Consciousness, endogenous generation of goals and homeostasis

Abstract

Behaviour can be both unpredictable and goal directed, as animals act in correspondence with their motivation. Motivation arises when neurons in specific brain areas leave the state of homeostatic equilibrium and are injured. The basic goal of organisms and living cells is to maintain their life and their functional state is optimal if it does not lead to physiological damage. This can somehow be sensed by neurons and the occurrence of damage elicits homeostatic protection to recover excitability and the ability to produces spikes. It can be argued that the neuron's activity is guided on the scale of "damage-protection" and it behaves as an object possessing minimum awareness. The approach of death increases cellular efforts to operate. Thus, homeostasis may evidently produce both maintenance of life and will. The question is -how does homeostasis reach the optimum? We have no possibility of determining how the cell evaluates its own states, e.g. as "too little free energy" or in terms of "threat" to life. In any case, the approach of death increases cellular efforts to operate. For the outside observer, this is reminiscent of intentional action and a manifestation of will.

Нomeostasis as the Chemical Basis of Consciousness

“…There are material correlates of the presence of consciousness in the studied object [12]. So, conscious perception activates some areas of the brain more than others.…”

“…Really, the numerical experiments for one and twodimensional non-linear cases demonstrated that the proposed mechanism ensures overcoming the obstacle to an optimal state [7][8][9]12]. However, such a quest is too slow for tuning of multi-variable functions.…”

“…The tension of homeostatic compensation can lead to the generation of action, corresponds to conscious decision-making and looks like a desire for life. We are developing here the idea of the connection between homeostasis and consciousness (Tsitolovsky, 2015). This makes it possible to simulate sensation, motivation, free decision making, to estimate elements of experience and to model personality.…”

Fuzzy Logic and S‐Lagrangian Dynamics of Living Systems: Theory of Homeostasis

“…These variables can describe both behavioral and physiological or neurophysiological features and we consider them as coordinates of the abstract state space of the system. 2 As we have mentioned in Section 1.4, living organisms are somehow able to evaluate their level of discomfort or stress (see Ref. [1] for comprehensive discussion), so we consider this feature as additional scalar variable, S , and will call S as stress-index (S-index).…”

“…Thus, the mystery of arbitrary actions may be disclosed by exploring homeostasis [1]. It should be noted that homeostasis may evidently produce both maintenance of life and the will to act [2].…”