Dialog 2.5: Beyond the Room – Animal Minds and the Looping Prestige Error

The afternoon air was exceptionally clear, with that special sort of clarity that is only seen on a day following a sharp frost. Near the sprawling oak at the end of the field mottled by patches of lavender, a Cistercian monk wearing the characteristic plain white habit of his order was sitting on one of the ancient stone benches on either side of the path. Around him stretched the fields of the monastery’s working farm. As he gazed toward the acres of wheat to the west, the monastery cat was sitting in a spot of sunlight nearby, licking its paw.

The cat looked up at the gentle sound of a single pair of footsteps approaching along the path from the east. It was the monastery’s administrator, Synergos, walking with a stack of papers under his arm. He ambled up to the second stone bench, on the other side of the path, and settled slowly down on it, placing his papers beside him. His hand resting on the stack, he sat staring in the cat’s direction, with a heavy, pensive expression. Only then did the monk, Haplous, shift his gaze to him.

“You look as though you had just audited a failing account,” Haplous said, his voice warm. “What is weighing on you?”

Synergos heaved a sigh, still looking towards the cat. “You’re right. Since our last talk, I’ve been thinking, and it has really put me into a spin. You know that I love animals.”

“Yes, that much is obvious from how often you play with our feline fellow here,” Haplous said with a grin. “But this should not be a cause for sadness. They bring us joy, don’t they?”

“They always did,” Synergos continued, “but since our conversation yesterday, I’ve been thinking: supposing your framework is correct, that is… if our subjective experience arises only through this ‘looping’ of our PTD – then this cat, and every creature like it, must be... well, dark inside. You know, functioning and everything, but without the inner light that we have.”

Haplous fell silent for a moment, as the cat sat on its haunches in the patch of sunlight among the clover, twitching its tail. Then a slow smile spread across his face, and he burst out laughing. “Ah, Synergos. Sorry to laugh, but you are demonstrating how looping can often make a person sad for no good reason. And, on top of that, you have fallen headlong into the Looping Prestige Error.”

“The Looping Prestige Error?” Synergos looked up, startled. “You have a formal term for these things I am thinking?”

“Yes, and many people fall into it the first time they are introduced to the BAL-looping ideas,” Haplous explained. “It names exactly what you just did: you considered that the cat does not have the same PTD loop that you have, and then automatically assumed that the cat was missing something of absolute importance. But this is actually a number of errors all rolled up into one.”

Synergos’s expression took on an air of puzzlement. “How so?”

“Ah,” said Haplous, shifting his weight on the ancient stone bench, “where to begin?”

“Maybe you could start with why this is called the prestige error.”

“Oh yes,” Haplous began. “It is a mistake of status. First we enthrone our own specific form of inwardness, and then we pity any creature we reckon doesn’t have the same thing. In doing so we fancy ourselves as empathetic, but behind this there is actually a deep-seated and unnoticed bias. People do this in consciousness studies all the time: even while aiming to be generous, they slight the animals by adopting the assumption that, if the animals are to have their proper significance along the scale of being, their minds should be like ours, and then they set about demonstrating possible similarities.”

“Wait. So you are saying that even while trying to be open-minded and considerate of the animals they are nonetheless revealing a self-centered bias.”

“I would not go so far as to use the term ‘self-centered’; they are working with all due care and they mean well. Maybe it is better to say it is necessary to think all this through carefully, before setting off down some particular path toward the defense of animal minds.”

“OK, so enlighten me. Yesterday you told me that everything we are ever aware of – essentially, our entire conscious existence – is a product of the looping of our human PTD, something that only we as a species have. So, if the cat lacks that, does it have inner experience like ours?” Synergos pressed.

“And do you recall how we defined this PTD and this looping?”

“Yes. You said that humans, like all animals, have within them an inner model of the world. And here we are not talking about subjective experience or an inner picture. This is on the level of mechanism. The inner model is a functional arrangement embodied in the activity of the brain’s neurons and it is used in the organism’s pursuit of goals. It consists of what you called stand-ins for relevant elements and relations in the outer world. These stand-ins are embodied by functionally defined neuronal proxies, and our human language faculty is, in turn, functionally defined within this system as a device for transferring proxy configurations from one brain to another. Called the proxy transfer device, or PTD, it consists of two channels: the output, or o-channel, and the input, or i-channel. Scientists have shown that the two channels always operate in tandem, so that activity on one side is coupled with activity on the other.”

Haplous looked pleased. “Yes, so far so good. What else can you say about it?”

“During infancy, the overall brain system, called the Brain at Large, or BAL, learns a clever trick of neural reuse called PTD looping. Essentially, incipient but ultimately unexpressed signals in the o-channel cause their usual tandem resonance in the i-channel, where the signal can return to the BAL and activate the same neuronal proxies that are active in the individual’s baseline function.”

“Wait. You said baseline function. What do you mean by that? Baseline, as compared to what?”

“I mean, simply, without looping. The function any animal brain has, when not using the expressive-receptive loop.”

Haplous nodded in agreement. “Yes, that is a good name for it, please go on.”

“Well, that is about it. Except to say that the content that is thereby activated is called the ‘gist’ of that signal. And this gist is used by the BAL as a cognitive tool, while it also constitutes all the content of every mode of our subjective experience.”

“And at what stage does this crossover take place?”

“You said it could take place at almost any point, or at various points at once, along the two channels – ranging from the first stage, called semantic formatting, all the way to the final motor-routine workups, just before the efferent signals move out to the muscles of speech, signing, or writing. Oh, and I think I misspoke. The effect is not always gist; gist is the effect at the most inward level. When the crossover is at outer stages the effect can be phonological, akin to an inner voice.”

“And is there a difference in effect, depending on where the crossover occurs?”

“Very much so. When it occurs far out along the channels, at the phonological stage, it may be heard as what some call inner speech. People use that a great deal in everyday life. For example, they might look at a string of numbers and then turn their eyes to where they are writing, mentally hearing the numbers as they copy them.”

“Good.” Haplous nodded. “And where else can the crossover occur?”

“It can cross over at almost any stage, but perhaps the most interesting crossovers occur at the most inward stages, closest to the initial semantic formatting, before the phase in which the words and sentence structure are built.”

“And what is that like? I mean, what is the inner experience when looping takes place there?”

Synergos responded, “It does not seem like language at all. It seems like the end result of any language communication. Consider, for example, the inner experience we have when we are immersed in reading an adventure novel. We experience it in a way not unlike life itself.”

Haplous nodded encouragingly. “The gist.”

“Yes. ‘Gist’ is a technical word in the framework, but its meaning corresponds with the idea of the word in daily life. It is the most distilled meaning, and it is felt as the final, ultimate effect of a communication signal.”

Haplous pressed on. “But what is it like?”

“It is like experience itself. When I read a book about King Arthur’s court, for example, or a scene from Moby-Dick in which the sailors are on deck battling the whale, I have an inner experience that approximates what I would have if I were really there. It is not so full and intense, of course. You might say it feels thinner, but the experience is very similar. When I recall moments of my experience while reading Moby-Dick, I know, of course, that I was never on a whaling ship, and yet the recollection is not much different from what I might recall if I had actually been on one.”

Haplous nodded approvingly. “And now, an advanced question, to see if you grasp the framework’s architecture well enough to use it in explanations and predictions. Based on that architecture, what effect do you expect global aphasia would have on a patient’s subjective experience?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Aphasia. It is the medical term for an acquired impairment of language, usually caused by damage to language-related regions of the brain. Depending on where the damage occurs, it may affect speaking, understanding, reading, or writing. Global aphasia involves severe impairment of both language production and comprehension.”

“Well, that would all depend on where along the channels the impairment lay, wouldn’t it? If the blockage were at or outward from the beginning of the phonological stage, then all the more inward stages could still function for looping.”

“So if a person with global aphasia had a blockage at an outward stage, they could nevertheless retain the ability to loop at all the stages inward from the blockage?”

“I am not a doctor, Haplous, you know that. But reasoning solely from the architecture of the framework, it seems possible. In regard to verbal output, a blockage at one point in the channel could prevent the signal from reaching the end and becoming speech while leaving the earlier stages intact. So looping, and the resulting subjective experience, could still be possible at every stage before the blockage.”

Haplous nodded.

“But tell me,” Synergos asked, “what do actual medical studies show about this?”

“Indeed, in line with your prediction, I have read of a documented case of global aphasia lasting one month following brain surgery. During the episode of aphasia, the patient suffered severe impairment of speech production, comprehension, and repetition, while she was able to correctly perform tasks requiring conceptual analysis and nonverbal operations. After she recovered, she reported that throughout the episode she had remained able to formulate her thoughts internally.”

Synergos nodded. “Like I said, it would depend on where the blockage occurred. Think of an electrical wire. Cut it at any one point and the wire can no longer carry the signal from one end to the other. It does not matter that nearly all of the wire remains intact. As a complete pathway, it has ceased to function.”

“Yes, of course. But it would still retain its utility up to the point of the break.”

“Exactly. And the same would be true of the output channel of the PTD. A severe blockage at any point could entirely prevent any end-to-end throughput, with no speech from emerging at the end. But the stages before the blockage might still remain active, with the possibility of looping at any of them.”

“Very good! Because we never discussed that before, which means you know the framework well enough to apply it to new questions.”

“As is my habit, I jotted down some notes after our talk yesterday.”

Haplous leaned forward. “Very well. So let’s begin our analysis. Let’s look at the cat’s functional reality. He has an output channel – his cries, his posturing, the way he moves his tail, eyes and ears, the way he tailors his scents to the occasion... And he also has an input channel to interpret those same signs in others. He gives signs; he reads signs. If he is hurt, does he stay silent?”

“No,” Synergos admitted. “He yowls. Don’t you remember last week when our feline buddy was lying too close to the roofers and got his tail squeezed under a stack of shingles one of them set down on it?”

“And if another cat hears that sound, does it ignore it?”

“No, it reacts to the distress. It responds to the signal.”

“Exactly. So the cat has an expressive channel and a receptive channel, and these, we saw, were the prerequisites for humans to learn to loop, as an evolutionary exaptation of a preexisting skill. It therefore stands to reason that the cat could engage in the same cognitive procedure.”

Synergos did not look convinced. “But we do it with our two-way communication faculty, and who is to say that cats, when they do these things, intend to communicate? Maybe they yowl and emit every other gesture and sign by reflex.”

“It would not matter if it is by reflex or intention; in either case the cat’s BAL – its Brain at Large, the whole brain-and-organism system we have been talking about – could learn to loop.”

Synergos considered this. “OK, but their equivalent of the PTD would be very different from ours. So does that mean they might have inner experience like ours, but of a different nature, as given by their own looping?”

Haplous paused. “Before we go further, we need to define more carefully what we mean generally by ‘experience.’ In the framework, when used alone, it has a broad sense that applies to any organism with a BAL.”

“Any animal? Really? Even a dragonfly? What about a paramecium?”

“Well, the latter is not really an animal; it is a protist. But yes, this broader sense of experience as defined in the framework applies even to the paramecium. Or to an animal as simple as C. elegans. Have you heard of it?”

“No, but by the name I assume it is elegant?”

“Very much so. It is a tiny sort of worm with remarkably smooth, elegant motion, and just 302 neurons. In the framework, by definition, we say that its BAL has experience. We can say this because we begin by taking the word in its broadest sense. Did you know that originally it was related to the idea of testing?”

“Really?”

“Yes, and even today, in some other languages – Portuguese, for example – the same word, experiência, can mean either ‘experience’ or ‘experiment.’ So we begin with this broad definition. C. elegans certainly experiences in this sense. It is constantly testing its environment: sensing, turning, sliding elegantly backward and forward, adjusting its strategies, moving toward goals and away from adversity.”

Synergos raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying the worm has subjective experience?”

“Not necessarily. Later we will define what allows for our own familiar sort of subjective experience. Whether C. elegans has anything of that sort is a further question, and for now we can leave it open. For now, it is enough to say that it has experience in the broader sense we have defined.”

“OK, sure. You are defining experience as applying to an animal that tests and senses its environment, which has elements within it that stand in for relevant aspects of its environment and which change based on its sensory input to reflect changes in the environment, and then, based on those changes within it, behaves in ways to bring about changes in the environment or its relation to it, effectively moving from an initial state toward a goal state.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

Considering this, Synergos asked, “How do scientists refer to this sort of system? Is there a special word for it?”

“Yes, any such system is called cybernetic.”

“No, really? I thought it was from science fiction.”

“Really. The sort of system you just described has a name. It is called a cybernetic system.”

“So, you are saying, by definition, in the framework, any cybernetic system has experience.”

“Yes, it is not to say that every cybernetic system is conscious. It is simply a useful definition of the word ‘experience.’”

Synergos sat silent for a few moments in thought. “OK. So far so good. By definition, you say. So if we add an adjective to that, we get a more restricted field, correct? As with any adjective: you have ‘rocks,’ and then you have ‘heavy rocks,’ which are a subset of rocks. So subjective experience would be a specific category of experience?”

“Yes, exactly. And if you have a little time this afternoon, we can work through it, to learn the relationships between baseline experience, baseline content, looped content, and subjective experience. It won’t take long. I’ll bet we can finish before the chapel bell tolls for five o’clock mass.”

“Oh really? Well, if you can lead me through anything so important as that in less than an hour, I’m all for it. It sounds fascinating. Let’s go.”

“OK. We will begin by recalling what you so elegantly summed up just now about the framework. You said that in our own specific looping, using the human PTD, the looped signal arrives back at our neuronal proxies and activates them in accordance with the patterns its signal is built on, which in our case is semantic formatting.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“OK, very good. Now let’s distinguish two further terms: ‘attendance’ and ‘content.’ In the case of C. elegans, it is not so obvious, in a first consideration, that there is ‘content’ that it is attending to. But in our own case, wouldn’t you say that there is content in our subjective experience? That when you experience something subjectively, you are attending to content? Your BAL is attending to content?”

“Yes, very much so. When I am having any sort of subjective experience – let’s say I look at that oak tree over there, with the sparrows flitting among the branches and chattering with one another – I would say that that tree and overall scene is the content of my subjective experience.”

“Very good, yes, you have the idea. And the framework is not only parsimonious in its architecture, but also in its terminology. Since we use the term ‘experience,’ preceded by an adjective, to denote subjective experience, we will use the same word, ‘experience,’ in the more general sense as well. And we will likewise use the word ‘content’ in a general sense. We will say that even C. elegans, as it moves about, is attending to content.”

“What do you mean? Subjective content like I just described with the tree?”

“Not necessarily. It has sensory inputs, and functionally these can be treated as information; information can be considered content, you see? So C. elegans is also attending to content as it moves about, testing its environment, experiencing, adjusting, and acting.”

“I’m not so sure... But OK, I suppose you can define your terms as you wish, as long as you are consistent and never stray from your definitions. – But I will pay strict attention and make sure that you do not later start smuggling in meaning to these words apart from how you have just defined them.”

Haplous beamed. “And I’m so happy that you will do that, Synergos, because, to tell the truth, that is a problem with some frameworks in consciousness studies. They begin using a word in a certain way and later use it in extended senses that were not there at the beginning of their theorizing. By imprecisely leveraging the meanings of their words, smuggling in additional meanings along the way, they obtain theoretical developments they have not earned, and the system loses validity. The BAL-looping framework aims to avoid this by defining its terms explicitly and holding those definitions steady throughout its developments.”

With his right hand, Synergos began to count the fingers on his left. “OK, let me name them. We have experience; we have a subset of that, subjective experience; we have content, as you have now defined it; and yesterday we covered looping, semantic formatting, the inner model of the environment, and so on. Everything so far is well defined.”

Haplous nodded. “So now we’re ready to continue with your question. Let’s go back to it.”

Synergos leaned forward. “Yes. I was asking: are you saying that it’s plausible that the cat loops?”

“Just considering the architecture, yes, I would say it seems possible. Any creature with output and input channels for the expression and reception of signs possesses the basic architecture from which looping could arise. And brains are notoriously adept at putting neural reuse to work.”

Synergos shifted his gaze from Haplous to the cat, its tail twitching while it watched a butterfly extracting nectar from a clover blossom. His expression once again grew pensive. “If the cat does loop, would its subjective experience be somehow poorer than ours?”

“I would not call it poorer,” Haplous replied. “If cats loop, they would loop the content that is meaningful to them. To say that our greater expressive range, as reflected by the thickness of Webster’s dictionary, automatically makes our experience more significant would be like saying that a set of clothes made with ten yards of fabric is inherently better or more valuable than a garment made with just two.”

“So sparser content does not necessarily equate to lesser significance,” Synergos said.

“Of course not,” Haplous answered. “Consider a poem of ten lines by Emily Dickinson compared with a hurriedly written essay of five pages by a middle-school student who did not even study for the test. More is not necessarily better in every case.”

“Yes, I see.” Synergos nodded. “So animals that loop in their own way cannot be said to have a less significant inner life than humans simply because their content is less elaborate.”

“Well stated,” Haplous said. “A repeated error is to begin with the foregone conclusion that such experiences can reasonably be arranged along a single scale. We do not currently know how to define any such scale for ranking the significance or value of one species’s subjective experience in relation to another’s, and we may never have one.”

Synergos considered this and then ventured, “But you, as a religious monk, surely you must think that the human has more significance? I mean, are not the sacred scriptures addressed to humans, and not to nonspeaking animals?”

“It’s a very good question, especially considering that many people – including many scientists who are also religious – will wonder about that. Let us consider it from the standpoint that subjective experience arises in relation to something called a soul. Now, if there is a God who put a soul into one species, and not in others, does that imply that the others do not have subjective experience?”

“No, of course not. Subjective experience is a sort of content that is experienced. It could be experienced by the animal itself, without a soul. Or who knows, if you believe in souls, then maybe the animal has another sort of supernatural entity within it, somehow akin to a soul but different, which experiences the subjective content. So the question of subjective experience, in and of itself, is not a religious question.”

The two sat in silence for a moment, as Haplous watched a hawk circle above the wheat field, while Synergos petted the cat, which had climbed into his lap and was the same butterfly as before, now flitting among the lavender.

It was Synergos who spoke first. “OK, so let’s get on with it. What is this thing, subjective experience? How does it exist? How does it come into being?”

“Another great question, Synergos. A lot of people want to know. But we need to back up a square or two, because the question you need to start with is more basic than that.”

“How so?”

“The question is, where does the existential crux lie: in the content of experience, or in the relationship between the content and the agent that is attending to that content, or in the agent in and of itself?”

Synergos exhaled in a sputter. “Whoa! Now you’ve got to slow down there.”

“OK, let’s move through this step by step. Here we get into an area where the BAL-looping framework ideas help us to sort things out. We have talked about subjective experience, and how its content is formatted by the brain, right?”

“Well, yes,” Synergos said, “the framework explains how and under what conditions content is looped and formatted, and how the BAL attends to it as a cognitive tool.”

Haplous continued. “Right. In BAL looping, we consider the redness of the apple, its roundness, the number of apples that are on the table, the shape of the table, all of these things, as the content of subjective experience. We consider that this content is formatted through the PTD, and it is the BAL that is attending to that content.”

“OK, that makes sense, so it’s the BAL that’s the agent, right? The one that’s doing the experiencing?”

“Exactly. So now you can probably see where I’m going with this. It is not the subjectively formatted content that is important in this equation; it is the experiencer. What we call ‘subjective experience’ is the BAL’s experience of content in that looped format. The redness of the apple, its roundness, the shape of the table – that is content. But the content is merely the object of focus; the BAL’s focus on it is what we call attendance. So, when it comes to consciousness studies, the existential crux lies in the agent attending to this content, the agent engaged in this experience.”

“OK, that is clear. The agent having the experience is the existential hub when it comes to consciousness studies, not the content it is attending to.”

Haplous lowered his voice. “Exactly. And this, Synergos, is the third of the errors I said were rolled up in your initial question – and this is perhaps the deepest one of all.”

“I’m sorry… what were the first two again?”

“First, we have enthroned our own form of subjective experience. Second, we have assumed that richer or more elaborate content must make an experiencer more significant.”

“I see.”

“And now, number three, we have gone one step further: we have confused the role played by the content of subjective experience, not distinguishing between this and the role of the experiencer that is attending to that content. This is like a visitor to an art exhibition pointing at the paintings and claiming that those works are him, the visitor. He confuses himself with what he is seeing.”

Synergos assumed a thoughtful air. “But why must there be an experiencer, or attender, at all? Traditionally it seems that people assume there is one, but scientifically, can’t you just have the paintings, as you were saying?”

Haplous seemed pleased. “Yes, very good. And the answer begins with the distinction we have just made. Remember, we are starting with very simple animals, such as C. elegans and its 302 neurons. As I explained, within the BAL-looping framework, even a simple organism like C. elegans, by definition, is said to experience its world. It does this by means of the inner stand-ins it carries within its inner model of the world. These stand-ins are the content of that experience. This is by definition. And, you see, the very idea of content assumes an attender to that content.”

Synergos looked uncertain. “But you say this is by definition, so it is just you saying so. You are not presenting it as a fact or a discovery based on evidence.”

“Exactly. In this case, it is similar to using Newton’s F = ma as a defining relation. The definition will earn its worth according to how well it holds up and what it allows us to explain.”

“Well, in this case it leads you to say that all animals that seek goals in relation to their environment, attending to content in their inner models as they do so, have experience. How would this apply to machines? Take an air conditioner with a thermostat, wired so that its motor activates above a certain temperature, with the goal of bringing the room temperature back down to the target. Would it have experience?”

“A very penetrating question – and yes, by these definitions, it would.”

“But are you sure? Isn’t having an intention part of having a goal? And how would a machine have an intention?”

“We will come to the idea of intention in due course,” Haplous replied. “For now, you must realize that requiring intention at the level of definition would already smuggle in a factor that cannot be objectively verified. How would we verify an intention? To construct an objective, functional, scientific framework, we must define our terms in relation to observable and measurable phenomena. Once we make a general observation that squirrels eat acorns for food, and then observe a hungry squirrel that has caught sight of an acorn, is focused on it and moving toward it, we infer that getting to the acorn is its goal. We expect its muscles to adjust its behavior in ways so that it approaches the nut, picks it up, and then either eats it or finds some means to store it for later. The goal is inferred by observing its behavior.”

Synergos nodded. “I see. So if we observe the air conditioner, we can also infer its goal?”

“Absolutely.”

“But it is not an animal.”

“And what of it? An animal brain obtains its energy by burning food calories, while the air conditioner’s control system uses electricity. An animal brain belongs to a body that arose organically through animal reproduction and evolution, while the air conditioner’s control system is made in a factory. But at any given moment, regardless of the energy they use or how they were made, both are sensing their environment and adjusting their behavior on the basis of sensory inputs in order to achieve goals in relation to that environment.”

“Is this just a weird idea peculiar to the framework, or do other scientists think this way?”

“The entire science of cybernetics treats cybernetic systems – mechanical, electrical, animal, or plant – on the same basis. It is a matter of architecture. One of the major contemporary theories of consciousness, IIT, takes physical systems of many kinds under its scope and can attribute some degree of consciousness to systems far simpler than animals, including even simple recurrent control circuits of a kind found in some thermostatically controlled systems. Other theories, such as panpsychism, attribute consciousness to all things, even noncybernetic ones. But note that the framework does not go quite so far – it does not attribute consciousness to an air-conditioning system – only experience.”

“OK, now, if I have understood you correctly, you said that any cybernetic system has experience. But not necessarily subjective experience.”

“Yes, that’s right. There are different kinds of experience. So far, we are attributing only experience in its broadest defined sense to the thermostatically controlled air conditioner, the paramecium, and C. elegans.”

“Yes, I see. This makes sense. Begin with the general idea, and then narrow it down.”

“Precisely.”

“This way of defining experience broadly, and then refining the terminology as you approach the question of consciousness, seems acceptable to me – as long as you can get some traction out of it, define your terms carefully, and make sure you do not surreptitiously start using your terms with additional nuances.”

Haplous smiled. “I’m glad that you will be paying attention. Please tell me at any point you think I am doing that. So… we are agreed on the idea of content, so defined, as some aspect relevant to a system’s goals, and to which it is attending?”

“Yes, I grant you the use of this carefully defined term: content.”

“Good. Now I will introduce another term: looped content.”

“This one I can guess. I remember how you explained that, in looping, the semantically formatted signal at the most inward end of the PTD output channel resonates across to the input channel, which returns it to the BAL as gist.”

“Good. And you remember that, when it is being used functionally by the BAL, this looped content, or gist, has meaning only insofar as it activates the relevant neuronal proxies – the same proxies that are active in actual experience?”

“Yes. This is how you define gist in the framework.”

“And so now I will explain that just as in the case of baseline cybernetic operation any neuronal proxy configuration the BAL is attending to is content, so too, when a neuronal proxy configuration is activated by looping, this is also content.”

“It makes sense. Following your definition, neuronal proxy configurations the BAL is attending to are content. When they are activated in baseline operation, they are baseline content. When activated by looping, they are looped content.”

Synergos stopped and for some moments seemed to be considering what he had just said, as the cat near his feet pricked up its ears to the sound of a hay combine in a neighboring field.

It was Haplous who broke the silence. “And what do you think? Is a proxy configuration actively participating in the BAL’s current inner model of the world somehow different depending on whether it is recruited in unlooped operation as opposed to when it is activated by looping?”

“It must be, obviously.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, suppose I am walking along a forest path, and the proxy configuration for a rattlesnake becomes active right there in my inner model of the world, at a position corresponding to a few meters ahead of me, due to my baseline operation. In that case, I would have a visceral reaction. I might freeze midstride in fear. But if I merely pictured one there on a whim, I would keep walking without breaking stride.”

“And what do you think the difference would be?”

“Apparently the BAL knows the signature of baseline operation very well. It would feel the tone among the various functional areas. In this case of baseline activation, the neuronal proxy configuration would arise there accompanied by a corroborating signature in the vision center, and perhaps that of sound, if it were rattling. On the other hand, if I merely pictured it on a whim, in my imagination, these functional signatures would be lacking. The relevant functional signature in that case would be PTD operation, and the BAL apparently knows the difference.”

“And suppose your mind were to stray this evening during five o’clock mass, and you were to recollect this scene you can see there now at the end of the field, with the giant oak tree and the wheat field beyond it. That proxy configuration would then be active in your BAL, but would it be the same as what occurs now, when you are actually looking at it?”

Synergos reflected. “No, of course not. When we see the oak tree without looping, that is one thing: the relevant proxies are activated through sensory input. When we look at it while also looping, however, the proxy configuration is activated in both ways at once. The looping operation could move from an overall view of the tree, then alight on different aspects, move down to the details, and return to the overall view. All the while, sensory input would be streaming in from the retina, reinforced by functional signatures including those of the muscles that change focus by adjusting the curvature of the lens in the eye, and the muscles that move the eye slightly as it points to different parts of the tree. By contrast, if the BAL loops onto the same proxy configurations during five o’clock mass, inside the chapel, the vision center is doing something altogether different, so the experience would lack this reinforcement.”

“So the BAL is very much able to tell the difference between the two kinds of activation?”

“Yes. That distinction would be very useful, and it is one we know firsthand. People do not usually confuse what they are actually seeing with what they are imagining,” Synergos observed.

And now it was Haplous’s turn to speak, and he began to pronounce his words slowly and deliberately. “And I want you to feel the full weight of this, because it offers a totally different angle on a great deal of what consciousness studies have been doing for a long time. The redness of red, the warmth of the sun on your face, the throb of grief, the lift of joy – all of this is just content. All of it involves the activation of neuronal proxies, and it does not matter whether that activation is unlooped or looped. Whether it is baseline content or looped content, it is still just content. Remember, we define experience as attendance to content. There must be an attender. The attender is the experiencer, and both are one and the same: the BAL.”

Synergos looked up, his eyes meeting Haplous’s. “You said that so deliberately that I sense it must be important, so somehow I think I am not grasping the full significance of your point.”

“As I continue, I think you will see,” Haplous replied. “I was simply reinforcing that whatever the BAL attends to, or experiences, is content.”

“OK, yes, because at first I thought you said that the BAL was experiencing the world.”

“Yes, of course. You are right, and it is experiencing both things: the content within it and the world with which it is interacting cybernetically.”

“But suppose your definitions are wrong?”

“They will prove to be wrong if they lead to inconsistencies or predictions that clash factually with empirical evidence. That is how science works. You construct a theory and see how it stands. If it continues to withstand those tests, it remains viable.”

Synergos considered this. “OK, let us see. Let’s take myself as an example. You are saying that my BAL is the experiencer, and that my BAL includes all of me, including all the parts of my brain?”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“And you are saying that C. elegans, with its 302 neurons, and I are both experiencing our worlds, and that this is possible only through those embodied stand-ins for the external world – the inner model of the world, which at any moment takes the form of activated neuronal proxies?”

“Yes, that is right.”

“And you also say that humans have their own very distinctive device for interindividual communication, called the PTD, and that it can give rise to an operation called PTD looping?”

“Yes.”

“And you are saying that the brain operations of other species can also involve an analogous kind of loop, provided that they have an output channel and an input channel that can likewise activate their neuronal proxies?”

“Yes, that is it.”

Synergos looked at the cat. “So when my feline friend here yowls because a stack of shingles lands on its tail, and another cat immediately realizes that this one is in pain, is that an example of this interindividual transfer?”

Haplous smiled. “Yes. Whether or not your friend intended to communicate, the neuronal proxies in the other cat changed with the yowl in such a way as to embody another cat in distress.”

Synergos sat for a few moments, gazing vaguely toward the chapel. “So, in your framework, it is all very straightforward. Not much mystery there at all.”

Haplous laughed. “I would not say that. Even something made completely clear remains full of mystery. You only need to look deeper than the outer appearance.”

“But perhaps now we can return to my original question. I think it concerned the subjective experience of the cat.”

“Yes. You were asking whether, in the view of the framework, your feline friend was dark inside. And that is basically the same as asking whether it has subjective experience.”

“Well, does it?”

Haplous laughed again. “From what you know about the framework, what would you say?”

“I think it comes down to what subjective experience is. From what we have just discussed, the cat is definitely an experiencer, right?”

“Most definitely.”

“So that much we know. It has experience. Now we have to deal with the subjective part. What does that mean, anyway?”

“The origin of the phrase, and how it acquired its present denotation, are hard to trace. But the essential idea seems to be that a subjective experience occurs to one subject alone. It is not a group experience, nor is it the outward experience of an individual that others can observe. It is subjective in the singular: it occurs to that one individual, and no one else can know it directly.”

“So, basically, an inner experience. You see it, sense it, witness it, but no one else can – not directly. They can know of it only if you tell them.”

“That’s it.”

“And is it the same thing as consciousness, then?”

“According to the framework, no. They are different terms referring to different things.”

“How are they different?”

“We will come to that. But first tell me your answer: do you think the cat has subjective experience?”

“How would I know? Didn’t we just say that it occurs to one individual, and that others would not know of it unless that individual told them? And this cat is hardly capable of expressing an idea as precise and complex as whether it is having subjective experience.”

Haplous seemed more animated than ever. “But there are ways to test for it, at least in humans.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. For example, the human BAL can count precisely from memory only up to a very small number when unassisted by looping. Suppose I asked you how many windows there are in your apartment. Could you tell me?”

“Hmmm... I suppose I could, but I would have to walk mentally through each room, imagining each wall, and make the count.”

“Could you do it without using looping in this way?”

“No. I could say vaguely that there was a plurality, and I might say with some assurance that there were more than five but fewer than twelve, but I could not give you the precise number and be sure of it except by looping and counting. So wait – are you suggesting that we could test another species by devising a memory-based counting test?”

“No. Such a test would not transfer from one species to another. We cannot know with certainty whether another species has some counting ability within its unlooped BAL processes.”

“Then I think you would have to say that we cannot know whether the cat has subjective experience. At least, I cannot think of a test other than simply asking it, as I could ask another human.”

“But there are other possibilities.”

“Such as what?”

“Consider the early cave paintings. Some are hundreds of meters underground, yet they present consummate depictions of bison and other animals. Assuming the painter did not bring a bison, or a previous depiction of one, into the cave, what would have guided the hand?”

“You are probably thinking it would have been a mental image, and therefore subjective experience. But that hardly seems conclusive. Cats might have subjective experience and simply be poor artists – or uninterested in making art. And an animal capable of producing painted depictions from memory would give us evidence suggestive of subjective experience, but could that not also be a special way its BAL works without looping, as you pointed out in the case of counting?”

“Yes, of course. You are right.”

Synergos’s expression took on an air of frustration. “So how can we know?”

“Before we answer that, let us ask why anyone would be so interested in knowing.”

“Because it would mean that cats are like us. They have an inner life – the inner light I was talking about. I suppose dualists would then wonder whether the cat had a soul. It would grant the cat a new status of being, you might say.”

“Would it? Why?”

“It would be like us... Oh! I see what you are doing. This is the Looping Prestige Error, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is. And it seems to be a carry-over from dualistic religious ideas: ‘I think, therefore I am,’ that sort of thing. Man with a soul, made in the image of a spiritual God. In that view, this is where the value lies.” Haplous’s hand moved to the wooden cross that always hung near his heart.

“But is it wrong? How can we know otherwise?”

“As a scientist, I look for answers grounded in evidence that anyone can see, not conclusions that rely on religious scriptures. I am not saying that ancient scriptures are untrue. But the truths they propound, when they are not grounded in empirical evidence and scientific method, are not scientific. They are relevant to adherents, but not to others. For adherents to insist that nonadherents accept or rely on these ideas flouts every ethical Golden Rule. And it is not science.”

“So enlighten me. How does the framework approach this question?”

“The framework always works from two directions. At one end, there is subjective experience as we know and experience it. At the other, there is the material world as we examine it in a cyclotron, under a microscope, in a laboratory, or in the field with binoculars. The framework works inward from both ends and joins them firmly in the middle.”

“So at which end do you begin in this case?”

“We begin at the end of subjective experience and ask: when do we have it? Do we have it continuously?”

Synergos considered. “According to the framework, we do not. We have it only through looping, and we are not looping all the time. Looping is a cognitive tool the brain uses to build recollections, to imagine something, to create a fantasy, or to perceive the world in a looping-enhanced way, through conscious attention to vision, hearing, touch, or any other sense. Otherwise, it makes sense that the BAL would give it a rest when it was not needed, and from my own introspection I sense it is not operating at all times.”

“Very good. And when we are not looping, how is our experience?”

“It is unlooped, baseline experience, like that of the other systems we were discussing – paramecia, C. elegans, fish, cats, and so on, provided they are not looping.”

“Yes, exactly. Now suppose I asked you, just after a period of baseline experience, what your experience had been like. How would you be able to tell me?”

“I would have to recall it, of course, even if it had occurred only a few seconds earlier.”

“And in the framework, how do we recall something?”

Synergos considered. “We use the PTD to begin producing incipient expressions about it. The BAL works through a process called the naïve archeologist method, drawing on functional traces from multiple sources and normally achieving practical fidelity with what we were objectively doing just then. The principle that assures this close fidelity is called interfunctional complementation. The result is a reconstruction we can rely on for practical purposes as an account of the experience occurring in those previous moments or minutes.”

“But you said that we are not always looping...”

A look of sudden realization came to Synergos’s expression. “Ah! I see your point. After a period without looping, recollection nevertheless produces its result in the format of looping, because the recollection itself is looped. So, through recollection, all experience – even unlooped experience – necessarily appears as looped experience.”

“Exactly,” Haplous said in agreement. “In fact, I am presently writing a BAL-looping glossary in which this principle appears under the heading ‘Looping Indeterminacy Principle.’”

“So wait a minute. Looking back, we seem to have no way of knowing at what times we were looping, and at what times we were not?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Whenever someone says, writes, or even gains the unspoken impression that they are definitely engaged in a moment of subjective experience, we can take that as evidence that they are engaged in subjective experience at that moment. Furthermore, some recollections provide clear clues of the careful perceptual inspection we engage in while looping. I might remember tracing the arc of a rainbow slowly upward, remarking to myself that it forms a semicircle, and then thinking that its red resembles a red flash I once saw on the surface of icy snow against the winter sunlight. All of this can provide strong indications. But on other occasions I can certainly recall something in the form of looped experience, through the rendering of functional traces, even though I was not looping at the time.”

Synergos remained silent for a moment. “But if the only difference is that the same content is activated through looping and given the format of the PTD, why does subjective experience seem so utterly important to us? Why do we treat it as though it were the center and essential ‘without-which-nothing’ of our existence?”

“There are at least two reasons,” Haplous replied. “The first follows straight from what we have just been discussing. Whenever we look back upon some span of time in our experience, we do so through recollection, and we carry out the process of recollection through looping. So even experience that was originally unlooped winds up in our recollection as looped content. Therefore, whenever we look in the rearview mirror, so to speak, looped experience seems to be everywhere. This makes it appear as though it is all that we ever do.”

“I see. Baseline experience leaves traces, but when those traces are taken as evidence by the naïve archeologist operation, they result in content that has the format of subjective experience.”

“Exactly. Looping therefore enjoys a kind of retrospective monopoly. It supplies not only the subjective experience we have while looping, but also the only form in which our unlooped experience can later be recalled.”

“And the second reason?”

“The second is that looping brings content into a privileged functional zone. The PTD is involved in speaking, listening, reading, writing, recollection, imagination, explicit learning, reasoning, books, schools, dialogs, discussions, the dialog on TV and internet, sermons at church, and the accumulated knowledge of human culture. Looped content is the content we can name, report, compare, teach, record, and verbally transmit to others.”

Synergos nodded. “So yes, that definitely gives it status. We use language a lot in our interactions. And words play an outsized role in our social interactions. And what is school, what is university, if not reading, listening to lectures, writing essays, taking written and oral tests, etc. A very important part of our lives takes place through the use of our PTD.”

“Precisely. In our social life, the PTD plays a massive role, and in our private, subjective experience, it is literally the ‘without-which-nothing.’ This is true. The mistake is to infer from its privileged position that it is the whole of experience, or the whole of the experiencer. It is the room in which the BAL reads, writes, remembers, and speaks. But the privilege of that particular room does not make it the entire house, nor is it necessarily the most important room, nor should we unreflectively consider it the without-which-nothing of our existence.”

“This is interesting. I now see that the task is not simply to ask whether the cat’s subjective experience resembles mine. I also need to ask how my own looped experience differs from my unlooped experience, so that I understand what distinction we are actually trying to identify in the cat.”

“OK, let’s do that. Suppose you have just passed through a period of unlooped experience, and I ask you to recall what you were doing. As you recall it, your PTD activates the same neuronal proxies that were active in the unlooped experience, but now activates them through the semantic formatting characteristic of looping, because semantic formatting is the first step in the PTD loop. Now compare this subjective experience with the previous unlooped experience. How are they different?”

“Well, how could I say with certainty? Have I ever recalled unlooped experience except through looping? I cannot recall it without looping, and I cannot examine it analytically while it is happening, because the act of doing so would itself engage looping. So how could I know what it was like?”

“Yes, you see it clearly, that is the point,” Haplous observed. “And if you cannot make that direct comparison within yourself, how could you know what a cat’s unlooped experience is like?”

“I obviously couldn’t. But who knows whether its looped experience, if it does loop, might overlap with mine? We are both mammals. We have similar sensory systems and brains that are alike in various respects. There may be substantial overlap.”

“I agree. But in light of the framework, we can still identify respects in which the possible formats do not overlap, because it includes yet another principle called the Coterminous Principle.”

“Oh? And what is that?”

“It states that, because our looped experience is caused by our incipient expression, its content must be coterminous with the semantic possibilities provided by the loop, beginning with the initial semantic formatting in the o-channel which makes the signal that then crosses over to the i-channel, to be fed back to the BAL through the inmost part of that channel.”

“Wait. You lost me there. Can you repeat that in simpler terms?”

“OK. Starting with the output side, the PTD’s output channel, which we call the o-channel, has a first stage called semantic formatting. Other stages follow. At the morphemic stage, the word parts of a language are selected; at the syntactic stage, the words are grouped into a linear structure for speech or writing. Finally comes an auditory stage in the case of speaking, or arm and hand movements in the case of signing or writing…”

“Could there also be an auditory stage coupled with hand movements during writing? I always say that I can hear myself mentally saying the words as I write.”

“Yes, although people use different strategies. The brain can learn to skip steps, as in speed reading, which proceeds faster than full auditory sequences can be formed. But that is beside the point. What matters here is that semantic formatting comes first. That first step, coupled with the signal formats streaming back to the BAL through the inmost part of the i-channel, and the proxy configurations that those can activate – all of this places a hard limit on the boundaries of subjective experience.”

Synergos looked pensive. “I see what you are saying. Since all looping begins at some point in the o-channel, resonates across to the i-channel, and then returns to the BAL, the actual crossover may occur at the semantic level, the word level, the phrase level, the auditory level, or another later level. But all the successive levels are built on the semantic level. In terms of the signal, you cannot go beneath it. So every result of looping will lie within the boundaries of what is possible from that semantic basis.”

“Yes, exactly. That is the idea of the term ‘coterminous,’ from the Latin: their boundaries are precisely the same.”

Synergos continued the thought. “So the range of possibility of human looped content is bounded, and it is coterminous with the possibilities provided by the semantically formatted signal of the human PTD; while for cats, their range of possibility for looped content, if they have it, is likewise restricted to the possibilities afforded by their PTD signals.”

Haplous spoke encouragingly. “Yes, you’ve got it.”

“But wait. If this cat’s o-channel is incapable of outputting a signal that would denote my identity in its inner model, can it have subjective experience about me? Since subjective experience only arises through looping, and the possible range of gist is limited to the range offered by the semantic structure carried by its o-channel, how could it have any subjective experience about me?”

“I see what you are saying… how could your identity enter its looped content?”

“Exactly,” Synergos continued. “It can express affection, yes – not through speech, of course, but through intonations and gestures, all part of its expressive o-channel. So I suppose it could loop affection, but perhaps it could not loop anything like, ‘I love Synergos.’”

Haplous laughed. “I think it plausibly could. But we also have to cure you of the need for it to loop that content. If it sees you, jumps into your lap, purrs loudly, kneads your legs and chest with its paws, and rubs its face against yours, is it not expressing its affection toward you? Is that not enough? Even supposing the subjective experience is not there, wouldn’t this baseline experience be quite sufficient?”

“Yes, now that you mention it, I suppose that is enough.”

“Now, as to whether it can loop something like ‘I love Synergos,’ it might be able to. Animals wag their tails, flick their ears, move their faces in different ways, and walk with a certain posture. All of this is expression. In fact, many of these movements and gestures could represent a kind of global broadcast system, a term used by neuroscientists to denote a method for one part of the brain to recruit the attention of many other parts. In this hypothesis, a possible extension of the BAL-looping framework, a global broadcast need not take place only through circuits confined within the brain’s internal functioning. The simplest, most readily available way to let the brain’s functional areas know that something important is happening might be through motor movements. The effect of these movements is then sensed by many other functional areas, effectuating the broadcast.”

“Is that a neuroscientific principle?”

“So far, it is a possible extension of the BAL-looping framework, though not a basic part of its architecture. But in this extension, there could be a gesture for ‘Synergos.’ It might be hard for humans to interpret, but it is possible that a dog runs around in a certain way when a particular person approaches, or cocks its head in a characteristic way, for that person and no other, you see? All these would be gestures. To express ‘I love Synergos,’ your feline friend would need only to loop the gesture pertaining to you together with a gesture pertaining to affection.”

“So you mean I might see the cat twitching or moving its head as though it were rubbing against me, and that would mean it loves me?”

“Not necessarily. Remember that in looping, the gestures themselves can be entirely suppressed. The expressive process reaches its earliest stage in the output channel, resonates to the input channel, and there you have it: the neuronal proxies are activated. It is expressing the sentiment to itself – assuming, of course, that the cat loops. We do not yet know that it does.”

“How would we ever know?” Synergos asked.

Haplous looked back at the cat. “It is my hope that, as the framework becomes more widely known, laboratories will take up the ideas of the o- and i-channels and look for correlations with behavior. It should be possible.”

“This entire discussion has been interesting, Haplous. If you do not mind, I would like to review a little. Today we talked about content, experience, looped content, looped experience, and their relationship to baseline experience and subjective experience, right? And you said that even C. elegans experiences content, in the broader sense you established.”

“Yes, that’s right. ‘Experience’ names the BAL’s attendance to content, while ‘subjective experience’ names the special case in which the attended content has been looped and formatted by the PTD.”

“But how do you know that?”

“Once again, I’m just explaining definitions within the framework.”

“OK, I momentarily forgot. Without definitions we can’t get anywhere. But you said you were going to explain this to me before the tolling of the bell for five o’clock mass. You had better get around to it, because I think the time is approaching.”

“Well, basically I think we have already run through it. There is not much else to see, except perhaps to point out where people have become a bit confused by some other terms that are not well defined.”

“Oh? And what terms are those?”

“Perhaps the word ‘consciousness’ itself is misleading us. It sounds like the name of some further thing that exists somewhere in the BAL, when really all you have is the BAL, content, and its attendance to content. If we wish, we can also employ the term ‘consciousness’ in connection with this situation, as long as we are careful in our definition of this term.”

“Oh, I see, so you had it all covered; now the only small detail remaining is to explain what consciousness is,” Synergos observed with a hint of wryness.

Haplous smiled. “I would put it somewhat more modestly. The word ‘consciousness’ can still be useful as a general term, but I do not think it names some additional thing within the BAL. We already have the BAL, the content it attends to, and the act of attending.”

“So consciousness is not itself another element?”

“Not in the framework. ‘Experience’ is the broad term we have been using for the BAL’s attendance to content. When that content has been looped and formatted by the PTD, we call the BAL’s attendance to it subjective experience.”

“But that last part is more than a definition, isn’t it?”

“Yes. That is where the proposal becomes substantive. Remember what happens in looping. The activity returns through the receptive side of the PTD and activates the same neuronal proxies involved in the BAL’s ordinary, unlooped operation. But now their activation has passed through the semantic formatting of the PTD.”

Synergos nodded slowly. “And that gives the content the peculiar form in which we know our own subjective experience.”

“That is the proposal. Notice some of its marks. The content can be reflected upon. It is available, at least potentially, for report. It can enter recollection and be reformulated. And it comes to us in the semantically organized form characteristic of the human PTD.”

“So the subjective experience is not something produced after all that happens?”

“No. That is important. The BAL’s attendance to the content in that looped, semantically formatted condition is the subjective experience. We should be careful not to imagine the material process occurring first and then, somehow, another occurrence called subjective experience appearing afterward.”

Synergos sat quietly for a moment. “That does change the way the question sounds.”

“It also changes the way some familiar phrases sound. Nagel famously asked what it is like to be a bat. That phrase is useful because it directs our attention toward the animal’s experience. But saying that there is ‘something it is like’ to be an organism does not yet tell us what additional thing, if any, needs to be explained. It tells us that there is experience.”

“And Chalmers takes the question farther.”

“Yes. He asks why physical processing should give rise to a rich inner life at all, and remarks that it seems ‘objectively unreasonable’ that it should.”

Synergos considered this. “That is difficult to answer.”

Haplous looked at him. “Who is trying to answer it?”

“Chalmers.”

Haplous smiled.

Synergos caught himself. “His BAL.”

“Precisely. There is no little philosopher standing outside the system looking in. Chalmers’s BAL is doing the wondering. It is using its own neuronal proxies and the relations among them to form the concepts PHYSICAL PROCESS and SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE, and then trying to understand the relation between them.”

“And those are the same proxies we have been talking about.”

“Yes. There is not one inner model for the material process and another hidden model for the subjective experience. The loop falls back upon the same proxy system. The difference lies in the condition under which the content is activated and attended to.”

Synergos frowned. “Still, Chalmers could say that you have not actually explained enough. Perhaps PTD looping is not the complete account.”

“Quite so.”

“Then haven’t we simply moved the problem?”

“Not if we grant him the strongest possible case. Suppose this framework is wrong in some important respect. Suppose another theory eventually describes the process much better. Let us imagine that, one day, researchers really do account for the entire functional story.”

“The entire story?”

“As far as function can take us. The sensory receptors, neuronal activity, proxy configurations, attention, whatever mechanisms organize the content, whatever gives it the form in which it becomes available for reflection, recollection and report. Everything. If PTD looping belongs in that story, include it. If something better replaces it, use that instead.”

“All right.”

“Would Chalmers then be satisfied?”

Synergos thought for a moment. “No. I don’t think so. He would still ask why all that processing should be accompanied by subjective experience.”

“Then let us look very carefully at what remains in the question. Suppose the complete process has been identified, including whatever gives subjective experience its particular form. Why should that process be experienced in this way?”

“Yes. That is the question.”

Haplous paused. “Why should it be experienced otherwise?”

Synergos looked at him sharply.

“I do not mean that as a clever answer,” Haplous continued. “I mean: what alternative are we comparing it with? If this particular occurrence, with this organization and this attended content, is the subjective experience, why are we assuming that the identical occurrence ought somehow to be different from what it is?”

Synergos remained silent.

“We can certainly ask why one experience differs from another,” Haplous went on. “Why RED rather than BLUE? Why pain rather than warmth? Why this memory rather than another? Those differences may correspond to different proxy configurations, different relations, different functional conditions. There is a great deal there for science to explain.”

“But suppose I grant all of that,” Synergos said. “I can still ask something.”

“I think you can.”

“Why should this occurrence exist at all?”

Haplous nodded. “Now I think we have arrived at the difficult part.”

“Can the functional account answer that?”

“I do not see how it could. Functional explanations describe relations among things and processes that already exist. This activation affects that one. This configuration leads to another. This input produces that change. They can tell us why an occurrence takes one form rather than another, why it happens under certain conditions, and what consequences follow from it.”

“But not why there should be an occurrence at all.”

“Exactly. Every relation in the explanation already presupposes the existence of the things entering into the relation. Adding another functional relation merely gives us another existing element and another relation to explain.”

Synergos leaned back. “Then Chalmers is right that completing the functional story does not make his final question disappear.”

“Yes. I think we should grant him that. But perhaps we should look more carefully at what has remained unexplained. If subjective experience is the occurrence we have just described, what remains may not be some further phenomenal product that the material process has failed to generate. The remaining question may simply be why the occurrence itself exists.”

“And that is not peculiar to consciousness.”

“No. It is the question lurking behind every field of inquiry. Why should there be anything for the relations to relate?”

Synergos smiled faintly. “That sounds like a rather large assignment for researchers studying consciousness.”

“Perhaps too large. Chalmers called it ‘objectively unreasonable’ that physical processing should give rise to a rich inner life. I would turn the phrase around more cautiously. Once the occurrence and its organization have been identified, I do not think it is objectively reasonable to require an account of its functional organization also to explain why there should be existence at all.”

“Because we do not demand that in the physical sciences.”

“Exactly. Physicists try to identify the regularities and relations among the phenomena they find. They ask whether their laws explain the motions, transformations and interactions they observe. They do not refuse to use those explanations until somebody has first shown why matter, laws, or a universe should exist in the first place.”

“So we have not answered the ultimate question.”

“Not at all.”

“But neither have we shown that subjective experience is beyond scientific explanation.”

“Quite the contrary. There is an enormous amount left to explain. Why does subjective experience contain this content rather than that? Why does looping give it this semantic form? Why are some contents available for report and recollection while others are not? What happens in dreams? Under hypnosis? After particular forms of neurological damage? How does attention alter what enters the loop? Every discernible feature gives us another opportunity to test the proposed machinery.”

Synergos nodded. “So the ultimate question can remain open without becoming the task that every theory of subjective experience must solve.”

“That is how I would put it. We should explain as much of the occurrence as we possibly can, and not mistake the fact that existence itself remains mysterious for evidence that some additional ingredient must have been left out of the mechanism.”

Presently he looked again at Haplous, who, he noticed had also been looking at the cat. “All right. But what does all of this have to do with my question about him?”Presently he looked again at Haplous. “All right. But what does all of this have to do with my question about our very content pal there?”

“It means that the question we have been worrying about all this time – does the cat loop, does he loop in the same way as us, does he loop richly enough to count – is not the real question. Even if the cat does not loop at all, even if he is attending wholly to unlooped sensory content, there is still a BAL attending to and experiencing that content.”

Synergos patted the cat’s head. “So, to phrase that in the technical way you have been setting forth, let me summarize. You’re saying that many animals might have a form of looping, with a format shaped by their own expressive and receptive systems. And even if they don’t have any looping at all, they are still agents attending to and experiencing sensory content. And we know of no way to rank the significance of a BAL based simply on the richness of what it is attending to.”

“Yes, now, by Jove, you’ve got it!”

Synergos beamed. “It seems simple when you work through it carefully.”

“Exactly. And I must add that this is not just about the difference between humans and other animals. It is also about the nature of our own BAL’s activity, depending on whether it is experiencing looped or unlooped content.”

“How so?”

“Just as we discussed how many animals attend to and experience sensory content without looping, we humans can do the same.”

“We have talked before about this, but can you refresh my memory, in this new light?”

“Sure, and I will use a metaphor. Let’s say that the whole operation within the BAL is like a house, and the content from the PTD constitutes something akin to one room of that house.”

Synergos shifted on his bench. “OK, that is clear; one house, with the looping room as one part of it.”

“The PTD looping room is where everything we can name, recall, and report takes place. When ‘you’ are in that room, the BAL is attending to the semantically formatted activity of the PTD. And this room has a special significance, because the PTD is what we speak with, what we listen with, what we write with, and what we read with. It is also what we recall things with and imagine things with. It supplies the semantic formatting characteristic of our subjective experience.”

The monastery cat was on its back among the clover, batting at a tassel of clover above it, as Synergos leaned forward with a very intent look on his face.

Synergos paused, and then the words came slowly: “And when we leave that room, what do we experience?”

Haplous sat serenely for a moment, his face infused with a warm glow from the afternoon sun. “We must still be careful with the word ‘we,’ but ‘experience’ is exactly the broader word we need. Outside the room, the BAL still experiences whatever content it attends to. What is absent is the looped formatting that characterizes subjective experience.”

Synergos nodded. “Point taken.”

Haplous continued, “But that does not mean the BAL disappears when the room is inactive. The BAL is the whole house, and it can attend to unlooped sensory content outside the room.”

Synergos frowned. “So when people say ‘I,’ they often identify themselves with the activity in the looping room, because that is the part they can recall and report. But in the more inclusive and technically accurate sense, the experiencer is the BAL as a whole?”

“Exactly. You are not merely the room. You are your BAL.”

Synergos leaned forward. “So I am the whole house.”

“That’s it. The room has a special role because it is where content is looped and semantically formatted, but it is only one part of the house.”

“I see,” said Synergos.

The cat rolled onto its feet, stretched each of its forelegs in turn, and wandered through the clover in the direction of the chapel.

“And you know,” Haplous observed, “there is yet another kind of case that brings this division into view within our own species: blindsight. You have heard of that, right?”

“Yes. It is well documented in the neuroscience literature. People may report seeing nothing in part of their visual field, yet still respond in various ways to things presented there, or even use the visual information to guide their movements.”

“There are also related cases involving patients with spatial neglect. In some of them, a person can report an item presented on the affected side when it appears alone, but fails to report it when another item is presented at the same time on the unaffected side.”

“So the competition from the second item prevents the first from entering reportable awareness?”

“That is one way of putting it. But it does not necessarily prevent the BAL from processing the first item in other ways. In one fMRI experiment, a patient was briefly shown a house on the right side while either a neutral face or a face displaying fear appeared on the left. On some trials, the patient reported seeing the house but no face at all. Yet even when the patient did not report seeing the face, a face displaying fear still produced greater activity than a neutral face in several preserved brain regions, including the amygdala.”

Synergos raised his eyebrows. “So the patient did not report seeing the face, but his BAL was nevertheless processing information about its expression.”

“Exactly. The amygdala is involved in processing emotionally significant information, including expressions on other people’s faces. So that difference measured in the amygdala suggests that the face was registered in the patient’s BAL, and its expression was distinguished from a neutral face, even though the face itself was unavailable for report.”

“That is remarkable.”

“And then there is the famous case involving two drawings of houses. One drawing showed an ordinary house, while the left side of the other was on fire. The patient said that the drawings were identical. Yet when she was asked which house she would prefer to live in, she reliably chose the one that was not burning.”

“So again, the visual difference was unavailable for report, but was nevertheless available within the BAL and influenced the patient’s choice.”

“Yes. And these cases work something like a cyclotron in physics. When an atom is broken apart, it reveals evidence of an internal organization that would otherwise be difficult to observe. In these neurological cases, the ordinary coordination of the BAL is disrupted, and the resulting division reveals different kinds of processing that normally operate together.”

“But what exactly do they reveal in relation to the framework?”

“Normally, baseline operation and loop-enhanced operation work closely together over the same sensory situation. Information used by the BAL, when relevant to behavioral choices, is in principle also available for PTD looping, and therefore to recollection and report. Because the two operations ordinarily complement one another so smoothly, we may mistake them for a single operation.”

“But in these cases they come apart.”

“Precisely. Sensory content can remain available to parts of the BAL and can even influence its activity, while being unavailable to the PTD for report. These cases do not by themselves prove the BAL-looping account, but they reveal exactly the kind of functional division the framework proposes.”

“Are there other examples besides blindsight and these cases of spatial neglect?”

“There are various others, yes. Some arise from different pathologies, while others appear in unusual or even everyday circumstances.”

“Such as what?”

“Split-brain conditions, for example. Or those strange occasions when two people seem to discover that they had already been inwardly humming the same tune. Or reports of an entire life passing before someone’s eyes in a moment of extreme duress. Each can serve as a kind of cyclotron case, revealing aspects of ordinary BAL functioning by placing it under unusual conditions.”

“I would certainly like to talk about those. Do you think you will have time tomorrow?”

“I would be glad to. But remember, this morning I told you the natural continuation of our discussions would be dreams. Dreams provide another cyclotron-type case, because they help reveal how short-term recollection works following a period in which there was neither objective nor subjective episodic experience.”

“Oh, I see. So dreams tomorrow. But I do hope we can talk about these other cyclotron cases afterward. Maybe the next day?”

“I would like that.”

From across the field, the bells announcing the five o’clock mass began to toll, as always, fifteen minutes before the hour. Synergos stood up. “I must say, after this conversation, I am not sure whether I feel enlightened or befuddled. I now see that the basic nature of my existence is something I had never really considered before, and I cannot yet say what to conclude from that. But I can see the central point you were making: I had set myself up as the standard, and then made the further mistake of equating my subjective experience with myself, when really subjective experience is only one form of my BAL’s experience – its attendance to looped, formatted content.”

Haplous was grinning as he too stood up. “Being befuddled is often a necessary step toward enlightenment.”

As they began their walk toward the chapel, Synergos looked ahead and saw the cat there along the side wall of the chapel, sniffing among some stalks of grass. “I think I understand, Haplous. I am the house. The room is just where I write the letters.”

Haplous nodded. “And once you know that, the letters become much more interesting.”

— End of Dialog 2.5 —