Seeing red

[emjay]

By common medium do you mean the body map? As in how you can feel referred pain in all the wrong places etc? Or are you saying that this common medium exists (in whatever non-existing sense you define ) wherever there is matter and that essentially forms blocks bound together by relationships etc so that say the brain... or what is active in the brain could form one such block and the bigger it is, the richer and more subjective it is? Or something else entirely?

Well, it's clear that all our experiences are drawn together into a single sense of awareness.  What is it into/around which they are drawn together?  How is it that multiple, mostly independent systems manifest as a sense of unified experience?

One thing that a neural network is exceptionally good at is finding common denominators... ie stereotypes. If a pattern's there it will find it and represent it given enough interconnectivity between neurons, which is certainly the case in the brain. So given a system that uses a neural network to integrate sensory data from a lot of different sources, and coordinate it for the benefit of the whole organism, I believe it is inevitable that the network would identify the common denominator that all this sensory data applies to - the organism - and therefore neurally represent a self at various levels of abstraction - including the body map for instance, and perhaps at the apex of that, the single self... the part that appears to own all of this. It wouldn't matter what neuron(s) did the job... that would be changeable depending on how the network settles... such that with the split-brain patients who at least appear to have two consciousnesses, the network, split into two smaller networks would find them both settling into new states with different neurons coming to represent the self. And that would then be one of the states to be differentiated in consciousness with it taking the form of a single sense of awareness with the all perceptions revolving around it being a manifestation of the relationships and states it has to preserve in the network.