Towards a Possible Entropy-Driven Process of Consciousness

Abstract

In the present article, we argue that consciousness and body are not to be separate to explain the intentional consciousness of the human being facing to environment. 1) The most neurobiologist and neurocognitivist studies suggest that the emerging consciousness appears to be a generic recurring process which subsumes under it the various results of scientist approaches. When analyzed with the cybernetic transductive method of Simondon, this process can be viewed as a noetico-neuronal unit which the sui generis activity can be boiled down to concept of intentional consciousness. 2) Homeostasis can be also metaphorically described as a generic recurring process which subsumes under it the myriad molecular feedback loops of organism. This self-regulating dynamic process could be governed by the cosmologic (Earth + Universe) production of entropy, which would keep high activity and dissipating energy and low internal entropy to maintain an ordering in the organic structure. 3) Based on numerous arguments and data, the cerebral noetico-neuronal process and the self-regulating homeostasic process may be viewed as an entire physiological (brain + body) system. We suggest that the whole (brain + body) has an intentional embodied consciousness that could be driven by the cosmologic production of entropy 1 . 675Journal of Behavioral and Brain Science self identity and the homeostasic unit of the human being [1]- [6]. Without awareness, the body could not be voluntary, as evidenced by the neuro-vegetative coma, but without corporeity, consciousness could not be free. The self-maintaining of the subject requires us to believe that it is intentional psycho-physical unit that maintains the life of the individual. However, since the world is never outside the body, insofar as it belongs to the bodily system, we can admit that the human is always a whole "world-body-consciousness". So, in the light of this view, it should be possible to formulate a model of conscious psycho-physical unit whose intentionality would be due to interaction between two poles: a pole subject cognitive and a pole object "attractor". Recently, based on increasing evidence that the quantum physics is probably important for understanding of some biological phenomena, several neuro-scientists struggled to explain the permanent interaction between the brain and the environment in terms of process of quantum coherence [7]. Unfortunately, quantum coherence process in a wet biological system such as brain would seemingly require fulfillment of many unrealizable conditions. At the present time, there is impossibility to seriously propose a model of conscious psycho-physical unit which has only a quantum principle as a basis. Another possibility would be that the psycho-physical intricacy that keeps alive the individual is governed by the laws of dissipative nonequilibrium thermodynamic systems. As suggested by Nicolis and Prigogine [8], the alive being seems to behave as a non-isolated dissipative thermodynamic system which maintains its balance with the outsi...