The Four Realms

This the most detailed, most researched, most up to date, and quite frankly the Best Model of Consciousness articulated in LeDoux's the 4th Realm. The first Realm is biological, the second is neuro-bio-logical, third is Cognitive. LeDoux maps Kahneman's System 1 into the neurobiological and the cognitive realms and System 2 maps to Consciousness, the Fourth Realm.

This is just scratching the surface

The book builds and codes concepts and in the last chapter, Ledoux lays out his Mental Model of Consciousness. Here is a quote from the end of the book. It reads like dense code, but after reading thru the book, the code and the model make sense.

p.290 " For example, within-modality features of visual objects (the color and shape of an apple) are bound together in the visual cortex. Then multimodal binding involving convergence zones in the parietal and temporal lobes integrates the visual representations with representations from other modalities, such as audition. Episodic multimodal visual scenes are constructed in parietal and hippocampal circuits. The final construction of the multimodal Gestalt representation requires the assembly of schema in the sub-granular meso-cortex. These schema are then integrated into granular PFC working memory, providing the conceptual foundation for the pre-conscious mental model of the present moment.

The output of the pre-conscious model, I suggest, results in a conscious experience with multimodal content, much like Baddeley suggested for his hypothetical episodic buffer. Baddeley stopped short of explaining how the episodic buffer might enable complex conscious experience. I will pick up where he left off, focusing on how complex multimodal experiences are constructed as higher-order states.

My proposal, in brief, is that conscious experience is not a direct output of the pre-conscious mental model but is instead secondary to an abstract (that is, multimodal, or modality independent), pre-conscious, narrative code, a kind of mentalese, that the model generates. But before I explain the mentalese nature of the narrative, I need to explain mentalese itself."

p.295 "The abstract mentalese narrative can, in other words, be thought of as a mental stream with three broad distributaries, or sub-streams, that diverge from the pre-conscious mental model (Figure 26.1).
- One is the distributary of verbal expression. It flows to cortical language circuits, making possible external linguistic communication about the contents of the narrative.
- The second is the distributary of action. It controls goal-directed behavior by way of connections with the basal ganglia and cortical motor circuits. And
- the third stream is the distributary of consciousness, the ground zero of explicit conscious ex-periences. Unlike the other two streams, the distributary of conscious-ness remains within the confines of PFC working memory, where it populates a second mental model, a conscious one, with explicit content in the form of a conscious higher-order state."

p.294 "In-the-moment mental states require momentary neural activity consisting of short, coherent neural events that reflect what happens over the course of several hundred milliseconds. These are bundled together into event chunks by postdictive processing, as discussed previ-ously. In other words, the pre-conscious content of the present-moment mental model (that is, the high-order state) is an event chunk_ One set of outputs of the pre-conscious mental model goes back to the lower-order input circuits, setting up recurrent activity that"

p.298 " different kinds of conscious states also have different energy needs. The default condition for consciousness is low-energy tacit anoesis, which uses procedural meta-cognition to implicitly con-ceptualize lower-order states and maintain fringe experiences in the conscious mental model. Higher-energy noetic consciousness is called on when explicit factual or conceptual content is needed to explicitly categorize and conceptualize external or internal events, but also to verify anoetic feelings of rightness, or cope with feelings of wrongness. Super-high-energy autonoetic consciousnesses is engaged when, and only when, episodic memory is deployed to explicitly conceptualize your personal involvement in a situation, as in mental time travel. ... The conscious model is engaged only when distinct advantages justify its energy expenditure."

p.286 "...several problem-solving functions of confabulations: sense-making to understand the present; self-making to maintain personal identity; and world-making to organize interactions with the outer world. One way to think about all this is that confabulations are called on when ordinary narrations are insufficient to sustain a Jamesian feeling of rightness."

Information is distributed around the brain, using predictive coding to synchronize the local Mental models. This is this coding is known as Mental ease.