Traditionally, the question has been, ‘What device could turn 100 billion externally-related neurons into a singular, internally related whole?’ which is to say, a question of accomplishment. And yet, given that discontinuity requires discrimination, and discrimination requires information, the fact that consciousness appears unified, something internally related, immediately speaks to the lack of information. Expressed in these terms, the ‘problem of unity,’ from the accomplishment perspective, is the problem of manufacturing the lack of a certain kind of information.
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But why should a sense of global, internally-related, conscious unity arise out of an inability to self-discriminate? Encapsulation entails sufficiency: the RS accesses comparatively little second-order information pertaining to the information it accesses: as a result, differentiations are ‘skin deep.’ The various modalities are collapsed into what seems to be an internally related whole.
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21 This raises the interesting possibility that the ‘binding problem,’ the question of how the brain coordinates its activities in response to a cohesive world given the variable speeds with which different perceptual information is processed, is altogether separate from the question of the unity of consciousness.
Perhaps our sense of externally-related multiplicities is environmentally derived, a learned and evolved product of our ability to ‘wade into’ the (externally-related) multiplicities that comprise our proximate world. Consider the distal world, the long intellectual labour required to see the stars as externally-related multiplicities. Access invariance, along with apparent relational invariance between stars, convinced a good number of our ancestors that the stars were anything but discrete, disconnected objects hanging in empty space. Much the same could be said of the conscious brain. Restricted to invariant ‘channels,’ unable to wade into and interact with the vast informatic cosmos of the greater brain, it quite simply has no access to the information it needs to discern its myriad discontinuities. External-relations are flattened into internal relations; the boggling modular, let alone neural, multiplicity is blurred into the holistic haze of phenomenal experience, and we are stranded with a profound sense of unity, one that corresponds to nothing more than the contingent integration of information in our conscious brain.
Twirling batons blur into wheels. Numerous shouts melt into singular roars. Or as Bacon writes of ignorance: “all colours will agree in the dark” (1985, p.69). Experience is filled with instances of what might be called ‘default unity,’ events drained of complexity for the simple want of resolution—information. You could say reflecting on consciousness is like watching a nation-spanning mob from high-earth orbit: the simple inability to discriminate leaves us ‘assuming,’ ‘feeling,’ a unitary consciousness we quite literally don’t have.
I appreciate how naive or even preposterous this must sound prima facie. The thing to recall is that we are talking about the way consciousness appears. The question really is quite simple: What information is available to the RS? Information regarding the neural sourcing of available information? Of course not. Information regarding the external-related causal complexities that deliver and process available information? Of course not. Given that the RS is responsible for consciousness, it stands to reason that consciousness will be blind to its neural sourcing and biomechanical complexity. That what it intuits will be a kind of compression heuristic, an informatically parochial and impoverished making due. And this brings us to the tantalizing edge of conscious unity: “There is a great difference between mind and body,” Descartes writes, “in that the body, by its nature, is always divisible and that the mind is entirely indivisible” (1968, p. 164). Is it merely a coincidence that this ‘great difference,’ even as Descartes conceives it, happens to be informatic?
Once again, the real mystery is why the RS should turn the absence of information into the intuition or assumption of ‘default identity.’ It’s important to realize, however, that the only thing new about this particular mystery is the context BBT provides it. Researchers in psychophysics, for instance, presume ‘default identity’ all the time. Consider the way visual, auditory, and tactile processing ‘blurs’ stimuli together when the information presented exceeds certain thresholds. Below certain intervals, what are in fact multiple stimuli are perceived as singular. One might think of this in terms of filters, beginning with our sensory apparatus and ending at the RS, where the capacities of given neural systems ‘compress’ differences into identities and so strip incoming information of ‘functional redundancies,’ which is to say, information not required for effective action.
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Fusion or coincidence thresholds demonstrate the way informatic capacity constraints find phenomenal expression as default identity. Conscious unity, BBT suggests, is simply a global example of this selfsame effect, ‘fusion writ large,’ given the limits on recursive availability confronting the RS. Like the now and personal identity, the misapprehension of unity is simply a structural side-effect of being conscious in the first place.
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What could make the experience of unity come into existence? BBT answers,
nothing. Conscious unity is every bit as illusory as mistaking an incessant flicker for single abiding light.
