The  Nursery

"Detector Approach"

Jan Holmgren     October 1997

jan.holmgren@mbox303.swipnet.se

"So this time the Cat vanished quite slowly, beginning with the tail, and ending with the grin. Wasn't that a curious thing, a Grin without any Cat? Would you like to see one?

If you turn up the corner of this leaf, you'll have Alice looking at the Grin: and she doesn't look a bit more frightened than when she was looking at the Cat, does she?"

Lewis Carroll (the Rev. Charles L. Dodgson, in The Nursery "Alice", first published 1890, intended "to be read by Children aged from Nought to Five. To be read? Nay, not so! Say rather to be thumbed, to be cooed over, to be dogs'-eared, to be rumpled, to be kissed ...") here demonstrated a fundamental observation, that can be verified by any child: There is much more in the world than matter or function; even the grin of the Cheshire Cat is "something".

Martin Gardner (in The Annotated Alice, first published 1960) remarked: "The phrase "grin without a cat" is not a bad description of pure mathematics. Although mathematical theorems often can be usefully applied to the structure of the external world, the theorems themselves are abstractions that belong in another realm "remote from human passions," as Bertrand Russell once put it in a memorable passage, "remote even from the pitiful facts of Nature ... an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.""

Karl Popper (in "The Bucket and the Searchlight", in Objective Knowledge, An evolutionary Approach, 1972) stated that universal statements and negative existential statements are logically equivalent. For example, the second law of thermodynamics can be formulated as follows: "There does not exist a machine which is 100 per cent efficient". To a scientist, says Popper, such formulations in the form of prohibitions are challenges to test and to falsify; they stimulate him to try to discover those states of affairs whose existence they prohibit or deny.

Fundamental for the Detector Approach (Hypothesis on Consciousness) is the following negative existential statement: "There does not exist a fall-out of consciousness with no qualities". According to this universal law, even a concept like "the grin of the Cheshire Cat" somehow involves qualities, even though they may be obscure, ethereal, and very hard, perhaps often impossible, to identify and name. Where there is no quality, there is no fall-out of consciousness.

I think the Cheshire Cat is a splendid complementary metaphor for that spot on the theater stage that is lit up by a searchlight in Baars' Global Workspace theory of consciousness. That spot need not be "held together", as seen "from the outside". Parts of it may be thought to appear and disappear in different places just like the Cheshire Cat, and function very much like this: ""How are you getting on?" said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with. Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. "It's no use speaking to it," she thought, "till its ears have come, or at least one of them.

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Consciousness The Detector Approach