Editing Binding problem (section)

=== History ===
Early philosophers René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz<!--[26]--><ref>{{Citation|last1=Kulstad|first1=Mark|title=Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind|date=2020|url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/leibniz-mind/|encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|editor-last=Zalta|editor-first=Edward N.|edition=Winter 2020|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University|access-date=2022-06-09|last2=Carlin|first2=Laurence}}</ref> noted that the apparent unity of our experience is an all-or-none qualitative characteristic that does not appear to have an equivalent in the known quantitative features, like proximity or cohesion, of composite matter. [[William James]],<ref>{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.210224|title=The principles of psychology Vol. I|last=James|first=William|date=1890-01-01|page=145|publisher=New York : Holt}}</ref> in the nineteenth century, considered the ways the unity of consciousness might be explained by known physics and found no satisfactory answer. He coined the term "combination problem", in the specific context of a "mind-dust theory" in which it is proposed that a full human conscious experience is built up from proto- or micro-experiences in the way that matter is built up from atoms. James claimed that such a theory was incoherent, since no causal physical account could be given of how distributed proto-experiences would "combine". He favoured instead a concept of "co-consciousness" in which there is one "experience of A, B and C" rather than combined experiences. A detailed discussion of subsequent philosophical positions is given by Brook and Raymont (see 26). However, these do not generally include physical interpretations.

[[Alfred North Whitehead|Whitehead]]<ref>Whitehead, A. N. (1929) Process and Reality. 1979 corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press. {{ISBN|0-02-934570-7}}</ref> proposed a fundamental ontological basis for a relation consistent with James's idea of co-consciousness, in which many causal elements are co-available or "compresent" in a single event or "occasion" that constitutes a unified experience. Whitehead did not give physical specifics, but the idea of compresence is framed in terms of causal convergence in a local interaction consistent with physics. Where Whitehead goes beyond anything formally recognized in physics is in the "chunking" of causal relations into complex but discrete "occasions". Even if such occasions can be defined, Whitehead's approach still leaves James's difficulty with finding a site, or sites, of causal convergence that would make neurobiological sense for "co-consciousness". Sites of signal convergence do clearly exist throughout the brain but there is a concern to avoid re-inventing what [[Daniel Dennett]]<ref name="Dennett">{{cite book|last =Dennett|first= Daniel|date=1981|title =  Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology|publisher = MIT Press|isbn = 0262540371|url = https://books.google.com/books?id=_xwObaAZEwoC}}</ref> calls a Cartesian Theater or a single central site of convergence of the form that Descartes proposed.

Descartes's central "soul" is now rejected because neural activity closely correlated with conscious perception is widely distributed throughout the cortex. The remaining choices appear to be either separate involvement of multiple distributed causally convergent events or a model that does not tie a phenomenal experience to any specific local physical event but rather to some overall "functional" capacity. Whichever interpretation is taken, as Revonsuo<ref name="Revonsuo 1999"/> indicates, there is no consensus on what structural level we are dealing with – whether the cellular level, that of cellular groups as "nodes", "complexes" or "assemblies" or that of widely distributed networks. There is probably only general agreement that it is not the level of the whole brain, since there is evidence that signals in certain primary sensory areas, such as the V1 region of the visual cortex (in addition to motor areas and cerebellum), do not contribute directly to phenomenal experience.