VI. Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

A. Natural Econsciousness and Ecognition

Kawade, Yoshimi. The Origin of Mind: The Mind-Matter Continuity Thesis. Biosemiotics. 6/3, 2013. For this “Origins of Mind” issue a Japanese linguist scholar, in the tradition of biologist Kinji Imanishi (1902-1992), distances from Western contrary views to aver Asian convictions of an innately mindful nature and cosmos. Mechanistic neoDarwinian selection only occurs after the fact of formative, “proto-mind” influences. Accordingly, cells and organisms possess an original creative autonomy, rather than passively impacted by environments, akin to theorist Robert Reid’s revision (2007, 2010). In such a conducive, informed milieu, life’s evolution is distinguished by ramifying semiotic and communicative qualities. As a result, a regnant consciousness emerges from primal matter to human witness and cognizance. It is worth much notice that a bicameral worldwide noosphere is not beholding to western machine sterility. For Eastern, and Southern realms, a phenomenal organic vitality and vision is the evident once and future preference.

Living things are autonomous agents distinguished from nonliving things in having the purpose to actively maintain their existence. All living things, including single-celled organisms, have certain degrees of freedom from physical causality to choose their actions with intentions to fulfill their purpose. This circumstance is analogous to that of human intention-actions guided by mind, and points to the ubiquitous presence of the dimension of mind in the living world. The primordial form of mind in single-celled organisms eventually evolved into the human mind by virtue of the adaptive value of mind for survival. Life seems to have originated from nonliving matter in processes that are continuous. Thus the dimension of mind must extend to the nonliving world, and the origin of mind should be taken to relate to the origin of matter. Inasmuch as matter exists in a hierarchy of levels of complexity extending from quarks up to the whole universe, mind must also be presumed to exist in a hierarchy of levels of complexity associated with matter. (Abstract)

The biologist M. Dan (Saibou no ishi (Cell’s Will) 2008) ascertains, with support by observations of a large variety of living systems, that each living cell is an autonomous being with its own will and acts on its will to achieve the purpose to live and, in the case of a cell in multicellular organisms, to fulfill its particular role for the whole organism. Since such a view will not be gained by mechanistic-reductionistic approaches to living systems that are prevalent in contemporary biological research, she emphasizes the importance of observing the behavior of whole organisms. Proto-emotion and cellular will be aspects of a proto-mind. It will develop gradually into mature mind, integrating will, emotion and other elements through organic evolution, because of the adaptive value for survival that mind undoubtedly has, even at its primordial levels.

King, Chris. Quantum Mechanics, Chaos and the Conscious Brain. Journal of Mind and Behavior. 18/2-3, 1997. Speculations that the human brain manifests a universal evolutionary dynamics which springs from quantum non-locality. Subjective consciousness is primal and gives rise to free will and choice. The Australian neuroscientist has also posted a “Biocosmology” website at: www.dhushara.com/book/bchtm/biocos.htm.

Kleiner, Johannes. Models of Consciousness. arXiv:1907.03223. A Leibniz University of Hannover postdoc mathematical physicist provides a latest survey which builds on the work of David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel so as to course through integrated information theory, global workspace models, conscious agent networks, and more.

The study of consciousness has emerged as a response to novel developments in neuroscience, cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy. Its aim is to develop a scientific account, formulated by way of mathematical laws or regularities, of how conscious experience relates to the physical domain. Even though models of consciousness have been proposed in the literature, details of the underlying conceptual terminology and framework remain poorly understood. This paper proposes a scientific study of consciousness based on concise definitions along with several examples. (Abstract excerpt)

Koch, Christof. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. A consummate statement by a leading neuroscientist reviewed more in Current Vistas.

Koch, Christof. Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. New York: Dutton,, 2024. The natural neuroscientist philosopher (search) continues his quest for a viable understanding of our very human sentient, knowledgeable awareness. His subjects are both his own emotional senses and their essential situation within a conducive cosmos. .In regard, his main thematic guide is integrated-information theory see section) which he endorses and embellishes. In all, the 2020s contribution illumes and presages our personal and planetary awakening to a new, phenomenal procreativity.

In his latest contribution, Christof Koch explores the only thing we directly experience: consciousness. The text proceeds to investigate the physical origins in the brain and how this basis can be used to measure consciousness in natural and artificial systems.   He explains when and where can degrees of consciousness exists, in consideration of major social and scientific questions: When does a fetus first become self-aware? Can psychedelic and mystical experiences transform lives? What happens to consciousness in near-death experiences? Why will generative AI ultimately be able to do the very thing we can do, yet never feel any of it? And do our experiences reveal a single, objective reality?

The brain is the most complex piece of self-organized matter in the known universe. By no coincidence, it is the organ of consciousness. Unlike advances in genomics and astrophysics, progress in understanding the brain and mind directly relates to who we are, our strengths and infirmities and whether we partake of some larger, ultimate reality which we can and will discover. (13)

Christof Koch is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, and a former professor at the California Institute of Technology.

Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Volume 190, 2024. The visionary creator and interviewer of the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Life, Consciousness, Meaning TV and YouTube series since the 2000s also has a doctorate in neuroscience. See his Wikipedia page for even more achievements. This 167 page contribution then is a comprehensive survey of extant vistas and topical aspects as we human wonderers lately study from an entire span of scientific and philosophical approaches. (But I worry that the still mechanistic mindset has long concluded that there is no independent, abiding truth to get close to.) See also Theories of Consciousness by Anil Seth and Tim Bayne in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (23/439, 2022) for prior survey.

Diverse views of consciousness are arrayed on a physicalist-to-nonphysicalist landscape of essences and mechanisms. Categories: Materialism Theories (philosophical, neurobiological, electromagnetic field, computational and informational, homeostatic, embodied and enactive, relational, representational, language); Non-Reductive Physicalism; Quantum Theories; Integrated Information Theory; Panpsychisms; Monisms; Dualisms; Idealisms; Anomalous and Altered States. A Landscape of Consciousness, I suggest, offers perspective.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Intelligent Universe. www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kurzweil02/kurzweil02_p2.html. The computer scientist, inventor and author conceives a progressive cosmic evolution which by its nature evolves into sentient beings so they can then take up and transform its future creation.

The universe has been set up exquisitely enough to have intelligence. There are intelligent entities like ourselves that can contemplate the universe and develop models about it, which is interesting. Intelligence is, in fact, a powerful force and we can see that its power is going to grow not linearly but exponentially, and will ultimately be powerful enough to change the destiny of the universe. (2)

Lanza, Robert. A New Theory of the Universe. American Scholar. 76/2, 2007. A cell biologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine rightly argues that life and consciousness ought precede and thus distinguish a “biocentric” cosmos. Surely another sign of “a profound shift in worldview” but which takes 20th century quantum physics as its fundamental arbiter, not realizing that a universal self-generating organic physics, a revolution in our midst, is its true vital essence.

Linde, Andrei. Universe, Life, Consciousness. www.andrei-linde.com/articles/universe-life-consciousness-pdf. This is a talk by the Russian-American, Stanford University philosophical cosmologist given at a 2015 Science and Nonduality Conference in California. Long ago I was fortunate to attend his first public lecture in the USA in September 1983 at Harvard where he spoke about a novel inflationary origin and a fractal multiverse of bubbling cosmoses. In the years since this theory has become an accepted version (with objections) as global science advanced from overhead slides to streaming videos. But Linde has a visionary side and here evokes an “eternally existing self-reproducing inflationary universe” due to quantum wave fluctuations which leads to the unusually important role played by the concept of an observer in cosmology. A mid 2010s result is another inference of a self-observing, participant universe. By these lights, the presence of informed, personal awareness would seem to be a phenomenal imperative by which to bring a genesis cosmos into being.

Is it not possible that consciousness, like space-time, has its own intrinsic degrees of freedom, and that neglecting these will lead to a description of the universe that is fundamentally incomplete? What if our perceptions are more real than material objects? Is it possible to introduce a “space of elements of consciousness,” and investigate that consciousness may exist by itself, even in the absence of matter, just like gravitational waves, exist in the absence of protons and electrons? Will it not turn out, with the further development of science, that the study of the universe and the study of consciousness will be inseparably linked? After the development of a unified geometrical description of the weak, strong, electromagnetic, and gravitational interactions, will the next important step be the development of a unified approach include the world of consciousness? (12)

Lockley, Martin. The Evolutionary Dynamics of Consciousness: An Integration of Eastern and Western Holistic Paradigms. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 17/9-10, 2010. In this rare journal that provides space for alternative visions of a different organic, sentient, Romantic, awakening universe, a University of Colorado geologist expands his purview, in the vein of Johann Goethe and Jean Gebser (1905-1973), to envision once more an original mindfulness from which sequentially arises a personal, global, and cosmic self-recognition and realization. We also note Lockley and Ryo Morimoto’s new book How Humanity Came into Being: The Evolution of Consciousness (Floris Books, 2010), not yet seen.

These paradigms recognize the importance of recursive (fractal) organizing principles that structure the biosphere’s spatial dimensions and, in the temporal realm, structure long- and short-term evolutionary cycles. (66) The marriage of Gebserian cultural philosophies with Gothean biology, the science of complexity and eastern praxis traditions leads to a simple, elegant and remarkably broad appreciation of the fundamental role of consciousness as an essential property of dynamic living systems. (66-67)

Loocke, Philip van, ed. The Physical Nature of Consciousness. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2000. By way of a merger of physics and psychology, conscious perception is understood as inherently built into a developing quantum universe. To neuroscientist Karl Pribram, human sentience is a micro-encapsulation of its essence:

It is conjectured that each organism, like a Leibnizian monad, re-presents the universe, and the universe reflects, in some manner, the organism that observes it. (117)

Manousakis, Efstratios. Founding Quantum Theory on the Basis of Consciousness. Foundations of Physics. 36/6, 2006. The Florida State University physicist reverses the prior suggestion that mental awareness is a quantum derivative to posit that such realms actually spring from a primordial sentience. By these coherent lights, streams of consciousness can be “extended to the notion of a Universal/Global stream of conscious flow of ordered events.”

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