A systematic approach to brain dynamics: cognitive evolution theory of consciousness

Panpsychism and dualism in the science of consciousness

A resurgence of panpsychism and dualism is a matter of ongoing debate in modern neuroscience. Although metaphysically hostile, panpsychism and dualism both persist in the science of consciousness because the former is proposed as a straightforward answer to the problem of integrating consciousness into the fabric of physical reality, whereas the latter proposes a simple solution to the problem of free will by endowing consciousness with causal power as a prerequisite for moral responsibility. I take the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a paradigmatic exemplar of a theory of consciousness (ToC) that makes its commitments to panpsychism and dualism within a unified framework. These features are not, however, unique for IIT. Many ToCs are implicitly prone to some degree of panpsychism whenever they strive to propose a universal definition of consciousness, associated with one or another known phenomenon. Yet, those ToCs that can be characterized as strongly emergent are at risk of being dualist. A remedy against both covert dualism and uncomfortable corollaries of panpsychism can be found in the evolutionary theory of life, called here "bioprotopsychism" and generalized in terms of autopoiesis and the free energy principle. Bioprotopsychism provides a biologically inspired basis for a minimalist approach to consciousness via the triad "chemotaxis-efference copy mechanism-counterfactual active inference" by associating the stream of weakly emergent conscious states with an amount of information (best guesses) of the brain, engaged in unconscious predictive processing.

From the origins to the stream of consciousness and its neural correlates

There are now dozens of very different theories of consciousness, each somehow contributing to our understanding of its nature. The science of consciousness needs therefore not new theories but a general framework integrating insights from those, yet not making it a still-born "Frankenstein" theory. First, the framework must operate explicitly on the stream of consciousness, not on its static description. Second, this dynamical account must also be put on the evolutionary timeline to explain the origins of consciousness. The Cognitive Evolution Theory (CET), outlined here, proposes such a framework. This starts with the assumption that brains have primarily evolved as volitional subsystems of organisms, inherited from primitive (fast and random) reflexes of simplest neural networks, only then resembling error-minimizing prediction machines. CET adopts the tools of critical dynamics to account for metastability, scale-free avalanches, and self-organization which are all intrinsic to brain dynamics. This formalizes the stream of consciousness as a discrete (transitive, irreflexive) chain of momentary states derived from critical brain dynamics at points of phase transitions and mapped then onto a state space as neural correlates of a particular conscious state. The continuous/discrete dichotomy appears naturally between the brain dynamics at the causal level and conscious states at the phenomenal level, each volitionally triggered from arousal centers of the brainstem and cognitively modulated by thalamocortical systems. Their objective observables can be entropy-based complexity measures, reflecting the transient level or quantity of consciousness at that moment.