This chapter explains that like biological ecologies, consciousness is stabilized in nonlinear, chaotic, self-creating, or “autopoietic” contexts that are never at rest but continuously recreating themselves through feedback and feed-forward processes. Nonlinearity is virtually universal in biological as well as natural cognitive systems. Unlike mathematical models of highly abstracted events...
In the spirit of William James, we present a process view of human consciousness. Our approach, however, follows upon Charles Tart’s original systems theory analysis of states of consciousness, although it differs in its reliance on the modern sciences of complexity, especially dynamical systems theory and its emphasis on process and evolution. We argue that consciousness experience is...
This systems model of dreaming consciousness examines the self‐organizing properties of the sleeping brain, offering a step towards reconciling brain‐based and content‐based attempts to understand the nature of dreaming. The brain can be understood as a complex self‐organizing system that, in dreaming, responds to subtle influences such as residual feelings and memories. The...