Incomplete Nature Part 18

A relevant attribute of this tension is that neuronal activity rates take place on a millisecond time scale while the hydrodynamic and diffusion changes that must support this activity take place on a multisecond time scale. Interestingly, because of the time it takes for morphodynamic activity to differentiate to a regular attractor stage, mental processes likely take place at rates that are commensurate with metabolic time scales; and in the case of highly complex and highly robust morphodynamic attractors, this may take longer-perhaps many seconds to reach a stage of full differentiation. These different temporal domains also contribute to the structure of experience.

The differential between the time that neuron to neuronal excitation can take place and the time it takes to mount a metabolic compensation for this change in activity means that there will be something a.n.a.logous to metabolic inertia involved. This delay will slightly impede the ability of heightened but short-lived morphodynamic activity in one region to spread its influence into connected regions, which are not already primed with increased metabolism. This sort of dynamical recruitment will consequently require stable and robust attractor formation and maintenance, and thus stably heightened metabolic support.

What controls local metabolic support? There appear to be both extrinsic and intrinsic mechanisms able to up-regulate and down-regulate cerebral blood flow to local regions. Intrinsic mechanisms are becoming better understood because of the importance of in vivo imaging techniques that are based on hydrodynamic changes, such as fMRI. If, as I have argued, extrinsically regulated local increases and decreases of metabolic support can themselves induce significant changes in neuronal activity levels, with a.s.sociated alterations of signal dropout and random spontaneous activity, then such a regulatory mechanism could play a significant role in directing attention, differentiating mnemonic content, activating or inhibiting behaviors, and shifting modality specific processing. How might this be effected?

Extrinsic control of regional cerebral blood flow is less well understood than intrinsic effects, and my knowledge of these mechanisms is minimal, so what I will describe here is again highly speculative. But some such mechanism is strongly implicated when considering mind-brain relationships dynamically. The answer, I believe, is something like this. Certain stimuli (or intrinsically generated representations) that have significant normative relevance (perhaps because they are a.s.sociated with powerful innate drives or with highly arousing past experiences) are predisposed to easily induce characteristic patterns of activity in forebrain limbic structures (such as the amygdala, nucleus acc.u.mbens, hypothalamus). These limbic activity patterns distinguish conditions for which a significant shift of attention and mental effort is likely required, for example, because of danger or bodily need. These limbic structures in turn project to midbrain and brainstem structures that control regional differences in cerebral blood flow and regional levels of neuronal plasticity. These in turn project axons throughout the forebrain and serve to modulate regional levels of neuronal activity by adjusting blood flow and intrinsic neuronal variables, which make them more or less plastic to input patterns.

In this way, highly survival-relevant stimuli or powerful drives can be drivers of mental experience to the extent that they promote selected differentiation of local morphodynamic attractors. So, for example, life-threatening or reproductively important stimuli can regulate the differentiation of specific a.n.a.lytic, mnemonic, and behavioral capacities, and shut down other ongoing mental activities by simply modulating metabolic resource distribution. Because this is an extrinsic influence with respect to the formal constraints that are amplified to generate the resulting morphodynamic processes, and not the result of direct interactions between regionally distinct networks, there can be a relatively powerful inertial component in such transitions, especially if they need to be rapid, and the subsequent attractor process needs to be highly differentiated and robust (as is likely in life-threatening situations).

Rapidly shutting down an ongoing dynamic in one area and just as rapidly generating another requires considerable work, both thermodynamic (metabolic) and morphodynamic. But consider the a.n.a.logy to simple physical morphodynamic processes like whirlpools and Benard convection cells. These cannot be generated in an instant nor can they be dissipated in an instant, once stable. The same must be true of the mental experiences in such cases of highly aroused shifts of attention. Prior dynamics will resist dissolution and may require structural interference with their attractor patterns (morphodynamic work imposed from other brain regions) to shut them down rapidly. They will in this sense resist an imposed change. This tension between dynamical influences at these two levels-the homeodynamics of metabolic processes and the morphodynamics of network dynamics-is inevitable in any forced change of morphodynamic activity.

It is my hypothesis, then, that this resistance and work created by these dependencies between levels of dynamics of brain processes const.i.tutes the experience of emotion. In most moment-to-moment waking activities, shifts between large-scale attractor states are likely to be minimally forced, and so will engender minimal and relatively undifferentiated emotions. But there should be a gradation of both differentiation and intensity. The orthograde nature of morphodynamic differentiation does not in itself require morphodynamic work, and so there is not necessarily extrinsic "mental effort" required for thoughts to evoke one another or to spontaneously "rise" from unconsciousness. This emergent dynamic account thus effectively distinguishes the conscious from unconscious generation of thoughts and attentional foci in terms of work. The more work at more levels, the more sentient experience. And where work is most intense, we are most present and actively sentient. Self and other, including the otherness created by the inertia of our own neural dynamics, are thus brought into stark relief by the contragrade "tensions" that arise because we are const.i.tuted dynamically.

There is, of course, still something central missing from this account. If the contents of mental experiences are instantiated by the attractor dynamics of the vast flows of signals coursing through a neural network, where in this process are these interpreted? What dynamical features of brain processes are these morphodynamic features juxtaposed with in order that they are information about something for something toward some end? The superficial answer is the same as that given for what const.i.tutes the locus of self in general: a teleodynamic process. But as we have already come to realize, the sort of teleodynamics that arises from brain process is at least a second-order form of teleodynamics when compared to that which const.i.tutes life. This convoluted and hierarchically tangled form of teleodynamics includes some distinct emergent differences.

WHENCE SUFFERING?.

The last chapter began by questioning whether there might be intrinsic moral implications to corrupting or shutting down a computation in process. I agree with William James' conclusion that only if this involves sentience do moral and ethical considerations come into play, but that if sentience is present, then indeed such values must be considered. This is because sentience inevitably has a valence. Things feel good and bad, they aren't merely good for or bad for the organism. Because of this, the world of sentience is a world of should and shouldn't, kindness and abuse, love and hate, joy and suffering. Is this really necessary? Could there be mental sentience without its being framed between wonderful and horrible?

As we have now seen, computation is ultimately just a descriptive gloss applied to a simple linear mechanistic process. So the intrinsic intentional status of the computation, apart from this mechanism, is entirely epiphenomenal. This beautifully exemplifies the patency of the nominalist critique of generals. Computation is in the mind of the beholder, not in the physical process. There is nothing additionally produced when a computation is completed, other than the physical rearrangement of matter and energy in the device that is performing this operation. A computer operation is therefore no more sentient than is the operation of an automobile engine. But, as we saw in the Self chapter, a teleodynamic process does in fact transform generals into particulars; and the constraints that const.i.tute and are in turn const.i.tuted by such a process do have ententional status, independent of the physical particulars that embody them. This self-creation of constraints is what const.i.tutes the dynamical locus of sentience, not merely some physical change of state.

In light of the hierarchic conception of sentience developed above, however, I think that this general a.s.sessment now needs to be further refined. There are emergent sentient properties produced by the teleodynamics of brains that are not produced by simpler, lower-order forms of sentience. Crucially, these are special normative properties made possible because the sentience generated by brain processes is, in effect, a second-order sentience: a sentience of sentience. And with this comes a sentience of the normative features of sentience. In colloquial terms, this sentience of normativity is the experience of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering. And it is with respect to these higher-order sentient properties that we enter into the ethical realm.

To understand how this higher-order tangle has created a sentience of the normative relationships that create this sentience itself, and ultimately identify the self-dynamic that is the locus of subjective experience, we need to once more revisit how the logic of teleodynamics, at whatever level, creates an individuated locus of self-creation and a dynamic of self-differentiation from the world.

In chapter 9, teleodynamics was defined as a dynamical organization that exists because of the consequences of its continuance, and therefore can be described as being self-generating over time. But now consider what it would mean for a teleodynamic process to include within itself a representation of its own dynamical final causal tendencies. The component dynamics of a teleodynamic process have ententional properties precisely because they are critical to the creation of the whole dynamic, which in turn is critical to the continued creation of these component dynamics. Were the reciprocal synergy of the whole dynamic to break down, these component dynamics would also eventually disappear. The whole produces the parts and the parts produce the whole. But then a teleogenic process in which one critical dynamical component is a representational process that interprets its own teleodynamic tendency extends this convoluted causal circularity one level further.

For animals with brains, the organism and its distinctive teleodynamic characteristics will likely fail to persist (both in terms of resisting death and reproducing) if its higher-order teleodynamics of self-prediction fails in some respect. Failure is likely if the projected self-environment consequence of some action is significantly in error. For example, an animal whose innate predator-escape strategy fails to prevent capture will be unlikely to pa.s.s on this tendency to future generations. Such a tendency implicitly includes a projected virtual relationship between its teleodynamic basis and a projected self/other condition. Generation of a projected future self-in-context thus can become a critical source of constraints organizing the whole system. But generating these virtual selves requires both a means to model the causality of the environment and also a means for modeling the causality of the teleodynamic processes that generate these models and act with respect to them. This is a higher-order teleodynamical relationship because one critical dynamical component of the whole is its own projected future existence in context. This implicitly includes a normative a.s.sessment of this possible condition with respect to current teleodynamic tendencies, including the possibility of catastrophic failure.

The vegetative teleodynamics of single-celled organisms and organisms not including brains must be organized to produce contragrade reactions to any conditions that tend to disrupt teleodynamic integrity. The various component structures, mechanisms, and morphodynamic processes that const.i.tute this integrity must therefore be organized to collectively compensate for any component process that is impeded or otherwise compromised from without. There does not need to be any component that a.s.sesses the general state of overall integrity. But in an animal with a brain that was evolved to project alternative future selves-in-context, such an a.s.sessment becomes a relevant factor. A separate dynamical component of its teleodynamic organization must continually generate a model of both its overall vegetative integrity and the degree to which this is (or might be) compromised with respect to other contingent factors. A dynamical subprocess evolved to a.n.a.lyze whatever might impact persistence of the whole organism, and determine an appropriate organism level response, must play a primary role in structuring its overall teleodynamic organization.

In the previous section, we identified the experience of emotion with the tension and work a.s.sociated with employing metabolic means to modify neural morphodynamics. It was noted that particularly in cases of life-and-death contexts, morphodynamic change must be inst.i.tuted rapidly and extensively, and this requires extensive work at both the homeodynamic (metabolic) and morphodynamic (mental) levels. The extent of this work and the intensity of the tension created by the resistance of dynamical processes to rapid change is, I submit, experienced as the intensity of emotion. But such special needs for reliable rapid dynamical reorganization arise because the teleodynamics of organism persistence is easily disturbed and inevitably subject to catastrophic breakdown. Life and health are fragile. So the generation of certain defensive responses by organisms, whether immune response or predator-escape behaviors, must be able to usurp less critical ongoing activities whenever the relevant circ.u.mstances arise.

Teleodynamic processes have characteristic dynamical tendencies, and when these are impeded or interfered with, the entire integrated individual is at risk. But catastrophic breakdown is not just possible, it is essentially inevitable for any teleodynamically organized individual system, whether autogen or human being. The ephemeral nature of teleodynamics guarantees that it faces an incessant war against intrinsic and extrinsic influences that would tend to disrupt it-and the more disruptive of its self-similarity maintenance, the greater the work that must be performed to resist this influence.

Influences that are so disruptive that they will ultimately destroy the teleodynamic integrity of a single cell, or even a plant, will in the process induce the production of the most intense and elaborate contragrade processes possible within the repertoire of that organism's systems. But because there is no separate dynamical embodiment of the integrity of the whole, no locus of individuated-self representation, these dynamical extremes do not const.i.tute suffering. There is a self, but there is no one home reflecting back on this process at the same time as enduring it. This is not the case for most animals.

The capacity to suffer requires the higher-order teleodynamic loop that brain processes make possible. It requires a self that creates within itself a teleodynamic reproduction of itself. This emergent dynamical homunculus is const.i.tuted by a central, teleodynamically organized, global pattern of network activity. By definition, this must be const.i.tuted by reciprocally synergistic morphodynamic processes. The component morphodynamic processes are, as we have discussed above, generated by the self-organizing tendencies of the vast numbers of signals circulating around and incessantly being introduced into the neural networks of the various brain systems. However, not all morphodynamic attractors produced in a brain contribute to this teleodynamic core, though there is a continual a.s.similation of newly generated morphodynamic processes into the synergy that const.i.tutes this ultimate locus of mental self-continuity and self/non-self distinction.

A simple individual autogenic system embodies the constraints of this necessary synergy implicitly in the complementarities and symmetries of the constraints determining and generating the various morphodynamic processes that const.i.tute it. This is also true for an animal body, though more complex and hierarchically organized. But it is not true of the teleodynamics of brains. Brains have evolved to regulate whole organism relationships with the world. Their teleodynamics is therefore necessarily parasitic on the teleodynamics of the body that they serve. Thus, for example, hypothalamic, midbrain, and brainstem circuits in vertebrate bodies play a critical role in regulating such global body functions as heart rate, digestion, metabolic rate, and the monitoring and maintenance of the levels of a wide variety of bloodborne chemical signals, such as hormones.

The local processes that maintain these systems are highly robust, and in many cases are quite nearly cybernetically organized processes.4 In this sense, they are least like higher-order morphodynamic neural processes, and thus their functioning does not directly enter mental experience. Nevertheless, the status of these functions is redundantly monitored by other forebrain brain systems, and these deep brain regulatory systems provide the forebrain systems with signals reflecting their operation. The result is that vegetative functions of the organism are multiply represented at various levels of remove from their direct regulation. The nearly mechanistically regular constraints of their operation are thus inherited by higher-order brain processes.

So what const.i.tutes the core teleodynamic locus of brain function? The answer is that it too is multiply hierarchically generated at different levels of functional differentiation. Even at the level of brainstem circuits, there is almost certainly a synergistic dynamic linking the separate regulatory systems for vegetative functions; but it is only as we ascend into forebrain systems that these processes become integrated with the variety of sensory and motor systems that const.i.tute regulation of whole organism function. The constraints const.i.tuting the synergy and stability of core vegetative systems provide a global organizing influence that more differentiated levels of the process must also maintain. At the level of brain function where sensory and motor functions must be integrated with these core functions, the differentiation of morphodynamic processes that involve these additional body systems is inevitably constrained to respect these essential core regularities. In this way, the many simultaneously developing morphodynamic processes produced within the various forebrain subsystems specialized for one or the other modality of function begin their differentiation processes already teleodynamically integrated with one another. The self-locus that is const.i.tuted by this synergy of component morphodynamic processes is thus also a dynamic that is subject to varying degrees of differentiation. It can be relatively amorphous and comprised of poorly differentiated morphodynamic processes, or highly differentiated and involve a large constellation of nested and interdependent morphodynamic processes. Subjective self is as differentiated and unified as the component morphodynamic processes developing in various subregions of the brain are differentiated and mutually reinforcing. And this level of self-differentiation is constantly shifting.

The teleodynamic synergy of this brain process is ultimately inherited from these more fundamental vegetative teleodynamic relationships, which contribute core constraints influencing the differentiation of this self-locus. These core constraints provide what might be considered the envelope of variation within which diverse morphodynamic processes are differentiated in response to sensory information and the many internally generated influences. Since the locus of this self-perspective is dynamically determined with respect to the "boundaries" of morphodynamic reciprocities, and these are changing and differentiating constantly, there can be no unambiguous anatomical correlate of this homunculus within the brain. Nevertheless, the teleodynamic loop of causality that integrates sensory and motor processes with the projected self-in-possible-context must at least involve the brain systems these processes depend upon, such as the thalamic, cerebral cortical, and basal ganglionic structures of the mammalian (and human) forebrain. But even this may be variable. Comparatively undifferentiated self-dynamics may only involve perilimbic cortical areas and their linked forebrain nuclei, whereas a self-dynamics involved in complex predictive behavior may involve significant fractions of the entire cerebral cortex and the forebrain nuclei these regions are coupled with.

So why is there a "what it feels like" a.s.sociated with this neural teleodynamics? And why does this "being here" have an intrinsic good and bad feel about it? The answer is that this self-similarity-maintaining dynamic provides a constant invariant reference with respect to which all other dynamical regularities and disturbances are organized. Like the teleodynamics of autogenic self, it is what organizes all local dynamics around an invariant telos: the self-creating constraints that make the work of this self-creation possible. In a brain, this teleodynamic core set of constraints serves as both a center of dynamical inertia that other neural activates cannot displace and a locus of dynamical self-sufficiency that is a constant platform from which distributed neural dynamics must begin their differentiation. But the teleodynamic integrity of this core neurological self is a direct reflection of the vegetative teleodynamics that is critical to its own persistence. To the extent that the vegetative teleodynamics is compromised, so too will neurological self be compromised. But vegetative teleodynamic integrity and neurological teleodynamical integrity are only linked; they are not identical.

As the possibility of anesthesia makes obvious, the mental representation of bodily damage can be decoupled from the experiential self. Under these circ.u.mstances, thankfully, sensory information from the body is not registered centrally and cannot thereby alter neural teleodynamics. Mental processes can therefore continue, oblivious to even significant physiological damage. So pain is not "out there" in the world. It is how neural teleodynamics reorganizes in response to its sensory a.s.sessment of vegetative damage. Its effect is to interrupt less critical neural dynamics and activate specific processes to stop this sensory signal. To do this, it must block the differentiation of most morphodynamic processes that are inessential to this end, and rapidly recruit significant metabolic and neural resources to generate action to avoid continuation of this stimulus. So, whereas any non-spontaneous shift of neural dynamics requires metabolic work to accomplish, the reaction to pain is preset to maximize this mobilization.

In many respects, pain is a special form of minimal perception, which helps to exemplify the relationship between what might be described as the a.n.a.lytic and emotional aspects of sentience. Perception is not merely the registration of extrinsically imposed changes of neural signals. It involves the generation of local morphodynamic processes that remain integrated into the larger teleodynamic integrity and yet are at the same time modulated by these extrinsically imposed constraints. Any slight dissonance that results initiates neural work to further differentiate the core teleodynamic organization to minimize this deviation. This drives progressive differentiation of the relevant morphodynamic processes in directions that at the same time are adapted to these imposed constraints and minimally dissonant with global teleodynamics. So perception is, in effect, the differentiation of self to better fit extrinsically imposed regularities. This can be looked upon as a sort of principle of work minimization that is always a.s.sessed with respect to this core teleodynamics.

In contrast to other sensory experiences, pain requires minimal morphodynamic differentiation to be a.s.sessed: only what's necessary to localize it in the body and determine what kind of pain (with only a very few modalities to sample). Unlike other percepts, however, there is no differentiation of morphodynamic perceptual processes that is able to increase pain's integration with core teleodynamics. Instead, pain blocks the differentiation of other modes of sensory a.n.a.lysis and rapidly deploys resources to possible motor responses to stop this sensation (such as the rapid withdrawal of one's finger from contact with a hot stove). This simple non-a.s.similable stimulus continues to drive the differentiation of actual and potential motor responses until the painful stimulus ceases. Of course, once damage is done, the pain stimulus will often continue despite actions to limit it. In these cases, a continual "demand" for recruitment of a motor response, and a correlated mobilization of metabolism to achieve it, will persist despite the ineffectiveness of any action. One consequence is that further damage may be averted. Another is that the continual maintenance of this heightened need to act to end the pain is experienced as suffering. Pain that can't be relieved is thus continually perturbing the core teleodynamics; contorting self-dynamics to necessarily include this extrinsic influence and the representation of a goal state that remains unachieved; and constantly mobilizing and focusing metabolic resources for processes that fail to achieve adaptation.

The capacity to suffer is therefore an inseparable aspect of the deep coupling between the neurally represented and viscerally instantiated teleodynamics of the body. Specifically, it is a consequence of the evolution of means for mobility and rapid behavior able to alter extrinsic conditions. Organisms that have not evolved a capacity to act in this way have no need for pain, and no need to represent their whole bodily relationship to extrinsic conditions. Their teleodynamic integrity is maintained by distributed processes without the need for an independent instantiation as experience. Pain is the extreme epitome of the general phenomenology we call emotion because of the way it radically utilizes the mobilization of metabolic resources to powerfully constrain signal differentiation processes, and thereby extrinsically drive and inhibit specific spontaneous morphodynamic tendencies. More than anything else, it exemplifies the essence of neurological sentience.

BEING HERE.

In the last chapter, we began to explore the distinctive higher-order form of teleodynamics that emerges from a teleodynamic process that must include itself as a component: a teleodynamic circularity in which the very locus of teleodynamic closure becomes virtual. This is a tangle in the dynamical hierarchy that is superficially a.n.a.logous to the part/whole tangle that defines teleodynamics more generally. In a simple autogenic system, each part (itself a morphodynamic product) is involved in an ultimately closed set of reciprocal interaction relationships with each other to create the whole, but it takes the whole reciprocally synergistic complex to generate each part. In logic, this would amount to a logical-type violation (in which a cla.s.s can also be a member of itself). By including the capacity to model itself in relation to extrinsic features of the world, a neurally generated teleodynamic system similarly introduces a higher-order tangle to this dynamical hierarchy.

In this chapter, we discovered a further tangle in the hierarchy of neural teleodynamics. Because neurons are themselves teleodynamic and thus sensitive to and adaptive to the changes in their local signal-processing Umwelt, the higher-order dynamics of the networks they inhabit can also be a source for changes in their internal teleodynamic tendencies. Thus neurons "learn" by changing their relative responsivity to the patterns of activity that they are subject to. In the process, the biases in the network that are responsible for the various morphodynamic attractors that tend to form will also change. This can happen at various timescales. As neurons temporarily modify their immediate responsivity over the course of seconds or minutes, the relative lability of certain morphodynamic attractor options can change.

Finally, with the exploration of perception, and specifically the perception of pain, we have brought together these various threads, integrating all with the concept of emotion. Emotion in this generic sense is not some special feature of brain function that is opposed to cognition. It is the necessary expression of the complicated hierarchic dependence of morphodynamics on homeodynamics (specifically, the thermodynamics of metabolism), and the way that the second-order teleodynamics that integrates brain function is organized to use this dependence to regulate the self/other interface that its dynamical closure (and that of the body) creates.

Although each is discontinuous from the other by virtue of dynamical closure, neuronal-level sentience is nevertheless causally entangled with brain-level sentience, which is entangled in a virtual-self-level of sentience. And human symbolic abilities add a further, yet-higher-order variant on this logical type-violating entanglement. This latter involves the incorporation of an abstract representation of self into the teleodynamic loop of sentience. Thus we humans can even suffer from existential despair. No wonder the a.n.a.lysis of human consciousness tends to easily lead into a labyrinth of self-referential confusions.

There remains an immense task ahead to correlate these dynamical processes with specific brain structures and neural processes. But despite remaining quite vague about such details, I believe that the general principles outlined in these pages can offer some useful pointers, leading neuroscientists to pay attention to features of brain function that they might otherwise have overlooked as irrelevant. And they may bring attention to neural dynamics that have so far gone unnoticed and suggest ways to develop new tools for a.n.a.lyzing mental processes considered outside the purview of cognitive neuroscience. So, while I don't believe that neuroscience will be pursued differently as a result, or that this will lead to any revolutionary new discoveries about neurons, their signaling dynamics, or the overall anatomy of brains, it may prompt many researchers to rethink the a.s.sumptions they bring to these studies.

While we have only just begun to sketch the outlines of an emergent dynamics account of this one most enigmatic phenomenon-human consciousness-the results point us in very different directions than previously considered. With the autogenic creation of self as our model, we have broken the spell of dualism by focusing attention on the contributions of both what is present and what is absent. Surprisingly, this even points the way to a non-mystical account of the apparent non-materiality of consciousness. The apparent riddle of its non-materiality turns out not to be a riddle after all, but an accurate reflection of the fact that the locus of subjective sentience is not, in fact, a material substrate. The riddle was not the result of any problem with the concept of consciousness, but of our failure to understand the causal relevance of constraint. With the realization that specific absent tendencies-dynamical constraints-are critically relevant to the causal fabric of the world, and are the crucial mediators of non-spontaneous change, we are able to stop searching for consciousness "in" the brain or "made of" neural signals.

I believe that human subjectivity has turned out not to be the ultimate "hard problem" of science. Or rather, it turns out to have been hard for unexpected reasons. It was not hard because we lacked sufficiently complex research instruments, nor because the details of the process were so many and so intricately entangled with one another that our a.n.a.lytic tools could not cope, nor because our brains were inadequate to the task for evolutionary reasons, nor even because the problem is inaccessible using the scientific method. It was hard because it was counterintuitive, and because we have stubbornly insisted on looking for it where it could not be, in the stuff of the world. When viewed through the perspective of the special circular logic of constraint generation that we have called teleodynamics, this problem simply dissolves. The complex and convoluted dynamical processes that are the defining features of self, at any given level, are not embodied in molecules, or neurons, or even neural signals, but in the teleodynamics of processes generated in the vast networks of brains. The molecular interactions, propagating neuronal signals, and incessant energy metabolism that provide the substrate for this higher-order dynamical process are necessary substrates; but it is because of what these do not actualize, because of how their interactions are constrained, that there is agency, sentience, and valuation implicit in their patterns of interaction. We are what we are not: continually, intrinsically, necessarily incomplete in our very nature. Our sense of self, our experience of being the originative locus of agency, our interior subjective isolation, and the sense of emerging out of nothing and being our own prime mover-all these core characteristics of conscious experience-are accurate reflections of the fact that self is literally sui generis, emerging each moment from what is not there.

There can be no simple and direct neural embodiment of subjective experience in this sense. This is not because subjectivity is somehow otherworldly or non-physical, but rather because neural activity patterns convey both the interpretation and the contents of experiences in the negative, so to speak; a bit like the way that the s.p.a.ce in a mold represents a potential statue. The subjectivity is not located in what is there, but emerges quite precisely from what is not there. Sentience is negatively "embodied" in the constraints emerging from teleodynamic processes, irrespective of their physical embodiment, and therefore does not directly correlate with any of the material substrates const.i.tuting those processes. Intrinsically emergent constraints are neither material nor dynamical-they are something missing-and yet as we have seen, they are not mere descriptive attributions of material processes, either. The intentional properties that we attribute to conscious experience are generated by the emergence of these constraints-constraints that emerge from constraints, absences that arise from, and create, new absences. You are in this quite literal sense something coming out of nothing, and thus newly embodied at each instant.

But this negative existence, so to speak, of the conscious self doesn't mean that consciousness is in any way ineffable or non-empirical. Indeed, if the account given here is in any way correct, it suggests that consciousness may even be precisely quantifiable and comparable, for example, between states of awareness, between species, and even possibly in non-organic processes, as in social processes or in some future sentient artifact. This is because teleodynamic processes, which provide the locus for sentience in any of its forms, are precisely a.n.a.lyzable processes, with definite measurable properties, in whatever substrates they arise. Because a teleodynamic process is dynamically closed by virtue of its thoroughly reciprocal organization, it is clearly individuated from its surroundings, even if these are merely other neural dynamics. Because of this individuation, it should be possible to gain a quant.i.tative a.s.sessment of the thermodynamic and morphodynamic work generated moment by moment in maintaining its integrity. It should also be possible at any one moment to determine what physical and energetic substrates const.i.tute its current locus of embodiment.

These should not be surprising conjectures. As it is, we already use many crudely related intuitive rules of thumb to make such a.s.sessments when it comes to a.s.sessing a patient's state of anesthesia or level of awareness after brain damage, and even when comparing different animals. We generally a.s.sume that a metabolically active brain is essential, and that as metabolism and neuronal activity decrease below some threshold, so does consciousness. We a.s.sume that animals with very small brains (such as gnats) can have only the dimmest if any conscious experience, while large-brained mammals are quite capable of intense subjective experiences and likely suffer as much as would a person if injured. So some measure of dynamical work and substrate complexity already seems to provide us with an intuition about the relative degree of consciousness we are dealing with.

The present a.n.a.lysis not only supports these intuitions but provides further complexity and subtlety as well. It suggests that we can distinguish between the kind of brain dynamics that is a.s.sociated with consciousness and what kind is not. Indeed, this is implicit in the critique of computational theories. Computations and cybernetic processes are insentient because they are not teleodynamic in their organization. In fact, we intuitively also take this into account when we introspect about our own state of conscious awareness. For example, when acquiring a new skill-such as learning to play a piece of music on an instrument like the piano-the early stages are very demanding of constant attention to sensory and motor details. It takes effort and work of all kinds. But as learning progresses and you become skilled at this performance, these various details become less and less present to awareness. And by the time it is performed like an expert, you are able to almost "do it in your sleep," as the saying goes. Highly skilled behaviors are performed with a minimum of conscious awareness. It is as though they are being performed by an algorithmic process. Indeed, in vivo imaging studies demonstrate that as we become more and more skilled at almost any cognitive task, the differential level of metabolism and the extent of neural tissue involved decreases, until for highly automatic skills there is almost no metabolic differential. Computationlike processes can involve precise connections and specific signals. They need not depend on the statistics of ma.s.s-level homeodynamic and morphodynamic processes. So, if automated functions are those that have become more computationlike, we should expect that they will have a rather diminutive metabolic signature. Indeed, it makes sense that one of the functions of learning would be to minimize the neural resources that must be dedicated to a given task. Consciousness is in this respect in the business of eliminating itself by producing the equivalent of virtual neural computers.

Serendipitously, then, fMRI, PET, and other techniques for visualizing and measuring regional differentials and changes in neural metabolism may provide a useful preliminary tool for tracing the changing levels and loci of brain processes correlated with consciousness. If the three-level emergent dynamic accounts of the differentiation of mental content and emotion are on the right track, then the dynamical changes in this signature of changing brain metabolism are providing important clues about these mental states. Indeed, this intuition is provisionally a.s.sumed when studying brain function with in vivo imagery.

So, even though this is a theory which defends the thesis that intentional relationships and sentient experiences are not material phenomena in the usual sense of that concept, it nonetheless provides us with a thoroughly empirical set of predictions and testable hypotheses about these enigmatic relationships.

CONCLUSION OF THE BEGINNING.

Although much of my professional training has been in the neurosciences, in this book I have almost entirely avoided any attempt to translate the emergent dynamic approach to mental experience and agency into detailed neurobiological terms. This is not because I think it cannot be done. In fact, I've hinted that my purpose is in part to lay the groundwork for doing exactly that. I believe that an extended effort to articulate an emergent dynamical account of brain function is necessary to overcome the Cartesian no-man's-land separating the study of the brain from the study of the mind. But the conceptual problems that remain to be overcome are immense.

I have at most sketched the outlines here of an approach that might overcome them. Despite the number of pages that I felt were required to even frame the problem correctly, I don't claim to have accomplished much more than to have described a hitherto unexplored alternative framing of these enigmatic problems. I believe, however, that once this figure/background logic of a.n.a.lysis becomes a.s.similated into one's thinking about biological, psychological, and semiotics problems, the path toward solutions in each of these domains will become evident. These paths have not been followed previously simply because they were not even visible within current paradigms. Such alternatives didn't exist in the flat materialistic perspective that has dominated thinking for much of the last few centuries. It is my hope that this glimpse of another scientifically rigorous, but not simplistically materialistic, way to view these issues will inspire others to explore some of the many domains now made visible.

I believe that despite its counterintuitive negative framing, this figure/background reversal of the way we conceive of living and mental causality promises to reinstate subjective experience as a legitimate partic.i.p.ant in the web of physical causes and effects, and to ultimately reintroduce intentional phenomena back into the natural sciences. It also suggests that the subt.i.tle of this book is slightly misleading. Mind didn't exactly emerge from matter, but from constraints on matter.

EPILOGUE.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value . . .

-FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

NOTHING MATTERS.

Have we now arrived at where we started? Is this where we thought we were when we began? Let's take stock.

The laws of physics have remained unchallenged. The sense that I have of being a sentient and efficacious agent in the world, of being able to change things in ways that resemble my imagined ends, of recognizing beauty upon hearing a Chopin nocturne or sensing the tragedy of being part of a civilization unable to turn away from a lifestyle destroying its own future; all these have not changed. But something I now know about these experiences is different. I know something more and am something less as a result. At the very least, my experiences must be understood differently. This "I" from which I start, and from the perspective of which the whole physical world often seems alien, now appears in a different light. I am not the same I. On the one hand, I have somehow lost the solidity that I once took for granted, me-the-physical-body is no longer so certain; and yet on the other hand my uncertainty about my place in the world, the place of meaning and value in the scheme of things, seems more a.s.sured with the realization that I may be more like the hole at the wheel's hub than the rim of the wheel itself.

We began this exploration with an a.n.a.logy between the challenges posed by the mathematics of zero and the challenges posed by the ententional properties of living and mental processes. We then explored the many ways that modern science has, like the mathematics of the Middle Ages, attempted to exclude a role for the mark of absence in the fabric of legitimate explanation. Then, accepting the challenge of explaining how it could be that absent phenomena might be causally relevant, we began to reconceptualize some of the most basic physical processes in terms of the concept of constraint: properties and degrees of freedom not actualized. This figure/background reversal didn't undermine any known physical principles, nor did it introduce novel, unprecedented physical principles or special fundamental forces into contemporary science. It didn't even require us to invoke any superficially strange and poorly understood quantum effects in our macroscopic explanations in order to account for what prior physical intuition seemed unable to explain about meaning, purpose, or consciousness. Rather, it merely required tracing the way that two levels of self-organizing, constraint-creating processes could become so entangled as to result in a dynamical unit-an autogen or teleogen-that enables specific constraints to create, preserve, and replicate themselves with respect to the given constraints in their physical context. But being able to trace in detail each step that is required to cross from the realm of simple mechanical processes into the realm of ententional relationships changes everything. Even such basic concepts as work and information have taken on new meaning, and previously esoteric notions like self and sentience can be given fairly precise physical definitions.

When Western scholars finally understood how operations involving zero could be woven into the fabric of mathematics, they gained access to unprecedented and powerful new tools for modeling the structure and dynamics of the physical world. By a.n.a.logy, developing a scientific methodology that enables us to incorporate a fundamental role for possibilities not actualized-constraints-in explaining physical events could provide a powerful new tool for precisely a.n.a.lyzing a part of the world that has previously been shrouded in paradox and mystery. The mathematical revolution that followed an understanding of the null quant.i.ty in this way may presage a similarly radical expansion of the sciences that are most intimately a.s.sociated with human existence. It is time that we overcame our confused Zeno's paradox of mind, which makes it appear that represented purposes can never reach the finish line of causal consequences. It's time to recognize that there is room for meaning, purpose, and value in the fabric of physical explanations, because these phenomena effectively occupy the absences that differentiate and interrelate the world that is physically present.

THE CALCULUS OF INTENTIONALITY.

It is with teleodynamic organization, I have argued, that for the first time one physical system is capable of influencing other physical systems via something that is merely virtual-that which is specifically absent, missing, displaced, potential, or merely abstract. In the simple thought experiment that exemplifies the core architecture of this argument-the emergence of an autogenic process-it is the premature halting of the component morphodynamic processes, a tendency that is spontaneous and would otherwise run to self-extinction, that makes self, information, and life possible. This preserves the preconditions necessary to iterate this process again and again. These preconditions are self-reconst.i.tuting and thus self-referential constraints. This failure to continue makes possible the capture, preservation, and potential propagation of the constraints that are thereby created-a process that I have also called an entropy ratchet because it prevents the decay of secondary constraints generated as a side product of an otherwise entropy-increasing, constraint-destroying process. It is the possibility of briefly building up constraints by morphodynamic action, and then halting the process before there is any dissipation of those constraints, that is the secret of this distinctive form of causality. In principle, it allows the generation of constraints to continually reconst.i.tute this intrinsic potential endlessly. It also provides the capacity to remember and reproduce information, because self-rectifying constraint preservation is the defining criterion of referential information. This property is the foundation for all higher-order intentional processes.

To put this in somewhat enigmatic terms, teleodynamics enables the potentially indefinite to enable something intrinsically incomplete to bring itself into existence. Consider again the a.n.a.logy between ententional phenomena, on the one hand, and zero and infinity in mathematics, on the other. Purposes and functions have what amount to infinitesimal vectors. If, as the philosopher Ruth Millikan asks us to imagine, a lion suddenly and miraculously came into existence due to some amazing quantum accident, with all the living physiological detail of any living lion, its heart could still be said to function to pump its blood, its eyes could still be described as functioning to guide its movements, and its s.e.xual urges could still be described as existing for the purpose of reproducing.2 Even though none of these phenomena arose by natural selection, at the very moment this lion popped into existence, before even one beat of its heart, at that instant these tendencies were present and the entention was present as well, if these processes are poised to begin and proceed in a way that preserves the whole lion.

Similarly, though my fingers never evolved for linguistic communication, the moment I began to use them to type words on a keyboard, they came to function for this end. This is because the function was not implicit in fingers or computer keys but in how the constraints of linguistic communication by computer fit with the constraints of finger movement control. The potential of my fingers to a.s.sume this function was simply not excluded by the constraints they acquired due to natural selection. In this respect, even their grasping function can't be attributed to natural selection. Any acquired constraints that were valuable to grasping were simply maintained preferentially down the generations. It didn't require work to bring this function into existence for the simple reason that this convergence of constraints wasn't excluded, though in the course of evolution many other possibilities were. In this respect, function is effectively a geometric or formal relationship, not a material efficient one, a dynamical alignment or symmetry of some structure or process with respect to the teleodynamic system of which it is a part. Because of this, functionality can arise the instant that this potential becomes an actualized tendency, and even if in its implementation it is impeded from achieving this end.

This is the a.n.a.logue to an infinitesimal velocity. Being able to ascribe a velocity to a projectile at a specific point along its trajectory, even though actual velocities are defined by finite distances and durations, was one of the powerful capabilities provided by the invention of calculus. So being able to specify an a.n.a.logous basis for the a.s.sessment of ententional properties provides a way to solve the Zeno's paradox of the mind that has held up our understanding of these phenomena for millennia. Specifying a function or representation is, in this respect, like the operation of differentiation in calculus: specifying an intrinsic (instantaneous) telos.

Similarly, the value of these physical attributes to the overall teleodynamics of the accidental lion can also be estimated, as can the value to it of objects in his surroundings. Food, water, appropriate levels of oxygen in the air, ambient temperature-all can be a.s.signed some potential value with respect to their ability to support the ends served by the tendencies of this teleodynamics. Each behavioral option with respect to each environmental attribute can now be a.s.signed some relative value in terms of its correspondence or not with physiological requirements for this incipient persistent tendency. And means to estimate these qualities will be recapitulated cognitively, translated into tendencies to mobilize neural work to obtain or avoid them with respect to this evaluation. This valuation, likely weighted with respect to many interdependent functional factors, is the a.n.a.logue of the operation of integration in calculus.

So, by a.n.a.logy, one might be justified in claiming that it is with the emergence of teleodynamics that nature finally discovered how to operate with the dynamical equivalent of zero. None of the dynamical properties a.s.sociated with life and mind-such as function, purpose, representation, and value-existed until the universe had matured sufficiently to include complex molecules capable of forming into autogenic configurations. The explosive growth in dynamical complexity and causal possibility that arose with the emergence of teleodynamic processes on Earth, beginning with the origin of life, was a revolution of physical processes far more extravagant than the revolution of mathematics that followed the taming of zero. But these teleodynamic properties, whether embodied in the constraints affecting molecular dynamics or the constraints organizing neuronal signal dynamics, are the a.n.a.logues of zero in what might be called the formal operations of matter-the dynamics of physical change. Life and mind are in this sense the embodied calculus of these physical processes; and with each leap from one teleodynamic level to another-from life to brain processes to the symbolic integration of millions of human minds extending over millennia-that physical calculus has now expanded in expressive power to the point it is able to fully represent itself.

VALUE.

Perhaps the most tragic feature of our age is that just when we have developed a truly universal perspective from which to appreciate the vastness of the cosmos, the causal complexity of material processes, and the chemical machinery of life, we have at the same time conceived the realm of value as radically alienated from this seemingly complete understanding of the fabric of existence. In the natural sciences there appears to be no place for right/wrong, meaningful/meaningless, beauty/ugliness, good/evil, love/hate, and so forth. The success of contemporary science appears to have dethroned the G.o.ds and left no foundation upon which unimpeachable values can rest. Philosophers have further supported this nihilistic conception of scientific knowledge by proclaiming that no a.s.sessment of the way things are can provide a basis for a.s.sessing how things should be. This is the ultimate heritage of the Cartesian wound that severed mind from body at the birth of modern science. The removal of any approach to value from a scientific perspective is the ultimate expression of having accepted the presumed necessity of that elective surgery.

As I lamented in the opening chapter of this book, the cost of obtaining this dominance over material nature has had repercussions worldwide. Indeed, I don't think that it is too crazy to imagine that the current crisis of faith and the rise in fundamentalism that seems to be gripping the modern world is in large part a reaction to the unignorable pragmatic success of a vision of reality that has no place for subjectivity or value. The specter of nihilism is, to many, more threatening than death.

By rethinking the frame of the natural sciences in a way that has the metaphysical sophistication to integrate the realm of absential phenomena as we experience them, I believe that we can chart an alternative route out of the current existential crisis of the age-a route that neither requires believing in magic nor engaging in the subterfuge of ultimate self-doubt. The universe is larger than just that which we can see, and touch, or manipulate with our hands or our cyclotrons. There is more here than stuff. There is how this stuff is organized and related to other stuff. And there is more than what is actual. There is what could be, what should be, what can't be, what is possible, and what is impossible. If quantum physicists can learn to become comfortable with the material causal consequences of the superposition of alternate, as-yet-unrealized states of matter, it shouldn't be too great a leap to begin to get comfortable with the superposition of the present and the absent in our functions, meanings, experiences, and values.

In the t.i.tle to one of his recent books, Stuart Kauffman succinctly identifies what has been missing from our current blinkered metaphysical worldview. Despite the power and insights that we have gained from this powerful way of conceiving of the world, it has not helped us to feel "at home in the universe." Even as our scientific tools have given us mastery over so much of the physical world around and within us, they have at the same time alienated us from these same realms. It is time to find our way home.

GLOSSARY.

Absential: The paradoxical intrinsic property of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent. Although this property is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, it is a defining property of life and mind; elsewhere (Deacon 2005) described as a const.i.tutive absence Attractor: An attractor is a "region" within the range of possible states that a dynamical system is most likely to be found within. The behavior of a dynamical system is commonly modeled as a complex "trajectory of states leading to states" within a phase s.p.a.ce (typically depicted as a complex curve in a multidimensional graph). The term is used here to describe one or more of the quasi-stable regions of dynamics that a dynamical system will asymmetrically tend toward. Dynamical attractors include state of equilibrium of a thermodynamic system, the self-organized global regularity converged upon by a morphodynamic process, or the metabolic maintenance and developmental trajectory of an organism (a teleodynamic system). An attractor does not "attract" in the sense of a field of force; rather it is the expression of an asymmetric statistical tendency Autocatalysis: A set of chemical reactions can be said to be "collectively autocatalytic" if a number of those reactions produce, as reaction products, catalysts for enough of the other reactions that the entire set of chemical reactions is self-sustaining, given an input of energy and substrate molecules. This has the effect of producing a runaway increase in the molecules of the autocatalytic set at the expense of other molecular forms, until all substrates are exhausted Autocell: A minimal molecular teleodynamic system (termed an autogen in this book), consisting of mutually reinforcing autocatalytic process and a molecular self-a.s.sembly process, first described in Deacon 2006a Autogen: A self-generating system at the phase transition between morphodynamics and teleodynamics; any form of self-generating, self-repairing, self-replicating system that is const.i.tuted by reciprocal morphodynamic processes Autogenic: Adjective describing any process involving reciprocally reinforcing morphodynamic processes that thereby has the potential to self-reconst.i.tute and/or reproduce Autogeneses: The combination of self-generation, self-repair, self-replication capacities that is made possible by teleodynamic organization; the process by which reciprocally reinforcing morphodynamic processes become a self-generating autogen Boltzmann entropy: A term used in this work to indicate the traditional entropy of thermodynamic processes. It is distiguished from "entropy" as defined by Claude Shannon for use in information theory Casimir effect: When two metallic plates are placed facing each other a small distance apart in a vacuum, an extremely tiny attractive force can be measured between them. Quantum field theory interprets this as the effect of fluctuating electromagnetic waves that are present even in empty s.p.a.ce Chaos theory: A field of study in applied mathematics that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that tend to be highly sensitive to initial conditions; a popular phrase for this sensitivity is the "b.u.t.terfly effect." Although such systems can be completely deterministic, they become increasingly unpredictable over time. This is often described as deterministic chaos. Though unpredictable in detail, such systems may nevertheless exhibit considerable constraint in their trajectories of change. These constrained trajectories are often described as attractors Complexity theory: A field of study in applied mathematics concerned with systems of high-dimensionality in structure or dynamics, such as those generated by non-linear processes and recursive algorithms, and including systems exhibiting deterministic chaos. The intention is to find ways to model physical and biological systems that have otherwise been difficult to a.n.a.lyze and model Const.i.tutive absence: A particular and precise missing something that is a critical defining attribute of "ententional" phenomena, such as functions, thoughts, adaptations, purposes, and subjective experiences.

Constraint: The state of being restricted or confined within prescribed bounds. Constraints are what is not there but could have been. The concept of constraint is, in effect, a complementary concept to order, habit, and organization because something that is ordered or organized is restricted in its range and/or dimensions of variation, and consequently tends to exhibit redundant features or regularities. A dynamical system is constrained to the extent that it is restricted in degrees of freedom to change and exhibits attractor tendencies. Constraints can originate intrinsic or extrinsic to the system that is thereby constrained Contragrade: Changes in the state of a system that must be extrinsically forced because they run counter to orthograde (aka spontaneous) tendencies Cybernetics: A discipline that studies circular causal systems, where part of the effect of a chain of causal events returns to influence causal processes further back up the chain. Typically, a cybernetic system moves from action, to sensing, to comparison with a desired goal, and again to action Eliminative materialism: The a.s.sumption that all reference to ententional phenomena can and must be eliminated from our scientific theories and replaced by accounts of material mechanisms Emergence: A term used to designate an apparently discontinuous transition from one mode of causal properties to another of a higher rank, typically a.s.sociated with an increase in scale in which lower-order component interactions contribute global properties that appear irreducible to the lower-order interactions. The term has a long and diverse history, but throughout this history it has been used to describe the way that living and mental processes depend upon chemical and physical processes, yet exhibit collective properties not exhibited by non-living and non-mental processes, and in many cases appear to violate the ubiquitous tendencies exhibited by these component interactions Emergent dynamics: A theory developed in this book which explains how homeodynamic (e.g., thermodynamic) processes can give rise to morphodynamic (e.g., self-organizing) processes, which can give rise to teleodynamic (e.g., living and mental) processes. Intended to legitimize scientific uses of ententional (intentional, purposeful, normative) concepts by demonstrating the way that processes at a higher level in this hierarchy emerge from, and are grounded in, simpler physical processes, but exhibit reversals of the otherwise ubiquitous tendencies of these lower-level processes Entelechy: A term Aristotle coined for a non-perceptible principle in organisms leading to full actualization of what was merely potential. It is responsible for the growth of the embryo into an adult of its species, and for the maintenance of the organism's species-specific activities as an adult Ententional: A generic adjective coined in this book for describing all phenomena that are intrinsically