A theory of consciousness

International Journal of Research in Economics and Social Sciences, 2019

The human being is a creature of the nature. Like other creatures he is equipped with facilities that enabke him to navigate in the nature in which he operates, to feed himself that enables him to have the energy to operate in the nature, and to procreate, that more or less forces him to secure the survival of the species to which he belongs. The facilities include, beside arms, legs and muscles with which he can operate, and genitals, by which he can secure procreation, a set of senses which will alert him to the conditions he will encounter in nature, as well as to conditions inside his body. His senses will send nerve signals to various areas of his brain consisting of assemblies of neurons. From those areas neuronal signals will propagate to other neuronal assemblies via interconnecting axons.

The question of the nature of consciousness is one that has been long pondered, and yet tends to leave those who ponder it with more questions than answers. To wonder, "where does consciousness come from?" is more than to search for a specific structure in the brain, or a certain pattern of activity. By the same token, asking, "how does consciousness work?" does not lead one down a simple path to the functionality of a specific region of the brain. Consciousness, as integral and necessary for our existence as it seems, is anything but simple, and every aspect of its existence divides philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and many others. The search for a defining set of structures and level of complexity found in all organisms that are conscious becomes confounding when the realization is made that there isn't even really a solid definition for what consciousness is. This essay does not reveal the answer to the specifics of the nature of consciousness, and, to the scientific community's knowledge, neither does any other. However, this essay will put forth the theory that one's consciousness at any moment is an amalgamation of all of the sensory, social, and contextual influences that they experience in that moment. That it is a series of interactions between internal and external influences, between different brain structures, and between the body and the brain. In this essay, I will give evidence as to why I feel that consciousness can be most effectively understood by looking at it not as a singular state or stable set of properties, but as a constantly changing and dynamical system with many different interacting facets. To do this, I will address how consciousness has been studied philosophically, scientifically, and through disorders of consciousness.

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What is consciousness? What can we say about this elusive topic? We must begin with attention to ourselves. There is no other option because we have access only to our own consciousness, not to anybody else's. Within our own mental functioning, we have evidence on consciousness; we experience our minds and their workings. Relying on such experience, Bernard Lonergan proposed an account of consciousness, which I summarize here.

Within theoretical and empirical enquiries, many different meanings associated with consciousness have appeared, leaving the term itself quite vague. This makes formulating an abstract and unifying version of the concept of consciousness – the main aim of this article –into an urgent theoretical imperative. It is argued that consciousness, characterized as dually accessible (cognized from the inside and the outside), hierarchically referential (semantically ordered), bodily determined (embedded in the working structures of an organism or conscious system), and useful in action (pragmatically functional), is a graded rather than an all-or-none phenomenon. A gradational approach, however, despite its explanatory advantages, can lead to some counterintuitive consequences and theoretical problems. In most such conceptions consciousness is extended globally (attached to primitive organisms or artificial systems), but also locally (connected to certain lower-level neuronal and bodily processes). For example, according to information integration theory (as introduced recently by Tononi and Koch, 2014), even such simple artificial systems as photodiodes possess miniscule amounts of consciousness. The major challenge for this article, then, is to establish reasonable, empirically justified constraints on how extended the range of a graded consciousness could be. It is argued that conscious systems are limited globally by the ability to individuate information (where individuated information is understood as evolutionarily embedded, socially altered, and private), whereas local limitations should be determined on the basis of a hypothesis about the action-oriented nature of the processes that select states of consciousness. Using these constraints, an abstract concept of consciousness is arrived at, hopefully contributing to a more unified state of play within consciousness studies itself.

mental consciousness that supervenes upon ultrasensation. In Chapter 8, consciousness is unfolded, providing an explanation for its origin and evolution. Chapter 9 considers other perspectives on the nature of consciousness, including psychology, Western and Eastern philosophies, and theology. Part 2, Physics and Metaphysics, is presented for readers interested in the more technical principles of theoretical physics and the deeper ontology underlying the cycles of the cosmos and evolution along the anthropic pathway. Chapter 10 investigates gauge theory, describing how global and local symmetries are mediated in the standard model and relativity. Chapter 11 describes symmetry-group theory, and the many types and characteristics of the symmetries enfolded in nature. M-Theory/string theory, cyclic braneworld cosmology, and the origin and nature of entropy are described in Chapter 12. In Chapter 13, the ubiquity of cycles in nature is demonstrated, ranging from loop quantum gravity, to intercycling environmental-biological-neural pathways, to the life-cycle of the universe. An excursion is taken to study object orientation in computer science, and show how this information messaging paradigm is intrinsic to all systems of nature. Chapter 14 discusses quantum mechanics in detail, comparing its orthodox interpretation to David Bohm's ontological interpretation, which "emphasizes the wholeness that is signified by quantum laws." In Chapter 15, the anthropic pathway is retraced in terms of astrophysics; quantum Darwinism, natural selection, and universal Darwinism are reviewed; and the "fine tuning problem" is investigatedi.e., what was the cause or reason for the universe to have possessed the improbable coincidence of property values necessary for complexity and conscious life to emerge and evolve? The multiverse solution to the fine tuning problem is negatively critiqued; instead, a specific evolutionary pathway that has developed within the event horizon of our observable universe is delineated. This pathway has traversed an extremum between order and disorder, proceeding inexorably toward an anthropic attractor of complexity, and the conscious human brain. The Anthropic Pathway 12 causally affective interpretant process-structure. (An open system has throughput and variable contents, as opposed to an isolated-system in which contents are conserved. A living biosemiotic system, while holistically closed, is an open system.) Thus, a cell, a tree, a sea star, and a human being are all holistically-closed, open-system, biosemiotic interpretants processing afferent and efferent sign streams within their holistic symmetry space. For example, the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas has eye-apparatus capable of sensing light (afferent signs), processing these signs (interpretant), and then directing its motor flagella to move by broadcasting intracellular electric signals (efferent signs). As defined by Webster, experience is "the direct participation in or the observation of events as a basis of knowledge." A unicellular organism like an amoeba, which can sense and recognize a paramecium, and decide to engulf and assimilate it based upon the content of its self-embodied knowledge base, satisfies this definition of experience. Similarly, a tree, sensing light, moisture, gravity, or pressure in its environment, can process and integrate that information, evaluate it with respect to its stored knowledge base, and determine the optimal growth trajectories through which to project its roots, altogether constituting an experience. New experiences may be encoded into the process-structure of the tree to update its knowledge base, which may later be called upon to reiterate or avoid that experience. An experience realized by any holistic biosemiotic living system may result either from signs that originate in the external environment-such as the experience of hearing a bell-or from signs produced within the system's internal milieu of interdependent pathways-such as the experience of a thought. Whether stemming from external or internal sources, experiences update the process-structure and knowledge base of an organism, and influence the nature and consequences of its subsequent experiences. The Anthropic Pathway 14 by emitting and reacting to electrochemical ions. The electrochemical signaling currency of neurons has taken the form of small neurotransmitter molecules. Neurotransmitters evolved from large prohormone-derived signaling peptides used in non-neuronal signaling systems. A neuron accumulates voltage through its afferent connections, or dendrites, located on its input end, and releases neurotransmitters from efferent connections on its output end, or axon, upon the accumulation of a specific action potential voltage on the cell body. Neurotransmitters may induce or inhibit other neurons to reach their particular action potential firing thresholds. Action potentials were originally involved in nonneuronal mechanisms such as flagellar beating in motile single-celled choanoflagellates, which later colonized to form multicellular organisms that inherited and exapted the action potential underpinnings. Neurotransmitters are conveyed across tiny clefts, called synapses, which are located between the efferent axon of one neuron and the afferent dendrite of another. Synapses were co-opted from ancestral peptide-based protosynaptic devices utilized in cell-to-cell communication among unicellular organisms, including colonial choanoflagellates. The first nervous systems were in the form of diffuse nerve nets located just beneath the epidermal layer of certain marine organisms. Nerve nets facilitated prolonged, coordinated, and integrated behaviors. Nerve nets appeared independently in the phylogenic branches of Ctenophora (comb jellies) and Cnidaria (hydra, jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals). Within evolving nerve nets, infoldment led to the clustering of groups of neurons into ganglia, nuclei, and centralized proto-brains. Later, Bilateria split from the Cnidaria line, and it is in this line that the most extreme degrees of neural complexification, anatomical and functional specialization, and informational integration have been attained, notably in the neocortex of Homo sapiens. The nervous system is often considered, or defined, to be the only platform upon which consciousness exists. However, the systematic evolutionary the interpretant process-structure may operate independently of the sensory, motor, and homeostatic systems lying outside the interneuronal domain by processing and cycling sign streams flowing exclusively within the domain, as in the case of the cycles encoding and recalling multimodal memories, and, in advanced domains, for the logic cycles facilitating cognitive thinking. Furthermore, selective partitioning of the interpretant network into a unitary, reentrant, and sustained ultrasensory complex establishes the endogenous environment underlying the phenomenal symmetry space of subjective experientiality. Complexity and holistic closure. The interneuronal domain is not merely a network that relays patterns of integrated information for collective sensation and mechanical response. The interneuronal domain has evolved into a feedback-feedforward network of such complexity that it The integration of information through the nodal hierarchy begins when impulses, such as light rays or sound waves, impinge on sensory receptors in the eye or ear. Patterns contained within these impulses are mapped via the thalamus to first-level processing nodes in the primary cortices specialized for vision or audition. These processed patterns are then forwarded to second level nodes for unimodal association, where, for the sense of vision, specific colors, shapes, and motional attributes are identified and integrated. At levels three and four of the hierarchy, The term "neural correlate of consciousness" has two connotations. The full neural correlate of consciousness is the spatiotemporal symmetry space that encompasses all of the indispensable process-structures which may combine to produce an object of consciousness. The collection of spatiotemporal structures corresponding to the full neural correlate of consciousness has been termed the dynamic core-the concepts of the dynamic core, neuronal group selection, the remembered present, and reentry are due to the late Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman. Originally, the dynamic core was conjectured to consist of the thalamocortical system, * * *

I argue that (subjective) consciousness is an aspect of an agent's intelligence, hence of its ability to deal adaptively with the world. In particular, it allows for the possibility of noting and correcting the agent's errors, as actions performed by itself. This in turn requires a robust self-concept as part of the agent's world model; the appropriate notion of self here is a special one, allowing for a very strong kind of self-reference. It also requires the capability to come to see that world model as residing in its belief base (part of itself), while then representing the actual world as possibly different, i.e., forming a new world-model. This suggests particular computational mechanisms by which consciousness occurs, ones that conceivably could be discovered by neuroscientists, as well as built into artificial systems that may need such capabilities.

Communication and Cognition, 2001

ABSTRACT (first two sentences added for 2013 upload) This paper focuses on the ontology and intentionality of conscious states (what conscious states are and what they represent). It also gives a critique of reductive physicalism. Physicalists commonly argue that conscious experiences are nothing more than states of the brain, and that conscious qualia are observer-independent, physical properties of the external world. Although this assumes the ‘mantle of science,’ it routinely ignores the findings of science, for example in sensory physiology, perception, psychophysics, neuropsychology and comparative psychology. Consequently, although physicalism aims to naturalise consciousness, it gives an unnatural account of it. It is possible, however, to develop a natural, nonreductive, reflexive model of how consciousness relates to the brain and the physical world. This paper introduces such a model and how it construes the nature of conscious experience. Within this model the physical world as perceived (the phenomenal world) is viewed as part of conscious experience not apart from it. While in everyday life we treat this phenomenal world as if it is the “physical world”, it is really just one biologically useful representation of what the world is like that may differ in many respects from the world described by physics. How the world as perceived relates to the world as described by physics can be investigated by normal science (e.g. through the study of sensory physiology, psychophysics and so on). This model of consciousness appears to be consistent with both third-person evidence of how the brain works and with first-person evidence of what it is like to have a given experience. According to the reflexive model, conscious experiences are really how they seem.

ALEFTP 7501 Approaches to Consciousness: Introductory Materials, 2021

Introductory essay and glossary for the Alef Trust 7501 Approaches to Consciousness course. Updates for August 2025 include: •An extra paragraph in the essay detailing the May 2025 debate over IIT and 'pseudoscience' in Nature. •An additional glossary entry on Time consciousness. • mention of a new paper by Woollacott & Weiler in the 'Transmission theories of consciousness' entry. The paper discusses possible neural substrates of the 'filter'. • Other minor updates include mention of a 2025 article on Free Will from Scientific American. This suggests that we do not yet have sufficient evidence from neuroscience to disprove free will.