User:Mariela Szirko/Consciousness

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Natural scientists study nature. Existentialities or psyches are among the realities now found in nature. Ere assumed, rather, to belong exclusively with an outer-to-nature or preternatural realm, they were found not being so in an academic neurobiological tradition - born in South America in the 1760s - external to the scientific communications carried out in English: consciousnesses, existentialities, or psyches are the realities that transform themselves only on a selection of their respective antecedents, not necessarily on all of them (definition by Crocco, 1971).

A brief historical introduction

This finding occurred in the 1960s, in a long comparative research about the biological devices performing some microorganisms' functions of relation before the origin of the nervous systems; and, again, in the early 1970s, in a research on the physical stability showed by the brain organs despite this stability being mathematically forbidden by the numbers of physiological elements, connectionships, and independent variables at play in them. The region's political instability, then the academic rise of mind's descriptions not stemmed from natural science but from a psychotherapeutical technique, undermined this tradition's physical resources and dampened the diffusion of its contributions. These remained extraregionally ignored in the mid-1990s, when cheap communications became global. At this stage, a number of professional and economic interests evolved on Internet around asserting the objective indefinability of existentialities, psyches, or consciousnesses, as they came to be be termed. Such objective undefinableness worked, too, for keeping natural scientists from studying these realities, by then long objectively found in nature. The impossibility of an objective definition charged against them meant that only ostension (namely, pointing to the reader's subjectivity, or intimate experience) could be used in such substandard "definition": no machine, e.g., would objectively recognize those realities. This false problem started being revised in 2006 and 2008, as independent celebrations of the centenary of other contributions in this tradition appeared in the world literature., , , Objective definition (includes no reference to a subjective element) of consciousness, psyche, existentiality, soul, mind or spirit, as natural sciences find it in nature, is simple. This article will no further dwell on the historical context , just mentioned, but strive to shed light on this old and simple, if as yet scarcely familiar concept.

What are Psyches, Minds, or Instances of Consciousness?

For natural sciences, "consciousness," a reality whose action is observed in, e.g., its unfolding some trophic chains and so deflecting biological evolution, is not seen as a freely exchangeable material, replaceable in whole or in part for another portion of a similar nature – the nature of a "fungible material," such as a physical field or a body of water divisible in homogeneous portions. Thus every psyche or found portion of consciousness is defined not as mere intellectual performance (or other distributable feature) but rather as synonymous with a finite existentiality, and to stress this all-important point, in what follows, consciousness, psyche or mind will be referred to as “her,” not as “it.”

Every psyche or portion of consciousness is found to be primarily an unconnected, and unmergeable, eclosion or “pop-out” of “existential finitude.” Although rare, the word “eclosion” will nevertheless be stressed in this article. Like the eclosion or “pop-out” of microphysical particles in the indeterminacy-ruled scenarios depicted by quantum field theory, also psyches are found to eclose, namely not to "emerge" from some specifying circumstances but rather to "pop out" from undefinable conditions. The phrase “existential finitude” denotes for natural scientists every reality able to sense and move a portion of nature while altering herself by sedimenting those causal involvements away from temporality – this refers to an “instant” and not a time sequence. The designation “away from temporality” thus means “not on a time course but inside the instant,” specifying where such reality occurs and simultaneizes the sedimented sequences (“memories”) of her reactions to her causal interactions. This is why any reality that knows itself ought to possess memory, being erroneous the Aeschylus-Plato theory imagining brain-engraved memory traces or never found "engrams" : since nature vacates itself outside actuality and consequently every thing in nature, including each mind, exists only within the physical instant, the preservation of memories is an effect due to the absence of time course rather than the presence of brain engrams.

By way of the brain organ – whose states coupled with and causally affecting the therein-circumstanced psyche build up short-term representations that covary with biological relevancies – this psyche's memories are made to include a representation of the time course that affected the surrounding circumstances. A most remarkable feature, each eclosion of existential finitude is found at a fixed circumstance (i.e., some brain, body, family, epoch) and possibilities of interpersonal relationships, wherefrom every circumstanced existentiality sensoperceptually apprehends reality as differently centered. This makes a well-defined or precisely determined sorting that, nonetheless, cannot be determined, by the boundary conditions or historical path that led to compose such circumstance and formed the brain in it, rather than another sorting, in which this existential finitude has not eclosed at all or instead “popped out” at another circumstance. More simply, no brain can determine who will be the person to sense its states or to exert active ownership of it.

Consequently, the ontic makeup of consciousnesses or psyches is not to be confused with their mental contents. Mental contents, which historically became what is referred to by the term "mind", are those distinctions, in the ontic makeup or constitution of existentialities, consciousnesses or psyches, that only the incumbent individual psyche can respectively know and distinguish, despite the fact that some of these mental contents can also be shaped by non-exclusive, fungible means. Such means are based on the action of physical force fields, used by every brain organ only to demarcate mental contents in any a psyche eclosed at it; as mentioned, no brain can specify which existential finitude is to interact with itself rather than with some other brain. This organic incapacity becomes undetectable when every psyche is supposed to consist only of her mental contents – her "mind," whose generative making is misjudged as the full entirety of brain-"mind" relationships. Or, brain-existentiality relationships, namely the psychophysical nexus, are reduced, or supposed to consist only of, brain-mind relationships. As a remedy to this oversight, the word “existentiality” also serves to designate a psyche without special regard to the acquired contents this psyche differentiates in her own reality or ontic consistency. This reality is ontic and also ontological – that is, also directly knowable to itself both with regard to its state and the causal generation of its inner contrasts and their demarcations, thus making those contents observable. These mental contents are the acquired availabilities found in everyone’s mental world, and are made up of structural (structure-possessing) and structureless elements. Mental contents’ structureless element comes as the mind’s reaction either to outer actions (intonation, phosphene-like phenomenology) or to the own acts (non-intonative or non-phenomenal reaction); mental contents’ structure also comes from either extramentality or the mind – that is, as outer patterning of the sensation-generating causal actions or as combinations of the mind’s sensation-generating own causal acts. Other availabilities are inherent or primary and thus are not called contents, but constituents of every existentiality: to wit, gnoseological apprehension (cognizance or "cognitiveness"), semovience (the efficiency to inaugurate new causal series), and cadacualtez (each existentiality or psyche's intrinsic unbarterability).

Objective definition of consciousness, as realities found in nature by natural sciences

Past and future situations only rise in the context of minds. They do not exist outside of psyches: extramentally, i.e. outside of consciousnesses or psyches, only present situations occur; not past and future ones. Past and future situations are only imagined, in a simplified way and diversely for sure. In this way – namely, by their being imagined now – their reality or ontic consistency is in fact a part of the present situation; in this it exhausts itself. In other words, past and future situations lack any other relevance for extramental reality, since they are neither found, nor do they cause effects, except as assemblages of mental contents envisaged by psyches. Thus, all nature is actual only at a given instant, and each present situation determines its own time transformation; nonexistent situations cannot causally determine any transformation whatsoever. In this context, a cornerstone of familiar-scale physics is that, because aside from quantum concerns any indeterminacy in it is found to apply to future events, when determining each next transformation the actual or last situation is tantamount to its entire preceding history.

In contrast, minds change quite differently: consciousnesses, existentialities or psyches are the realities that transform themselves only on a selection of their respective antecedents, not necessarily on all of them.

This is the objective definition of consciousnesses or psyches in general, as it is accepted in the Argentine neurobiological tradition (where M. Crocco proposed it since the 1960s and published it first in 1971 ) as well as in other regional research institutions. Instead, in the Angloamerican traditions, upon deficiencies by then existing in the communication with the traditions abroad (nowadays lessened) and cultural differences (specially as regards the culturally prevailing notion of time and the influence of British Platonism on this; and the evolution of the concepts of soul and mind in history of ideas), this objective definition of every psyche or found portion of consciousness has long been neglected. The history of the concept, though very interesting, exceeds the present synopsis, in which it may nonetheless be observed that such objective definition was attained in the context of an extense comparative research of the Proterozoic biological functions of relation, before the existence of nervous systems.

In contrast to such consciousnesses or psyches found in nature, the things situated amid them (or things that compound the hylozoic hiatus, namely all extramentalities such as winds, rocks, fungi, trees, and computers, for which a variation in quantity or distribution of motion cannot occur as an effect of internal forces) inevitably use all of their history, tantamount to the last situation, to transform themselves as time elapses. Thus while all their yesterdays pack into their now, all our tomorrows are ours to shape. In finding the brute fact of this selection, physics finds in nature the gnoseological apprehension and semovience enacting it. Both are found to come conjointly, in discrete circumstanced eclosions, whose efficient actions and reactions become set as the natural phenomena we as natural scientists are trying to describe and understand.

To be remarked, this knowledge or gnoseological apprehension grasps certain phenomenal reactions, namely intonations of the self-knowing being, which cause to discontinue the outer causal series that had led to them. Such a series of efficient causal determinations comes to an end by producing intonative reactions, i.e. phosphene-like manifestations that are both phenomenal (that is, in which a sensation is known) and inefficient to continue the series. Therefore, the emplacement of circumstanced existentialities in nature is found whenever a break affects some efficient causal chain. The last link of this chain phenomenizes as the reaction of a self-knowing being, a reaction that becomes gnoseologically apprehended but lacks causal efficiency to further its preceding causal series. One aptitude excludes the other, both being discrete capabilities featured by efficient causation. As empirically found, outer causal efficiency can work out intonative reactions in psychisms, but it cannot cause psychisms to be affected in such a way as to instrumentally transmit the outer efficiency. Existentialities do not behave as billiard balls. Any causal consequence from this outer efficiency is thus to be a new causal string semoviently originated by the causal efficiency of the same self-knowing being that did the gnoseological apprehension, and selected it as causal antecedent rather than deselecting it, or else adjusted it contextually to posit it as causal antecedent. Such events do not happen in the hylozoic hiatus, where all of the causal series continue (i.e., all causal efficiency is transeunt, matter-energy is conserved over effects) but, in trade, there is no gnoseological apprehension. In other words, by coming to gnoseological apprehension, the causal series that led toward the intonative reaction cannot continue any longer. A semovient enactment of the efficient causality of the same self- knowing reality is now needed to start another causal series, which may enact continuity with or departure from the route of the former causal series.

What every existentiality, psyche, or found portion of consciousness, does? What precisely is it that existentialities do? Classical – not quantum – physics, accordingly, finds consciousnesses or existentialities as those realities that affirm, for their own transformation in time, a selection of nonexistent (past and future) situations.

The finding occurs in view of the fact that noticing these nonexistent situations, a noticing which is gnoseological apprehension, is a prerequisite for such a selection. The affirmation of a selection is “semovient,” a term so far barely outlined. It means that such affirmation starts a novo, or from scratch, new causal series that transform the ontic makeup or consistency of the selecting and affirming consciousness, existentiality or psyche, thereby also transformatively affecting and changing its causally linked extramentalities – i. e., brain, body (or a neuroprosthesis), and some of its surroundings. Because of that semovience, consciousnesses, active at a break in efficient causal chains, have been evolutionarily selected as a means to achieve determinations in mechanically undecidable situations. Nevertheless, this singularity (namely, the inauguration of new causal series of events instead of merely continuing older series, as mindless things do) is not relevant for attempting to localize in brains the actions of finite minds.

Further reading

The State journal Electroneurobiology, belonging with the academic tradition in which this objective definition of every psyche or found portion of consciousness was achieved decades ago, offers a number of related articles.

References

  1. Mariela Szirko, Chptr 11 (pp. 313-358) in Helmut Wautischer, ed., Ontology of Consciousness: Percipient Action (A Bradford Book: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.- London, 2008). The present entry is greatly based on an earlier, open access version licensed under Creative Commons. 
  2. Mario Crocco, "¡Alma de reptil!", Electroneurobiología 2004; 12 (1), pp. 1-72. (Spanish)
  3. Alicia Ávila y M. Crocco (1996), Sensing: A New Fundamental Action of Nature (Folia Neurobiológica Argentina, vol. X: Institute for Advanced Study, Buenos Aires), pág. 862-891 y 980-981.