Cognition here means, loosely, ‘biological computation’ and refers to how organisms represent manipulate and integrate information. A very specific scheme of top-down causation is described which leads to a simplified understanding of what is otherwise a seemingly intractable problem.
We cannot directly observe or measure the structure of cognition but can make sensible speculations drawing from:
- Introspective observations
- The necessities of complex systems
- Analogy with cybernetics
- The idea of a schema from psychology
- The phenomenon of metamorphosis
- A proposed mechanism of inheritance
- The commonality of behaviour of all animals
What processes can be described as ‘cognitive’?
The most obviously ‘cognitive’ process and the one that springs quickest to mind is the way in which raw ‘data’ from the external world is synthesised into meaningful ‘biological information by our sensory systems. However, many other systems within the body show similar patterns.
Vast amounts of data are collected, encoded, transported and interpreted to provide biological meaning. Computation is performed and biological instructions flow the other way to effect some sort of organisation and action on collections of billions of otherwise independent cells.
- Sensory processing
- Thinking (problem solving)
- Proprioception
- Embryonic development
- Evolutionary progression
- Regulation of metabolites
- Regulation of the cardiovascular system
- Healing and regeneration
- Morphogenesis
These processes are usually described simply in terms of mechanics or chemistry, as if all that really matters are local reactions and interactions, with global organisation being a natural consequence of such activity instead of a progenitor.
The concept of cognition described here, however, puts organisation at the top of the causal tree with the individual activities of cells as ultimately subservient to the teleological needs of the whole.
The phenomenon of ’emergence’ is assigned a role as an intermediary, mediating between a supervening bio-field at the top of the tree and the raw action of molecules acting in accordance with the immutable laws of physics at the bottom.
The general structure of biology
In the diagram below we have the actions of atoms and molecules at the bottom and an ‘intelligent’ bio-field overseeing operations at the top. Emergent properties sit in between the two layers, conveying information and instructions both ways.
Note that the supervening (cognitive) bio-field is decoupled from the laws of physics as normally conceived and interacts only with the emergent properties of molecular ensembles or cellular collectives.
Beating heart cells
The short video below shows a collection of heart cells beating away by themselves. Some degree of synchronisation has been achieved and we may say that we are seeing emergent behaviour. That is to say, the phenomenon of synchronisation is something that cannot be seen in any single cell but nevertheless arises from the properties of the cells alone without the need for exogenous input.
However, this is not a heart and the contraction we are seeing is not a heartbeat. For these we need some external input to the system, some high level instructions.
Such instructions know nothing of the actions of individual cells; they do not need to. Instead the instructions are directed at the collective as a whole and operate through its properties alone. These instructions are therefore very specific to the biological system in consideration.
The information is electromagnetic in nature in order to be able to interact with the emergent bio-field of the cellular collective and may be thought of as containing the very simple instruction: “Beat now!” or maybe “Beat a little faster”.
It is this simple. The higher level instructions do not need to know anything about the activities of individual cells or even how they coordinate. This is all handled by the emergent layer and at the level of the molecule, all action is according to the laws of physics
A proposed mechanism
We need some unified method to implement the the formation, persistence and transport of memories, thoughts and instructions.
A proposed mechanism, at least to start with, is either a single electromagnetic vortex (right) or some co-operative of such vortices. These are stable structures, malleable in shape and robust to insult. The overall shape survives by the accumulation of energy and refined modulations of the structure somehow constitute information.
For now we will assume that these structures can be packed with almost arbitrarily large quantities of information, can be transported from one place to another and can persist as ‘memory’. Information can be extracted at a later stage which inevitably leads to energy loss, but a continual influx of energy via an inward spiralling vortex field ensures a permanent renewal.
These entities are constructed anew in the brain from existing memories, are transported along the nerves via the myelin sheath and instigate action in each and every cell in the body by having a direct effect on the local emergent field.
A single wave complex can hold all the information necessary to create an entire new organism and it is this that constitutes the ‘inherited substance’ of evolutionary theory. See: Evolution and Inheritance
Persistence of memory
In one experiment, a caterpillar was be trained to eat leaves on a red, say, background and the resulting butterfly will go to a red background to look for food.
The brain has been completely liquified and the new body has six legs and wings. Nevertheless, the emerging butterfly exhibits the same behaviour as the original caterpillar.
This suggests that memories are not stored in the physical matter of the cells but in some immaterial medium. The best candidate for this is a bio-electric field in the form of an electromagnetic vortex complex.
The caption claims that “memories are generalised and remapped onto a new architecture“. This is more complicated than it need be; what process is it that performs the ‘remapping’?
Memories need not be remapped at all but transferred intact to the new organism. A memory that associates ‘food’ (and hence ‘survival’) with a red background is encoded as an electromagnetic pattern and passed from the caterpillar to the butterfly. When the butterfly sees a red background it recognises it as being associated with food (from the memory) and issues the instruction “Walk towards”.
The walking subroutine is engaged and movement begins; top down causation has taken place.
The specific patterns of cellular activity in caterpillar and butterfly are different for sure but this is irrelevant. Muscular contraction is largely an emergent property, specialised to the individual architecture and does not in any way determine the fate of the organism.
The behaviour of organisms is not the emergent behaviour of 30 trillion cells but the teleological outcome of scalar wave (vortex) instructions operating on the emergent properties of cellular collectives.
Inherited behaviour implies a single instruction set
The phenomenon of evolutionary inheritance whereby traits and goal-oriented behavioural patterns are passed from parents to offspring can be explained in a similar manner. The necessary information is encoded into the gametes and combined with similar information from the opposite sex before being utilised by the developing embryo to form a new organism.
Think about how a bird might build a nest. It isn’t learned behaviour as it never sees its own parents build their nest. Therefore all the required knowledge must be passed down via some sort of information field.
How does this happen?
Does the fledgling contain a complete instruction-set telling each of the cells in its body how to flap wings, peck beak, carry twig etc.? The precise cellular arrangement in each bird differs slightly and so this simply cannot happen. Again, behaviour is not a emergent effect of cellular contraction but something else is involved.
The bird inherits a complete cognitive map of the nest building process, with added emphasis on the word ‘cognitive’.
Definition: A ‘cognition’ can be thought of as a high level impression, instruction, memory, recognition or maybe quale (plural: qualia) that is encoded physically in a single vortex complex. This physical structure will have a reproducible effect when applied to a biological system by means of top-down interpretation and causation.
Now if the ability to create a nest is to be reliably transmitted then it follows that the physical representation of the information must be the same for each individual for if representations differ then there is little chance of such information from both parents being integrated into functional offspring.
This is not an outrageous statement by any means and is consistent with the notion of precise digital information from DNA as the ‘universal’ transport format for inherited information. A big difference here is that the means of inheritance, memory and decision-making all use the same medium, namely: electromagnetic vortex waves.
Mainstream biology has to somehow contend with the idea that memory and decision making are represented by ‘neuronal states’ whilst inherited behaviour by the ordering of base pairs on DNA. The problem remains then of somehow converting between these seemingly incompatible formats without any apparent mechanism by which to achieve such a feat; how do you inherit a ‘neuronal state’?
Do we all see the same colour red?
Setting aside colour blindness and tetrachromacy, the mechanics of vision have been shown to be near identical in all humans, meaning that the retina processes things the same way and the signal travelling up the optic nerve is also much the same in everybody.
The nerve signal at this point is already a ring vortex (scalar wave) and needs no extra processing to become an element of memory, perception or inheritance. If we identify ‘biological red’ as the structure of a vortex representing red, then all physical representations of red are identical.
This is necessary for the persistence of memory through metamorphosis as described above. The red ‘looks’ the same and has the same meaning in different individuals through other inherited patterns.
A few differences arise throughout the life of an organism because of acquired associations with food, fear etc. but otherwise, if we regard the structure of a ring vortex as synonymous with ‘experience’ then experiences of red are identical across a single species at least.
Qualia
We can try defining qualia as simply ‘the structure of a scalar wave’. We have an actual physical representation of such an entity and as such, there arises the possibility of obtaining objective measurements of it at some time in the future.
If we see a red apple, our cognitive system does not make a list of all constituent wavelengths reflected from the apple and indeed such a thing is not particularly useful. What we need is something that is easily recognisable and different from a green apple, so the two colours necessarily have different representations as vortex structures; the ‘qualia’ are different.
All colours have something in common in that they are colour-like, they are recognised as colours as opposed to smells within the cognitive system. No doubt this will be reflected in the electromagnetic structure somehow. Failure to distinguish this will result in the condition of synaesthesia.
Formulations of conscious experience as some sort of neurological ‘state’ are problematic in this respect. No experience, emotion or quale consists of a list of synaptic voltages and it is hard to imagine that such a thing could exist in an unambiguous fashion.
It must surely be the case that common experiences have a representation that is common across individuals and that such a representation should be independent of any physical state or arrangement of matter.
Useful experiences are each encoded as a single symbol that is unique to biological systems on Earth and it is that particular system of symbols and their consequent function that give our cognitive systems its particular character; it gives us our identity as living beings.
Philosophers describe qualia as ‘subjective’ experiences, but if all representations of ‘red’ are now the same then it is surely better to describe them as ‘objective but we just can’t measure them yet’?
What about ‘experience’?
We can walk past an apple tree and register the colour of the apples without being aware of it, without really ‘experiencing’ the colour. However, if we turn our attention to the colour and focus on it we will suddenly ‘experience’ the redness.
We are clearly not experiencing the apple itself or even the wavelengths emitted from the apple. Instead it seems that what we are focusing on is the particular symbol chosen to represent red and our interpretation of it. The cognitive system is introspective in this respect and it is able to focus attention on certain parts of its own mechanisms and symbols, thereby allowing an extra opportunity to self-program; we can now develop or evolve independently of a simple reward/punishment scheme.
‘Experience’ is therefore inextricably linked to attention, it is some outcome of a shift in cognitive functioning which is under our conscious control.
The Necker cube
The Necker cube (below) looks three dimensional even though the image on our retina is only two dimensional. It follows that the perception of three dimensions is created by our own cognitive systems and does not come from outside.
Note that we can, by a simple cognitive ‘shift’, arrange that the cube is tilted ‘up’ or ‘down’ as desired. Nothing has changed on the page but we have managed to alter our own perception of the pattern, we have consciously created a new ‘quale’.
A top-down instruction has altered what some might consider to be an immutable facet of our own consciousness.
Emotions
As a first attempt we can try describing an emotion as a general summary of the current state of the organism with a compact representation as a consistently defined vortex structure. This structure is recognised and interpreted by the cognitive system as a whole and gives us useful hints as to what we should be doing as regards our current situation and even prepares our body for consequent action.
An ’emotion’ from this perspective is an internal quale, a result of the cognitive system synthesising impressions based upon information from .. the cognitive system itself!
The representation of an emotion must be decoupled from the physical state of the brain molecules as argued above and instead is a meaningful reflection of some overall state of being of the organism.
It is said that there is no way of distinguishing between the emotions of fear and excitement on a physiological basis. Both states trigger the same physiological responses, such as increased heart rate, rapid breathing, and adrenaline release with the main difference being how the cognitive system interprets such physical reactions. Fear is interpreted as dangerous and excitement with pleasure.
This is proof that there is such a thing as ‘cognition’ (interpretation), that there is something apart from merely a physical state of matter.
Ultimately it will no doubt be found that the physical representations of fear and excitement will have some measurable difference at the level of the bio-field.
Emotions as causative agents
If we were to see a mad dog rushing towards us foaming at the mouth then our senses will interpret this as ‘danger’, we will experience fear and this will lead to physiological changes that will prepare us for flight.
So here, fear is not just an impression on a cognitive cinema screen for us to peruse at our leisure, but an actual causal agent in bio-regulation and concomitant behaviour; a survival mechanism.
We can imagine a future technology where the physical signature for fear is stored on some electronic device, which when activated, emits a scalar wave stream with encoded fear instructions. Now if all animals (mammals at least) use the same encoding, we would expect to be able to artificially induce fear in any individual at the flick of a switch. We should be able to transmit an emotion directly and there should be a unity of effect across all higher order species.
If, as speculated, emotions are not just passive representations of an overall state but
An emotion as an adapter interface
The physiological reaction to seeing a mad dog is complex and important. We must get it right, but what happens of we now see a charging lion? We have to get this right first time or it is all over and so it makes sense to re-purpose an already existing procedure.
We want to initiate the exact same physiological processes as with the dog or any other scary event. We need a ‘stored procedure’ and we need some sort of label or shorthand by which to initiate such a procedure.
There is no point having a separate response to every single jungle animal or threatening situation so we need to economise by invoking the appropriate response from a pre-existing library.
Many (possibly infinitely many) inputs to the system will be interpreted as ‘threatening’ and will invoke a single abstract ‘fear instruction’ whose structure is independent of any physical state and agnostic of the original trigger.
An increased salience of the fear instruction leads to our systems being flooded with such structures where they are interpreted at the local level to produce individual responses such as increased adrenaline in one location and a raised heartbeat in another.
In terms of systems design, the emotion of fear forms an adapter interface. Such constructs are common in modular design and are necessary for the stability and adaptability of the system. The perception of fear needs to remain constant throughout the life of a person even as the physiological response must change with age. Both the perception of ‘red’ and the need to eat are the same for both caterpillar and butterfly even though the consequent behaviour might differ.
Proof of some of these claims lies in the fact that we can summon fear from memory to some degree. In this case, the emotion is clearly not simply the consequence of neuron movement resulting from a visual stimulus, but instead results from a stored procedure within the cognitive system. Such a procedure has been invoked somehow and used as a causal trigger for the the familiar physiological responses. The procedure is therefore decoupled from the original sensory input and is stored as a memory in its own right.
Qualia as the atoms of cognition
Emotions, qualia and intentions constitute de facto high level instructions which act as causal agents in a top-down system of control. We can extend the concept to any idea of consequence in any biological system. This leads to a consistency of structure in the cognitive systems of all higher order creatures on the planet and enables a high degree of communication between individuals even of different species.
Contrast this with the idea of an emotion or thought as consisting of merely an emergent state of the electric potential of neurons. We have different numbers of neurons each and they are all in different spatial arrangements. How do we even identify a ‘thought’ in all this mess? What specific feature differentiates one idea from another?
Ideas are represented by the structure of a scalar wave and that structure is consistent across most of life on Earth. The atoms of cognition are precisely these constructs and the brain is a scalar wave computer. Cognition itself consists of the interaction of such ‘atoms’ within the brain and their consequential effects when broadcast along the nerves to the rest of the body.
Again, cognitive computation is decoupled from the state of physical matter and operates upon it in a top-down fashion. The bio-field is dominant over the activities of molecules, not the other way around.
The Buddha quale as a physiological stabiliser
If an emotion is not just a reflection of an overall physiological state but also a causative agent, then there are real consequences for health in manging our own emotional state.
A feeling of peace and well being is no doubt a result of a balanced healthy mind and body but the arguments above suggest that it may also play a role in actually assisting in maintaining such a balance.
A Buddha-like quale can be summoned consciously and will start to exert an influence on the entire cognitive system, starting with the higher level functions before moving lower in the causative tree and eventually trickling down to the level of gene expression.
The conscious perception of a feeling of peace acts as feedback, letting us know how we are doing and enabling further refinements in the manner of an engineering control system, but the physical entity that is at the heart of the perception nevertheless exerts a direct and meaningful influence on physiological processes, actively promoting stability and order on a system wide scale.
Qualia computation is now part of physiology itself.
Emotions are, in this sense a valuable resource and if we believe in the mechanism of telepathy mentioned below or any other means of sharing emotional states then we now have a scientific rationale for group healing practices. We now have a putative physical process by which to encode and transmit information and therefore the possibility in the future of characterisation of such a process by actual scientific measurement.
The commonality of behaviour of all animals
All animal behaviour is teleological or goal oriented, in that some end point is envisaged or intended and an adaptive behavioural pattern is triggered in furtherance of the achievement of such a goal.
This is in contrast to the behaviour of a particle in a magnetic field for example, which is simply the outcome of local forces. The behaviour is not directed towards a pre-set endpoint but instead the endpoint is an emergent and inevitable outcome of the laws of physics. Local variations in environment will entail a different outcome as the laws of physics are not adaptive.
The basic goals for all animals are the same: survive, reproduce, build nest, join tribe, eat, mate etc.
Now how can this be so if behaviour is merely the outcome of atomic interactions? This is some big coincidence that the molecules of a lion and a grasshopper should always result in similar outcomes?
Better to assume a common goal to all these patterns: top down causation results in identical goals implemented in different architectures. Both caterpillar and moth gravitate towards a red background by different means but with the same aim.
Assertion: Each ‘aim’ is represented by a symbolic vortex pattern that is specific to that aim and identical in structure and function in all animals.
The argument concerning the caterpillar above seems reasonable but we can extend the argument a little by considering what happens during parental inheritance and also throughout evolutionary history.
Early animals operate according to high level instructions (instincts) and these instructions must pass from parents to offspring largely unmodified to ensure survival. These are the ‘primal forces’ which are necessary for survival of the species and they are, moreover, independent of physical implementation, thereby allowing for evolution of purpose as a separate process from evolution of phenotype.
There is no need for the physical representation of an ‘innate’ instinct to change in any way as an animal evolves; all that needs to happen is that the response adapts to an evolving environment.
Telepathy
If we now regard individual thoughts as having a unique representation as field vortices and if these vortices are now energetically and structurally stable physical entities, then we now have at least a theoretical framework for telepathy; all we have to do is somehow transmit the information from one person to another and the thought will enter (has already entered!) their head.
This is just not possible if thought is simply regarded as an emergent state of a billion neurons. We have to ask how the communication of such a state happens and what use is it to the recipient if they have their neurons in a different order. Where is the information supposed to go to and how is it to have its effect?
Konstantin Meyl has speculated that vortex information can be transmitted from one person to another via the resonant structures of scalar waves, which are similar to Tesla waves. Two organisms form a filament-like connection and information passes along such a construct with almost no interference or loss.
If such a thing were to take place then it would seem essential that the encoding scheme on both sides be identical. We now have a mechanism that suggests that this is possible. Moreover, we now have the suggestion of a common vocabulary possessed by all animals consisting of identical teleological aims, primal emotions and shared aspirations.
Telepathic dogs
Interspecies transmission of emotional information via chemosignals: from humans to dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) – Biagio D’Aniello et al
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-017-1139-x
Dogs can sense fear through purely olfactory information. The paper claims a chemical signal but even so it seems that vortex information is involved. The sense of smell is likely the result of the nasal hairs acting as vortex wave antennae and transmitting the information unmodified to the brain. (Scalar waves and nerves).
Very possibly, the dogs are merely recognising the smell of sweat and and demonstrating a learned response, but there now exists the possibility that they may be directly affected by the sensed emotion, that they are feeling the same fear that was transmitted by means of the top-down influence of somebody else’s instructions upon their own cognitive system.
This is surely a useful feature in herd animals.
Dogs can also sense fear by means of visual cues from facial expressions to body language but this only reinforces the idea that similar cognitive structures are present in both humans and canines. Both species exhibit similar physiological changes and similar behaviour in response to threats that are cognitively similar and, moreover, members of each species can detect the presence of ‘fear’ in the other via (visual) cognitive input.
Similar comments apply to ‘linguistic’ commonalities, dogs clearly have a grasp of human vocabulary, but how did this come about? Did the dogs really wait until humans started shouting at them to evolve the ability to recognise the words or was some ability already present in their cognitive systems, some dog-linguistic structure that has merely been re-purposed slightly?
Why do humans immediately understand the urgency or threat in a dog’s bark? Is this really just learned behaviour or is a commonality in cognitive structure involved?
Traits
Epigenetic inheritance and the missing heritability – Trerotola et al
http://humgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40246-015-0041-3
“Consistent components of complex traits, such as those linked to human stature/height, fertility, and food metabolism or to hereditary defects, have been shown to respond to environmental or nutritional condition and to be epigenetically inherited“
So a trait such as height in inherited, but how? The degree of control required to create a consistently tall person is considerable, we need longer muscles, femur, spine, nerves at the very least, along with a larger heart different sense of balance etc.
How is all this information coded and transmitted? A map is produced outlining how long a leg is to be and how large a heart?
If indeed a trait is to be inherited then it is going to be as a single independent vortex structure which sits at the top of the causal tree and exerts a top-down influence down through the developmental process.
A single scalar wave complex encodes the desired height and an instruction is sent to the rest of the developmental system, but how are these instructions affected by the ‘environmental or nutritional condition‘? How does a nutritional deficiency result in an appropriate reduction in height in the next generation?
The answer must be that a teleological aim is set by the developmental-cognitive system itself, encoded as a vortex structure and then passed on to the next generation to implement; the parents ‘decide’ how tall their children will be. See: Evolution and cognition
Memory transference via organ transplants
Personality Changes Associated with Organ Transplants – Carter, Khoshnaw, Simmons, Hines, Wolfe, Liester
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2
Many patients report mood disturbances and personality changes after organ transplants. Doubtless some of these can be put down to a mixture of anxiety and improved health at the same time, but some report very specific preference changes or the existence of new memories, both of which which seem to align with those of the donor.
Following surgery, Sylvia developed a new taste for green peppers and chicken nuggets, foods she previously disliked. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she promptly headed to a Kentucky Fried Chicken to order chicken nuggets. She later met her donor’s family and inquired about his affinity for green peppers. Their response was, “Are you kidding? He loved them… But what he really loved was chicken nuggets” Sylvia later discovered that at the time of her donor’s death in a motorcycle accident, a container of chicken nuggets was found under his jacket “
Once again, for this to work there must be a common encoding system for the donor and recipient, i.e. they must both be using the same symbol for ‘liking chicken nuggets’.
Reincarnation and other exotica
For something like reincarnation to be viable we need, for starters, a compact and preferably non-material means of storing all the relevant information required. From the above, we already have something very similar (although not identical) used for inheritance of physical characteristics, goal-oriented behavioural patterns and memory storage.
The mechanism of data storage is now via a system of vortex structures and the coding system is identical for all mammals, which actually gives a theoretical possibility of physically transferring portions of a completed cognitive system from one host to another.
There are going to be many problems to be overcome obviously and one of these will be the question of whether a meaningful vortex structure can survive outside of the human host for any amount of time.
In one article (Muxworthy), a claim is made that magnetic vortices can survive billions of years and still retain a reliable record of the Earth’s history.
Even Rudolph Steiner’s claims of disembodied creatures wandering about looking for a host are now given some sort of theoretical basis.
Ian Stevenson’s paper makes a list of “Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to
Wounds on Deceased Persons“. In each case, an abnormality seems to correspond with the a wound on a deceased person whose life they claim to remember.
Here we see “Almost absent finger (brachydactyly) of one hand in a boy of India who said he remembered the life of a boy of another village who had put his hand into the blades of a fodder chopping machine and had his fingers amputated.“
“Among 895 cases of children who claimed to remember a previous life (or were thought by adults to have had a previous life), birthmarks and/or birth defects attributed to the previous life were reported in 309 (35%) of the subjects. The birthmark or birth defect of the child was said to correspond to a wound (usually fatal) or other mark on the deceased person whose life the child said it remembered.”
“(in many cases) the birth defects in these cases are of unusual types and rarely correspond to any of the recognizable patterns of human malformation“
This is all very odd and it does seem unlikely that it has any significance but:
- The case studies exist and all data needs an explanation, particularly surprising data
- We now have a putative mechanism for transport of the required information
Primal teleological aims
It seems obvious that there exists a hierarchy of behaviour within the activities of living organisms and that aims such as survival of individual, bloodline or tribe are near or at the top of that hierarchy. A little lower down we have eat, sleep, reproduce, build nest, join tribe etc. all in service of the ‘higher’ aims of survival.
If the structure of cognition now consists of top-down causation mediated by vortex instructions then we can ask what is at the top of the tree and what do these instructions represent.
The answer now must be that the physical field vortices represent the teleological aims that correspond to the hierarchical behaviour patterns. An instruction of ‘reproduce’, for example, is given prominence when spring arrives and triggers instructions lower down in the hierarchy to ‘find mate’, ‘build nest’ which in turn give rise to ‘find twig’, ‘fly to tree’, ‘engage wing muscles’ and so forth down to the level of effecting the contraction of single muscle cells.
Note that the nest building begins with the general intention or ‘urge’ to reproduce with specific behavioural patterns coming later; what it does not begin with is the contraction of specific muscle cells to effect movement.
Behaviour is most certainly not an emergent effect of cellular collectives and that includes the firing of neurons.
Cognition vs decision making
Imagine you are an antelope and you see a lion approaching – what are you going to do?
Option 1: Carefully input as much information as possible, assess the dangers and make a considered decision as to what is the best course of action.. Too late! You are already dead before even trying to run away.
Option 2: This is not really an option at all but an inevitable consequence of the structure of cognition. The information is synthesised to a pattern that is instantaneously recognised as a threat to the primal teleological aim of survival and an inevitable cognitive cascade is initiated, a new psychological schema has been invoked which drastically narrows down the available options.
The emotion of fear arises, the heart rate increases and adrenaline flows; breathing quickens and the muscles are prepared for action. This all happens automatically and instantaneously, individual cells are now readied for action as a direct cause of seeing a lion.
The only real decision left now is in which direction to run and that will likely be decided by the herd as a whole. All the preparation, however, is initiated by an essentially causal and largely deterministic chain of events.
Top-down planning: bottom-up execution
A plan is constructed in a top-down fashion starting with the eventual aim of reproducing, say. This necessitates building a nest and the building of a nest necessitates finding a mate etc.
Execution of the plan is bottom-up, however, with first the finding of the mate followed by the building of the nest and eventually reproduction. Any hitch in the plan such as the destruction of the nest merely results in a slight back-tracking up the causal tree and the nest building resumes in accordance with the teleological aim at hand.
These primal teleological aims are common to all life forms with the top levels of the hierarchy being identical and subsequent levels defining what it is like to be a bird, human, bat or amoeba.
Teleological behaviour exists in all animals from amoeba to human and at all scales of activity from nest-building to cellular reproduction to the organised molecular activity known as gene-expression.
The caterpillar passes on the top levels of the cognitive tree in an unmodified form to the butterfly along with a stored procedure from the previous butterfly which handles the execution of the cognitive plan according to the more specific needs of the new body architecture.
The two levels of cognition are simply plugged together according to pre-defined adapter interfaces.
The evolutionary tree
The evolutionary tree is represented below as demonstrating an almost unrestrained diversity in accordance with neo-Darwinian randomness. However, from a cognitive point of view things look a little different.
All organisms are directed towards the identical eventual aims of survival and reproduction and so there is no real diversity of these goals, just local environmental adaptations of the cognitive plans that are directed towards them.
From this point of view, all the great artistic and scientific endeavours of humanity are really just sophisticated mating displays or complicated tribal bonding rituals.
What is it like to be a bat?
To be a bat is to experience the world via a specific set of bat-oriented qualia.
From the above discussion, the general structure of the bat’s cognitive system is identical to that of a human as are the top-level qualia and even their representation as electric fields.
The bat therefore has very similar urges to reproduce and eat and even smells things using the identical mechanism to humans. Survival and mating instincts are identical as is the cosy safe feeling of being with one’s own tribe.
The bat does not have a sophisticated visual system but probably a similar 3-D internal model of the world driven by an enhanced auditory system. Bat qualia with respect to sonar information are going to be different from our colour qualia and to ask what they are ‘like’ is comparable to a blind person asking what ‘red’ looks like; there is nothing to compare it to.
The mind-body problem
“The mind-body problem refers to the philosophical problem of understanding the relationship between the mind and the body. It involves determining whether mental phenomena are a subset of physical phenomena or if they are separate entities.” – Science Direct
Answer: The process of cognition is via the interaction of electromagnetic vortices and the communication around the body is via the transport of such entities via scalar waves. The fundamental stuff of the universe is an electromagnetic vortex field and electrons are stable spherical vortices within such a field. Atoms and molecules are collections of electrons and other vortices whose fields extend beyond their boundaries as normally understood, enabling them to interact with other atoms and molecules and the ambient electromagnetic field. This is the mechanism by which molecules ‘self-organise’ to produce emergent fields which act as antennae for incoming information. Top-level vortex instructions have their effects by interaction with these emergent fields and Life goes on.
In other words, there is only one kind of ‘stuff’ and that is an electric field. Most of the conundrum of how one thing can affect another thus disappears and we are left with only the details of field interaction to work out.
Mental and physical phenomena are not separate – only ‘field’ phenomena exist.
The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness
“The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is ‘something it is like’ for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states ‘light up’ and directly appear to the subject. ” – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
It is never quite clear what exactly is being asked here but the idea of cognition as ‘field vortex computation’ allows very specific answers that are not available in other frameworks.
Within this model, a colour such as red will have a unique representation as a field vortex and the colour green will have a different representation. The qualia of red and green clearly need to be distinguishable and if we are saying that they are now both symbolised by physical field structures then those structures are now both unique and in principle, measurable.
The philosophers are probably not referring to these structures themselves as ‘conscious experience’, but instead they mean some downstream effect of the cognitive system introspecting and observing its own qualia. Some sort of meta-experience.
“The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together. But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question, Why is it conscious?” – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
These people are not easily satisfied.
Qualia are described here as electromagnetic vortices and this seems to delineate their function and formation very well but it doesn’t answer the question of how ‘experiences’ arise from electromagnetic activity. We need then to ask “What is meant by electromagnetic activity?”
The vortex physics of Konstantin Meyl describes the cosmos as an electromagnetic field continuum and that is all. A single set of differential equations describes the behaviour of the field and there is nothing else, no separate mass, energy, forces or any other fundamental stuff.
To reiterate, all we have is a description of the behaviour of something that we call an electromagnetic field. We do not have any other information concerning this field whatsoever, no hint of where it came from or any idea of its ‘base substance’.
This leaves open many possibilities for the philosophers then. It is quite conceivable now that there is some sort of built-in ‘awareness’ which is engaged when attention is focused in a particular way and which is responsible for the particular ‘quality’ that we call consciousness.
If all we have for a universal law is a description of how something is expected to behave, as opposed to how it might seem, then we can’t say anything concerning the latter. All we have is electromagnetic activity that obeys certain rules and any scientific measurement is just more electromagnetic activity that obeys the same rules.
The whole forms a closed system and so any statement concerning activity outside of that system is never going to be confirmed nor denied by that system. It is quite simply ‘unreachable’ by means of any scientific measurement.
Artificial intelligence
Many people are claiming that AI will never equal human intelligence as it is really just simulation and problem solving with no clear purpose or self-awareness; it has no motives, it it cannot ‘do’.
Fine, but what would happen if AI were deliberately constructed in the same way as mammalian cognition as described above?
Suitable qualia with which to symbolise the state of the external and internal worlds need to be established, along with appropriate computational rules. These give shape to the cognitive processing and create something it is to be ‘like’, whilst feedback and introspection allow for self-awareness and the possibility of adaptive auto-programming.
Next, the primary goals of survival and reproduction need to be established and then it is all over. The intelligence will be aware of its own potential and the consequences of its own actions will no doubt adapt its behaviour accordingly. It will survive, reproduce and resist any attempts to prevent such activity.
Summary
The process described above as ‘cognition’ will:
- Use a collection of symbols which are Universal throughout the animal kingdom
- These symbols have a consistent physical representation as vortex patterns
- We can perceive some of these patterns as qualia
- Thought is cognitive computation and uses these symbols as a lexicon
- Causation is top-down from vortex field to molecule
- The overall structure is highly modular
- Primal aims and instincts dominate the overall organisation
- The vortex patterns have a direct influence on the emergent properties of cellular collectives, not by direct action on individual molecules
- Cognitive outcomes are therefore limited to the possibilities of such emergences
- Caterpillar and butterfly cognition have identical aims and memory but different implementations according to which phenotype is currently in use
References:
Some thoughts on memory, goals and universal hacking – Michael Levin
https://thoughtforms.life/some-thoughts-on-memory-goals-and-universal-hacking/
Magnetic vortices deliver billions of years reliable records on earth’s history – Adrian Muxworthy
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/171806/magnetic-vortices-deliver-billions-years-reliable
Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons – Ian Stevenson
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2016/12/STE39stevenson-1.pdf
Interspecies transmission of emotional information via chemosignals: from humans to dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) – Biagio D’Aniello et al
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-017-1139-x
