a human does as a biped. Click to enlarge works quite well on my PC.

So all in all, the dog is fair game.

The placement of the arrows is deliberate. Electrical messages only get to and from the brain via the brain stem, while some chemical messages have direct access. The division of the brain proper into hemispheres does not seem to be relevant in this context, Julian Jaynes notwithstanding - see reference 1.

My first contention is that consciousness arises in a critical part of the brain stem and that one can be conscious without very much - if anything - else. One piece of this jigsaw is a report about the life of people with hydranencephaly. A rare birth or neo-natal brain defect, often quickly fatal but sometimes leaving some years of life.

My second is that consciousness manifests itself as some kind of complicated, vector valued electrical field in, and to a very limited extent, around the head. One might perhaps think in terms of some new force of life, emerging from just the right kind of electrical field, perhaps in the way that the force of gravity emerges from its astrophysical soup. This consciousness manifests itself in short bursts or periods, from say half a second to a few seconds in duration, of relative electrical stability. Too short a period and we are in the world of the subliminal, a real enough world but not one that we know about subjectively, directly. Too long and we can't keep it up. These periods of stability can be detected by electrodes placed on the scalp: that is not to say that we can detect the contents of consciousness from the scalp, at least not yet or to any great extent, but we can say that it is there. These periods may sometimes be correlated with the saccades of the eyes.

Successive periods may be separated by rapid transitional periods during which the brain changes tack, as it were, or by rather longer periods of unconsciousness.

My third is that one might impose a topology on this cloud, inherited from the three dimensional space in which it lives. One might perhaps say that the cloud vanishes where the modulus of its vector value is less than some small number. This opens up the possibility of a cloud waxing and waning in time. Even the possibility of having more than one cloud on the go at once, although that would be complicated by the postulated need for consciousness to occupy some particular part of the brain stem. The brain stem forces a degree of single threading, in contrast to the massive parallelism elsewhere.

PS: the limited extent mentioned at second makes telepathy difficult. These fields are going to be very weak outside the head and you may not be able to do much even if you put identical twins head to head.

Reference 1: http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php.