joseph magrie
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Consciousness - An Adventure on the Anthropic Pathway
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Abstract
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, * * *