CONSCIOUSNESS

2. Neuroscience 111
synchrony hypothesis (Peter Milner 1974; Crick & Koch 1990). For example, Wolf Singer
(1996, 2007) contends that binding the distributed representations of an object’s properties is
achieved by “the synchronization of neuronal responses with high temporal precision” (2007,
p. 608). Singer also alleges that conscious experience depends upon the binding activities that
underlie the formation of a unified meta-representation: “If conscious experience depends on
the ability to dynamically bind the results of subsystem computations into a unified metarepresentation,
conditions required for the formation of meta-representations ought to be the
same as those required for awareness to occur” (Singer, 2007, p. 607). A philosophical upshot
is that binding is necessary for conscious experience, since without binding there could be no
unified meta-representation. Luck and Beach argue in favor of a neural suppression account
of binding: binding is “achieved by simply suppressing information arising from unattended
locations”, thereby allowing the neurons that remain active to “reflect features of a single
object” (1998, p. 461). Neural suppression operates to filter out unattended information so
that the neurons which remain active can render explicit the representational properties of an
object. I elaborate and provide a critique of Singer’s view, and then examine Luck and Beach’s
neural suppression account. I argue (1) that neuronal synchrony is not sufficient for binding
the distributed representations of an object’s properties into a unified object of consciousness;
(2) that binding is not necessary for conscious experience; and (3) that although synchrony
and suppression might play the role of tagging the distributed representations of an object’s
properties when competition arises within the cortical neural network, this does not explain
the more difficult question about the unity of consciousness. C17
140 No Syncrony Below N+1: The Sum of the (Parent and Daughter Particles
As) Members of a Self-Inclusive Set Francis Schwanauer
(Philosophy, University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME)
Aristotle’s predicate logic, which classified any ‘1’ substance with its simultaneous ‘n’
characteristics an early symbolic version of our practical present day accelerators or atom
smashers of ‘1’ parent particle into its ‘n’ synchronous daughter particles – was eventually
elaborated upon by set theory, which allowed for a fitting inclusion of the ‘1’ among the ‘n’,
for the ‘n+1’ members of a self-inclusive set, by such as Russell. This self-inclusion by way
of ‘n+1’ was paralleled in physics by subsuming the synchronously moving ‘n’, such as the
two ends of the lever (cp. Archimedes), or ‘action and reaction’ (cp. Newton), under the ‘1’
transformation and/or chain reaction a la E=mc2 (cp. Einstein). With the given synchrony of
the ‘n+1’ as a spatial relation still short of its plausibility as a temporal relation, however, science
was forced into a non-linear dynamical face-lift of our linear dynamical image of causality
by means of a selective representational apparatus (RA), to cope with the more complex
transformational wake of ‘n+1’. This historical, useful, and apparently harmless improvement
on the merely ‘mechanical’ and no longer adequate classical approach with a ‘conscious and
decisive’, RA, as culminating in the postulate of some ‘free’ agent in super-positional charge
of natura naturans, however, not only smacked of a metaphysical admixture to research and
methodology, but also split the world of serious science into two opposing camps at a ratio of
roughly 88/12 between proponents of upward and downward causation, respectively. Nevertheless,
this split among otherwise likeminded colleagues is fortunately premature and largely
unwarranted, since neither of the opposing camps has as yet demonstrated to the other, how
one and the same RA can or cannot be two such absolutely divergent items as 1: ‘a symbol’
of a myriad of representational possibilities to choose from, and also 2: a ‘concisely comparing
or even whimsically preferring judge’ deliberately choosing among them. Yet a more
intensive study of synchrony in self-organization - such as the human body - shows that the
RA cannot be both a representational possibility and its comparing judge at one and the same
time, since (demonstrable) synchrony as confined to such as attraction and repulsion, action
and reaction, the two ends of the lever, etc., is not an internal or local property but an external
non-local condition of any ‘n’, and thus is not deducible from the synchronously moving ‘n’,
but their simultaneously transforming ‘1’ in ‘n+1’ as a self-inclusive set. As I try to show in
my paper, synchrony among the local emanates from the non-local, as is evidenced by its local
tracks in any RA and the observation of the shadows of the Higgs boson in Cern. P8