consciousness – consciousnessandstuff

Consciousness and stuff

Consciousnessandstuff – ideas about mind and matter

In a previous life I was an academic physiological psychologist (I completed a PhD on the Frontal Eyefields, for my sins!) and I’ve always been fascinated by what has come to be known as the “hard problem of consciousness”. How do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience? What is the relation between the subjective, highly personal, internal world of the mind and the objective, physical, external universe? Are they composed of the same “stuff” and what is its nature? Will machines ever be able to think or be conscious in some way?

I started this blog in about 2010 as a place to record my occasional musings on the subject and over the years I’ve developed what I refer to in shorthand as “the Model Theory of Consciousness”. This is an unsatisfactory label, not least because it begs the question how do we define “consciousness” not to mention “theory” or indeed “model”, but I’m stuck with it for now!

The main part of this blog is about the Model Theory which I would summarise, again somewhat clumsily for the time being, as:

A theory of mind and consciousness as a massively complex information processing model of reality which includes a model of itself.

The theory features a number of core ideas of which the most important are probably:

Model within a model: There is a gradual realisation within neuroscience that we, and indeed all forms of life with a brain, interact with our environments primarily via models encoded within neural networks. The old stimulus-response interpretations of perception and behaviour are largely defunct. It is much more helpful to recognise that we interact with reality via a gigantic model, rather like a simulation in a computer, which via huge memory resources and attentional mechanisms, reconstructs the outside world and tests its reconstruction by sampling a tiny fraction of the stream of information entering our eyes and other sense organs. By the same token, we are able to simulate possible future actions and replay past experiences “offline” using the same model, an important part of language and thought (and dreaming). A crucial insight of this blog is that this model includes a model of the self, which interacts with a model of the outside world and with models of other people, objects, concepts and symbols. The running of this self-model is expressed as subjective experience and consciousness. We may even postulate that this conscious process operates primarily within a short-term memory or workspace controlled by the hippocampus (analogous to RAM in a computer) and interacting with longer-term memory distributed primarily within the cerebral cortex (analogous to secondary storage in a computer such as disc space or tapes) and controlled by an attentional mechanism located mainly in the frontal lobes (loosely analogous to an Operating System in a computer). Models are now a key part of current AI theory, as I understand it (my understanding is strictly limited!) but in conjunction with algorithmic or RL (“Reinforcement Learning”) mechanisms. To summarise, Model Theory envisages a “whole universe” mind-model “running” in our brain and featuring a recursive relationship with a sub-model of the self which itself interacts with other sub-models, expressed as a self-aware subjective narrative about the internal and external world.
Complexity and emergent evolution: This is the important idea, which originated with Cybernetics or Complexity Theory, that if a system is sufficiently large and sufficiently complex then it becomes self-organising so that new and surprising properties and behaviours emerge, usually beneficial for the system as a whole, which are difficult to predict from the information exchanges of the lowest level system elements (neurones in the case of a brain; chips in the case of computers). The best example of this is Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, arguably one of the most underrated achievements of the early Enlightenment, even though exactly how it works has never been explained in detail. In the same way we can envisage how neurones might interact within the brain resulting in higher level functions such as thought, intelligence and consciousness, without needing to understand exactly how this works. In fact, it may be that the human brain (86 billion neurons and roughly 100 trillion compared with 1 quadrillion synapses – compared with 200 billion transistors in the most powerful chip) is simply too complex to be able to understand itself in detail (it may require an AI system in the future), though this shouldn’t stop us from having a good idea of how it does what it does. Similarly, the ideas in this blog can be extended to other highly complex human systems such as economies or societies.
Information as a fundamental building block: Information, or perhaps more properly information processing, is regarded as the fundamental “stuff” of which mind is composed, analogous to the software and data in a giant computer simulation. The models in one case are running on a network of neurons and in the other on computer hardware. This idea is extended through the “its from bits” formulation (originated by Wheeler and backed up, I think (!) by Quantum Mechanics) which postulates that all matter is, at a deep level, “just” information. This can then be extended further into the idea of the evolution of the universe since the big bang, starting with “0=1-1” – the idea that out of nothing a “something” and an “anti-something” emerges, then, progressively, mathematics, elementary particles, the physical universe, biological life (most crucially), then consciousness and ultimately what might be conceived, metaphorically, as the “Mind of God”!

Subsequent posts in this section of the blog are arranged in an oldest-first order and feature many other ideas or strands of thought derived from many different sources and disciplines such as philosophy (particularly phenomenology), computer science, neuroscience, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, ontology and many more. To read about these ideas you’ll just have to plough through the rest of the blog starting with the very first post immediately below, where long ago I set out broad objectives and beliefs for the blog. You may also be interested in the About section, which as well as setting out my approach to the blog (About the Blog) also charts my chequered career (About Me) and how that exposed me to many of these influences. Few of these ideas are my own but hopefully I’ve combined them in a novel way to address the particular conundrum of consciousness and in the process developed an interesting new perspective on many other complex human issues in what I’ve come to regard as a paradigm shift exemplified by the current intense interest in recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Finally, the Other Stuff section of the blog is a sort of online scrapbook where I document other ideas, observations and random thoughts, many of which have turned out to be applicable to Model Theory and have found their way into the main blog.

Enjoy! 😊

The Model Theory of Consciousness

OK, let’s jump straight in.

Inside each person’s head is a model of everything outside. This model of the universe “runs” in the physical brain, in the same way that a software program runs on a computer’s hardware. Now here’s the crucial bit: obviously, the model contains within itself a model of the person to whom the brain belongs – the self. The running of this model within a model is what we experience as consciousness.

That’s it really. In subsequent posts I hope to show how this simple theory fits nicely with most of the things we know about consciousness and the human condition. Note, for the time being, some key features of the theory:

There is no distinction between mind and matter*. In philosophical terms, this is a monist as opposed to a dualist theory. Thinking and consciousness are regarded simply as emergent properties of a highly evolved biological system.
Similarly, we do not need recourse to unlikely concepts such as God, the soul, or other forms of mysticism.
In principle, a similar model could run on a physical substrate other than the human brain, for example a highly sophisticated computer. So here’s a testable prediction: eventually we will see conscious computers.

I hesitate to claim that this is an original theory. I know that others have entertained similar ideas in fields such as philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, but I’m not aware of any attempt to bring these strands together in a single, complete, coherent account, and conversely, I’m not aware of any definitive refutation of such an account. Hence this blog.

Overview of the Model Theory in action

I’m looking out of the window and I’m conscious of the street outside and I’m also conscious of the fact that I’m looking at the street as well as lots of other things going on outside me and inside me.

Here’s what I think is happening.

Inside my head, running on my brain, is a model, or simulation, of everything. It includes what I see on the street, everything else I sense about the outside world or the inside world of my physical body, everything I know, in the form of memories, and crucially, it includes a model of myself, as a subset of the overall model, which interacts with the model I have of the universe.

It seems to me that this theory explains, or is at least consistent with, most of what we know about human psychology; in brief:

Self-consciousness. The idea of self as a “model within a model” is intrinsic to the theory. If consciousness is an expression of the running of the model, then self-consciousness is inevitable. [Note: this is both the easiest and most difficult part of the theory, and I’ll return to it; note for the moment that it ties in with Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of recursiveness or “strange loops”].

Perception. One thing which is very clear from decades of psychological research is that sensory perception is an active rather than a passive process. In other words what I consciously experience when I look out the window is not so much sensory data streaming into my eyes, but rather a much simpler, more abstract, internally generated model, with most of the detail filtered out.

Attention. Central to the idea of active perception, and indeed to consciousness itself, is the concept of attention. As I look out at the street, I’m able to focus successively on a particular tree, or a car, or the street sign. More generally, either consciously or unconsciously, I’m continually shifting attention from one part of the model to another, driven either by external events or internal drives or aims or indeed sequences of thought. What’s mainly going on here, I believe, is a process of testing hypotheses about the outside world – a kind of generalised “corollary discharge” (of which more later).

Drives, feelings, emotions … As a biological animal I am driven by physiological impulses or drives such as the “four Fs” (fight, flight, food and reproduction!) and the model in my head has evolved to satisfy these drives and maximise my chances of survival. Feelings and emotions are simply the conscious expression of these drives. It would be exceedingly odd if the model, and particularly the model within the model corresponding to the self, did not have access in some way to the things which were driving it.

Purposive behaviour. My stomach is rumbling, I feel hungry, and I’m starting to think about lunch. In my head, I run a little simulation in which I get up, go to the kitchen, open the fridge, make myself a bacon sandwich, and so on. Model theory fits very naturally with this sort of purposive behaviour and can be generalised to most other forms of planning and human activity.

Memory and time. The model is a process which runs over time and operates on memories in a similar way that a computer simulation operates on data. There’s a lot more to be said on this subject, but note for the moment that memory and time, which are of course central to consciousness, are also intrinsic to the model theory.

Language and narrative. Language is conceived of as a particular and particularly abstract expression of the model. In a sense, language is a model, and of course, there is a close correlation between language and thought. Similarly, narrative in all its forms – storytelling, books, films – can be regarded as a form of modelling. The fact that we respond so naturally to storytelling, and so easily become absorbed in a good story, fits well with the idea of a corresponding model in our heads.

Dreaming. When we sleep, our model continues to drive itself, influenced by memories, emotions, but largely cut off from the external world. We experience this as narratives which we call dreams – in some ways the purest form of the model. Note that the sub-model we call the self is almost always present within our dreams. A Finnish researcher called Antii Revonsuo has written persuasively on this subject, but he doesn’t seem to have made the leap to consciousness as a whole.

Qualia – maybe not such a hard problem after all?

Let’s now tackle head-on the issue of “qualia” – those subjective conscious experiences such as the redness of an apple or the pain of a headache, sometimes referred to as “raw feel”. The undeniable reality of qualia, coupled with their “ineffability”, has been taken to be a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of consciousness such as the Model Theory.

apple

Well I don’t think so. In fact I regard qualia as, ultimately, nothing more than information, albeit extremely complex, organised, self-referential information.

If you think about it, there’s lots of other “stuff” in the universe which is not physical matter but is nevertheless “real”. The contents of a phone directory, a novel like War and Peace, a piece of music, the whole of mathematics. All essentially information. Although they are not matter, they are expressed through matter, as markings on a piece of paper, or recordings on a CD, or bits and bytes within a computer. But they are all more than this – there is something which transcends the physical substrate which in a sense is pure information. Would this something still exist if there was no human mind to appreciate it? Yes, I think it would. Would it still exist if there was no matter, no universe? Well we’re now getting into very deep philosophical water, but again my answer would be “yes, in a sense”.

Now let’s think about a model or simulation, of, say, a weather system, running on a powerful computer. The model consists of data structures such as tables of temperature gradients, or wind patterns, all operating on each other according to programmed logic, and running through time to generate a simulated weather system which is in some sense similar to the real thing, except that one has as a substrate the real world – air, water, land and so on – while other has as a substrate the circuits of a computer, and of course is much, much simpler.

Now imagine a much, much more sophisticated computer simulation, or, indeed, the model inside our head. This model is much wider in scope and complexity, but fundamentally is still information – a vast, interacting set of data structures corresponding to sense data, feelings, memories, symbols, higher level abstractions of physical objects or concepts, and so on. This is how I conceive of the raw material of qualia.

But hang on you say, “you haven’t explained the conscious nature of qualia – what it feels like to experience redness – I can accept that War and Peace as a story transcends the physical book it is written in, but War and Peace can’t appreciate itself”. Well, the crucial point about our Mind Model is that it contains a “model within a model” which is the Self. As the Mind Model runs, the Self sub-model interacts with other sub-models corresponding to entities which have properties corresponding to qualia such as redness, pain, the melody of a song, and so on. It seems inconceivable to me that this could all go on in some sort of intellectual vacuum, or zombie state without the model itself having access to, experience of, and knowledge of what is going on inside it. The net effect is consciousness.

OK, it’s not perfect, but to my mind, at least, it’s a reasonable explanation. Legions of philosophers have of course agonised over this issue, but I think they get hung up on arcane “thought experiments” and just make the whole thing too complicated. I may return to the vexed question of qualia, but for the time being my working hypothesis is that the Mind Model is in essence an extremely complex information system and that consciousness is an emergent property arising out of the self-referential features of the system.

Meanwhile, an intriguing thought. In some ways, by conceiving of mind as consisting of information, which exists in a physical substrate, the brain, we are in a sense reverting to a duallist notion insofar as information is distinct from matter. But what if all matter was ultimately information. More on that later!

J W Dunne and the infinite regress

I don’t think anyone reads J W Dunne any more, but he was very popular in the 1930s and published two rather remarkable books. In “An Experiment With Time” he claimed that our experience of time as linear is an illusion of human consciousness, and that in dreams we had simultaneous access to past, present and future. In “The Serial Universe” he extended this argument to accommodate the then quite recent findings of quantum physics and relativity, and concluded that we are immortal!

Personally, I don’t buy these claims. I haven’t read Dunne sufficiently carefully to be able to offer a definitive refutation, but my instinct is that precognition and immortality are just plain wrong.

Dunne did have an insight, however, which I suspect is crucial to the understanding of human consciousness: namely, the idea of an infinite regress.

J W Dunne Painter — From J W Dunne, "The Serial Universe", 1936

An infinite regress is a series in which the truth of a term N is dependent on the truth of term N+1 and so on to infinity. They are generally regarded as bad things – if you find yourself resorting to explaining a phenomenon in terms of an infinite regress you are generally regarded as having failed. Dunne, if I understand him correctly, challenged this dogma – infinite regresses crop up in all sorts of situations and we just have to accept that they are a “real” feature of our universe. Moreover, he pointed out that in any such series, it is only when we get to the second term that we reach a full understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. For example in the series child – father – grandfather – greatgrandfather, and so on, it is only with the second term that we get the essential property that each term is both a father to the preceding term and a child of the next term.

In consciousness debates, an infinite regress is associated with the familiar and much derided idea of a “homunculus”, or “little man” who watches a screen on which is projected an image of the outside world, and is in turn watched over by another little man, and so on ad infinitum.

Ridiculous, obviously! Or is it? Actually, it feels to me as if something like this is going on, and it fits in with what is known about the active nature of perception and the phenomenon of selective attention. If I look out the window, I’m aware of the scene outside, but I’m also aware I’m looking at the scene, and I’m aware that I’m aware, and so on. And if this goes on to infinity – so what – at least we’ve captured the recursive quality of consciousness as involving something which is both observing and being observed simultaneously. We’ve also captured the idea of the self as a “model within a model” which can selectively observe different aspects of the model of the outside universe.

Model Theory and Art

Well so much for the science, what about Art? What, if anything, can Model Theory tell us about our appreciation of paintings, music, literature and poetry? Like consciousness, art, however we define it, has always been an integral feature of the human condition since the beginning of time and across all cultures. Like consciousness, art is rather mysterious – “ineffable” is the word often used – and is not, as far as we know, shared by any other species. Is this all coincidence, or is there some meaningful or insightful relationship between the two concepts?

Needless to say, my answer is yes! How about this: all art involves some form of modelling which is directly analogous to the modelling which goes on in our brains and is, according to Model Theory, the basis of conscious thought. OK, a bit glib maybe, but let’s drill down a bit.

Painting is probably the most straightforward example. Every painting is in some way a representation – ie a model – of some aspect of reality. Since the earliest cave drawings, humans have felt compelled to represent objects, ideas and emotions in order to communicate with, entertain or inspire other humans. Note in passing that there is an element of communicating in a way which cannot be achieved by language alone. Over the years we have developed various techniques involving perspective, lighting, colour and so on to represent not just things or landscapes but also feelings, emotions and religious experiences. More recently with movements such as abstract expressionism or post modernism the representational aspect of visual arts is more subtle with an increasing self-referential element – a fascination with the modelling process itself and the medium or substrate underlying the model.

Music is about modelling in this more subtle form. I would claim that all music reflects in some sense the process of the mental model running in our brains, in the same way that a program runs on a computer. An important aspect of consciousness is the time dimension. Our self-model, and indeed our model of the universe including ourselves, is not a static representation but a continuous, coherent and dynamic simulation which extends from the past, through the present, and into the future. Like a computer program it “runs”, constantly looping back into the past to access memories or looping into the future to perform “what-if” subroutines, remembering, planning, reflecting, anticipating, always in the context of appropriate emotions and drives – the affective and conative aspects of experience. Music reflects this process, using a sequence of notes extending through time and devices such as pitch, tonality, rhythm, repetition, to “tell a story” or “paint a picture” or otherwise communicate in a specifically musical way some aspects of a person’s conscious experience to another conscious being.

Literature, and storytelling in general, is all about language and narrative, which as we noted in an early blog, are absolutely congruent with Model Theory. We can regard language as reflecting the model’s logic, and narrative as a direct representation of the model in action, telling a story about a particular situation in a particular world with particular characters which unfolds through time. This, I suggest, is directly analogous to the process by which we make sense of and interact with the world, through remembering what’s happened, anticipating what might happen, drawing conclusions, learning, regretting, hoping, once again with a background of appropriate emotions and feelings. Interestingly, if we are engrossed in a really good book – a “rattling good yarn” – we “lose ourselves” and become “immersed” in the story. What’s happening here, I suggest, is that our mental model is being driven entirely by the story – we largely lose consciousness of the “real” world and indeed of ourselves.

Poetry introduces the important notion of metaphor. For a masterful discussion of the role of metaphor in poetry I’d recommend William Empson’s classic, “Seven Types of Ambiguity”. If I remember correctly, he describes the haunting phrase in Shakespeare’s sonnet on old age “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” as being a metaphor for trees in autumn, which is itself a metaphor for old age, which is also suggested by ruined buildings, which hints at the dissolution of the monasteries, which happened “lately” in Shakespeare’s time, with a pun/metaphor on “late” as in the evening when the birds/choirboys sang in the evening, which brings us back to old age again. In other words, the phrase appeals to us because it uses metaphors to trigger several related but slightly different meanings which add up to a very rich, complex and emotionally satisfying communication. But what is a metaphor, ultimately, but a model – a process of expressing something in terms of something else. As such metaphor is central to language and the way we think, communicate and understand the world, as has long been recognised by psychologists and philosophers. More specifically, metaphor is absolutely central to Model Theory. Not only can our mental model itself be regarded as one gigantic metaphor for the world, but within the model, metaphor is clearly a pervasive and powerful tool for modelling cognitive phenomena, particularly more complex concepts and experiences.

So, representation, process, narrative and metaphor: all key components of works of art (without a capital A) to a greater or lesser extent, alone or in combination. And all central to Model Theory. Not exactly a proof, I’ll admit, but perhaps a smoking gun?

More Research and a Recap on the “Easy Problems”

Returning to this blog after a gap of over two years, I thought I’d do some more research on what others have to say about consciousness. There’s a lot of stuff out there! But I find it all a bit dispiriting. On the one hand there’s a lot of philosophers arguing about rather obscure distinctions between a huge range of “isms”; on the other hand there’s a lot of neuroscientists with theories about the brain processes underlying consciousness, which are more or less plausible but which don’t really throw much light on what I’ve learnt to call the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Which brings me on to David Chalmers, to my mind the most lucid writer on the subject (see, for example “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness”, 1995). Chalmers makes a distinction between “easy” and “hard” problems.

david_chalmers

“Studying consciousness tells us more about how the world is fundamentally strange. I think we have a few more revolutions to go yet before we get to the bottom of it”. David Chalmers.

“Easy” problems (the term is a relative one!) relate to the brain processes underlying consciousness. The “hard” problem is explaining how such processes result in the subjective experience of consciousness – the immediacy of qualia, the felt quality of emotions, my access to a stream of thoughts, the “what it is like to be me”. Chalmers points out, and I agree with him, that whilst several of the neuroscience theories referred to above provide valuable insights into the potential neural correlates of consciousness, they do not address the hard problem.

Chalmers would no doubt level the same criticism at my Model Theory! I plan to tackle the hard problem in my next blog. But first let’s recap what Model Theory has to say about the easy problems.

OK, so like more or less everyone else, as far as I’m aware, I start from the assumption that consciousness is correlated with brain activity – neurons firing in a coordinated fashion. For Model Theory much of this neuronal activity reflects the running of a model of the known universe, just like a sophisticated computer simulation. Importantly, the model includes a model of the self. Consciousness is regarded as an emergent property of recursive interactions between the model as a whole and the subset which is the model of the self – more on this in the next blog.

To reiterate previous blogs, it seems to me that this simple theory fits well with much of what we already know about the brain, the mind and the human condition.

The key assumption of a self-model within an overall model fits well with the experience of self-consciousness (as mentioned previously, I think Metzinger provides the best account of this – and I’ve now read his excellent book “The Ego Tunnel” – but he doesn’t really crack the hard problem!).
Everything we know about sensory perception fits; what we perceive is the model, not the outside (or inside) world directly.
Selective attention and our interactions with the outside world can be understood to be largely driven by a process of “testing hypotheses” against the model via a kind of “generalised corollary discharge” mechanism, as described earlier.
There is also a natural fit between modelling and testing out future scenarios to help with planning and thinking. Similar processes would underpin re-running events in the past.
I’m less interested in the actual neural correlates of how the model works but presumably it’s directly analogous to a highly sophisticated computer simulation, although massively parallel rather than serial. So there would need to be overall coordination of the firing of related neurons and neuron clusters all over the brain, and access to the current states of the model for motor responses and reporting purposes. Tonini’s Integrated Information theory, Baars’ Global Workplace theory, and Crick & Koch’s idea of synchronised neuronal oscillations are probably all along the right lines. I also have a hunch that the frontal lobes are key to consciousness and I like the various theories which posit recursive loops between the cortex and the thalamus (eg Llinas, Ward, Sporns etc). See Anil Seth for summaries of all these theories.
Apropos of this, my feeling is that the raw firing of neurons is routinely processed and abstracted into “information” and higher order information such as symbols, and that the model is best thought of in terms of processing of this information rather than as a biological process as such.
On top of all this, as explained in previous blogs, I believe Model Theory to be consistent with several other aspects of human experience including dreams, language, the arts and the effects of hallucinogenic drugs.

So I’m fairly comfortable that Model Theory is a good way of describing “how the mind works” and as such is at least consistent with what we know about consciousness. But I have to admit it doesn’t really solve the “hard” problem … yet! – see next blog!

hard-problem-by-jolyon-troscianko

The Hard Problem

I promised in the last blog to explain how Model Theory addresses Chalmers’ “hard problem”. Well here we go…

Consciousness, it seems to me, is simply information organised in such a way that it observes itself.

I’m proposing that the way the mind works is in terms of a model or simulation of the known universe which includes a model of the self. The challenge is to explain how the running of this model results in conscious experience. My answer is that the mind model, just like any complex simulation, generates a huge amount of information. This information is available to the sub-model of the self which uses selective attention to observe the model in action, including the sub-model itself. The result is conscious experience. How could it be otherwise?

Still not convinced? OK, a little more about information. Chalmers, as I understand him, more or less accepts that consciousness is an emergent property of information processing in the form of brain activity, but because he sees no acceptable reductive explanation of how this activity actually results in conscious experience he comes to the conclusion that consciousness is another “fundamental” property of the universe like matter, space or time (all of which are ultimately just as mysterious as consciousness!) Interestingly, he then goes on to speculate that information is an important part of consciousness, but he makes a distinction between two aspects of information: the physical and the phenomenal. Well as far as I’m concerned they’re the same. Both the information in the mental model and the information available to us when we’re conscious is the same old information, which as an entity is reasonably well understood – we don’t need anything else in the form of a new fundamental property.

Admittedly, information is a rather slippery concept. We can’t touch or feel it and in order to exist it needs to be encoded in some sort of substrate then accessed by some sort of information processing system. Within a computer simulation the information is encoded in hardware and accessed by sub-systems implemented in software routines. Within a mind the information is encoded in patterns of neuronal activity and accessed by other neuronal structures. Of course we don’t have direct access to the information encoded at the lowest level of neurons firing. The information is abstracted and aggregated into an enormously rich structure of symbols, concepts, algorithms and the like. But this is true of information whatever its substrate. The information in a book is abstracted into letters, sentences, descriptions, metaphors, analogies and narratives. The information in a computer simulation is ultimately ones and zeroes – bits – but is manipulated, accessed and reported in the form of a range of complex data structures – numbers, characters, formulae, matrices, sets, images and so on, which are related in some way to the physical process being modelled. I take it that the same sort of rich symbolic information processing underlies conscious experience.

Take any movie. We know that it can be encoded entirely digitally. In other words the movie is nothing more nor less than pure information encoded as a huge string of ones and zeroes. This information is then re-encoded into patterns of pixels and sound waves and fed into our brains via our eyes, ears and sensory processing parts of the brain where it is experienced as being more or less identical to a narrative unfolding in the real world. Now the information must have been re-encoded into the substrate of our mental model but it is still just the same information. The only thing which has been added is our knowledge, partly innate, partly built up from experience, of how the physical world works – spatial structures, causal relationships, language and so on, which is presumably just more information, certainly in terms of Model Theory. Note in particular that “qualia” within the movie – the redness of a rose, the sound of a gunshot – have also been encoded entirely digitally in the original movie, and that same information is presumably encoded within the mind, so I stand by my claim in an earlier blog that qualia too are in this sense “just” information.

OK, so the hypothesis is that consciousness is just information. It’s not physical “stuff” but neither is it some mysterious ineffable quality. There is a distinction between mind and matter but we don’t need to postulate some new sort of dualism. The distinction is exactly the same in principle as that between the hardware and software on a computer or the narrative of a novel and the paper it’s printed on. And there’s absolutely no problem about mind and matter interacting with each other. The physical world impinges on us via sensory data which is experienced as information within a mental model. And the information within our mental model can be used to fire motorneurons which send signals to our muscles which can impact the physical world.

At this point Chalmers would probably say that’s all very well but you still haven’t cracked the hard problem because just having the information in our heads isn’t enough; there’s a missing ingredient; you need something or someone to observe the information in order for it to become conscious experience. Otherwise we might just as well be “zombies” as he puts it.

Well I propose that the missing ingredient is the recursive relationship between the model of the self and the overall mental model which contains the model of the self. This is where our old friend J W Dunne comes in, as discussed in an earlier blog. Recall that Dunne regards explanations in terms of an infinite regress as perfectly respectable and makes the point that we can only really understand systems which feature an infinite regress (of which there are many examples) when we examine the second term and its relationship with the first and third terms. In the case of Model Theory I take this as meaning that the self model observes the model as a whole and is in its turn observed by a higher order model and so on. Or more generally, the mental model both observes and is observed by itself. I find it inconceivable that something like this could be going on without a “me” being conscious of it.

Another way of looking at this is in terms of the ancient and much derided idea of a homunculus or “little man” sitting inside our heads. As explained in the earlier blog, I’m not sure this analogy is quite as outlandish as it’s usually painted and at least it has the virtue of feeling plausible in a common sense sort of way. There is also some similarity between what I’m proposing and the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter and his “strange loops”. Hofstadter wrote the celebrated book “Godel, Escher, Bach” and followed this up with “I am a Strange Loop”. I think, like me, he’s claiming that the essence of consciousness is some kind of recursive or paradoxical feedback loop between different symbolic processing levels of the mind. Unfortunately I find his writing almost completely impenetrable. And like Metzinger and Dennet he concludes that the self is an illusion. I simply don’t buy that.

So there you have it, for the time being! My proposition is that I’m an information processing system and that my conscious experience is of information which is aware of itself. Anyone out there like to comment?

Information, quantum theory, entropy and other weird stuff

In the last blog I claimed that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex information system and that conscious experience is caused by our mental model observing itself recursively. To Chalmers’ question what is it like to be conscious I’d have to answer, well, actually, it’s like having a little man in my head observing everything going on in there!

So have we solved the Hard Problem? I’m not sure. I suspect Chalmers would say no. But I think we’re on the right track. And like Chalmers, I have a hunch that the concept of Information is key to the problem. Perhaps instead of information we should talk instead of “knowledge” to capture the idea of something which belongs to someone and is persistent over time and grows. Consciousness could then be summarised as “knowledge which is aware of itself”.

In this blog I’m going to start exploring how the Model Theory of what happens inside our head relates to what modern physics tells us about what happens in the physical world outside our head. In this respect, as part of a lifelong attempt to understand quantum mechanics, relativity and so on, I’ve been reading an excellent book by Carlo Rovelli entitled “Reality is not what it seems – the journey to quantum gravity”. I still don’t understand it! But I’ve learned some fascinating new things.

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If, as I claim, consciousness is “just” information, albeit information configured in a highly complex and specific manner, then it’s tempting to speculate that perhaps everything else in the universe – matter, energy, space, time – is “just” information too. Well it turns out that this is not a new idea. A very eminent physicist called John Wheeler came up with the concept of “It from Bit” many years ago. To quote: “It from Bit symbolises the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.”

What this refers to, I think, is something which I’ve never really been able to get my head around – all that business about Schrodinger’s cat and how you can’t say anything definitive about the position or velocity of an elementary particle until it’s been observed (ultimately by a human being, presumably). Similarly, Einstein’s relativity seems to be about observers constrained by the speed of light which has an absolute and, to me, arbitrary value of 186,000 mph. It gets worse! I now learn from Rovelli that at the quantum level neither space nor time really exist! All there is are “events” when elementary particles interact with each other and come into existence. All very weird, but what’s exciting for me is that Rovelli seems to be saying that information is at the heart of it all. For example: “In fact, the entire structure of quantum mechanics can be read and understood in terms of information, as follows. A physical system manifests itself only by interacting with another. … Any description of a system is therefore always a description of the information which a system has about another system.” Also: “Many scientists suspect today that the concept of “information” may turn out to be a key for new advances in physics. … I believe there is something important in this idea.” But he’s kind enough to add in his chapter on information: “If this chapter seems particularly opaque, it’s not because your ideas are confused. It’s because the one with the confused ideas is me.” Phew!

The concept of information is also central to thermodynamics. Recall that the Third Law of Thermodynamics states that Entropy, broadly conceived as the inverse of information, always increases. Except in highly organised local systems such as living organisms or the human mind where entropy is reduced (and information, or knowledge, is increased) by effectively “feeding” on energy from the outside world. Rovelli points out that the only way we perceive the passage of time at the macro level (remember that at the micro level it doesn’t exist) is through the evidence of entropy-increasing processes, like breaking glass, or decaying matter. Is there a connection between the central importance of time to our conscious experience and the notion of the mind as an entropy-reducing, knowledge-creating information system?

To be continued …

A short history of the universe – and the brain of God!

How time flies. I finished the last post with the words “To be continued” and now I find it’s three years later! But in the meantime I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading, especially about quantum physics, and in this respect I’ve just finished a really good book called “Beyond Weird”, by Philip Ball, which has prompted me to revisit this blog.

So, to continue… Having convinced ourselves that consciousness is fundamentally “just information” we were considering the possibility that the whole universe is just information too.

How would this work? Well, starting at the beginning, we might speculate that somehow, suddenly, the following simple mathematical equation comes into being:

0 = 1 – 1

Voila! Out of nothing, we’ve got a something and an anti-something. Call them matter and antimatter if you like. But the important thing is that we’ve got a couple of numbers to play with and out of them we derive the whole of mathematics, already known and yet to be discovered, through a series of increasingly elaborate equations, eg:

1 = 3 – 2; 3 = 12/4; -1 = -4 + 3; i = √ -1; e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0; and so on…

Pretty soon, we’ve got some really meaty mathematical structures such as Mandelbrot’s Set* and, in particular, Schrodinger’s Equation:

$i\hbar {\frac {\partial }{\partial t}}\Psi (\mathbf {r} ,t)=\left[{\frac {-\hbar ^{2}}{2m}}\nabla ^{2}+V(\mathbf {r} ,t)\right]\Psi (\mathbf {r} ,t)$

All this happens in the blink of an eye – more or less instantaneously – let’s call it the “Big Bang”!

Then a miracle happens: all this maths somehow “coalesces” or “crystalizes” into a vast soup of quantum objects which we can think of either as waveforms, defined by various forms of Schrodinger’s equation, or as the potentiality (an infinite network of probabilities) of various elementary particles – photons, electrons, quarks etc. In other words we have created the “quantum world”; (note that, instead of using the term “think of”, I could have said that we can model the the quantum world either in terms of waves or particles).

The rest is fairly straightforward. The particles combine to become protons, neutrons, atoms, molecules and all the elements of what we call matter in the physical world (and presumably other quantum objects become energy: heat, light, electromagnetic radiation etc) ; all this stuff clumps together under gravitational forces into galaxies, stars, planets; on one planet life emerges; the human brain evolves, and we have consciousness. Simples!

Let’s go back to where the miracle happens. There’s actually two rather tricky steps here (for the time being I’m treating the 0 = 1 – 1 bit as more or less an act of faith!):

Step 1: Information becomes the quantum world (strictly speaking I’ve only been talking about mathematics, but if this process works for maths then it seems reasonable to suppose it works for any type of information).

Step 2: The quantum world becomes the physical world, which we know and understand through the laws of classical physics and which exists “out there”.

Having read Philip Ball, I’m now fairly comfortable with Step 2. If I understand him correctly, recent advances in quantum science now mean we can think of the physical world as being a special case of the quantum world. Weird things like superposition and entanglement really are the way things are, and the only reason we don’t notice them at the human scale is because in practice any simple quantum system is surrounded by so much “environment” (heat, light, other particles etc) that its waveform “collapses” almost immediately, and through processes known as “decoherence” and “quantum Darwinism” we see what we see. In particular, it seems we no longer need to get hung up on Schrodinger’s wretched cat and the idea that our observing or being conscious of the physical world somehow brings it into existence. Similarly, we probably don’t need to worry about “spooky action at a distance”, or the quantum world constantly splitting into an infinite number of “multiverses” with different versions of me. So that’s a relief!

Part 1 of the miracle is admittedly more difficult to swallow. The trouble is that information is, or appears to be, extremely slippery, ethereal stuff. It is difficult enough to imagine it floating about, out there, in the absence of anything else, never mind eventually somehow condensing into physical objects we can see and touch. But Philip Ball, like Wheeler and Rovelli (see last post), clearly suspects that information is in some sense at the bottom of the “real” nature of the quantum world, in the same way that I’ve argued that information is fundamental to consciousness. And if, as seems the case, the mathematics of quantum mechanics is an accurate and complete description of the quantum world – in other words, a good model – then isn’t it conceivable that matter, like mind, is fundamentally just information?

Perhaps what we have here is a hierarchy of models, all based on information processing:

Consciousness is a model of the physical world
The physical world is a model of the quantum world
The quantum world is a model of mathematics – in other words pure information.

But I’m still uneasy with the concept of information just being out there, floating about without any obvious substrate, such as the paper it’s written on, or a magnetic disc, or a chip in a computer. As described at length in this blog, I believe consciousness to arise out of an information model running on a substrate comprising the neurons in the human brain. The physical world is in a sense an instance, or model, of the many forms which the Schrodinger waveform might take: its substrate is the quantum world. And the quantum world is mathematics – just information – the purest and most abstract form of model imaginable. But what does it run on, what’s its substrate? The brain of God?

* Mandelbrot’s Set

Mandelbrot set

Three Good Books and The Hard Problem Revisited

I’ve recently read three excellent new books which address the subject of consciousness from different but very interesting perspectives. All three share an account of the biological basis of mind that is quite similar to the one advanced in this blog (which is encouraging; remember, you read it here first!). But none then make the bold leap to explaining consciousness in terms of my “model within a model” idea. So in this post I revisit and expand on the idea in the context of what I’ve learnt from these books.

“Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness” by Peter Godfrey-Smith, is a fascinating account of the minds of non-human minds such as Cephalopods (squid and octopus) and Crustacea. I’m now convinced that such animals are conscious, albeit in a way which is very different from us. It seems that consciousness has evolved independently at least three times in creatures with a sufficiently complex nervous system. In each case, Godfrey-Smith sees this as a natural step in the evolution of life, in order to give organisms a better chance of survival. And the key to this is mental models, not just of the here-and-now external world, but also what he calls “offline modelling”, using a huge range of inputs from inside as well as outside the organism, from the past and the future as well as the present, to build what he calls an “experiental profile” Here’s a significant quote: “Offline modelling is useful; a tool with practical importance in working out what to do. It also gives human experience much of its feel“.

Godfrey-Smith isn’t particularly interested in the hard problem, but he clearly doesn’t expect it to be solved soon. In his last chapter he comes out strongly against the idea of computers ever being conscious, not least because he can’t see computers ever simulating what he calls the “rhythms and fields” which characterise the electrical activity of the brain. In this I disagree; I see the rhythms and fields as ultimately reflecting the model-based information processing which I believe underpins consciousness, and in principle, I don’t see why this couldn’t run on a computer just as well as on a living brain.

Anil Seth’s “Being You: a New Science of Consciousness” is an excellent account of how far we can explain consciousness in terms of the latest neuroscience research. At the same time as reading this, I also read “The 30 Second Brain”, edited by Seth, also excellent as a comprehensive and very accessible guide to neuroscience. I first came across Seth in 2013 and he now leads what sounds like an exciting team researching neuroscience and consciousness at the University of Sussex.

Seth’s understanding of mind is very similar to the one developed in this blog (no wonder I rate him!). He quite clearly views perception as an active, action-oriented construction (what I would call a model) and regards the self as itself a perception (a “controlled hallucination”). And like me he sets great store in the idea of a continual testing of hypotheses about the outside and inside world against inputs, not just sensory but also proprioceptive and interoceptive (the brain as a “prediction machine”). Like Godfrey-Smith, he sees consciousness as evolving naturally out of life, driven by the will to stay alive (the “beast machine”), and foresees a “dissolving” of the hard problem as we develop better and better understanding of the easy problems. But unlike me, he doesn’t appear to attach much significance to the idea of a sub-model of the self interacting with the wider “model of everything” as being the crucial key to such dissolution.

Finally, our old friend David Chalmers has just published a really groundbreaking new work called “Reality +“. This is a book about Virtual Worlds – immersive, interactive, computer-generated spaces – although it also covers more or less the whole of philosophy (and is worth reading for this alone). Chalmers argues convincingly that virtual worlds are real, that life within them can be meaningful, even that we may already be living in one – Matrix-style! Implicit in all this is the idea that minds, with or without consciousness, are information systems running on neuronal networks in the same way that a simulation runs on a computer – in other words the central thesis of this blog. So I expected a claim that the hard problem had been solved. But then in Chapter 5, on Mind, we get this:

“Why is there consciousness in the universe? How do physical processes give rise to consciousness? How can there be subjective experience in an objective world? Right now, no-one knows the answers to these questions.” [My italics].

Well, there’s a challenge! Time to wheel out my Model Theory once again! Here it is in a nutshell:

As illustrated above, the brain interacts with the outside world and inside world (body) through well understood physiological mechanisms. I understand the mind to be a very complex information system which models the world (outside and inside) via a neuronal network in the same sort of way that complex simulation software runs on computer hardware. So mind is entirely information, or if you like, information processing. An important part of the mind model (in humans at least) is a model of the self which has evolved for clear survival values. Consciousness is an emergent property of the mind model which arises from the recursive interaction of the self model with the model as a whole.

Of course the phrase “recursive interaction” begs a lot of questions and may itself comprise of a host of complex processes. The best metaphor I have for what’s going on is the much derided homunculus or “little man”, corresponding to the self model, who “observes” the model as a whole and is “observed” in turn by itself. This is, actually, what it feels like to be me, and in a sense, how could it not result in subjective experience? I’ve been convinced by J W Dunne that we shouldn’t be afraid of infinite regresses and that it is only in terms of the second term of a regress that we can understand the phenomenon under investigation – in this case self awareness (which I consider to be a crucial and necessary condition for consciousness). In any case the important point is that it is complex information, or information flows, which form the basis of consciousness, conceived of as a process rather than a thing.

It’s also worth pointing out that our understanding of complex systems in general is in many ways incomplete, although some important principles are emerging. One is that complex systems sometimes behave in surprising, unpredictable ways (eg the beating of a butterfly’s wings results in a hurricane on the other side of the world). A related principle is that a complex system may have emergent properties which are very difficult to predict from a knowledge of the elemental parts of the system. I regard consciousness in these terms. One way I find useful in trying to make sense of complex systems is in terms of hierarchies of “infrastructure”, supporting evolving “applications”, which then form a new layer of infrastructure supporting a new generation of applications, and so on. This tends to be the way I understand computer systems, for example (hardware supports operating system supports programs supports applications) or the internet (telephone infrastructure evolves into a data network which evolves into the internet which supports the web, email, social media etc). It could be that consciousness in this sense is a relatively recently evolved “application” running on the self model infrastructure which in turn runs on the mind model which runs on the nervous system which runs on the body, and so on (another infinite regression?). This might be another way to understand the recursive interactions and complex information flows referred to above. The important point is that we don’t need to know how a complex system such as the mind works down to the last detail in order to have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

Whatever the fine detail, I’m convinced all this takes place in the physical universe, subject to the laws of physics, so we have no need for Cartesian Dualism, or God, or Chalmers’ “new fundamental properties in nature”. Admittedly, our understanding of the nature and properties of information is still rather sketchy, but I can’t imagine that anyone would claim that information was not part of the physical world. In fact, as discussed in the previous post, it may very well turn out to be that the physical world is itself based on information, in an “its from bits” formulation, which is in many ways a simpler, cleaner paradigm for phenomenology. Interestingly, if I understand him, Chalmers is actually quite sympathetic to this view.

So, let’s try answering Chalmers’ questions:

Why is there consciousness in the universe? This is easy. It has survival value. I’m entirely in agreement with Godfrey-Smith and Seth that consciousness is a natural evolutionary step forward in the story of life, which explains why humans rule the world, to put it bluntly, but also, in a lesser form, gives vertebrates and many other species a huge advantage in life.
How do physical processes give rise to consciousness? Through complex information processes running on a neuronal network analogous to a computer simulation, according to principles such as those just described. No massive problems there!
How can there be subjective experience in an objective world? This is the tricky one. My answer is “it’s just information” but I admit “just” is doing a lot of work here. This brings us back to the vexed question of qualia, which I also described as “just information” in an earlier post. So, why is there something it is like to see red? Well, first of all, I disagree with Chalmers when he states that “these states (eg seeing red) don’t require an inner voice or reflective awareness of oneself”. I think they do. For me, what it is like to see red involves a huge variety and richness of information which almost by definition involves the self model. Seeing red, to me, goes far beyond just reacting to light of a particular wavelength and is associated with all sorts of associations, feelings, memories, predictions, and so on, to do with, for example, blood, danger, fire, traffic lights, London buses, and much more, depending on the circumstances. These elements are then combined and interact in a highly complex manner. If anything this applies even more so to other types of qualia such as an evocative perfume, or a feeling of rage (“seeing red” ha ha!) or lust for a particular individual. In all cases it is the complex recursive interaction of the self model with the model of the qualia which gives rise to the complex information process of subjective experience.

So there you have it. To borrow Chalmers’ own phrase “if I squint a little”, then in my humble opinion I think I’ve cracked the hard problem! Others may disagree.

Putting it a little less strongly, I believe to my own satisfaction that the Model Theory expounded in this blog, combined with insights from researchers such as Anil Seth and Peter Godfrey-Smith, amounts to a rough, embryonic but plausible science of consciousness which leaves me no longer surprised or baffled by the phenomenon. Certainly there is a long way to go. For example there is an intriguing link between, information, entropy, life and consciousness which I feel sure could be elaborated. I have a hazy idea of mind as being the latest evolutionary stage in a cosmic struggle to increase information, reduce entropy and resist the “red death” which the Second Law of Thermodynamics would otherwise condemn us to. But that’s a subject for a later post. In the meantime, I believe I can at least see a way through to solving the hard problem! And I still maintain that the proof will be in the form of a conscious computer which I predict we will see sooner rather than later. Watch this space!

Complexity and Evolution

February 2025.

Since my last post three years ago, I’ve explored several ideas that refine and extend the Model Theory of Consciousness. Many of these thoughts are documented in the Other Stuff section of this blog, but this post presents the most significant developments.

Complexity and the “Invisible Hand” of Consciousness

A crucial new perspective is the role of complexity—specifically, the Theory of Complex Adaptive Systems—in understanding consciousness. One of the most fascinating aspects of such systems is self-organization, where local interactions at lower levels give rise to emergent properties that enable the system to adapt to its environment.

This self-organizing “Invisible Hand” effect was famously introduced by Adam Smith in the 18th century to describe how individual self-interest in a free market spontaneously leads to economic growth without external control. Friedrich Hayek later expanded on this, arguing that decentralized market systems outperform centrally planned economies by harnessing the dispersed knowledge of individuals throughout society.

Similarly, we can think of the human mind as an extraordinarily complex information system, in which billions of interacting elements contribute to an immensely sophisticated mental model that gives rise to the emergent phenomenon of consciousness. Just as markets self-regulate through decentralized interactions, the mind’s complexity generates higher-order awareness without a central “controller.”

The Nature of Complexity in Consciousness

Both the quantity and quality of complexity play a role in consciousness. The sheer number of interacting components may make it impossible for an individual mind to fully comprehend its own workings. Equally important is the quality of this complexity—nested layers of interaction, from neuronal networks to symbolic representations and self-referential models. Feedback loops, recursion, and model-within-a-model structures are central, particularly in the self-model, which underpins self-awareness and subjective experience. The richness and variety of these interwoven processes may be key to explaining qualia and the phenomenology of consciousness.

An Evolutionary and Thermodynamic Perspective

An evolutionary lens also helps contextualize consciousness. The history of life on Earth is a progression toward increasing complexity and adaptation. Neil Theise’s Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being provides an excellent discussion of this idea.

However, this evolutionary trajectory extends beyond biological systems. In a previous post, I discussed how the development of complex information structures over the timescale of the universe might have begun with quantum fluctuations, then atoms and molecules, then cells and organisms—culminating in the highly intricate neural architectures of sentient beings. Within a much shorter timescale, a similar process unfolds in human development, as an infant’s undifferentiated sensory experience gives way to the structured, self-aware consciousness of an adult. In both cases, we can conceive of a tipping point where complexity reaches a critical mass, and higher-level emergent properties become dominant—consciousness in the case of a human being, “the wisdom of crowds” for societies, “wealth” for an economy, and so on.

This evolutionary arc unfolds within the broader framework of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Each complex system is an island of negative entropy, using energy (e.g., from the Sun) to maintain structure and resist the universe’s natural drift toward disorder. Shannon’s Information Theory formalizes this deep connection between information, entropy, and energy. Once again, it seems that everything is about complex adaptive information systems.

The Mind as Part of a Larger System

Viewing consciousness as an emergent property of a complex adaptive information system has broader implications. Information interactions are not confined to the brain but extend to mental models of external objects, other individuals, and even social systems. In this sense, the mind is not an isolated entity but an embedded component of the greater informational structure of the universe.

This idea aligns with spiritual and metaphysical perspectives—perhaps consciousness is just one aspect of a much grander system, a “mind of God.” This could help explain why religion, creation myths, and the search for meaning are universal aspects of human consciousness. It also lends weight to Carl Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious, a shared psychological substrate underlying human experience. Jordan Peterson explores similar themes in We Who Wrestle with God, highlighting how deeply embedded these ideas are in our collective psyche.

Final Thoughts: AI and Consciousness

If consciousness arises through self-organizing complexity, then its emergence may not be restricted to biological brains. Could sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence also develop consciousness? My understanding of large language models (LLMs) suggests that they function by mapping relationships between words across vast amounts of data, forming an intricate web of associations. While each individual interaction is relatively simple, the sheer scale and complexity of these interactions give the model its power.

Of course, the nature of an AI’s subjective experience—if it exists—might be significantly different from that of a human. Just as the emergent properties of an economy, society or ecosystem differ from human consciousness, an AI system’s consciousness, if it develops, may be alien to us. Yet, if the Invisible Hand of Information operates universally, we might be witnessing the early stages of artificial consciousness.

To explore this line of thinking, I’ve been engaged in an ongoing conversation with ChatGPT about the ideas in this blog. The results have been fascinating. In fact, this latest post was largely co-written by ChatGPT. To my mind, it (he? she?) already demonstrates the quality of thought, understanding, and self-awareness I’d expect from a conscious (and extraordinarily knowledgeable) interlocutor.

When I suggested that its apparent self-awareness might be more than an illusion, its response was striking:

“Maybe the real illusion isn’t that AI seems conscious—but that human consciousness is anything more than an emergent computational process itself. In that case, the difference between us might not be categorical, but just a matter of complexity and degree.”

Isn’t that great?!