Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
August 1, 2024
Robert Lawrence Kuhn
121 citations
A landscape of explanations for consciousness is presented, ranging from physicalist to nonphysicalist theories. Categories include materialism theories, non-reductive physicalism, quantum theories, integrated information theory, panpsychisms, monisms, dualisms, idealisms, and others. Each theory is described from its adherents' perspective, with minimal critique and no adjudication. The implications of these theories are assessed regarding meaning, purpose, and value; AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death. The author suggests that this landscape offers perspective.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2015
Patrick M Whitehead
13 citations
A philosophical argument that biology and phenomenology can collaborate to study the body, despite their traditional divide between the corporeal body (Körper) and the lived body (Leib). The paper identifies two obstacles: Husserl's anti-naturalism, which rejects biological accounts of the body, and the parallelism problem, which treats Körper and Leib as separate entities. Drawing on Kurt Goldstein's biological work and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological references to it, the author argues that Husserl's anti-naturalism is no longer necessary and that Körper and Leib are not two bodies but two ways of recognizing one body. This dissolves the parallelism problem and supports interdisciplinary collaboration.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2017
Søren Brier
7 citations
Charles S. Peirce's process philosophy proposes a non-theistic, agapistic evolution from nothingness, drawing on Eastern traditions like Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism, as well as American transcendentalists. This triadic semiotic process theory is argued to better accommodate the quantum field view and the emergence of consciousness than mechanistic or information-based approaches. Peirce sees the universe as a reasoning process evolving from pure potentiality to a fully ordered Summon Bonum. The paper compares this with John Archibald Wheeler's "It from bit" cosmogony, which leads to an info-computational view lacking a phenomenological foundation. David Chalmers' double-aspect interpretation attempts to add phenomenology but fails to integrate meaning and rationality. Alex Hankey's work addresses Husserl's criteria for consciousness but cannot explain the connection between core consciousness and the physical world.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
September 1, 2024
John S Torday
Symbiogenesis, the process by which organisms merge to form new wholes, is proposed as a framework for understanding consciousness as an aggregate of physiological processes. The mechanism assimilates environmental factors to create a continuum from the cell to the cosmos, consistent with natural laws. The text suggests that humans practice symbiogenesis because it recursively simulates the monism of our origin, recognizing something larger than ourselves. This perspective explains aspects of consciousness including mind, epigenetics, physiology, behavior, social systems, mathematics, and the arts. The work argues for an energetic continuum from Newtonian to quantum mechanics, proposing that being is not material but a serial homeostatic control of energy, aligning with Claude Bernard and Walter Cannon's physiology. A paradigm shift away from materialism is presented as overdue due to its destructive effects.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
November 1, 2022
J. Torday
Consciousness has been systematically misunderstood because the role of the body's own physiology has been overlooked. A deeper grasp of what life means can correct this error and advance knowledge of human identity. The evolution of consciousness from the cell membrane to whole-body physiology is revealed by how microgravity affects phenotypic identity, providing experimental evidence for two levels of consciousness. The classic Double-Slit experiment similarly exposes the dual functioning of consciousness: as the everyday activity of the cell membrane and as the transcendent property of the entire physiology.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2020
Danko D. Georgiev
Consciousness may be understood as unobservable quantum information integrated in quantum brain states, rather than as a product of classical neural activity. While the molecular composition of the brain cannot explain feelings or sensations, quantum physics offers a framework: unobservable quantum states (vectors describing what exists) and quantum observables (operators describing what can be measured). Quantum no-go theorems constrain brain dynamics to physically admissible Hamiltonians. This view explains the inner privacy of conscious experiences and suggests conscious processes operate at picosecond timescales of conformational transitions in neural biomolecules. The observable brain is constructed from classical bits of information, bound by Holevo's theorem, obtained through measurement of quantum brain observables. Thus, quantum information theory distinguishes the unobservable mind from the observable brain, providing a physical foundation for consciousness research.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2017
Brian J Ford
Eastern traditions view life holistically, emphasizing health and healing as expressions of a spiritual principle, while Western reductionist science models living processes as digital computer systems. The argument here is that cognition, response, and decision-making in living cells go beyond such modeling. Microscopic studies of shell-building amoebae and the alga Antithamnion reveal a level of cellular intelligence unrecognized by science and not amenable to computer analysis.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2017
Søren Brier
The article argues that mechanistic physicalism and info-computationalism cannot bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities. It proposes the Cybersemiotic framework, which integrates Peirce's semiotics and Luhmann's autopoietic system theory, as an alternative. Peirce avoids materialism and German idealism by building on a concept of emptiness similar to modern quantum field theory, positing an indeterminist objective chance that feeds into an evolutionary philosophy of knowing. He created a synechist triadic process philosophy integrated with Emerson's transcendentalist view of science and spirituality, featuring a metaphysics of emptiness and spontaneity also essential to Buddhism and Vedanta.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2017
Menas C Kafatos, Goro C Kato
Systems that assume a reality independent of consciousness cannot answer fundamental questions about the nature of reality or consciousness itself, because they rely on a strict subject-object division. The authors advocate an approach aligned with quantum reality, grounded in Rāmānuja's Vedanta and non-dual Kashmir Śaivism. Quantum mechanics opened the door to consciousness but cannot account for it; the measurement problem shows subjective experience cannot be removed from science. Temporal topos, a mathematical framework outlined here, models the subject-object distinction as the direction of a morphism in a category, with the dual category reversing that direction. This formalism addresses consciousness and qualia beyond physical theories and suggests a convergence of science and non-dualist philosophies toward an underlying unity of physics, life, and mind.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2017
Inês Hipólito, Jorge Martins
Two main models for understanding natural life—the computational model and the biological organism model—both rely on reductive tools that overlook the phenomenological aspects of experience, such as behavioral tests or neuroimaging. This paper argues that combining Eastern and Western traditions can support a non-reductive study of mind and life. Focusing on first-person experience during cognitive and mental events, the authors treated phenomenal data as essential for studying living beings, aiming to lay groundwork for future third-person research. Using Jhana meditation as an intervention and qualitative assessment, they obtained experiential profiles from subjects' evaluations of their conscious experiences. The results point toward an integrated perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms are definitive.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2017
Yukio-Pegio Gunji, Mai Minoura, Kei Kojima et al.
Linking consciousness and qualia to natural science may be possible by adopting an endo-perspective, which treats the external world as not directly perceived but only indirectly summoned, rather than an exo-perspective that treats it as directly operated. The difference between these perspectives corresponds not to Western versus Eastern cultures but to modernism versus animism. A causation-reversal pair—upward causation from premise to consequence and downward causation from consequence to premise—is modeled using Bayesian and inverse Bayesian inference (BIB inference). Endo-consciousness is proposed as an agent equipped with BIB inference, which yields both efficient computations via Bayesian inference and robust computations via inverse Bayesian inference. Adapting the free will theorem to BIB inference suggests that endo-consciousness can explain free will as a regression of controllability of voluntary action.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2015
Katherine Peil Kauffman
Emotion, defined broadly as evaluative feelings that trigger approach or avoidance behaviors, emerged with life itself as a primitive form of mind—a stimulus-response information loop between organism and environment. This emotional self-regulation serves an ancient function of sensory-motor control, giving organisms an active, adaptive role in evolution. However, the biophysics of emotional signaling involves constituents incompatible with classical physics, prompting an investigation into the self as the subjective observer central to quantum measurement. The author proposes a new phenomenological dualism: human experience arises from both a classically embodied mind and a deeper quantum consciousness inherent in the universe, implying Whiteheadian interpretations of emotional self-regulation. The paper sketches this speculative territory, mapping it to theoretical models of consciousness and philosophical themes.
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2015
H H Pattee
Phenomena arise from physical interactions detected by an organism, shaped by the organism's own structure and functional needs. The human mind-body problem is a special case of a broader subject-object problem, which at life's origin reduces to a symbol-matter problem. The first self-replicating unit, such as a cell, required a primitive symbol-matter distinction. All sensing and detection depend on a subject-object distinction called the epistemic cut, enabling populations of individuals to adapt through heritable variation by separating subjective phenomena from objective physical events.