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.