Schema
There is no escaping competition and cooperation. It is too far ingrained in our DNA.
In the nervous system, there is a neuronic act called competition. Act surprised. Deep in the act, there are neurons fiercely engaged in a tussle to impress the brain. And because the brain is picky, only a chosen few ever receive its unwavering attention. This is called signal enhancement.
Evolutionary and in true reductionist fashion, there are organisms that significantly became better at signal enhancement than others. The best improvers ended up as multi-cellular organisms. The Ls became the uni-cellular organisms. Mostly the invertebrates.
Winning came with a prize called the Tectum, a special cognitive controller for precision. This is the brainy part responsible for the vertebrates overt attention. For instance, when someone shouts, ‘hey look, a bird!’ we are inclined to look up to the sky.
Although complex, such an action is made instantly possible through a schema which is an internal model, representation, or a map of sorts.
A body schema “foot print” is a postural model framework that stores a pragramtic representation of our body’s spatial properties ‘‘moves” for spatial organization of action.
Take this analogy of our body schema:
Suppose a person, Kevin, has reached out and grasped an apple. You ask Kevin what he is holding. He can tell you that the object is an apple, and he can describe the properties of the apple. The reason is that Kevin’s brain has constructed a schematic description of the apple, also sometimes called an internal model. The internal model is a set of information, such as about size, color, shape, and location, that is constantly updated as new signals are processed. The model allows Kevin’s brain to react to the apple and even predict how the apple may behave in different circumstances. Kevin’s brain has constructed an apple schema. His cognitive and linguistic processors have some access to that internal model of an apple, and thus Kevin can verbally answer questions about the apple.
Now you ask Kevin, “How are you holding the apple? What is your physical relationship to the apple?” Once again Kevin can answer. The reason is that, in addition to an internal model of the apple, Kevin’s brain also constructs an internal model of his body, including of his arm and hand. That internal model, also sometimes called the body schema, is a set of information, constantly updated as new signals are processed, that specifies the size and shape of Kevin’s limbs, how they are hinged, how they tend to move, the state they are in at each moment, and what state they are likely to be in over the next few moments. The primary purpose of this body schema is to allow Kevin’s brain to control movement. Because he knows the state that his arm is in, he can better guide its movement. A side-effect of his body schema is that he can explicitly talk about his body. His cognitive and linguistic processors have some access to the body schema, and therefore Kevin can answer, “I am grasping the apple with my hand, while my arm is outstretched.” [Wikipedia].
I like to liken the schema to a chess manual and board. The manual provides the rules of the game, the finite sets of moves applicable in a chessboard. The board representing the canvas for those finite moves.
In humans, due to our extracurricular evolution, we developed the cerebral cortex. The cortex is like an upgraded tectum in that it is capable of both overt and covert attention. This means we can afford to pay attention to something without looking at it which we can refer to as a virtual movement.
To control this virtual movement, the cortex needs an internal model, and unlike the tectum which works with postural “physical” movements, the cortex must model something much more abstract.
According to AST, abstract modeling is possible through the construction of an attention schema.
An attention schema is like the body schema. Just like the brain constructs a simplified model of the body to help monitor and control movements of the body, so the brain constructs a simplified model of attention to help monitor and control attention.
The Curious Case
Just like a self-driving car needs only a high-level internal model of itself—such as its shape and size and how it handles the road, the schema lacks physical details of its functioning. It would be inefficient to carry everything, and therefore it can and should only be a simplified, imperfect and non-physical account of something real.
Given that, the attention schema is an embodiment of the brain’s imperfect but efficient understanding of its own attention. This according to AST, is why our brains adjudge that it has a non-physical essence of awareness we tend to call consciousness.
P.s.
All this is great, but there is also an equally interesting twist to all that I have just discussed.
We should not be under the misconception that biologists are the only ones with a monopoly on the study and understanding of life. The same applies to physicists. Or philosophers.
Easy problems are amenable to the reductive inquiry in that they are a sum of their parts. Easy in life terms is “tongue-in-cheek” as easy is going to Mars or curing cancer [Steven Pinker].
Consciousness is in itself a hard problem to decipher. For it is irreducible and more than a sum of its parts.
None of the diverse approaches – chemical, anatomical, physiological, embryological, and psychological” can account for it.
As scientists attempt to understand a living system, they move down from dimension to dimension, from one level of complexity to the next lower level. I followed this course in my own studies. I went from anatomy to the study of tissues, then to electron microscopy and chemistry, and finally to quantum mechanics. This downward journey through the scale of dimensions has its irony, for in my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons, which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line life has run out through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am now retracing my steps, trying to fight my way back. – Szent-Györgyi.
At the core of its property of irreducibility is the notion of qualia, the subjective phenomenal qualities of experience: how it is to feel pain, experience a shade of green, or a wonderful piece of music.
Small Wonder
In the grand scheme of segmentation “schema”, what’s not to say consciousness is a cooperative of many consciousnesses. The schema, but just as a barrier to all our internal organ consciousness. What’s not to say that the schema whilst useful, is our ‘ad-blocker’ to our organs chatter?
If at all, we are saying there is cell sentience, then could we be missing out on the verbal motor action?
So just like in the past, when we didn’t believe in animal consciousness, so too can our future selves believe in organ consciousness.
Could we have audio for all our organ starships?
I often imagine, the cells, reminiscent of starships. Each ship, with a captain, and everyone else on the ship with responsibilities. The ship with its own respective monitors, and inter-organ collaboration. With alarm systems, and fire-fighting pole when there is an emergency. All looking out for us. All these sentient beings, that are not legible to their masters. But they do exist.