Human Conscious Experience is Four-Dimensional and has a Neural Correlate Modeled by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity

Space-time intervals are the fundamental components of conscious experience, gravity, and a Theory of Everything. Space-time intervals are relationships that arise naturally between events. They have a general covariance (independence of coordinate systems, scale invariance), a physical constancy, that encompasses all frames of reference. There are three basic types of space-time intervals (light-like, time-like, space-like) which interact to create space-time and its properties. Human conscious experience is a four-dimensional space-time continuum created through the processing of space-time intervals by the brain; space-time intervals are the source of conscious experience (observed physical reality). Human conscious experience is modeled by Einstein’s special theory of relativity, a theory designed specifically from the general covariance of space-time intervals (for inertial frames of reference). General relativity is our most accurate description of gravity. In general relativity, the general covariance of space-time intervals is extended to all frames of reference (inertial and non-inertial), including gravitational reference frames; space-time intervals are the source of gravity in general relativity. The general covariance of space-time intervals is further extended to quantum mechanics; space-time intervals are the source of quantum gravity. The general covariance of space-time intervals seamlessly merges general relativity with quantum field theory (the two grand theories of the universe). Space-time intervals consequently are the basis of a Theory of Everything (a single all-encompassing coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe). This theoretical framework encompasses our observed physical reality (conscious experience) as well; space-time intervals link observed physical reality to actual physical reality. This provides an accurate and reliable match between observed physical reality and the physical universe by which we can carry on our activity. The Minkowski metric, which defines generally covariant space-time intervals, may be considered an axiom (premise, postulate) for the Theory of Everything.

Conscious experience is the direct observation of conscious events. In the brain, it is structured as four-dimensional and these conscious events are linked (associated) by spacetime intervals. This may explain why conscious experience appears to us the way it does. Conscious experience is an orientation in space and time, an understanding of the position of the observer in space and time. Causality, past-future relations, learning, memory, cognitive processing, and goal-directed actions all evolve from four-dimensional conscious experience. A neural correlate of four-dimensional conscious experience is found in the human brain and modeled by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The relativistic concept of spacetime interval might be central for understanding conscious experience and cognition.

Ethics originate from conscious experience. All categories of ethics (meta-ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, descriptive ethics) are knowable only through conscious experience. Hence, conscious experience might be considered a meta-ethic (the origin and basis of all ethics). Conscious experience appears to us as a unified four-dimensional space-time continuum or field. A neural correlate for conscious experience modeled by Einstein's special theory of relativity has been found in the human brain. Conscious experience can be described and understood using relativistic physics. The principles of relativistic physics therefore influence ethics. Three universals emerge from relativity which mediate conscious experience and ethics: the laws of physics, the speed of light, and space-time intervals. The presence of these universals suggests that conscious experience (observed physical reality) is determinate (predictable). We do, however, have free will (choice), and this free will appears to be governed by ethics.

Siva’s theories explained the necessity of new theory for description of the Universe, space ,time ,space-time and matter. It explained the formation of ‘space time continuum’ in terms of ‘Films of the universe’ and an effect of consciousness associated to living things. Thus it is required to bring consciousness in to physical laws and transformations. The relation between physical world and consciousness has been analyzed clearly and explained that consciousness, if we interpret in physics, must be an inertial frame of reference which can be transformed in to inertial frames defined by ‘Special Theory of Relativity’. It is possible only by changing the signal velocity from ‘c’ to ‘c√2’ . Thus the ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ has been modified and named as ‘Super theory of Relativity’. The relativistic factor for it is also calculated as [1+(v2/c2)]1/2 where v = vo [{1- (vo2/c2)}]-1/2 here vo is its absolute velocity .The necessity to adopt a new signal velocity which is greater than that of light has been discussed and the ‘Principle of Relativity’ and ‘Principle of simultaneity’ which are basics for transformation has been applied to interpret it in terms of relativity. It has been concluded that velocity of light is a part of signal velocity and photon will have rest mass. It says that the observable velocity is a result of absolute velocity multiplied by relativistic factor for ‘Super Theory of Relativity’. Thus infinite signal transformation is introduced for transformation between Inertial frames of reference. Infinite signal velocity will explain the ‘Quantum entanglement’ in terms of transformation of physical laws from one frame to another as explained in ‘Special & General Theories of Relativity’.

OPINION article Front. Hum. Neurosci., 19 July 2013Sec. Cognitive Neuroscience Volume 7 - 2013 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00387

Despite a growing understanding of human brain function, it is still unclear how conscious experience emerges from neural activity. A much-debated question in the search for the neural underpinnings of consciousness is whether prefrontal cortex actively shapes conscious experience or, alternatively, serves only complementary cognitive functions such as evaluating and acting on the contents of consciousness. Here, we studied the neural mechanisms of bistable perception to elucidate the role of prefrontal cortex in consciousness. Human participants reported periodic changes in conscious experience that were induced by conflicting sensory information. Two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments showed that prefrontal brain activity in inferior frontal cortex signals the conflict between conscious experience and available sensory information. In a third experiment, inhibitory transcranial magnetic stimulation revealed that a disruption of neural activity in inferior frontal cortex leads to a decrease of conflict-driven changes in conscious experience. Our results indicate that, by engaging in iterative and reciprocal interactions with sensory brain regions, inferior frontal cortex plays a critical role in both the detection and the resolution of perceptual conflicts. This points to a causal influence of prefrontal brain activity on the dynamic unfolding of conscious experience.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of neuroscientific theories of consciousness. These include theories which explicitly point to EM fields, notably Operational Architectonics and, more recently, the General Resonance Theory. In phenomenological terms, human consciousness is a unified composition of contents. These contents are specific and meaningful, and they exist from a subjective point of view. Human conscious experience is temporally continuous, limited in content, and coherent. Based upon those phenomenal observations, pre-existing theories of consciousness, and a large body of experimental evidence, I derived the Temporally-Integrated Causality Landscape (TICL). In brief, the TICL proposes that the neural correlate of consciousness is a structure of temporally integrated causality occurring over a large portion of the thalamocortical system. This structure is composed of a large, integrated set of neuronal elements (the System), which contains some subsystems, defined as having a higher level of temporally-integrated causality than the System as a whole. Each Subsystem exists from the point of view of the System, in the form of meaningful content. In this article, I review the TICL and consider the importance of EM forces as a mechanism of neural causality. I compare the fundamentals of TICL to those of several other neuroscientific theories. Using five major characteristics of phenomenal consciousness as a standard, I compare the basic tenets of Integrated Information Theory, Global Neuronal Workspace, General Resonance Theory, Operational Architectonics, and the Temporo-spatial Theory of Consciousness with the framework of the TICL. While the literature concerned with these theories tends to focus on different lines of evidence, there are fundamental areas of agreement. This means that, in time, it may be possible for many of them to converge upon the truth. In this analysis, I conclude that a primary distinction which divides these theories is the feature of spatial and temporal nesting. Interestingly, this distinction does not separate along the fault line between theories explicitly concerned with EM fields and those which are not. I believe that reconciliation is possible, at least in principle, among those theories that recognize the following: just as the contents of consciousness are distinctions within consciousness, the neural correlates of conscious content should be distinguishable from but fall within the spatial and temporal boundaries of the full neural correlates of consciousness.

This short commentary discusses the importance of space-time intervals in scientific study. Space-time intervals underlie special relativity, general relativity, and quantum field theory. In doing so, space-time intervals underlie human conscious experience, gravity, and a theory of everything. Space-time intervals also explain many of the puzzling scientific phenomena: quantum phenomena, dark matter, dark energy, the origin and evolution of the universe, and the life force. The importance of space-time intervals cannot be overestimated. Two articles published in Neuroquantology explain how all this was established from empirical evidence and theory.

<i>Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest</i>

The Equations for Consciousness: A Reply to “Tracking the Travels,” a Review of <i>Journey of the Mind</i>

Despite the compelling subjective experience of executive self-control, we argue that “consciousness” contains no top-down control processes and that “consciousness” involves no executive, causal, or controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it. In our view, psychological processing and psychological products are not under the control of consciousness. In particular, we argue that all “contents of consciousness” are generated by and within non-conscious brain systems in the form of a continuous self-referential personal narrative that is not directed or influenced in any way by the “experience of consciousness.” This continuously updated personal narrative arises from selective “internal broadcasting” of outputs from non-conscious executive systems that have access to all forms of cognitive processing, sensory information, and motor control. The personal narrative provides information for storage in autobiographical memory and is underpinned by constructs of self and agency, also created in non-conscious systems. The experience of consciousness is a passive accompaniment to the non-conscious processes of internal broadcasting and the creation of the personal narrative. In this sense, personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them. Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.

The reinforcement sensitivity theory lacks basic sources of any human experience :time, place, and learning contexts that have shaped the reinforcement; therefore I have assumed a missing link in Gray's framework based on special relativity relying on the «what, where, and when of happenning»? as major resources of human conscious experience, which under punishment or reward exceed the sensitivity to pleasant or unpleasant stimuli transcending therefore the Weber law, that's why I called it: Psychological Space-Time Reinforcement Sensitivity “PSTRS” axis. The lasts explains BAS and BIS systems sensitivity to reinforcement across the cognitive space-time continuum of episodic memory, and not only across the two great dimensions of fear/anxiety and defensive distance of the McNaughton &amp; Corr model of 2004. So, based on the disruption of the high-sensitivity information processing system in the brain, the four-dimensional conscious experience is distorted by its underlying sources and context. Thus, one of the timedominating records prevents the individual from overcoming the present., such in depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (psychological sensitivity to the past). These temporal records clearly lose their sequence and associative nature in dissociative symptoms due to the disruption of the most important milestone on which Einstein's physics was based. Consequently, psychological space-time reinforcement sensitivity supposes that psychological disorders can be interpreted according to the laws of special relativity (acceleration / deceleration), but this seems more complicated when it comes to mental disorders where the self is disturbed on its spatio-temporal axis as observed in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia looks like a three-componements disorder characterized by a disruption of the experience of time, place and self, which could be asummed up as a “self space-time disturbance". Notably schizophrenic patients appear losing the ability to gather in a dynamic way these componements, as if the world seemed missig the gestalt characteristic or fragmented. The past felt like an inevitable destiny inhibits the direction towards the future; sometimes disorient the self to the point of feeling lost, as if the psychological time slows down to the point of feeling separated from the « now » the physical time. So are we dealing with an Euclidian space? The article attempts to provide a non-traditional interpretation of mental disorders by including general relativity in psychological studies, based on the neurobiological bases involved in the spatio-temporal processing of the conscious experience in the quantum brain.

The relation between three aspects of memory—behaviour, knowledge, and conscious experience—is discussed. Memory research of the past has tended to concentrate on memory performance, and to neglect memory as conscious experience. This neglect may reflect the acceptance of a tacit assumption that behaviour, knowledge, and experience are closely correlated, an assumption designated here as the doctrine of concordance. Some recent research, explicitly concerned with conscious experience in remembering, has thrown doubt on concordance as a general rule. Four examples of this research are briefly reviewed: repetition priming, source amnesia, remembering vs knowing, and neural correlates of episodic and semantic memory as revealed by regional cerebral blood flow. This research suggests that there is no general correlation between memory performance, retrieved knowledge, and conscious recollective experience, and that these relations in different situations must be discovered rather than just postulated under the aegis of some tacitly accepted doctrine.

For many years, since Baars (1988) explicitly formulated it, contrastive analysis has been the key methodological approach in experimental studies of consciousness. When certain properly chosen psychological experimental setups (allowing an invariant target stimulus either to be consciusly experienced or not) were combined with brain-imaging methods, contrastive analysis became a quite powerful tool of research (Crick, 1994; Koch, 2004). By subtracting markers of brain processes recorded in the conditions without conscious experience of the target from the markers recorded in the conditions where the same target is consciously experienced it was believed that the markers of neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) can be obtained. However, as it turned out in the subsequent theoretical and experimental analysis, the picture is not so clear and simple (Bachmann, 2000, 2009; Miller, 2007; Aru et al., 2012; de Graaf et al., 2012). For example, when in the invariant conditions of independent variables a masked visual stimulus was consciously perceived or not (consciousness of the target standed as a dependent variable), NCC which were measured as a spectral perturbation of EEG was present already before stimulus presentation (Aru and Bachmann, 2009). Thus, the neural correlate of consciousness of a stimulus was present earlier than the stimulus itself was presented. Now, a reader must not get excited here because instead of some paranormal explanations brain-science based explanations can be comfortably used. In order to overcome the conceptual crisis hitting the traditional contrastive analysis based NCC research it was suggested that unconscious prerequisite processes (NCCpr) emerging as a result of contrastive analysis of brain-process markers of consciousness and similarly unconscious consequent processes (NCCco) must be differentiated from the constitutive processes directly associated with conscious experience (Aru et al., 2012; de Graaf et al., 2012). Thus, new experimental approaches were in need to avoid the trap of distilling prerequisite, direct, and consequent processes as mutually confounded and empirically inseparable. Despite some first attempts in this direction (Aru and Bachmann, 2015), the specialist landscape in this domain has remained obscure and no breakthrough solutions have been in sight. Moreover, there seems to be a number of additional uncertainties when we try to disentangle the various sub-types of NCC. Even NCCpr and NCCco are not unitary in terms of their theoretical meaning and associated neural processes. First, as the contents on which the perceptual report is founded can be selective, the markers of unused conscious contents may be erroneously neglected as markers of unconscious processes. They actually belong to consciousness level processes, but related to contents of consciousness qualitatively different from the ones specified by NCC. Second, in measuring NCC we must be able to disentangle contributions of the general consciousness enabling mechanisms and the selective contents representing mechanisms because their markers can be different and thus confused. In what follows I will substantiate these two issues.

Theory of everything must include consciousness. In this Part I of the series of three articles, we introduce the subjective experience (SE) and/or proto‐experience (PE) aspect of consciousness in classical physics, where PEs are precursors of SEs. In our dual‐ aspect‐dual‐mode PE‐SE framework, it was hypothesized that fundamental entities (strings or elementary particles: fermions and bosons) have two aspects: (i) material aspect such as mass, charge, spin, and space‐time, and (ii) mental aspect, such as experiences. There are three competing hypotheses: (1) superposition based H1 (SEs/PEs are superposed in the mental aspect of entities; when a specific stimulus is presented to the neural‐network, the associated specific SE is selected by the matching and selection process and experienced by this network), (2) superposition‐then‐integration based H2 (only PEs are superposed, which are integrated by neural‐Darwinism leading to specific SEs) and (3) integration based H3 (each entity has its own PE, which keeps on transforming appropriately as matter evolves from elementary particles to neural‐ networks; it is a dual‐aspect panpsychism). We found that the followings, in classical physics, are invariant under the PE‐SE transformation: electromagnetic strength tensor, electromagnetic stress‐energy tensor, the electromagnetic theory (Maxwell's equations), Newtonian gravitational field, the entropic force, Special and General Theory of Relativity. Our analysis suggests that (i) SEs are embedded in space‐time geometry for the structure of space‐time (empty space or the vacuum without matter). (ii) For matter field, SEs can move with spatiotemporal coordinates of matter because it is in the mental aspect of matter as both mental and material aspects are always together in the dual‐aspect‐dual‐mode optimal PE‐SE framework. (iii) Our specific SE is the result of matching and selection processes and can change with space and time. For example, the experience redness has V4/V8/VO‐red‐green neural‐network with redness‐ state as neural correlates. When a subject moves, the specific SE redness also moves with the subject’s correlated neural‐network. In addition, SEs can change with time as stimuli change. In other words, SEs in a subject change with space‐time. We conclude that it is possible to introduce the SE/PE aspect of consciousness in classical physics. In Parts II and III, the SE aspect of consciousness will be introduced in orthodox quantum physics and modern quantum physics (such as loop quantum gravity and string theory), respectively. Thus, the introduction of the SE aspect of consciousness in physics leads us to unify consciousness with known four fundamental forces, which entails towards a theory of everything.