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"This book is concerned with large-scale questions of evolutionary theory, especially its extension to human mind and culture. There is much that is of interest.
Table of contents
This being the case, early life can also be conceptualized as an elementary type of mind, one that uses information to pursue intelligent, life-sustaining behaviors. From these beginnings life has evolved toward increasingly complex organization and energy utilization, leading in a direct line to increasingly complex minds. The third major level of complexity is that of supra-living, or social systems.
These include human societies with their economies and technologies. They organize and direct much larger energy flows than the living organisms of which they are composed i. Each of these three levels comes into being and advances by energy-driven interdependent complex dynamics, which lead to increasing levels of organization Goerner, , forthcoming.
Consciousness and information Moving to the topic of consciousness now, let us momentarily adopt a subjective stance. Doing so we will discuss consciousness itself, then connect the resulting ideas with notions of energy, information, and evolution. Consciousness always has an object. In other words, it is always about something Combs, b. We are not just conscious, we are conscious of the taste of food, the smell of the sea, a tooth ache. We are conscious of joy, of boredom, of the meaning of words on the page in front of us, of the sound of music playing in the next room, of our own thoughts, of memories.
The point is that virtually all experience is experience of something. This has been a given in psychology and philosophy for a long time. Let us also consider the situation from the point of view of the brain. The exact relationship between consciousness and the brain is not known, and is unlikely to become known in the immediate future. It is generally understood, however, that the two are intimately connected. In particular, events in consciousness do not occur without corresponding events in the brain, though we may not know their precise nature. There are, of course, events in the brain that do not registrar in consciousness.
To look at a tree in bloom presents the mind with a picture of pleasing complexity. Likewise, we cannot doubt that the brain is treated to a similar upgrade in complexity, and that electrochemical changes there support our experience of pleasure as well. In the above example it is apparent that looking at a tree in bloom in-forms both the brain and the mind, or conscious experience, in a way that increases their complexity.
Their information level has been enlarged.
Here we see the interchangability of experience and information. Consciousness would seem to be intimately involved with the informing of the brain, and consciousness, by objects of attention. Moreover, on the brain side of this coin we see that the complexification associated with a conscious experience also involves an increase in energy, though this may be only be a small amount.
Here again the connection with neg-entropy comes into play as a decrease in disorganization and an increase in order. These ideas can be developed much further e. With the understanding that conscious experience does not occur without the presence of correlated events in the patterns of brain processes, we now turn our attention to the self- organizing nature of mind, or consciousness. However, we will keep in mind throughout that mental processes are bankrolled by energy-driven brain processes that evolve from moment to moment in the exquisitely complex process lattices of the nervous system.
An ecological understanding of consciousness Consciousness is perhaps best understood from an ecological perspective in which the ongoing events that structure it are seen as a rich interacting complex of informing cognitive, perceptual, and emotional information subsystems analogous to the interactive energy driven metabolism of a living cell. The result is an organic, self-generating, or autopoietic, system constantly in the act of creating itself.
This idea is consistent with Tart's , view that states of consciousness, including dream and non- dream sleep, various drug-induced and ecstatic states, as well as ordinary waking consciousness, are formed of unique patterns of psychological functions, or processes, that fit comfortably together to form something like a gestalt. This fitting together represents an energy minimum from the brain's point of view. There is increasing evidence on many fronts that such psychological processes, as well as the neurological events that undergird them, are partially chaotic or, if they do not meet the formal criteria for chaos e.
ISBN 13: 9780822308362
That is, they appear to be deterministic and nonlinear, exhibiting globally predictable patterns of behavior that never exactly repeat themselves, and are not predictable in detail. In other words, these psychological processes can be modeled as chaotic attractors. From this it seems reasonable that consciousness itself, as a whole fabric, can be understood as a complex system comprised of chaotic or chaotic- like psychological processes Goertzel, ; Goertzel, The advantage to this state of affairs is added flexibility.
For instance, in a memory search the injection of chaos keeps the process fluid, so the memory attractor, which can be viewed either psychologically or neurologically, is not permanently distracted into small incorrect minima, or in other words, so that incorrect items are not selected and the search terminated before the correct one is recalled. Bringing the above ideas together, we suggest that each state of consciousness, mood, or frame of mind, represents a unique and coherent--minimal energy--fit for the in-formation streams represented by the many psychological processes which comprise it, producing a stable pattern or gestalt.
Further, the stability of the pattern arises from its autopoietic tendency to self- organize. For instance, an ordinary episode of depression is usually accompanied by behaviors that actively feed that state of mind, or at least don't rally against it. In the mean time, cognitive processes such as thought, perception, and memory become tilted toward depressing outcomes.
Research suggests, for example, that when we are depressed we tend to recall unpleasant episodes from our past Bower, These recollections in turn feed the mood of depression, and so perpetuate a continuous cycle of memory and mood. To disrupt such a self-perpetuating circuit one needs to engage in activities that can up-end the dominant depressive attractor.
For instance, one can visit friends, listen to a rousing piece of music, eat a good meal, or take a brisk walk in the forest. The essential notion here is that the whole cloth of consciousness is woven of a tightly knit informational patchwork of subprocess, each made possible and supported on all sides by the totality of the cloth itself, while at the same time contributing its part to the creation of that totality. To take another example, consider two discrete states of consciousness, the ordinary waking state and dream sleep.
Each is an entire world of experience. Each carries its own intrinsic styles of thinking, its own forms of memory, feelings, thought and perceptions--its own possibilities. Dream thought, for instance, arises from the total experience of the dream and cannot be sensibly separated from it.
At the same time, it contributes its unique quality to the dream. Recently, a few neuroscientists e. Thus for human beings, processes such as thought, perception, emotion, and even memory, are usually shared events within tribal, family, and community groups. Exceptions are rare and sometimes celebrated, but do not represent the customary basic mode of human experience.
Thus it would seem that we need to seek a more complete understanding of social systems, from dyads to civilizations, in the context of the informational systems that nest the conscious experience of individual minds within much larger dynamic community systems.
Here, however, we note that such systems do not represent a hierarchically higher and separate category of energy organization, but in fact are interpenetrated by human experience and consciousness itself. References Abraham, F. Chaos theory in psychology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Pub. Abraham, R. On morphodynamics. Basar E. Chaos in brain function. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Bower, G. Mood and memory.
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The Evolution of Adaptive Systems - 1st Edition
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