Step 4: Calculate the Perception Index
The fourth step is to calculate the “perception index” (PI or \(\pi\))
of the putative resonating structure. PI refers to the perceptual or
sensory bandwidth of the PCC and is, in biological entities, based on
the various biological sensory pathways such as vision, touch,
etc. (Fn 3)
Footnote 3. Perceptual bandwidth doesn’t necessarily mean perception external to the brain, in the case of human complex subjects and probably for other mammalian consciousness either. For example, during dreaming there is clearly a high capacity for phenomenal content, with the “external” information supplied by certain parts of the brain instead of external perception. In the framework offered here, the parts of the brain that supply dream data to the CCL may be considered as external.
PI represents, essentially,
the connections from the CCL to the external world or, in the case of dreaming, data created internally and presented
to the PCC as though it were external data. Equation 2 provides a method
for calculating the sensory bandwidth (PI) of any PCC.
Eq. 2: \(\pi\left(\text{PCC}\right)=\sum{I\left(PCC,O_{j}^{\infty}\right)}\)
In Eq. 2, the sensory bandwidth of a PCC, in each iteration, is the sum
of all perceptual data between the PCC and the various objects of
perception, Oj. An “object” is literally any datum
presented to perception (Fn 4). This measurement
will in any interesting case not be simple due to the number of causal
connections between the PCC and the rest of the world, and the
difficulty in measuring these causal connections.
Footnote 4. All objects of perception are themselves subjects in a later moment, as they cycle from physical to mental poles in their own cycle times (Hunt 2019).
We can, as a working example in applying this framework, consider fruit
fly perception. Much is known about fruit flies, so they are a good
candidate for fleshing out this framework. To simplify further for
present purposes, let’s consider the fruit fly visual system as an
ostensibly separate neural system (it is, of course, not actually
separate).
Fruit flies have compound eyes with about 760 ommatidia (simple
eyes), each of which have eight photoreceptor cells. (Hardie and Raghu
2001). If we assume 12-bit color resolution for each photoreceptor, the
visual bandwidth of the fruit fly amounts to about 72,960 (12 x 760 x 8)
bits, the result of applying Eq. 2 for the visual system of a fruit
fly (Fn 5). As an index, this value for PI needs to be
normalized, however, to avoid unnecessarily large numbers in comparing
sensory bandwidth. For present purposes we can simply translate this
72,960 bit rate to a normalized value of 3 on a normalized scale from 0
to 10. The value we use for the normalized figure in this example is not
particularly important at this time because it’s only an illustrative
example (later work will flesh out a proposed normalization scale).
Footnote 5. Fruit flies have low spatial visual resolution compared to humans, but very good visual temporal resolution, at about 200 “frames per second.” By contrast, humans cannot experience much more than about 18 “frames per second” of visual input, though there are some exceptions.