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Electronic Letters to:
- BehavioralSystemsCognitive:
Ilja G. Sligte, H. Steven Scholte, and Victor A. F. Lamme- V4 Activity Predicts the Strength of Visual Short-Term Memory Representations
J. Neurosci. 2009; 29: 7432-7438[Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]
eLetters: Submit a response to this article
Electronic letters published:
"Solution to the "hard problem"
- Wim F. Kruit (23 September 2009)
"Solution to the "hard problem" 23 September 2009 
Wim F. Kruit,
biology professor
Amsterdam Polytechnic 1091 GM AmsterdamSend letter to journal:
Re: "Solution to the "hard problem"
w.kruit9{at}upcmail.nl Wim F. Kruit
Sligte et al. describe (visual) consciousness as follows: ”The stimulus will evoke recurrent processing (RP) confined to visual and temporal areas. As long as this local RP is present, the stimulus representation will still be available for conscious access once top-down attention is redeployed”. However, this theory leaves an important aspect unanswered, as earlier stated by the same authors (Lamme, 2006): “Why do some processes in the brain evoke conscious experiences, but others do not?" (The so-called “hard problem”).
I suggest the following answer. The RP is the result of a process of information reduction. I propose that this is achieved by turning the sensory input into an idea, as in the following example. A picture of, say, the queen, can be described by the coordinates and quality of each pixel. A page filled with these numbers would need a translator, while the picture itself offers instant recognition of the idea "the queen", and can be quickly transported to other parts of the brain.
Just one example of the usefulness of this concept of consciousness is activated extracted meaning. People with blindsight report to be blind in part of their visual field, but are able, e.g., to tell how many fingers are held up. Sligte et al. show that this can be explained by a lesion in the connection between the visual cortex circuits and the frontoparietal region, which selects what becomes conscious. So the ”idea” is created (which causes the RP) but kept at low activity, since it cannot be activated. Therefore there is no conscious awareness of “seeing”, but since some meaning has been extracted this can be picked up by brain areas that produce answers about what is “seen”.
Reference
V.A.F. Lamme. Trends in Cognitive sciences 2006;10:494.
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