Living beings bring more order to the world, and are required by the second law of thermodynamics, to simultaneously produce more disorder through metabolic heat dissipation. Consciousness in living beings produces even more order, enhancing survival and reproduction, and incurs an entropy debt that must be paid separately, and non-metabolically, through heat dissipation produced by Landauer’s...
Abstract Aim: Emergentism as an ontology of consciousness leaves unanswered the question as to its mechanism. I aim to solve the body–mind problem by explaining how conscious organisms emerged on an evolutionary basis at various times in accordance with an accepted scientific principle through a mechanism that cannot be understood, in principle. Proposal: The reason for this cloak of secrecy is...