Marc Wittmann's Reading List

"Gelernter is an expert in artificial intelligence and robotics. What he shows in The Tides of Mind is how fluctuating consciousness is. Consciousness is constantly ebbing and flowing during the day. He shows how we can be very alert and focused on one side of the mental spectrum when we’re concentrating, say in the discussion we’re having now, or in solving a problem. But we also have, on the other side of the spectrum, other states of mind where memory comes up, emotions come up, where we are not focused at all on what is happening in the world, but we’re focused on our inner feelings, our inner world. This comes back to my time perception research, where I argue time consciousness is related to emotional consciousness, which is related to your bodily self. “The high-alert state of mind, of problem-solving, is just one tiny aspect of consciousness” In a very poetic way, and that’s why I like the book, it is a meditation about different states of mind. It goes from dreaming to awakening, to mind-wandering, daydreaming, playing sport and being totally alert and concentrated. He shows also, with examples from literature such as Aristotle’s Poetics , how the mind changes over the day. He criticises researchers, psychologists, neuroscientists and scientists in artificial intelligence who always concentrate just on this one high-alert state of mind of problem-solving. That is just one tiny aspect of consciousness, and 95% of our daily consciousness is totally different in these fluctuations. Yes, he says that artificial intelligence could have something like this modulation of mind because then it would be able to solve totally different problems. Problems of creativity are often solved when you are daydreaming and wandering off, not even realising where you are, and suddenly you have a perfect idea. Big problems, even in science, have been solved in this non-focused way of daydreaming, or having emotional analogies, and then suddenly coming up with a solution. This is a part of decision making. Gelernter gives examples of the best scientists and Nobel Prize-winners who suddenly had a breakthrough idea. This, he says, would also have to be implemented in an artificial intelligence system, if we really wanted to solve the consciousness problem for artificial agents. Yes, and feel emotions."

"Bud Craig is a functional neuroanatomist, so for his whole career he has worked on body processes, on the signals that come from the periphery of the body—from interoception, from gut feeling, from the heart, from the lungs—into the brain. And as he shows, in humans and apes, into the insular cortex. The insular cortex is the primary interoceptive cortex, meaning it is the primary area in the brain that catches signals from the body and integrates them into motor processes. So as you feel yourself sitting on your chair, that is all insular cortex processing. “So as you feel yourself sitting on your chair, that is all insular cortex processing” This is related to my research because I showed with functional images that brain activity during time perception is strongly correlated to insular cortex activation. This is what I wrote in my book: that we perceive time as being in the outside world, but the subjective component of time is not in the outside world—you could say it is felt by ourselves, our bodily feelings. So I relate my work to Bud Craig’s to interpret my insular cortex findings related to time perception, because this gives the interpretation that our bodily feelings are the basis for subjective time. You could say it is related to the feeling of the passage of time. So it is not so much related to millisecond timing of tapping or in-language processing where we have to be able to discriminate everything in short milliseconds of duration. But to feel conscious of time, to feel the passage of time, there are also other neuroimaging studies which show how important the insular cortex is in this respect. The insular cortex is on the upper layer of the brain, the cortices layer. If you opened a skull and looked into the brain, you would see the cortex but not the insular cortex. You would have to dig on both sides, left and right, into the fissures, and it is hidden a little below. If you opened the fissures you would see it pop up, like an island. I have only seen it through functional imaging. I’ve seen it getting active, but only functionally, through the imaging system."

"He gives a very poetically formulated answer, founded in everyday experience, to how memory processes define your subjective time over longer time scales. If at Christmas you think: ‘wow, it’s Christmas again already! This year has passed so quickly,’ well, that is a classic adult perception of time. It rushes past so quickly as compared to all our memories of summer vacation at school. It was nearly eternity between each summer at school. Now, even if you go for two weeks on vacation, comparably it also passes quickly. “In childhood and youth, everything has this impression of novelty” The answer to this is related to memory. We get more and more routine in our lives. In childhood and youth, everything has this impression of novelty. Everything happens for the fist time: the first kiss, the first time drinking a beer in a pub, the first time going on vacation without parents. Everything from a developmental psychology standpoint is important because we have to learn to be adults, and we develop. Just imagine one year of development for a 14-year-old: there are so many changes going on, biologically and psychologically. Or think about a 12-year-old who’s still a child and a 15-year-old who is nearly an adult. There are just three years in between. Now compare three years in your life between 41 and 44. It all becomes more routine and we can’t escape this routine mode of perception. Even if you’re going to an exotic country you’ve never been to before, it might be the thirteenth time that you’ve been to a new country. So you won’t have these experiences of novelty you had in childhood and young adulthood. As you move away from your parents, study and find new friends, find a partner, marry, have your first child, and so on, and so on. This all has an effect on memory because everything that is new has a saliency, and all experiences lose this sense of saliency and then are not recorded thoroughly in memory anymore. If you look back, because subjective time retrospectively depends on your memory entries, you have less that you’ve recorded because less was exciting, less was novel, and so it feels as if time passed more quickly."

"Thomas Mann has a chapter: ‘Excerpts on Subjective Time.’ It’s like an essay in the middle of The Magic Mountain where he has an actuarial author explain to the reader how subjective time works. Almost everything that I have said and what Douwe Draaisma says was already voiced by Thomas Mann, in 1924. “In the ever-repeating sameness of the Magic Mountain Resort, time accelerates because all novelty is lost” The protagonist of the book, Hans Castorp, visits his cousin in a clinic in Switzerland, in the Alps, because he has a cough and tuberculosis. The first day the protagonist is at the clinic he sees everything anew, and that takes a certain amount of pages in the book. Then the next week he experiences takes the same amount of pages in the book as the first day did. Then the first month and the next month takes about the same amount of pages as the first week had, and so on. And later the first year takes the same amount of pages as the first day had. So because he stays there in the ever-repeating sameness of being in the Magic Mountain Resort, time totally accelerates because he loses all novelty. You could say time increases retrospectively for him in speed. It is a starting point of where to get inspiration, ideas and hypotheses, which you then try to validate empirically and compare. There is the wisdom of science where you intricately and more mechanistically find out how these things work, and brain science where you can identify that the hippocampus is related to memory and other brain regions that are involved in time perception. But I also relate very much to philosophers and novelists. This idea that time and all mental faculties are related to our bodily feelings is something you also find in novels and movies."

"Humphrey has an approach of consciousness that fits very well with the science of present moment experience. The present moment is something extended in time but has a certain limit of duration. Being in the present moment for one year is impossible, and even one day is much too long: probably not even three minutes. It is more in the seconds range, and maybe even on a very short seconds range, perhaps two or three seconds long. That’s when what we immediately perceive as here and now is effortlessly integrated into all our sensory input. This is the here and now, extended for a few seconds, the ‘present-moment consciousness’. “Being in the present moment for a year is impossible; even one day is much too long” What Nicholas Humphrey does very nicely is give an explanation of how consciousness might have evolved out of something that used to be some sort of a motor-output. This motor-output might be as simple as: oh, there is some sugar, go to where the sugar is because that is important for energy. This motor-output feeds back to your inner core, until you have something of a recurrent feedback for sugar. And this perception is, you could say, the present-moment of nowness because you are feeling this sugary state. Instead of just seeing sugar, you act towards the sugar, and you feel sugariness because there is feedback to yourself. This sounds a little complicated, but the point is that present moment-ness is a feedback of your perception over and over again, which extends over time. That’s what Nicholas Humphrey’s idea is—that consciousness is simply like a thick perception of what is out there, what you feel, extended over time. A sensory experience, I would say, is very imminent and concrete. If you are stuck in an elevator, you would really know what time is—that’s not illusory. We feel time. You can debate, of course, about the philosophical implications, but on the psychological level there’s no argument that we experience ourselves in time, and that we are very emotional about time. I would even go further and say we are very emotional about consciousness. That’s actually what Nicholas Humphrey says, that things become valuable only because we experience and feel sadness, happiness, hunger and thirst. Consciousness is very important, and it has a survival value. If we were robots, programmed to fetch water and drink it if we had liquid in our system, it wouldn’t be the same. If you have been thirsty for many hours, you know what it means, and you constantly feel something similar related to time and to all other emotions. Consciousness gives significance to things. Yes. Just like emotions, where the bodily self is also the anchor or the basis. We ‘fall’ in love; if we are angry, the whole body is involved. Emotions and time are strongly related, and emotions make us human. If we had no emotions at all, I would speak to you like a robot and we would be totally programmed. Emotions are not only signals about the state of the other person, but our whole being, functionally speaking, has to do with emotions and time. You could even say the way we are bored and feel the time drag is because it is a signal saying: ‘We have to leave this situation.’ So time and emotions direct us into different ways of living. Magic mushrooms are a way to experience something completely different, where you can reach to the frontier areas of experience. And people who have had the experience, even in scientific trials, have said it was one of the most important experiences of their lives; even one year after, in follow-up questions, they say it still totally heightened their mood. Moreover, people who had terminal illnesses who took psilocybin in a clinical setting also said that they could cope much better with the psychological aspect of death-threatening illness. So it really changes your attitude to life: you get a different perspective where you are not that important anymore. Meditation is also important because you have a tool with which you can interrupt the flow of your emotions. You are not helplessly exposed to your emotions because you have much higher emotion-regulation capacity, which can of course be very helpful. If you took your stress out in everyday life, in your work or with your family, then everything just collapses over you. Meditation enables you to take a time-out and concentrate, even if it is just for a few minutes, and to emotionally self-regulate. That’s why meditation is so helpful. Yes, from second to second. You can get more aware of these intrinsic variations in your mood, in your state of consciousness between drowsiness and alertness, and in all the emotional tides and fluctuations. In that way you can become more aware of yourself and the changes in consciousness and perception of time flowing around you."