Group-theoretic structure in the sequential flow of sensory experiences

Abstract

The hypothesis presented here is that in a given person, the overall configuration of sensory variables at any given moment, i.e. everything that the person is seeing, hearing, etc., can be treated as belonging to an infinite sequence of such momentary configurations, with the sequence being generated by a particular mathematical group. The ideas behind this are as follows. If a person's various moment-to-moment sensory experiences can all be described within the same coordinate system, then they can be treated as objects that sequentially transform into one another. If they are also encoded by brain events, then the person's own encounters with this encoding, e.g. when participating in brain-stimulation experiments, amount to instances where a given sensory experience inevitably follows other sensory experiences occurring in a specific sequence. For example, a person's visual encounters with certain equipment-settings might always be followed by a particular visual hallucination. If there exist sequences like this for any given momentary sensory experience, then these collectively form the person's sensory code, as it would be encountered from the person's own perspective. The person's ongoing flow of sensory experiences may then be treated as part of the infinite sequence implied by the various code-conserving ways in which sensory experiences can flow from one to the next. If this sequence can be generated by a finite number of code-conserving segments that transform into each other and link together end to end, then a person's full range of sensory experiences can be defined in group-theoretic terms.