Consciousness, Crosstalk, and the Mereological Fallacy

Abstract

SummaryThe cross-sectional decontextualization afflicting contemporary neuroscience—attributing to “the brain” what is the province of the whole individual—is mirrored by an evolutionary decontextualization exceptionalizing consciousness. The living state is characterized by cognitive processes at all scales and levels of organization. Many can be associated with dual information sources that “speak” a “language” of behavior-in-context. Shifting, tunable, global broadcasts analogous to consciousness, albeit far slower—wound healing, tumor control, immune function, gene expression, etc.—have emerged through repeated evolutionary exaptation of the crosstalk and noise inherent to all information transmission. These broadcasts recruit “unconscious” cognitive modules into shifting arrays as needed to meet the threats and opportunities that confront all organisms across multiple frames of reference. The development is straightforward, based on the powerful necessary conditions imposed by the asymptotic limit theorems of communication theory, in the same sense that the Central Limit Theorem constrains sums of stochastic variates. Recognition of information as a form of free energy instantiated by physical processes that consume free energy permits analogs to phase transition and nonequilibrium thermodynamic arguments, leading to “dynamic regression models” useful for data analysis.