In The Quest for Consciousness (Roberts & Company Publishers, 2004, p. 161), Christoph Koch gives the following title to a section of the text:
Salient Objects Attract Attention
Maybe he should have said instead:
Attention Makes Objects Salient
That would be consistent with the computer theory of exceptions. Exceptions are raised when the brain cannot otherwise handle the situation; a situation that can't be handled by the regular process is salient.
Or an otherwise unremarkable object, i.e., an object fitting the current process, may be subject to attention. It then becomes salient, and therefore triggers an exception.
As with computers, the exception is an opportunity for the exception-handling procedures to examine the process that raised the exception. A process that can so be examined is called reflexive in computer science. So the brain uses the exception-handling procedure to investigate itself. That's what consciousness is made of.
You may ask at this point: how does a computer bring an object to attention? Technically, it sets for that object an explicit Throw procedure. That procedure goes out of the current process to find the next Catch procedure, that manages the exception thrown. In the absence of attention, the Throw procedure is implicit and simply triggered when the on-going process finds it can't handle the case at hand (it has found a salient object).
How does the brain know where to set up an explicit Throw procedure. Well, we've now moved the discussion of consciousness to that of attention. The way a computer does it is while it is in exception mode, i.e. when it is capable to look at a reflexive process, it can intervene on that process as dictated by the exception procedure.
Add to this recursivity and voila. We've built a conscious brain.
Bertrand du Castel
Salient Objects Attract Attention
Maybe he should have said instead:
Attention Makes Objects Salient
That would be consistent with the computer theory of exceptions. Exceptions are raised when the brain cannot otherwise handle the situation; a situation that can't be handled by the regular process is salient.
Or an otherwise unremarkable object, i.e., an object fitting the current process, may be subject to attention. It then becomes salient, and therefore triggers an exception.
As with computers, the exception is an opportunity for the exception-handling procedures to examine the process that raised the exception. A process that can so be examined is called reflexive in computer science. So the brain uses the exception-handling procedure to investigate itself. That's what consciousness is made of.
You may ask at this point: how does a computer bring an object to attention? Technically, it sets for that object an explicit Throw procedure. That procedure goes out of the current process to find the next Catch procedure, that manages the exception thrown. In the absence of attention, the Throw procedure is implicit and simply triggered when the on-going process finds it can't handle the case at hand (it has found a salient object).
How does the brain know where to set up an explicit Throw procedure. Well, we've now moved the discussion of consciousness to that of attention. The way a computer does it is while it is in exception mode, i.e. when it is capable to look at a reflexive process, it can intervene on that process as dictated by the exception procedure.
Add to this recursivity and voila. We've built a conscious brain.
Bertrand du Castel
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