Gómez-Emilsson Andrés, Percy Chris
Qualia Research Institute, San Francisco, CA, United States.
College of Arts, Humanities and Education, University of Derby, Derby, United Kingdom.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2023 Aug 3;17:1233119. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2023.1233119. eCollection 2023.
The boundary problem is related to the binding problem, part of a family of puzzles and phenomenal experiences that theories of consciousness (ToC) must either explain or eliminate. By comparison with the phenomenal binding problem, the boundary problem has received very little scholarly attention since first framed in detail by Rosengard in 1998, despite discussion by Chalmers in his widely cited 2016 work on the combination problem. However, any ToC that addresses the binding problem must also address the boundary problem. The binding problem asks how a unified first person perspective (1PP) can bind experiences across multiple physically distinct activities, whether billions of individual neurons firing or some other underlying phenomenon. To a first approximation, the boundary problem asks why we experience hard boundaries around those unified 1PPs and why the boundaries operate at their apparent spatiotemporal scale. We review recent discussion of the boundary problem, identifying several promising avenues but none that yet address all aspects of the problem. We set out five specific boundary problems to aid precision in future efforts. We also examine electromagnetic (EM) field theories in detail, given their previous success with the binding problem, and introduce a feature with the necessary characteristics to address the boundary problem at a conceptual level. Topological segmentation can, in principle, create exactly the hard boundaries desired, enclosing holistic, frame-invariant units capable of effecting downward causality. The conclusion outlines a programme for testing this concept, describing how it might also differentiate between competing EM ToCs.
边界问题与绑定问题相关，绑定问题是意识理论（ToC）必须解释或消除的一系列谜题和现象体验的一部分。与现象绑定问题相比，自1998年罗森加德首次详细阐述以来，边界问题受到的学术关注极少，尽管查尔默斯在其2016年被广泛引用的关于组合问题的著作中进行了讨论。然而，任何解决绑定问题的ToC也必须解决边界问题。绑定问题询问统一的第一人称视角（1PP）如何在多个物理上不同的活动中绑定体验，无论是数十亿个单个神经元的放电还是其他潜在现象。初步近似地说，边界问题询问为什么我们在那些统一的1PP周围体验到硬边界，以及为什么这些边界在其明显的时空尺度上运作。我们回顾了最近对边界问题的讨论，确定了几个有前途的途径，但没有一个能解决该问题所有方面。我们提出五个具体的边界问题，以帮助未来的研究更加精确。我们还详细研究了电磁场（EM）理论，鉴于其在绑定问题上的先前成功，并引入了一个具有必要特征的特性，以便在概念层面解决边界问题。原则上，拓扑分割可以精确地创建所需的硬边界，包围能够实现向下因果关系的整体、帧不变单元。结论概述了测试这一概念的计划，描述了它如何也能区分相互竞争的EM ToC。
