Why Does Space Feel the Way it Does? Towards a Principled Account of Spatial Experience

Abstract

There must be a reason why an experience feels the way it does. A good place to begin addressing this question is spatial experience, because it may be more penetrable by introspection than other qualities of consciousness such as color or pain. Moreover, much of experience is spatial, from that of our body to the visual world, which appears as if painted on an extended canvas in front of our eyes. Because it is ‘right there’, we usually take space for granted and overlook its qualitative properties. However, we should realize that a great number of phenomenal distinctions and relations are required for the canvas of space to feel ‘extended’. Here we argue that, to be experienced as extended, the canvas of space must be composed of countless spots, here and there, small and large, and these spots must be related to each other in a characteristic manner through connection, fusion, and inclusion. Other aspects of the structure of spatial experience follow from extendedness: every spot can be experienced as enclosing a particular region, with its particular location, size, boundary, and distance from other spots. We then propose an account of the phenomenal properties of spatial experiences based on integrated information theory (IIT). The theory provides a principled approach for characterizing both the quantity and quality of experience by unfolding the cause-effect structure of a physical substrate. Specifically, we show that a simple simulated substrate of units connected in a grid-like manner yields a cause-effect structure whose properties can account for the main properties of spatial experience. These results uphold the hypothesis that our experience of space is supported by brain areas whose units are linked by a grid-like connectivity. They also predict that changes in connectivity, even in the absence of changes in activity, should lead to a warping of experienced space. To the extent that this approach provides an initial account of phenomenal space, it may also serve as a starting point for investigating other aspects of the quality of experience and their physical correspondents.

Visual Functions Generating Conscious Seeing

“…It is also conceivable that the process of perceptual organization generates the ego-perspective that vision has. For example, it was recently proposed (in the context of IIT) that the perception of space, as it unfolds in front of our eyes, is supported by brain areas whose units are linked by a grid-like connectivity, as in visual cortex (Haun and Tononi, 2019). Others link the ego-perspective to integrating visual information with interoceptive information (Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014).…”

More than just front or back: Parietal-striatal-thalamic circuits predict consciousness level

“…Such spatial representations are vital for perception and awareness, as parietal lesions give rise to spatial neglect (24). Based on IIT, grid-like structures, as in parietal cortex, may be especially suitable for supporting our environmental experiences (25).…”

“…As F* outperformed other metrics in predicting changes in consciousness, integration -between parietal deep layers and subcortical areas -seems to be vital. However, IIT, with its cortical focus (10,16,25), has not incorporated subcortical areas like the striatum. Deep layers of parietal cortex project to the striatum and reciprocally connect with thalamus.…”

Integrated information structure collapses with anesthetic loss of conscious arousal inDrosophila melanogaster

“…So far, empirical testing of IIT has been lacking in this regard. Instead, research has instead focussed on comparing varying operationalizations of system-level integrated information with regards to theoretical requirements [27,17,[28][29][30] or specific network architectures [31][32][33]. Meanwhile, there are relatively few papers on testing system-level integrated information as a measure of consciousness in neural data [34].…”