The Filter Theory of the Mind-Brain Connection
The age-old question of the mind-brain connection may find its answer in the age-old idea of the “mother-sea” of consciousness and the brain as a filter. Cloud computing and smartphones may help us understand this.
How does the mind relate to the brain? Physicalists are bottom-up thinkers on this question believing that all there is has evolved from the very beginnings of our universe. The fact that we have brains is a result of blind and random forces including the laws of physics and Darwinian evolution defined as the outcome of random mutation and natural selection. Our conscious thoughts or subjective experiences either are an illusion or emerge in a physical process happening in our brains in a way that is not yet understood. Because we live in a clockwork universe with unchangeable physical laws that are the total cause of everything that happens, the thoughts you have as you read this have been fully predetermined. There is no free will. Should you decide you’ve had enough of this post, that decision was set in stone as well. Bottom-up physicalist thinking is understood as the consensus view of mainstream science and is the one adopted and defended by the drivers of our culture including education, journalism and entertainment.
Top-down thinkers do not doubt the reality of consciousness nor subjective experience. Many versions feature the belief that the mind or consciousness is primary and precedes any physical laws or matter. In these versions consciousness is a universal substrate underlying all reality including the physical world. Some hold that what appears to us as solid matter is actually an illusion and only experience is real (idealism), or that matter is an aspect of mind (a form of monism). Others hold that our experience of the world of appearances is subjective and our conscious minds bring that subjective world into existence. Others, that consciousness is an integral element of all particles and combinations of particles (Integrated Information Theory and panpsychism). Still others, dual-aspect monists, believe that there is a collective consciousness, a unus mundus as described by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung or a “mother-sea” of consciousness that individuals with consciousness can access to varying degrees, as William James suggested. With all these varied, but non-physicalist ideas, how do top-down thinkers understand the mind-brain connection?
One view that accommodates much thinking and scientific study is the filter theory. This is attributed to William James and F. W. H. Meyers, two of the recognized pioneers of the science of psychology. As this view appears to be compatible with many philosophical traditions and ideas as well as with those who approach the mind-brain connection from a standpoint of contemporary physics, it may be emerging, perhaps more properly: re-emerging, as a leading contender for the best available explanation.
The filter model sees consciousness as outside the physical body and brain. Or, if inside the particles in the body and brain as in panpsychism, then in a form that physical matter can access.
So if you have a thought that a bug may have bit your leg and you need to lift your pant leg a bit to inspect the area, the awareness of the sensation of the bug bite arises in your consciousness. You sense the irritation or pain, but must translate that sensation into a thought, even a visual image. But, for your thought to become active in a bodily response, the brain must process it and if the thought includes the will to act the brain then takes action based on that thought and intention. The processing the brain needs to do to convert the intention into specific muscular action, which while exceedingly complex, is considered the “easy” problem. The “hard problem” as identified by philosopher David Chalmers is the thought itself. How does the wet computer that is the brain, the accumulation of bits of stardust that make up our cells, molecules, atoms and quarks, how does this generate the subjective experience of a bug bite? How does it conjure up a picture of a red spot on your leg and imagine in visual images the different types of pests which might have caused this irritation?
If consciousness is not physically located in the brain and is perhaps not physical at all, how does the brain interact? The filter model itself does not go far in answering that but there are a number of theories and ideas that are being considered today that arise from current physics. More on these in future posts. The filter model, which appears to be compatible with at least some of these current ideas, describes the role of the brain as a filter or reducing valve that serves to limit and select experiences or thoughts from the source or sources and the perhaps infinity of options available to it. In this case, the brain does not produce the thought as much as receive it, process it and act on it. Using radio or TV as an analogy, the brain is more receiver than transmitter. A receiver collects and filters the signals from outside the system, where a transmitter creates and distributes those signals.
William James was very aware of various ideas even from ancient religions and philosophers of a form of universal structure of consciousness. Particularly in his later years, he called this the “mother-sea” by which he meant the ocean of consciousness that is a foundation of all reality. This idea is far from unique to James or his friend and fellow psychologist Meyers who similarly explored the “supraliminal” and “subliminal” consciousness. Meyers envisioned a veil between our conscious minds, the sub-conscious and a greater consciousness outside with numerous experiences from creativity and genius to telepathy and clairvoyance a matter of the porosity of the veil. (How these relate to consciousness is explored in a number of the Top-Down or Bottom-Up articles.)
Pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung understood this in the form of archetypes and with physicist Wolfgang Pauli developed this into a concept called unus mundus: one world. (See my previous post that explains this in detail.) Gottfried Leibniz, a genius of math, physics and philosophy, explored the concept of “monads,” the most fundamental elements of reality of all emanating from just such a singular source. As the authors of the lengthy books Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism explain, this idea of the mother-sea, the fountain of all consciousness and the monistic “one world” are a part of much of the rich history and tradition of philosophy and religion originating in ancient India. This singular source of consciousness also explains, according to Paul Marshall, the origins of and meaning of mysticism as practiced and experienced by mystics from nearly all religious and cultural traditions across the world.
“Psi” phenomena documented in both books mentioned here edited by Edward Kelley of the University of Virginia, is also most easily explained by the filter model. Psi phenomena is gaining both popular and academic interest as evidenced in part by the rapidly growing list of academic and popular works documenting Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and related phenomena such as Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs) and childhood reincarnation. Many of these are discussed in best-selling books such as Proof of Heaven by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander III and Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife by Leslie Kean.
One of the most popular ways today of thinking about the mind-brain connection is using what is called the Computational Theory of Mind, or CTM. We can understand to some degree how a computer processes information using the simple binary codes of ones and zeros and logic gates that open or close depending on the instructions provided. The patterns of electrical signals between neurons in our brains seem to be analogous and when we talk to Siri or Alexa and they respond to us in lifelike voices and often in ways that demonstrate they understand what we want, it is somewhat easy to imagine that the brain operates like a computer. In many ways it does. At least some physicalists believe that computers will evolve consciousness just as our physical processes in the brain have evolved consciousness. Others, like computer systems pioneer David Gerlertner make it plain that they fully reject the physicalist idea of emergence of consciousness from intelligence alone. Similarly, Christof Koch dismisses the current ideas of CTM even in the title of his 2019 book The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread But Can’t Be Computed. Nevertheless, there are analogies to today’s computer technology that can help us grasp the filter theory of the mind-brain connection. One of those analogies is the cloud.
“The Cloud” has become a common term today with advertising for cloud computing services filling our screens. While far from simple, the cloud can be explained as a vast network of independent computers called servers storing both computer instructions and data and delivering computer processing power and operations to individual access points across the globe. Those access points include this laptop I am writing on, the smartphone in my pocket, the “smart TVs” in my home and an ever increasing array of connected devices. When computers came into popular use as the PC in about 1982, each individual computer could stand alone. Prior to that, a computer processor and the data storage were in a box that was shared by users through terminals. The PC made the computer personal and independent; fully functional with all the hardware and software needed residing on the desktop.
Then came the internet. When it first started the interconnected network of computers called the internet just stored data such as your written documents or photos. No longer dependent on the limited memory in your desktop, you could “upload” and “download” using vastly more storage capacity. Communication between computers (and the people using them) became streamlined as the instructions to manage sending and receiving messages as well as the message content became centered in this network of processors. Hence, email and ultimately social media.
Then came “cloud computing” where rather than having all the increasingly complex software instructions on handling all the communications, the files and the images on your computer, those functions could also be in the cloud. That freed the personal computer from limitations of processing power and storage and led to the massively powerful tools in our pockets and purses. The cloud, like the internet itself, was never one computer, it was always a distributed network. The distribution provided reliability because if one failed or power went out in one location, a dozen other locations could take over. It also provided for scaling up as one computer could be overwhelmed with demands where the load could be distributed across many computers. But that also meant that extensive software had to be developed to keep track of the instructions and contents so as not to get lost and to identify and correct for errors that were certain to arise as signals were sent and received through many different channels.
Today we have many clouds provided by major companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and many others. Incredible amounts of information are stored and the processing that occurs each second of each and every day was unimaginable when I started in the software business in 1979.
The analogy of “the cloud” and the “mother-sea” or “collective consciousness” is now apparent. Where is the cloud? someone might ask. Its physical location is completely dispersed. That makes it hard to visualize and likely why the cloud image was selected as the visual symbol of this idea. Where is the mother-sea? If all physical reality, as many such as Sean Carroll and Brian Greene say, is just a wave function, a distributed field of possibilities, the idea of a “sea” of consciousness may not be that far afield (so to speak). The vast amount of data stored, accessed and managed in the cloud gives a limited and vague hint as to what the unus mundus or “one world” of universal consciousness could be. The combination of both instructions for managing all the bits and bytes that represent the content as well as the content itself also provides a hint how the mother-sea or cloud of universal consciousness could contain all the laws and instruction codes as well as the data.
Perhaps these instructions are not just for handling the data but also for how the “hardware” of the universe actually works. In this view even the instruction codes could be genetic information that determines not only how my body responds to the environment but how my brain interacts with my body and my mind. The “data” content can include an information code on every minute particle that makes up my physical presence as well as every pattern of synapses that I need to process my experiences and memories. It most certainly could accommodate the complex patterns of synapses that are understood to be related to our memories.
In cloud computing the majority of the processing of data occurs in the network of servers and all the data or information is stored on the network. But for you to read a text message or an email or view a photo you have to access the instructions and the information. You do that through your “screen” device. Your device has to be connected to the cloud and say: “Hey, I’d like to have a look at such and such image that I stored there twenty years ago.” So that device, whether phone, laptop or smart fridge, has to have a necessary amount of processing hardware and instructional software on it. But it is specific to and mostly limited to the purpose of accessing the cloud and a few apps that are wholly contained within your device. For you to view the image on the screen or listen to music or a message through your bluetooth headphones, your device has to access that information, often downloading in limited amounts at a time. Buffering, or the delays caused by network interruptions or heavy processing bogging down transfers are one of those minor miracle-irritations of today’s technological life.
Your smartphone or tablet can be seen as a filtering device. Based on your intent and directions through voice or touch, it issues instructions to retrieve or access the software and data you want. Imagine if there were no filter and you had instantaneous access to all the code and data stored on all the world’s server networks. Information overload would hardly describe it. We are already nearly overwhelmed by the access we have to stuff from the cloud. You, through your filtering device, can control and limit how much you get and when you get it and even the forms or formats you receive it in.
Paul Marshall in Chapter 11 of Beyond Physicalism titled Why Are We Conscious of So Little: A Neo-Leibnizian Approach refers to a question posed by French philosopher Henri Bergson who suggested we should not ask why we remember at all, but why we remember so little. If we could access all at once every memory, every meal we ever tasted, every scent we experienced, every visual image our eyes received, how could we live? And what if, through the mother-sea, we had access to all the thoughts and memories of every other conscious being in the history of the universe. A great many highly regarded philosophers and religious thinkers believed we have access in some way to this universal consciousness and some, including Leibniz, believed this omniscience is contained in us in the form of monads.
Access to information is not the same as containing it all at once. We can access Wikipedia but we don’t have in our memory banks every article on every subject. We can see if our consciousness had full, unfettered access to all the data and all the code in today’s computer cloud we would almost literally explode from the information overload. We couldn’t handle it. With our brains as a filtering device, or “reducing valve” as the brain is sometimes referred to, we can control the access and make effective and purposeful use of the limited amount we access.
Memory provides an example of how this can work. There is very good reason to believe that memory is included in the brain in some form, but also there is good reason to think it exists outside of the brain. There is no real credible physicalist explanation of the very common experiences of NDEs as well as less common experiences of mystics and mediums. This is why committed physicalists wave away the question of such phenomena despite the very large body of scientific information that documents these experiences. The filtering or reducing valve function of the brain can help make sense of this. How could we remember everything that ever happened to us? Like access to universal consciousness or omniscience, in our physical bodies having access to too much would simply not work. So, our brain helps determine the memories to be “remembered” or recovered at our will or by our subconscious — as in dreams — even while the “mother-sea” has the capacity to store an unlimited number of memories.
Loss of memory through dementia or accidents in this view does not mean actual loss of memory.
The brain traces or patterns of those memories in our brains may be lost or inaccessible because when losing the function of certain processing capabilities. In such cases brain functions are hampered in a way that controlling the priority as well as recovery of selected memories are more difficult or impossible. This would also help make sense of amnesia where memory loss is total because of the loss of brain functions, but is slowly recovered. If the synaptic patterns of our brains are the sum total of our memories and these are lost due to the death of parts of the brain, how could such memories be recovered? Same with the phenomenon of the dying shortly before death recalling deeply hidden memories despite years of memory loss because of a dying brain. Again, the “backup” or perhaps primary copy stored in the cloud provides a possible answer, particularly when we understand that the backup contains far more data than our limited storage capacity in our brains will allow.
The filter, or reducing valve, theory of the mind-brain relationship may be gaining ground in part because of the growing interest in forms of universal consciousness emerging from both physics and neuroscience. The seriousness with which this old idea is being treated by a wide range of scientists suggests that the top-down or bottom-up question of mind and brain is far from settled.
