Abstract
This article develops a view of consciousness in the context of a new philosophical approach that invokes the concept of emergence, through which the operative principles of each level of organization of physical energy flow are functionally dissociated from those of the levels below it, despite the continuity of the physical laws that govern them. The particular form of emergence that is the focus of the present analysis is the emergence of conscious mental processing from neural activity carried by the underlying biochemical principles of brain organization. Within this framework, a process model of consciousness is developed to account for many of the experienced aspects of consciousness, many that are rarely considered in the philosophical discourse. Each of these aspects is rigorously specified in terms of its definable properties. It is then analyzed in terms of specific empirical tests that can be used to determine its neural substrate and relevant data that implement such tests. The article concludes with an analysis of the evolutionary function of consciousness, and a critique of the Integrated Information Theory approach to defining its properties.
Highlights
Philosophical Background: Principles of Functional EmergenceBefore addressing the properties of consciousness, it needs to be placed in the context of the overall physical reality from which it emerges
This is conceptualized in the form of Emergent Aspect Dualism (Tyler, 2015, 2018, 2019), which reconciles the epistemic dichotomies of monism and dualism, energy and matter, emergence and continuity, neural activity and consciousness, free will and determinism, and even continuous reality with the superposition and multiple worlds interpretations of quantum physics
This philosophical approach takes the view that complex levels of organization of physical energy are both ontologically and functionally emergent from more basic levels
Summary
Before addressing the properties of consciousness, it needs to be placed in the context of the overall physical reality from which it emerges. Since life involves a continuous series of decisions made by the most complex organ known to nature, it is hard to imagine that the inherent noise variations throughout the sequence of decisions could be considered deterministic throughout a human life This analysis might raise the issue of how this paradigm would apply to a non-conscious automaton programmed to make decisions based on accumulated evidence, which could be programmed to process an external prediction as part of its decision inputs (and respond in a way that is not previously predictable). We humans are only recently developing automata with these kinds of capabilities, the same issues could be formulated for such non-conscious systems, they only seem to be meaningful when viewed from the internal perspective This brief overview outlines how the Emergent Aspect Dualism philosophy simultaneously reconciles monism with dualism, energy with matter, continuous reality with superposition/multiple worlds, emergence with. The following analysis of the properties of consciousness in terms of classical biochemical processes does not depend in the resolution of that controversy
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