The Open Mind: A Phenomenology

Abstract

What does it mean to keep an "open mind"? In casual conversation it's a popular phrase with enough common sense to negate much need for debate about what the speaker means. Someone with an open mind might be considered considerate, equanimous, empathetic, a good listener, curious, or flexible in opinion. In Western culture an open-minded person might be receptive to new ideas, possibilities, and interpretations, suggesting that they successfully maintain an engaged yet dynamic mental relationship to various subjects or challenges. Yet in science's nascent study of consciousness, the notion of a mind "opening" is complicated by the field's inability to clearly articulate what a mind is, let alone how, or into what, it might open. It is the purpose of this research to present the biological significance of "open-mindedness" in order to discuss possible phenomenological implications pertaining to neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). In his seminal book The Open Work, Umberto Eco describes "openness" as a phenomenon of conscious organization that "locates the infinite at the very core of the finite," and "invites us to conceive, feel, and thus see the world as possibility." Utilizing the methods of MDA analysis, my critical phenomenological inquiry extends Eco's lens of cultural semiotics into quantum biology to provide key insights for understanding the aesthetic role of field dynamics in qualia physics-as interpretive events (i.e., watching a film, tasting a dessert, or drawing). In particular, pairing Eco's semiotic analyses of openness with Hameroff and Penrose's OR Theory concerning cognitive qualia-producing architectures such as microtubules, raises how sensations (i.e., interpretive events) between organisms and the ZPF are-as Antero Alli conceives-absorbed, integrated, and transmitted through quantum SED information states proposed by Joachim Keppler. Therefore, we can say that living systems are those systems that have adapted their material capabilities (including fundamental principles of self-organization and complexity in common cognitive architectures like awareness and attention) to perceive and interpret coherently. That is to say-biology has evolved to make meaning through its very aliveness. Our conscious ability to open our minds in order to interpret and communicate J. Adler our sensations, thoughts, and complete experiences, therefore reveals a radically multidimensional bio-geometry and biolinguistics based on a phenomenological field dynamics Eco's work constructs. Via an aesthetic information theory, Eco describes as, "a practical level of poetics that acts as programmatic projects for creation." The writings of Rumi, Husserl, Dewey, Emerson, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and others confer depth to the emergent mechanics of perception found throughout biotic systems. Eco's ideas thereby provoke discourse on the role of openness within recent theoretical works by Jeremy England, Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Robert Lanza, Deepak Chopra, Ervin Laszlo, Giulio Tononi, Stuart Kauffman, Walter J. Fr...