Consciousness — the New A3 Model
I recently posted part 4 of my series The Collapse of the First Global Civilization: The A3 Brain, Human Consciousness and the Crisis of Psychology. The entire article was listed as a 46 min read. There are subsections that stand on their own that I’m sure will interest special audiences in a smaller format. Here is one of them.
This post discusses a new theory of brain organization that presents a functional model for consciousness in both animals and humans which is consistent with new discoveries in brain physiology. The consciousness model was developed along with a new 3-brain physiological model that is discussed in another article.
Consciousness is a brain response or “perception” based on transmitted sensory input. While plants also respond to external stimulus, they are not considered “conscious” by definition, because they don’t have a centralized brain system.
A1 Consciousness — Animals
In A3 theory, there are 3 levels of consciousness. These levels are NOT the same divisions as the related 3-brain physiology model described in another article. This can be confusing for a first reading, so I’ve included a table below that you can refer to which shows the relationships graphically.
The column on the left shows the 3-brain physiology model. It uses and renames the 3 brains that Freud suggested: Id, ego and superego; but changes some fundamental assumptions that have been associated with them. This is described in the 3-brain article titled Freud Vindicated!
Let the term “A1” stand for being “aware”. Then:
>> Hulk brain is an A1 brain. All its functions are inherited AND its process knowledge is also “pre-wired”, automatic, and purely reactive. The nerve signals from the senses are sent directly to the Hulk brain. The nerve signals from heart beat, blood gases, blood pressure and many hormone levels are also sent to Hulk. So we can say, Hulk is AWARE of conditions that generate the energy forms it senses. All higher animals have this brain, which is often called the reptile brain. I say this brain is “reactive” meaning it lives in the moment. If things are normal, it maintains whatever state it is in. If something varies from “normal”, Hulk takes action to get back to normal.
>> Middle brain is also A1. Its functional “wiring” is also inherited. BUT, all its perceptual “knowledge” has to be learned. All higher animals also have a Middle brain. This brain is physiologically distinct from Hulk. Middle brain gets its information from Hulk. But here is where the big difference starts. Middle brain memorizes streaming patterns of the sensory input that Hulk passes to it. Streaming means continuous recording over time. But these are super recordings. Not only does Middle brain record video, but it also records streams of audio and every other sensation of the body, all synchronized. That includes smells, taste, touch and physical pain, heat, vertigo and motion, digestive upsets, sleep deprivation etc.
Middle brain is especially focused on storing patterns that precede traumas and follow traumas. It does this to conduct 3 additional processing steps:
a. it continually matches and evaluates newly arriving patterns against stored patterns and “rates” how well they compare. We experience these “ratings” as “emotions”.
b. it can trigger the playback of stored patterns that the animal previously experienced. For emotions like “fear”, it can use those emotions to trigger other stored patterns of physical response. This could include things like fighting, or fleeing for example. For weaker threats, it can trigger playback in new combinations and let them run just to analyze a situation.
c. it is recursive of its own processes. That is, it can self-trigger playback and pattern matching, just for the fun of it, or more importantly, to replay, over and over, traumatic patterns from the past to draw the greatest number of connections between memories to best deal with related issues in the future.
I’m sure you can see where this is leading. In the graphic above, under “Middle brain”, is a list of “aliases”: Conscience, Mr. Grimm, Guardian angel, and Temptation. The constant chatter of pattern matching “ratings”, i.e. “emotions”, along with snippets of memories, are what we interpret as the “little voices” in our heads telling us the right and wrong things we need to do. And because these are “streaming” processes, we, and all animals, sense them as “awareness”.
The combination of Hulk and Middle brain still operates functionally as an A1 (aware) brain. The combination just has a greatly advanced decision making ability about events, over Hulk alone, because it can match sensory input with stored memories.
Middle brain is also divided into two functional sub parts: one is always awake; the other can turn on and off to produce different levels of awareness (being awake or asleep). The retriggering of memories during sleep, of course, is the cause of dreams.
A2 Consciousness — Human SELF-AWARENESS
Notice, Hulk and Middle brain, even together, do not yet produce the ability humans have that we call “self awareness”. Now let’s bring in the function of Thinker brain (A2). I believe a relatively simple mutation occurred in human brains about 40,000 years ago which caused A2 consciousness. The physiological structure of Thinker is just a simple repeat of Middle brain. But it is a second physical brain on top of Middle brain.
It is also a completely learning brain. It stores input streaming patterns. It matches and evaluates streaming input patterns and rates them for comparison. It can trigger playback of internal memories. It is recursive of its own processes.
What makes Thinker different from Middle brain and gains it an A2 consciousness rating is its input and output connections. Thinker gets some input perceptions from Hulk; but it gets most of its inputs from Middle brain. It sends its output decisions to both Hulk and Middle brain, but also to itself again.
What makes Thinker “self aware” (A2) is the simple connection it has to the output of Middle brain.
If we call Middle brain’s process of streaming sensory patterns, being “aware” (A1), then Thinker, by watching Middle brain, has become “AWARE (A1) of being AWARE (A1)”. This is, in mathematical terms, A1 times (or acting on) A1, or A-squared! (A2) THIS IS WHAT CREATES HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS!
Remember, this “advanced” capability is what Freud called the “ego”, not the super-ego. Thinker (A2) is only found in humans. All its knowledge is learned. It can remember some sensory patterns, but mostly it doesn’t. When it needs to remember such a pattern, it just queues Middle brain to find it and provide it. What Thinker is storing as patterns is large groups of abbreviated versions of the sensory patterns Middle brain is processing along with the evaluation emotions that Middle brain is creating.
When Thinker is awake, it is dominant over Middle brain’s on/off part and keeps it awake as long as Hulk does not get sleep deprived. When Thinker goes to sleep, if Middle brain’s on/off part is running, it can produces dreams.
I think you’d be curious about the process that led me to this discovery. Many books have discussed “awareness” and “perception”. But one book I read a very long time ago, used the term “awareness” in place of “perception” in a context I didn’t expect. The author, for example, called vision the “awareness” of external light images, rather than the “perception” of light images. BUT, he also called the brain’s ability to “perceive” the messages of pain and emotion “awareness”. He phrased this as being “aware of being aware”. My math background immediately tagged this A2 (awareness squared). Immediately after I thought of A2, another very simple, but very lucky puzzle piece fell into place. To me, the obvious extension was to ask, was there such a thing as A3? I.e., a brain that was “aware of being aware of being aware”? I wrote it down in my notebook and then completely forgot about it for 20 years. When the new 3-brain model occurred to me, the A3 consciousness concept also came into my head.
A3 Consciousness — Intuitive System Visualizers
What distinguishes our Thinker brain’s A2’s consciousness is that its “awareness” is observing streaming resolved patterns stored in our subconscious Middle brain. Thinker’s awareness is not primary sensory perceptions. But another key is that the resolved patterns in Middle brain are high level streaming descriptions, not only of events, but broad “retrospectives” of our entire experience “history” and their related emotional evaluations. These two elements of Thinker’s process, along with its physiological position of monitoring Middle brain’s output, produce a functional description for human “self awareness”. The A1 ability to re-trigger streams of prior memories is what allows humans to understand instructions and follow complex orders. It was A2 that gave humans the ability to “cooperate” and “build” a civilization. (Ironically, it also significantly explains many mental illnesses. More on that in later posts.)
But, as I studied what an A2 brain could actually do, cooperation and building cities etc., it became clear to me that an A2 brain would NOT be sufficient for humans to “envision” and “create” the technical marvels that exploded over just a few thousand years in ancient societies. That’s when I realized, if, right around the time that the A2 mutation occurred, a very similar duplicate mutation occurred, it could have created humans with a second Thinker-2 on top of the first Thinker-1, just as Thinker-1 appeared on top of Middle brain. That would be equivalent to what I call A3. This new brain addition is what Dr. Tyrrell in Ireland called the “brain’s BIG BANG!”
These A3 humans were the philosophers and architects of the ancient world. They were the ones who designed the cities, irrigation, armies, navies, governments etc. A3 physiological structure is just another repeat of the Middle brain mutation but with different input and output connections. The A3 brain gets highly structured inputs mostly from Thinker brain’s A2 output. It also gets some inputs directly from Hulk and Middle brain, and can be recursive of its own output. It sends output to Thinker 1, Middle brain and Hulk brain’s inputs and recursively back to itself.
The value of this A3 brain structure is that it allows those who have it to intuitively visualize complex systems. This is actually captured well by the old admonitions, “he can’t see the forest for the trees”, and “he’s got his head in the weeds.” An electrician is good at the intricacies of plug types, wire sizes, metals and insulation, circuit breakers, voltages, currents etc. But they can’t typically visualize how all of these functions working together in hundreds of variations, can be optimized for the energy efficiency of a city or coordinated automation. A civilization “architect” works at a level above wires. Her “components” are houses, factories, administrative buildings, power grids, road systems etc. Most people can envision all of these items. What would identify a person as A3 is their ability to “see” all of these things working together simultaneously in their mind. To be an A3, it is NOT sufficient to visualize them one at a time.
Distinguishing A3 in Modern Society
There are some important differences that distinguish between A2s and A3s. Both the A2 and A3 mutations were rare events when they occurred. The A2 mutation gave homo sapiens great survival advantages over their A1 Neanderthal competitors. By the time the A3 mutation occurred, most humans were probably already A2s. But the A3 mutation did not create the same dominance relationship with A2s, as A2 did over A1s. It only takes the creativity of one A3 architect to visualize a pyramid, or a city. It then takes the cooperation and instruction following skills of thousands of A2 workers to build the pyramid and city.
In an evolutionary sense, A3 skills do not gain a reproductive or survival advantage over A2 skills. So, while there are undoubtedly A3’s still among us now, I believe there aren’t very many. My current best guess, and it is only a guess based on personal experience, is less than 2% of the world population has an A3 brain. But even then, these 2% are hard to spot. They don’t stand out in society. If we try to identify them in standardized testing, they don’t stand out because the tests aren’t selective enough. Also, A3 skill abilities probably vary widely with an IQ like distribution. Some have very broad memories, while others can’t remember as much but are stronger in logical reasoning. On top of that, while A2 thinking produces strong cooperative drives along with strong aggressive drives, it appears that A3 thinking does not include the aggression. So A3s are typically less assertive, keeping them out of the limelight despite their creative abilities. And, of the A3s that are alive, many of them may be truly reclusive.
Do I think that I’m an A3? Yes. But I’ll be the first to admit, this is such a new idea that it will take the work of a lot of scientists to refine what the A3 brain actually does. A3 traits, like creativity, can easily be mimicked by smart A2s and imitatedi broadly through learned behaviors. Once an A3 gets an idea like the wheel, A2s can create wheels with a huge variety of variations. So, it could be hard to tell a high functioning A2, with strong memory skills, from an A3 doing most normal tasks. And when social and technical breakthroughs are examined, there are many situations where the “creative leap” is totally luck, and not true creativity. I think Google, Facebook, Microsoft and all the Apple upgrades fit this luck model. By way of contrast, the MAC graphic interface and the iPod were true genius (Even though we know the MAC graphic interface wasn’t the technical genius of Steve Jobs, but rather the engineers at Xerox. The product genius was clearly Steve’s doing.)
A3 is also not going to show up in IQ tests. Those tests are for memory. A3 will not correlate well with college degrees, either BS or PhD level, because those credentials are too strongly based on conformance with existing academic ideas. I’m also sure that A3 brains and skills will be negatively correlated with many highly regarded professions like doctors, lawyers and accountants. Each of these reward conformance to protocol, which is not a motivator for A3 thinking. We also have to be alert that the abundance of A3 creativity we observed in earlier society ( Archimedes, Aristotle, Plato, Da Vinci, Mozart, Edison) was very dependent on social structure. There are undoubtedly more A3s alive today than in the past. But modern information noise and suppression of innovation by governments and large corporations, stifles most A3s alive today. Unfortunately, A3s will very rarely be found in politics, a role in which their type of thinking is sorely needed.
So society’s prior ability to benefit from A3 skills during the dawn of civilization may be completely blocked during the unfolding collapse. This is, of course, a big tragedy because there is one area that A3s are very good at: understanding complexity. As I stated in discovery 4. HUMAN BRAINS, (A2s) have not evolved much since the Stone Age, and are NOT CAPABLE of understanding high complexity well enough to keep it from harming them.
Other short excerpts from article 4 related to psychology are:
Sigmund Freud Vindicated ! — a New 3 Brain Model
Consciousness linked to Maslow’s Hierarchy
The Seven Deadly Sins
Why modern psychotherapy doesn’t work — Truth, Values and Freedom
Additional discussions of this issue can be found on the A3 Society web page under the following tabs: Brain Theory ; Human Species ; Psychology
Images courtesy of flickr — ascriptions with photos
