The Sub-Trunk Illusion...

...or The Mind and the (mis-)Identification of Consciousness

Just how does the magician, in a single instant, manage to switch places with his assistant -- hand-cuffed, tied up, bagged, and locked inside the trunk?

Some notes:

1. The following train of thought occurred to me in about five seconds. It's taken a couple of hours to get it down in words, and several more to revise and clarify.
2. Please feel free put the quote-marks of so-called-ism wherever you "like" in the following.

Okay, here we go:

• I recently encountered a short story [1] describing the delay between the moment the nervous system starts a movement and the conscious decision to act. The decision seems to follow the act, as if we're already doing something before we've decided to -- as much as 200 milliseconds before. The conscious mind is a back-seat passenger? And who's driving?
• A little searching turned up one Benjamin Libet whose research is apparently the basis for the story.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet
• http://www.pdcnet.org/volbrain.html
• http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/libetnew.html
• Research, challenges, disagreements to his work continue. Lots of people are concerned with how this denies, or doesn't deny, free will. For the moment, that's not my concern.
• If his work holds up, it leads me to a train of thought:
• Suppose it's true, that conscious awareness and voluntary decision-making really do occur after other deeper neural processes, that is, that we're already doing something before we think we've decided to.
• I asked myself, "Okay, then, what conciousness? What is its origin? What is its function?" What follows is my best guess on that subject so far.
• (Note: I haven't read a lot of or about Libet yet. I plan to, but for now, I may be making up my own words for things that already have agreed-upon and useful names.)
• In an organism without a consciousness, whatever neural clusters, or committees, or group of activities, or functions there are that do the work of guiding the organism, they have to accomplish a variety of tasks in order for it to survive. A lobster doesn't have to consider itself or its place in the grand scheme of things in order to avoid predators and catch prey.
• This group of activities or functions seems to correspond with many definitions of the "unconscious" so let's call it that.
• As a neural net or brain gets bigger and more complex, it can have more states, and so can do more things.
• One of the things it can do increasingly well is model the world around it. Modelling the world is important; it's used for prediction and evaluation of options: "There's a Thing Over There. That TOT is closer than it was a minute ago. That TOT is moving closer. If that TOT continues to get closer, move underneath that big rock."
• As the capacity for modelling gets better, the modeller has to begin to include the organism itself within the model. The model couldn't work properly without a representation of such a constant and major actor in its world.
• Like the rest of the model, the self-representation gets better, more complex, as modelling capacity improves. "The space under that rock is too small to fit underneath" leads to "This organism is X big."
• Eventually the capacity for modelling is highly complex, and the self-model includes a lot of information about its own physical form, its abilities to move, and even its own internal states, social standing, and other abstractions.
• "This organism has a torn-up leg and cannot move as fast as usual."
• "This organism hasn't eaten in a week" becomes "this organism is wicked hungry."
• "This organism isn't big or nasty enough to fight for herd dominance."
• At this point, I'm picturing the model as a kind of scoreboard, like the one in a baseball park. The scoreboard itself is not the state of the game, but it is supposed to represent the state of the game. If the guys inside the scoreboard at Fenway Park fail to record a run, the run still counts.
• Likewise the self-model is not the organism, but has been built, with experience over time, to reflect the organism. It's a necessary part of the planning/navigation function of the entire model.
• At first, the unconscious uses, or monitors (or whatever you want to call it) the self-model, giving it no special privileges or status within the overall model. It's just another part of the planning space.
• Something changes this arrangement. I think it's related to a synchronization illusion/effect. Examples:
• You're watching a movie on tv. The sound is coming out of the little speaker in the front of the tv, but since the sound is synchronized with the movement of the talking actors and the moving objects, you begin to perceive the sound as coming from the actors.
• After awhile, you turn on your new stereo setup, and now the sound is coming from two big speakers in the front corners of the room, several feet away from the tv screen, but after a very short time, you don't notice that, and once again the sound seems to come directly from the actors and objects on the screen.
• You can probably think of lots of other examples of this synchronization illusion:
• You might remember, for instance, the discovery a few years ago that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album worked superbly as a sound-track to the movie The Wizard of Oz. All kinds of motions seemed nicely synched to aspects of the music.
• Or you might think of the way that Carl Stalling made orchestral music work as very specific sound-effects in Bugs Bunny cartoons -- even to the point of imparting volition and emotion to, say, a furious robot thinking or a searching hand emerging from a rabbit hole.
• Those are all examples of visual-aural synchronization, but there are others. Pavlov's dogs, the foundational experiment of behavioral psychology, can be seen an example of a synchronization effect: the ringing bell elicited salivation once the dogs identified the sound with a spray of meat-powder.
• And doesn't that open up a whole field of thought to run around in? Is the inherent neural learning function wrapped up with response to the synchronization illusion?
• So, we have this sophisticated self-model that's just one part of an a world-model. But when it's working well, its predictions are pretty much in synch with the actual functioning of the organism. The model represents the ongoing current state of the organism with enough accuracy that something special happens.

*CLICK!*

• The synchronization effect kicks in, and the unconscious identifies the model with the organism. It/they give the self-model a special promoted status: the illusion/effect of consciousness. The model of the organism becomes identified as the organism. The scoreboard is taken for the game itself, and the substitution is complete.
• In this picture, of course the act precedes the conscious decision to perform the act. The conscious decision to act is the after-the-fact representation of the action, not the action itself. The batter hits a double, and it's only after he reaches second base that the scoreboard shows what happened.

Some comments and questions:

1. I don't believe that all, or even most, of this is original.
2. Even if my theory is accurate, I don't think that it has any bearing on the question of free-will versus determinism. I'm not talking about the nature of the game; I'm talking about why so many of the spectators are watching the scoreboard instead of the field.
3. My big question is, has anyone previously put all of these pieces together? That is, used the synchronization-effect idea together with Libet's evidence? Who else (if anyone) used the synchronization illusion to explain the scoreboard-for-the-game effect? Obviously, the idea that consciousness is an illusion is not original. But just how the trick is done, that part that might be.

---

[1] Gregory, Daryl. "Second Person, Present Tense." Asimov's Science Fiction September 2005: 86-102

De la caña se hace el guaro

Okay, I just did an online search and found almost nothing about Tíc Táck. That's not right. Somebody ought to post something about this stuff.

Tíc Táck is a spectacularly raw liquor that proclaims itself "El Licor Nacional de los Salvadoreños" -- although El Salvador's ministry of tourism neglects to list that distinction along with the national flower (Izote), the national tree (Maquilishuat), and national bird (Torogoz a/k/a Talapo). Maybe one of those would make a better-tasting beverage than this 36% alcohol, clear-as-water rocket fuel. They might as well start with the bird.

Tíc Táck is mostly cane spirit: sugar cane squeezings fermented, then distilled. The generic name for this mass-produced industrial moonshine is "guaro" or sometimes "aguardiente" (literally "ardent water"). And it's very popular -- there's even a song about it:

De la caña se hace el guaro
¡que caramba! sí la caña es buena fruta.
Sí la caña se machuca ¡que caramba!
sí el guaro también se chupa.

From the sugar cane they make the moonshine
Oh boy! yeah that cane is good fruit.
Yeah they crush the cane, yippee!
Yeah, and they suck down the moonshine, too.

(Actually, I find "chupar" translated as "to absorb," but I'm pretty sure they're not saying that they soak their feet in it.)

Fermented distilled cane juice is theoretically the same stuff they make rum out of. But while rum is aged in wooden whiskey barrels for at least a year, Tíc Táck is merely "super filtrado" and "multirrectificado" for whatever good that does, and then, with a little "sugar and glicerine added," squirted straight into the bottle and shipped out the factory door. According to something called "The Ministry of Rum" you ought to age newly-distilled cane liquor because "the ... raw spirits contain small amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas... which gives the spirit a hot harsh taste." And "hot harsh taste" isn't a bad way to describe Tíc Táck. Not enough multirrectificado-ing, perhaps? Maybe the sugar and glicerine is added to keep your mouth from simply bursting into flame.

I was introduced to this product during a stay in El Salvador in the late 1970s, not long before the sad and dreadful civil war that swept the country. Some local friends were hanging around drinking, and they offered me a swig from a small hip-flask bottle. I'm certain that I didn't really have a full-on Roger Rabbit head-turns-purple steam-shoots-out reaction, but whatever did happen must have been humorous enough. Once my eyes cleared, and mis amigos had finished rolling around on the ground in fits of laughter, they explained that they had been mixing theirs into little bottles of Coca-Cola, and then squeezing in some lime.

They informed me that, except in extreme and unusual circumstances (like, say, not having any Coca-Cola), only a complete bolo (drunkard) would actually swig Tíc Táck neat. With that, I realized, we were on the familiar territory, as the heavy sweetness of the Coke nicely blankets that "hot harsh taste" to yield a good (and cheap!) approximation of the rum and cola cocktail still called "Cuba Libre" by those nostalgic for JFK and the early 60s, or perhaps the heady days of the Spanish American War.

The small bottles of Tíc Táck I'd brought home were long gone, and I hadn't seen the stuff anywhere since. Recently though, I fell in with a group of Salvadoran immigrants. We were talking about conditions back home, when I suddenly remembered that dreadful aguardiente with the rooster-silhoutte on the label. "Tíc Táck!" they exclaimed as one. Of course they remembered it. And did I know? there is at least one store in Cambridge which carries it. And sure enough there is, and they do. A dust-covered 750 ml bottle set me back ten dollars.

Back in the day, I think those flasks were maybe four or five colones ($1.60 - $2.00 US) in every little tienda and grocery store. These days, the civil war is over and the colon has been retired in favor of the US dollar. But the people of El Salvador still produce and celebrate their licor nacional.

¡Sí, la caña ES buena fruta!

That's sooooo cold!

I don't know why I like this so much, but I do. There's just something about these guys...

God tries to kill air passengers, thwarted by "satanic competence" of Air France

I couldn't find this anywhere else on line, so I'm quoting the best line of the day, by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. He was talking about the Air France plane struck by lightning that went off a Canadian runway into a ravine and caught fire. The excellent training, skill, and courage of the flight crew and the rescue personnel was nowhere mentioned in all the news reports about "the miracle" survival of the passengers and crew.

Stewart's plea: "Can't someone take some human credit for a job well done?"

Apparently not.