Jhanas, symmetry, and the substrate of consciousness

Jhanas seem to be existence proofs that the substrate of consciousness can be refined enough that individual symmetry groups emerge

This is a surprising result! And puts constraints on what this substrate could be

I’m curious whether the lower jhanas are strict subsets of higher & whether going up each jhana increases the symmetry group of experience by exactly 1 or ≥1

Stream of thought long answer about Jhanas, discrete symmetries, & the substrate of consciousness:

“Jhanas track the stepwise presence/absence of individual symmetries” might go too far but “each jhana corresponds to relaxing one or more symmetry-breaking constraints” is I think pretty plausible. That it’s *even possible* for the biological substrate of consciousness to enter & sustain low-complexity modes & stepwise transitions is interesting, suggesting (e.g.)
1. At least weak evidence that there’s one primary substrate of interest, rather than many (i.e. if consciousness is smeared across all of biology, all else being equal it’s less likely to exhibit such simple *and* stable patterns because perturbations & degrees of freedom may leak across systems & cause instability)*;
2. A heuristic for approaching the binding/boundary problem. Boundaries determine eigenmodes; insofar as we can assume & identify simple eigenmodes in the body we can “track the energy” and explore the converse, i.e. the degree to which eigenmodes also determine boundaries;

More broadly, I think the jhana-symmetry perspective could also help
3. Separate the ‘substrate of consciousness’ from the ’signatures of constraints’ & mechanisms that constrain its eigenmodes. Jhana seems gated by muscle tension & vasocomputation suggests (vascular) muscle tension as a core mechanism the mind uses for symmetry breaking. I think it may be unusually productive to look at the physiology of how muscle tension affects each candidate substrate for consciousness;
4. Neuroimaging heuristics: the more we can infer about the informational profile & physical substrate of each jhana, the more easily we can search for their signatures on neuroimaging. Practically speaking and all else being equal, if the higher jhanas do involve more symmetries, neuroimaging data from them should be more compressible and this relationship might be stepwise+convergent across practitioners.

To your question: which substrates do these considerations point toward? I’d highlight three (each of which is coupled to the others in a somewhat complex way):
- Microtubules. The more I look into Penrose & @StuartHameroff’s thesis (along with @anirbanbandyo) that microtubule resonance is an interesting substrate for human consciousness the more it seems worth taking seriously. Though there’s little consensus on the relative contributions of & functional interactions between microtubules and mitochondria.
- Water. Water is the dominant molecular medium of the cell & H2O has a bunch of unusual chemical properties that lend itself to periodic structure. We’ve spoken briefly about the ‘water chemistry fork’ of cell biology, e.g. Szent-Györgyi’s ‘flickering water’ model of the cell & Ling’s POM**. Pollack has a modern synthesis of a subset of these ideas. The basic story from these thinkers is that water in biological systems may have more order than we think & plays a significant role in biological function & pathology. The poetic version is something like ‘we evolved in the ocean and took it with us in our cells’ (cf Bernard & Quinton). The qualia variant of this might be ‘we underestimate the degree to which human qualia is water qualia’, i.e. basic biological qualia may be structurally emergent from the eigenmodes, symmetries, & symmetry breaking operations intrinsic to a certain structured / partially ordered phase of water.
- “EM”. I think the electromagnetic field is the arena where most of the consciousness magic happens because it’s the arena where almost all of complexity lives (cf Barrett 2014), at least at human scales. You also have a very solid paper discussing this. The question then is how to identify the most interesting subsystems affecting these fields in biology. “What are the smallest, simplest systems with the fewest degrees of freedom which account for a disproportionate amount of the variance in our EM field?” Or in terms of A Paradigm for AI Consciousness, “what levers & state spaces primarily determine the human body’s branchial repertoire?”

A bit of a tangent but I also think vasocomputation latches are likely to act as enforced local dynamic minima that constrain EM, microtubule/cytoskeletal, & water-related degrees of freedom. 'Latches as dead qualia pixels' holds across all three of these candidate substrates. “What is the local bioelectric environment of a latch?” is imo one of the most interesting open questions in bio / consciousness research / longevity.

*Could be 'merely definitionally true' but I think there's a stronger version that says something real. Still held weakly

**A deep thank you @anabology for helpful compressions of ASG & Ling

Thinking about @adamsafron's wonderful phrase, "making and breaking symmetries in mind and life" --

To a first approximation, the nervous system makes symmetries and the vasomuscular system breaks them. Neural firing is fast, recurrent, & condition-sensitive, allowing coherent modes to discover and amplify one another; vascular contraction durably deforms the local neural state space, imposing metabolic clamps & bioelectric boundary conditions that break the symmetry among competing modes and stabilize a small number against the rest.

I.e. neurons are sensitive & adaptive but noncommittal and 'just want to vibe' whereas the vasomuscular system has strong opinions & can hold neurons in semi-static states to enforce them. The more such ‘stagnant pocket universes' in our nervous systems, the harsher harmonization constraints get (like a toddler hitting the same note over and over when you’re trying to play a song)

In a system with high symmetry, careful symmetry breaking can impose a coordinate system. Vasocomputation+STV suggest that infant nervous systems can have huge peaks of joy but lack a functional coordinate system, which limits their ability to form & address structure inside their nervous system, and model & coordinate with the environment outside of it. We see a temporary relaxation towards this state in e.g. the higher jhanas (prediction: progression in the jhanas is gated by capacity to temporarily open the deep-seated latches which implement this coordinate system, or at least harmonize with them such that they’re temporarily phenomenologically invisible)

“As above, so below” and if we ground the cell's symmetry group in water/tetrahedral symmetry, cellular computation could be thought of as moving among these symmetry classes. Optimistically, this lens could inform a future periodic table of cellular qualia, which could itself form the basis for a similar table of tissue resonance qualia. Less optimistically, it’s a significant compression of three big claims: that qualia is substantially localizable to cells/tissue, that tetrahedral order is the right backdrop for understanding a cell’s state space, and that this state space is tightly coupled to qualia (e.g. water structure proxies EM structure, which proxies local qualia structure). But even if these three claims didn’t pan out I’d still hold that we should be able to coarse-grain a cell’s symmetry groups and this will form the basic shape of its functional repertoire

(Thanks to Adam for discussion on this, and to @KanizsaBoundary for previous discussion on coordinate systems. I still think (vaso)muscular addressability & reverse-engineering the control signal is a particularly high-value target)