Figure 3.

(A) The dynamics of perceptual content. Total phenomenological state comprises various articles whose temporal course of emergence and disappearance from awareness can vary greatly. Four perceptual contents/objects are shown (PC/O). Roughly speaking for a given stretch of time the total phenomenological state can be thought of as the sum of all the events/objects present in awareness. We have argued elsewhere that in a given state of consciousness this sum (the richness of consciousness, Tononi 2004) is constant over time (Fekete, 2010; Fekete and Edelman, 2011). (B) A trajectory through a state space. In the discrete case a trajectory would be a temporally ordered set of states, whereas in the continuous case it would be a path as is shown in the figure. (C) The space of all trajectories for a given system (in a given state of consciousness). Different categories correspond to different regions in space. Trajectories (points) within a category correspond to different instances of the category and share a family resemblance, through similarity in structure. This allows great flexibility in the face of varying uncertainty and computational demands, as the representational goal is achieved when a certain progression is achieved (a path), without implying that intermediate points need be reached at a constant rate, or that experience is strongly constrained by exact timing of stimuli. The ongoing hierarchical (multi-scale) computational efforts of interconnected neural networks enable the manifestation of conscious states, and constitute ever unfolding perceptual (and conceptual) content whose physical analog (i.e. isomorph) is emergence of ongoing multiscale structure (and synchrony) in space and time.