From probabilities to percepts: A subcortical “global best estimate buffer” as locus of phenomenal experience

“…an essentially neurological concept—the concept of “somatotopic,” “topographic,” and “isomorphic” sensory maps or representations—can be translated into simple ideas or terms that have a clear meaning from the standpoint of subjective awareness, without getting too deeply entrenched in the many…”

“The decision making machinery hypothetically incorporated into the schematic egocenter in my previous publications (see Merker, 2012, pp. 59, 68; Merker, 2013, pp. 19–22, and Figures 1.2 and 1.4 in particular) accordingly is the intrinsic collicular circuitry by which the priority target of the…”

“…of your brain’s pre-personal, non-conscious, neurocomputational “best guess” as to what is causally responsible for your current and just passed sensory data in a given context and relative to certain priors (of varying flexibility) that constrain and bias your perception (cf., Merker, 2012).”

“…brainstem may be the medium for conscious function (Merker, 2007) but more recently he has discussed the possible role of thalamic nuclei in implementing a “global best estimate buffer” and implementing perspective and an ego-center for interactions with the body and external world (Merker, 2012).”

“First, it has been proposed that conscious contents, because of their very nature, can never be ambiguous at one moment in time (Merker, 2012).”

“This approach is consistent with that of Merker (2012), who argues that this occurs in a “best estimate buffer,” although he locates it in the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus.”

“From classical theories to more recent ones, much of consciousness research has brought to the fore the phenomenologically salient and central role of a ”subjective perspective”, as a non-trivial, viewpoint-dependent, unified internal representation of the world in perspective [57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 42, 63, 40, 3].”

“…of the degree to which the “sensory world” of a given taxon has been augmented with an elaborate system for veridically reconstructing the sources of sensory afference based on prior learning — the basic function of neocortex in mammals and of telencephalic elaboration in birds (Merker 2012).”

“Meanwhile, that conjecture is far from being as secure as its adherents might think (see Merker, 2007, 2012, 2013), and requires one to ignore the fact that so far the strongest neural correlate of awareness has been recorded in a subcortical and not a cortical location (Wilke et al., 2009).”

“…sometimes under the notion of a first-person “egocenter”, as operating, in a pivotal manner, at the core of the inferential processing allowing organisms to adaptively relate multimodal sensory information and intentional action in the world (Merker 2013, p. 13; see also Merker 2012, p. 54).”

“Contextual disambiguation is crucial to cognition in general and perception in particular [1], as highlighted by the work of many artists such as René Magritte and Maurits Escher.”

“…2017; Pitts et al., 2018), but in particular that it is “through [gaze shifts] that the brain most immediately expresses its behavioral priority of the moment, and it is to them that it yokes the recruitment of the remainder of its motoric equipment in implementing actions” (Merker, 2012, pg. 46).”

“In this latter view, prefrontal activity may well be the source of conscious contents, but it is not the site where the content becomes conscious (Merker, 2012).”