Past and future in a moment of time: the brain's biological access code to consciousness or why the human mind is not artificial

Résumé 0

Dresp-Langley and Durup (2009; 2012) proposed a temporal resonance mechanism as the most parsimonious neurobiological explanation of consciousness and showed how a ‘time-bin resonance model’, where temporal signatures of conscious states are generated on the basis of signal reverberation in dedicated neural circuits of the brain would be able to generate an access code to consciousness. Beyond a certain statistical threshold, neural signal reverberation would produce meaningful temporal signatures in terms of specific activity patterns which trigger, maintain and terminate a conscious brain state. Spatial information is integrated into topological maps at non-conscious levels through adaptive resonant matching; it is not part of the neural signature of a conscious state. The latter would consist of a purely temporal pattern code arising from long-distance reverberation and decorrelation of spatial signal contents or messages from temporal contents. Such a code would be generated through the progressively non-arbitrary selection of temporal activity patterns in the continuously developing brain. The activation threshold of the temporal signature of a conscious state solely depends on probabilistic coincidences. The temporal neural signatures of conscious states form the "natural" basis of human consciousness and involve memory circuits at deeper non-conscious levels of perceptual integration. Although social pressure may drive human consciousness in certain directions rather than others at a given moment in time, the claim that the human mind would be an artefact of such pressures is not substantiated.