First, I would like to state — as a theoretical physicist who is partners with another theoretical physicist — that the blog I took this from, BackReAction, is painfully cute. It’s run by two theoretical physicists who are married, and their tagline says, “Events on the world lines of two theoretical physicists, from the horizon to timelike infinity.” Oh, stop being so cute; you’re killing me.
From their post on the 2011 FQXi Conference, which is an international and inter-disciplinary meeting on the nature of time, they wrote:
David Eagleman gave a very engaging talk about how our brains slice time and process information without confusing causality. The difficulty is that the time which different sensory inputs needs to reach your brain differs by the type and location of input, and also the time needed for processing that might differ from one part of the brain to the next. I learned for example that the processing of auditory information is faster than that of visual information. So what your brain does to sort out the mess is that it waits till all information has arrived, then presents you with the result and calls it “right now,” just that at this point it might be something like 100ms in the past actually.
Even more interesting is that your brain, well trained by evolution, goes to lengths to correct for mismatches. Eagleman told us for example that in the early days of TV broadcast, producers were worried that they wouldn’t be able to send audio and video sufficiently synchronized. Yet it turned out, that up to 20ms or so your brain erases a mismatch between audio and video. If it gets larger, all of a sudden you’ll notice it.
Eagleman told us about several experiments they’ve made, but this one I found the most interesting: They let people push a button that would turn on a light. Then they delayed the light signal by some small amount of time 50ms or so past pushing the button (I might recall the numbers wrong, but the order of magnitude should be okay). People don’t notice any delay because, so the explanation, the brain levels it out. Now they insert one signal that comes without delay. What happens? People think the light went on before they even pushed the button and, since the causality doesn’t make sense, claim it wasn’t them! (Can you write an app for that?) Eagleman says that the brains ability to maintain temporal order, or failure to do so, might be a possible root of schizophrenia (roughly: you talk to yourself but get the time order wrong, so you believe somebody else is talking) and they’re doing some studies on that.
As someone who is intensely interested in the theoretics of time travel, and also has been effected by schizophrenia (well, technically, my doctors are calling it schizoaffective disorder, which is undifferentiated schizophrenia and bipolar disorders coexisting simultaneously) for over a decade, I find this hypothesis of schizophrenia as a sort of neuro-chronological disorder oddly sensible and yet equally astounding.
However, the idea that neurological processes which are normally quite resource intensive, such as visual information processing, could occur so fast as to cause a schizophrenic person to believe, to use the DSM stereotype, that “someone else is doing it” or that “the thoughts originate from an outside source” requires further inquiry. In other words, how is it, precisely, that these processes could occur “faster”, to use the rather inelegant language of this linear neuroscientific model, in a schizophrenic brain?
Now, at this point, I’m just throwing things out there as ideas, and I would like to state that I am not a neuroscientist. But could these processes be tied to a dual-state time vector?
Many physicists throughout recent decades have postulated theories of “quantum consciousness”, a laRoger Penrose’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory, which he rather curiously arrived at via Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. That theory is controversial. However, recently some neurological processes have been shown to have quantum effects on the macroscopic scale. Many other neurological processes are likely relegated to the realm of classical mechanics. I would like to delve a little deeper into this idea that schizophrenia is a result of a chronological disconnection (dare I say, time out of joint?) from the perspective of a physicist.
Before I go on, I would like to briefly summarize the concept of a dual-state vector. For those not familiar, here’s a paper from Arxiv which covers the dual-state vector formalism. It’s only six pages, but if you’re thinking, “tl;dr”, then the abstract explains the idea quite concisely: “The Two-State Vector Formalism describes a quantum system at a particular time by two quantum states: the usual one, evolving forward in time, defined by the results of a complete measurement at the earlier time, and by the quantum state evolving backward in time, defined by the results of a complete measurement at a later time.” It’s a way for information, at the quantum scale, to determine and be determined by both its past and its future simultaneously.
So let’s go back again to Eagleman’s theory that schizophrenia is a result of the brain erroneously perceiving events which occur to quickly in a linear timeframe as the work of some outside entity. There is trouble here, in that this hypothesis falls within the range of what David Dennet terms Orwellian or Stanlinesque, which is explained and rectified in his Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness:
Daniel Dennett‘s Multiple Drafts Model of Consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991. As the title states, the book proposes a high-level explanation of consciousness which is consistent with support for the possibility of strong AI.
Dennett describes the Multiple Drafts theory as first-person operationalism. As he states it:
The Multiple Drafts model makes [the procedure of] “writing it down” in memory criterial for consciousness: that is what it is for the “given” to be “taken” … There is no reality of conscious experience independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).^[1]^
Dennett’s thesis is that our modern understanding of consciousness is unduly influenced by the ideas of René Descartes. To show why, he starts with a description of the phi illusion. In this experiment, two different coloured lights, with an angular separation of a few degrees at the eye, are flashed in succession. If the interval between the flashes is less than a second or so, the first light that is flashed appears to move across to the position of the second light. Furthermore, the light seems to change colour as it moves across the visual field. A green light will appear to turn red as it seems to move across to the position of a red light. Dennett asks how we could see the light change colour before the second light is observed.
Dennett claims that conventional explanations of the colour change boil down to either Orwellian or Stalinesque hypotheses, which he says are the result of Descartes’ continued influence on our vision of the mind. In an Orwellian hypothesis, the subject comes to one conclusion, then goes back and changes that memory in light of subsequent events. This is akin to George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where records of the past are routinely altered. In a Stalinesque hypothesis, the two events would be reconciled prior to entering the subject’s consciousness, with the final result presented as fully resolved. This is akin to Joseph Stalin‘s show trials, where the verdict has been decided in advance and the trial is just a rote presentation.
[W]e can suppose, both theorists have exactly the same theory of what happens in your brain; they agree about just where and when in the brain the mistaken content enters the causal pathways; they just disagree about whether that location is to be deemed pre-experiential or post-experiential. […] [T]hey even agree about how it ought to “feel” to subjects: Subjects should be unable to tell the difference between misbegotten experiences and immediately misremembered experiences. [p. 125, original emphasis.]
Dennett argues that there is no principled basis for picking one of these theories over the other, because they share a common error in supposing that there is a special time and place where unconscious processing becomes consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett calls the “Cartesian theatre“. Both theories require us to cleanly divide a sequence of perceptions and reactions into before and after the instant that they reach the seat of consciousness, but he denies that there is any such moment, as it would lead to infinite regress. Instead, he asserts that there is no privileged place in the brain where consciousness happens.
Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of “presentation” in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of. […] Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea. But […] the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us—laypeople and scientists alike—even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized. [p. 107, original emphasis.]
With no theatre, there is no screen, hence no reason to re-present data after it has already been analysed. Dennett says that, “the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the brain does not bother ‘constructing’ any representations that go to the trouble of ‘filling in’ the blanks. That would be a waste of time and (shall we say?) paint. The judgement is already in so we can get on with other tasks!”
According to the model, there are a variety of sensory inputs from a given event and also a variety of interpretations of these inputs. The sensory inputs arrive in the brain and are interpreted at different times, so a given event can give rise to a succession of discriminations, constituting the equivalent of multiple drafts of a story. As soon as each discrimination is accomplished, it becomes available for eliciting a behaviour; it does not have to wait to be presented at the theatre.
Like a number of other theories, the Multiple Drafts model understands conscious experience as taking time to occur, such that percepts do not instantaneously arise in the mind in their full richness. The distinction is that Dennett’s theory denies any clear and unambiguous boundary separating conscious experiences from all other processing. According to Dennett, consciousness is to be found in the actions and flows of information from place to place, rather than some singular view containing our experience. There is no central experiencer who confers a durable stamp of approval on any particular draft.
Different parts of the neural processing assert more or less control at different times. For something to reach consciousness is akin to becoming famous, in that it must leave behind consequences by which it is remembered. To put it another way, consciousness is the property of having enough influence to affect what the mouth will say and the hands will do. Which inputs are “edited” into our drafts is not an exogenous act of supervision, but part of the self-organizing functioning of the network, and at the same level as the circuitry that conveys information bottom-up.
The conscious self is taken to exist as an abstraction visible at the level of the intentional stance, akin to a body of mass having a “centre of gravity”. Analogously, Dennett refers to the self as the “centre of narrative gravity”, a story we tell ourselves about our experiences. Consciousness exists, but not independently of behaviour and behavioural disposition, which can be studied through heterophenomenology.
That Eagleman’s hypothesis is Orwellian or Stalinesque has difficult implications for free will, which, as we shall see, arise from a linear understanding of time and dependence upon linear causality. Phrased succinctly, the physics of classical mechanics as applied to neurophysiology supply no basis for a person’s ability to alter their stream of consciousness through mental effort; the mechanistic determinism of classical physics rules out the possibility of free will. Hypotheses which can be classified as Orwellian or Stalinesque not only depend hopelessly upon linear causality, but also imply that there is no mechanism for concerted alteration of consciousness, maintaining the impossibility of free will — something which modern studies in neurophysiology have shown is not the case, i.e. self-directed neuroplasticity.
If we were to view certain neurological processes (and again, I do not know which ones, nor do I think anyone else knows yet) as wavefronts propagating through a field, we could imagine the dominant consciousness within a brain as the wavefront with the highest strength. Similarly, the “outside entities” in the consciousness of a schizophrenic brain could be seen as lesser wavefronts piggybacking on the dominant one, like a skier behind a powerboat. However, the problem again shifts to being temporal: How is it that lesser wavefronts could arrive before the dominant one? In other words, how could the skier arrive before the boat? And, in addition to these problems, we have yet another temporal problem in light of Dennet’s Multiple Drafts model: If consciousness is the cause and effect of consciousness, this nearly raises it to godlike status; consciousness becomes a sort of prime mover in the sense of Aristotle’s primum movens and St. Thomas Aquinas’ dreadfully ignorant Cosmological Arguments. (Hey, dude, I don’t care if your confusion earned you sainthood, but there’s this thing called Perturbation Theory in quantum mechanics, and it explains that zero-point fluctuations of the inflaton field generate density perturbations and that zero-point fluctuations of the metric field likewise generate primordial gravitational waves…)
As a result of these problems, I think a model of consciousness which allows for anti-temporal effects is pertinent. And to go back to my original idea of dual-state time vectors: If a quantum system can determine and be determined by both its past and its future simultaneously, future neurological processes can create the current neurological processes which cause the future ones. This solves the temporal issues of lesser wavefronts arriving before the dominant wavefront, as well as the problem in Dennet’s model where consciousness creates consciousness (and it’s turtles all the way down…).
If we accept a modified version of Dennet’s Multiple Drafts Model with quantum effects, in which schizophrenia is caused by dual-state time vectors causing lesser wavefronts to arrive before or at the same time as dominant ones, we have new problems to be dealt with. First, consistent characterizations of schizophrenic voices and hallucinations are not addressed. I can personally attest that I have heard a middle-aged, British, male voice narrating nearly all my actions and thoughts for the past decade, quite consistently. That is, this voice has not changed character or tone, and other schizophrenics report similar experiences of recurrent hallucinations. (And, also interestingly, female-bodied schizophrenics report more male voices, and male-bodied schizophrenics report more female voices.) This fact is quite troublesome: either it is that all wavefronts within the brain are a consciousness in and of themselves, or else if they are not their own consciousness there is little reason for these wavefronts to not manifest macroscopically as noise or random hallucinations (which do also occur, but do not delegitimise the tenacity of consistent hallucinations). However, if each wavefront is its own consciousness, it would seem plausible that the dominant consciousness could shift between wavefronts, which is obviously not the case, i.e. schizophrenia is not multiple personality disorder. So why is it that these alternate waves remain distinct and separate?
It could be that the dominance of the main wavefront does in fact shift occasionally to another wavefront, which might account for fluctuations in paranoia. That is, suddenly the consciousness of a schizophrenic is derailed from its dominant wavefront into the rather informationally limited perspective of a lesser one, which would account for the characteristically misdirected hyper-vigilant behaviours associated with paranoia as the brain tries to recuperate from a loss of previously-held perspective awareness. I’m not sure if I agree with that idea yet; I’m just throwing it out there. And also, I should briefly state that other theorists have attempted to use the Quantum Zeno Effect to explain the coherence of the dominant consciousness, but I can’t really attest to the veracity of that idea.
Lastly, I would like to state that I feel at once both within a position of privilege and deprivation while speaking of these ideas. I recognise that I have better insights into the workings and structures of schizophrenia as one who endures living with it, yet I cannot help but doubt my ideas pertaining to its pathogenesis in light of the neurological systems of self-obfuscation and segmentation — the very things which I am trying to see and define. It’s tortuously frustrating.