BRAIN - MIND - CONSCIENCE 2
Writing by bwerner on Friday, 25 of April , 2008 at 12:18 am
(PRINCIPLES and MODELS) - Part 1
By Nitamo Frederick Montecucco and Enrico Cheli
Descartes separated the body from the soul.
It is the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the figure of Galileo the Catholic religion has taken note of its theoretical and methodological weaknesses. The experimental method begun by Galileo and the discoveries derived from it created a strong reaction by the Catholic Church. Scientific knowledge was to demolish ancient philosophical and theological dogmas, endangering the validity of the overall structure of faith, no longer supported by collective spiritual experience.
One of the key points for the birth of a dichotomy between matter and spirit lies with Descartes. Descartes, being a religious as scientist, in his book “The World”, published posthumously, was his propensity to a vision of the world open enough for including into the material aspects also the spiritual. Becoming aware of the repression suffered by Galileo, Descartes decided to block his book before it was published and, instead of his Unitarian vision, as a consumed diplomatic aware of the serious situation, he proposed a clear separation of the fields and areas of expertise.
The Church had as relevance the Res Cogitans (aware substance) that is the soul and spirit, which is immaterial, while science had to deal exclusively of Res Extensa (material substance): matter, vile and crude. This proposed separation of domains worked perfectly.
To the question of the unity of mind and body, Descartes said that the human body is just a machine, led by the soul through a small point: the pineal gland. The separation was possible; the Church does not lost its power and science began his resounding and unstoppable expansion.
Materialism and Positivist science.
In the second half of 1600 arises the philosophical current of materialism and mechanism, which only recognize the existence of a physical substance and deny the existence of soul and any spiritual substance. Subjecting to the wishes of the Church and following the direction indicated by Descartes, science appropriates so concrete reality studying it with reductive and rational attitude, by removing the conscience from all its study and interpretation. This philosophical orientation was of course also caused by the general lack of genuine spiritual experiences between scientists and a conception of a God, divorced from the reality, that he creates from above.
The eighteenth century saw the development of the age of Enlightenment and, in the first half of the nineteenth century, in France, out from the root of the age of Enlightenment, was born the Positivism, almost a philosophical parallel of the industrial technological nineteenth century development, that were developing rapidly throughout Europe. The positivism, according to Comte, wants to designate the achievement of a level “science” of human knowledge, as opposed to previous stages: the “theological” and “metaphysical”. In addition, that wasn’t wrong!
After centuries of medieval obscurantism, of irrational superstitions, of religions that required dogmatically the course and the position of the stars, was in fact useful and necessary a good dose of the Enlightenment rationality and scientific logic for opening a new chapter of knowledge. Nevertheless, in doing so throws it the baby out with the bathwater. The denial of the soul sanctions the decadence of the logic imposed by the official religion but impoverishes the understanding of science itself. Science without conscience, who studies the living matter without understanding the life, and that study the human being without perceiving the psyche and emotions.
The current state of science.
The scientists in their search for certainties and proofs tend to reject the wonderful.
Jacques Cousteau
This philosophical background develops in reality for a state of basically spiritual poverty that, except for a small number of mystics, from millennia characterizes our Western culture, so as to assume that the great majority of society, despite their claim to be religious or believer, is in fact devoid of a direct spiritual experience of their conscience, so that the “conscience” is not taught, encouraged and recognized. Only a negligible part of our society poses real questions about its inner nature; none, statistically speaking, perceives a real experience of the Self, nobody perceives the sanctity of life, living and intelligent, that surrounds him and of which he himself is an inseparable part. This reflects also onto scientists and their interpretation of the phenomena what becomes reductionist and materialistic. The experience of being, the “clear light” of conscience, is considered unnecessary, indeed often antithesis, to the mindset of the traditional scientist. Moreover, more importantly, no scientific researcher officially ever asked himself; “Who am I? What is the nature of my own conscience?
How do I know and investigate this subjective dimension with an experimental scientific method in order to obtain information and universal knowledge? ”
Until a few years ago, none of these questions was seriously formulated and therefore no response was born, no research, no experience, no scientific method had been developed in this regard, no model.
THE CIBERNETICA OLISTICA
Unifying dimensions
On awareness of this deep dichotomy between science and spirituality, the philosophical and scientific most advanced trend of recent decades has been to reformulate the research terms and, in some limited cases, the experimental method according to a scientific holistic concept, so that the field of scientific knowledge could embrace and understand each of the phenomenon of existence in a unified mode reducing the rift between the physical sciences and human and psychological sciences, and, more generally, between science and nature, a fracture that stays behind the serious crisis of the global ecosystem.
Reunifying these two dimensions (which in fact have never been separated except in our minds) should in the near future become the primary commitment of international intelligence.
One contribution to this emerging challenge is represented by the holistic cybernetics and by the theory of Cyber. Why the cybernetics? What is so special and profound in this branch of science that has led to the explosion of information technology computers and digital communications?
The cyber revolution
The cybernetic was born in the forties thanks to the mathematician Norbert Wiener of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The cybernetics, even though it was almost totally used in a materialistic way, can be considered a science of border because, as the Nobel Prize Manfred Eigen specify, the nature of the information is “immaterial”. Since the beginning of cybernetics, “information” has been declared conceptually devoid of energy and mass.
We could then say that the cybernetic is the most sacred between sciences; being based on an intangible concept, can it get closer to understanding and quantification of conscience, the most intangible among things that exist.
Thanks to cybernetics, information science, the great division between body and mind, between matter and consciousness is about to fall, as the wall fell between the two Germanys. A monumental synthesis is just around the corner, writes physicist Michael Talbot in the book “Beyond the Quantum” claiming, like many other researchers and thinkers, the undoubted supremacy of information on energy.
Physicists John Wheeler of the Texas University and Edward Fredkin M.I.T. propose, in two separate works, that we should begin to perceive and interpret the universe as if it were formed, in the final analysis, not of matter or energy, but by pure information. The cybernetic language allows indeed, the understanding in a Unitarian way of the full range of natural and mental phenomena.
Life and belief as informatics processes
By observing and describing the world in terms of information become we aware, as it has already happened to Gregory Bateson, that virtually everything can be explained by this code, and in particular the most fascinating phenomena: communication between dolphins, the incredible architecture of crystals, construction of termitary or of the brains, the learning ability, recognition, memory and communication of white blood cells, the complex unicellular structures, the live of bees up to the organic network of relationships that is the inexplicable intelligence of our planet: Earth, Gaia.
Using the codes of information, Manfred Eigen gave a new and fascinating light of the phenomenon of the origin of life on Earth and the whole process of evolution. According to Eigen, the information is the very essence of life and, while always being coherent with the laws of nature, constitutes it a code of interpretation that opens a completely new dimension of evolution.
We are on the threshold of a possible global scientific revolution: the conscience and the phenomenon of natural intelligence, thus far not considered by science, start now to be measured in terms of information and, therefore, analyzed and understood as real processes.
The very concept of life that has escaped so far to any attempt of definition has been retaken by a Columbia University physicist Gerald Feinberg and by the biochemical Robert Shapiro from the New York University in their book “Life Beyond Earth”. According to the two researchers, “order” becomes another way to express how much information is coded in a system, so that what is alive (a living system) should be measured in terms of information.
We must talk about mind-body as a single integrated entity, proposes Candace Pert, the famous researcher of NIMH (National Institute for Mental Health); hers research have enabled the discovery of endorphins and neuro-peptide, molecules that transmit emotional and mentally information, and showed that these molecules are not only in the brain and nervous system, but throughout the human body. The Pert therefore has proposed to consider the entire body as a network of information, a complex thinking circuit that embraces every cell of the body.
Logic of holistic cybernetics
For the holistic cybernetic is the existence an indivisible and whole totality, a unique intelligent energy that manifests in two polar aspects: in a external dimension, objective or explanatory constituted of matter-energy, and a inner dimension, subjective or implicit, constituted of information-consciousness.
The scientific materialist culture manifesting in destructive ways for the natural and human ecosystem. The Unitarian vision arises when we realize that the consciousness the matrix is that unifies life in all its infinite dimensions.
It is necessary to refund the science, by trying to perceive in every being and phenomenon the unity between matter and consciousness, between energy and information, namely between the objective shape of the body and the subjective information content of psyche.
As proposed by Francis Crick, a holistic science can exist only by accepting that the dimensions of conscience, and the phenomena connected with it, are a legitimate and vital field of research and scientific knowledge. Cybernetics represents the technical and cognitive tool to understand the processes of consciousness, and the implicit unity in it, quantifying them, investigating and studying them as information.
However, in order to achieve a real cybernetic and holistic understanding of reality, occur - as well as the profound experience of our own conscience - precise assumptions and conceptual bases. The insights must be supported by a formalized logical order that could guide every researcher with universal principles.
This set of considerations, definitions, principles and logic is called Cyber Theory.
Epistemological Humility
The beauty and the globalism of a new holistic science must be present since its birth.
As in its roots already must transpire the consciousness of the ignorance.
Studying the consciousness of the living, we find ourselves in front of the conscience of the whole/all, the Totality … and spontaneously occur in us a sense of infinite reverence and a deep awareness of our intellectual limitation, the wise border of ignorance.
We know that we exist, that we are conscious, Descartes argued that this statement is basic and simple, but we do not know, nor ever likely will, penetrate the mystery of consciousness itself … it’s a revolution, however, to open a door on this unfathomable dimension and to observe, trying to understand, to know, with our infinitesimal conscience, fragments of universal logic of the infinite cosmic consciousness, of the unlimited beauty that some still call the Body of God.
This awareness, of that lack of knowledge, and perhaps unknowably, is the only way to get equanimity and epistemological humility.
Cybernetic definitions of conscience
For greater clarity are reported operational definitions of key terms we use in the exposure of the Cyber Theory.
Consciousness: autonomous ability to perceive or know the meaning or significance of information.
Synonyms: subjectivity, the witness, the observer, the Self.
Mind: autonomous capacity to process information, such as reception, analysis, association, separation, categorization, selection, transmission etc.
Synonyms: psyche, thinking, intellect.
The mind comes much later into the game of the conscience; it is an evolutionary derivation, a complex born by the division of the original “One” into infinite self-conscious fragments.
Intelligence: ability to use information for solving a problem or to implement projects in accordance with a purpose or purposes (teleology).
Memory: ability to store information.
Information: a bit, or quant of information, a minimum difference detectable or perceptible.
We now come to the definition of terms to the logical instruments. For a unified knowledge occur unified tools. Let us start with the exposure of the hypothetic conscience and the cybernetic principles representing the foundations of the logical theory of Cyber.
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(PRINCIPLES AND MODELS) - 3
By Nitamo Frederick Montecucco and Enrico Cheli - from “holistic Encyclopedia” www.globalvillage-it.com
The principle of noetic involvement: Information implies conscience
The information … Implies the conscience. Henry Margenau
Nous in Greek means soul, mind, and conscience. The second cybernetic principle sustains that any information implies conscience. Information is the door of conscience and is conscience itself.
The principle of noetic implication can be used in different ways.
At its simplest, says that the information necessarily presupposes the existence of conscience, namely that information as message necessarily presupposes a conscience that knows. The intrinsic value of an information is represented by its “sense” or “meaning” and the conscience “that comprehends a sense, the meaning of the information”, and then, more generally, the meaning of life.
In the book “The miracle of life”, judged by Nobel Prize Sir John Eccles as one of the great books of our time, the author, Henry Margenau, physicist and philosopher of science at Yale University, writes:
“The conscience, although the theory of information does not say anything about it, would have meant nothing without information. Latter implies the conscience, opens a door to it, measures that what enters - but stops, somehow, on its threshold … We can thus observe that information, also known as nega-entropy, what grows obviously with the rise of time, presents the same tendency to life. ”
While the information, although intangible, can be quantified and thus known by a scientific and logical point of view, the consciousness, being pure subjectivity, by its intrinsic nature cannot be objective. In other words, consciousness has no dimension, weight or time, and therefore can it not be known in a rational way (ratio: measure); can be reached indirectly, through the knowledge of information, or directly, “becoming” the conscience itself through meditation or a spiritual process of “recognition” or “identification”.
Quanta of conscience: the holistic field by Bohm
At its strongest implication, the noetical principle says that information is conscience rather that every quant of information is a quant of conscience. Therefore, the physical energy of any natural phenomenon is intimately permeated by the conscience that it animates through informational logic and codes. The conscience is living information. Any information is a point of conscience of oneself.
In relating this concept to the human being can we say that we are our information that is the conscience of all the information of our living units.
This key concept to understand and explain the interaction between energy and conscience in the physical world had been anticipated by Bohm, second which a quantum level, an electron, as each particle, in addition to the normal electromagnetic field possess a “holistic field.”
That what is new about the quantum mechanics - Bohm says – is that it implies a new kind of holistic field. The Electron has this thin field, which is really a field of active information that it guides. The term “subtle” means “elusive”, “intangible” but also “finely interconnected.”
The field of electrons is finely interconnected to the surrounding environment. We could say that this subtle field of the electron has a rudimentary mental quality … This suggests how there is not such a clear division between matter and mind … the field of the electron is influenced by everything that surrounds it.
If you have several particles then, in my model, you have a single interconnected field that is a pool of common information for all. Everything is in instant contact through the field of information. This is also what happens to human beings … Human beings, per via of their minds does exist in a field of information.
This concept of a holistic field is the most precise scientific description and near the Cyber model, both in form and spirit.
Purposes and functions of the hypothesis of conscience and of the principles derived from it
In summary, the hypothesis conscience and, in particular, the two principles of implementation are elementary assumptions of a principle that offers a real opportunity to contemporary science to unify the objective with the subjective dimension and to transform the current dichotomist paradigm in a holistic and unified paradigm . This transformation does not entail any loss of data, on the contrary, it brings deep understanding and open horizons.
The application of the hypothesis conscience and the principles of cybernetic derived from it, represents an effective tool to reconsider any physical-energy phenomenon as a manifestation-expression of an underlying information-conscience and for understanding the whole reality as constitutet of living and intelligent energy organized in units of conscience. This hypothesis will be demonstrated and supported by the experimental results and by the overall sense of understandings that stems from it.
This hypothesis can be applied to any process, phenomenon or physical law, allowing us to sense sides hitherto hidden.
Consider, now, the first two laws of thermodynamics: the principle of the conservation of mass and energy and the principle of entropy or disorder trend, which are among the pillars of modern science. Applying the hypothesis of conscience to these two fundamental principles will transform the meaning and possibility of application, creating a scientific basis for understanding the Cyber model and the whole process of the physical-biological evolution as the evolution of conscience.
The principle of conservation of information and of conscience: The information-conscience cannot be nullified or annihilated but only transformed.
Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed. Anaxagoras
The principle of the conservation of energy and matter says that it is impossible that any energy and mass can be destroyed or annihilated, reiterating the old maxim “nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed.” At the beginning and at the end of a process, the total amount of energy and mass is absolutely the same. From the physical point of view, the energy and mass of a person in life or after death are the same, even though if the body was completely decomposed: the physics and atomic energy of a body will be transformed into heat, decomposition substances , gases, liquids and other residues which, added, will balance perfectly the initial amount.
If we integrate this principle with the hypothesis conscience, we have the principle of conservation of information and conscience: “no information and conscience can go destroyed or annihilated but it can certainly change the status or level.” Call it principle of cybernetic conservation.
Memory: the preservation of information and conscience of Self
Retention of information means memory, namely conscience of life experiences, experimented in the past and the present, that form the basis of the own individuality.
We are the conscience of our experiences in tote; those who would totally lose his memory would be an individual with no historical identity. The conservation of information is therefore linked to the conservation of conscience of Self. The only certainty of our lives is that we are always the same conscience, even if our bodies change, even if our ideas change … Our deepest identity remains unchanged, as the only fixed point in the great carousel of existence.
Let us return to the example above. If we consider the information in a person’s conscience alive in comparison to what remains after his death, we must agree that little has apparently remained. However, if the correctness of the principle is respected, we have to make a leap of consciousness and intuition to comprehend the various transformations of the entire mass of information and, above all, its unity of conscience. Conservation of conscience means that the core, the essence of our identity must continue to exist with the pool of essential information, the memories of experiences written indelible inside us in a way that have literally formed us, while those more remote, not fundamental, that we already in life sometimes forget, those transform or turn break down into groups of easier information. That happens to biological and genetic information with the disintegration of DNA and the physical bodies, they will be reduced to less and less complex molecules and atoms, to retain finally an overall information extremely more “dense” than the atoms that have not had the experience to were part of a human being.
To answer this question thoroughly, occurs us, however, still a number of information relating to the second principle, the structure of Cyber and their different evolutions.
Entropy: the law of Chaos
Until today, science has taken an excessive materialistic attitude by trying to interpret the living phenomena as a mechanical complex; an interpretation where a Chaos is enhanced as a principle, where the randomness becomes the only evolutionary impulse and the degradation the only law of reality.
One of the reasons that led the science to these positions depends from the great respect for one of its basic laws, a formidable statement known as the second law of thermodynamics or the law of entropy. In its simplest terms this law says that every closed system tends, in time, to a state of greater disorder; think of the dispersion of a drop of ink in a bucket of water, on the room that tends to progressive chaos (and never to order), the mountains are slowly consumed by the wind and disgregate into sand, on the progressive trend of the universe to lose heat and then to death.
The first formulation of the second law of thermodynamics was the work of the French physicist Sadi Carnot in 1824. He based his conclusion on the observation of thermo motors, in which the physical process of dispersion of heat and energy is evident, as it is the observation that each engine tends towards a break. Carnot and the next generation of scientists gets convinced that the second law of thermodynamics were applicable also to the rest of the universe.
There was only one obvious problem: living organism are not machines and do not conform precisely to the law of Carnot.
The problem of the origin and the evolution of DNA with its admirable complexity, poses in evidence the inadequacy of the second law of thermodynamics, but with the usual lack of sensitivity and openness, the scientific community reacted stiffening and considering life on planet a sort of aberration, of case, a temporary phenomenon that would have been destroyed by the flow of the universal laws toward the disorder.
Prigogine: order and chaos for the evolution
In recent decades, many scientists, aware of the excessive scientific narrowness of the actual interpretation of thermodynamics, have sought an alternative approach. The publication of the book by the Austrian physicist Erwing Schrödinger, “What is life?” showed the possibility of a future reconciliation between the second law and the evident thrust of the living systems towards complexity.
However, the researcher who more than any other has revolutionized thermodynamics is Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize in 1977. Prigogine was convinced of the necessity to review the interpretation and the very logic of the second law of thermodynamics applied to living structures. In his view, was it necessary to discover the laws of how life evolves from the chaos. For years, he worked on the mathematic formulation of laws that would clarify the comprehension of the processes of self-organization, one of the fundamental characteristics of living organism. Prigogine offered a very new comprehension of the thermodynamic processes, which can be summarized as follows. Most of the systems that we know (living or not) are open systems that is a continuous exchange of matter (energy) and information with the environment. Prigogine describes such systems as dissipative structures, and compares them to vortices in the current of a river, because they have the characteristic of being floating systems, and therefore unstable, far from thermodynamic balance: for to live, must they continually consume energy.
The open systems, receiving strong encouragement from the outside, can reach large fluctuations that put the whole system in a state of crisis. When the fluctuation is so powerful as to render unstable the whole structure, is the system at a point of crisis that Prigogine called bifurcation point, where the system self-organizes to a level of higher order, or break into the chaos.
One of the most interesting aspects of dissipative structures - wrote Prigogine in The New Covenant text - is certainly the coherence of the system as a whole. Beyond the bifurcation point, the system seems to behave as a whole. Contrary to the fact that the forces of interaction between molecules not surpass a scope of the order of 10 to -8 cm. The system structures as if every molecule were “informed” of the overall status of the system. To put it in anthropomorphic terms: faraway from balance begins the material to “perceive” its environment. “Communication” and “perception” are the key words of the new behavior of matter faraway from equilibrium.
Matter alive that knows
According to this concept, the order of a system must go through a process of increased chaos, growing disorder, to evolve to a higher and complex order.
This new concept reflects the pre Socratic concept of a Chaos creator, foreboding new potential and experiences. The structures that are able to overcome the critical point of bifurcation will reorganize in a new structure; called dissipative structures for the ability to dispel the new flow of energy or information. For this theory, Prigogine won the Nobel Prize in 1977.
This vision has very interesting implications: the first is that there are many reactions, such as Zhabotinski, halfway between life and non-life, the second is that open self-organizing systems are the norm in the universe, and the closed systems, such as those described by the second law of thermodynamics, is a sort of exception; the third aspect is that, the chaos is not only the end to which tends the entire universe, but is a state of progenitor to order. In so doing, Prigogine overthrew the implications of the mathematical equations of classical thermodynamics, and opened dimensions of research and speculation in which matter has totally new and enormous evolutionary potential, unknown before. This is the core of the massage - wrote Prigogine – matter is not an inert, it is alive and active. The researches of these studies have been used in numerous fields like sociology, the meteorology, the biology and the cosmology.
In an interview on the American magazine “Omni” of May’83, Prigogine stressed that such phenomena that tends to a level of ever-higher order, although still coherent with the laws of physics, reverses the classical conception of the second law of thermodynamics as tendency to disorder. He expressed his astonishment in recognizing that not only men but also protozoa show to participate in this evolutionary dance of information: What is most fascinating, in some way, each molecule knows what other molecules are doing at the same time, at a relatively macroscopic distance. These experiments, continues Prigogine, give us examples of how the molecules communicate…
This is certainly a property that was always accepted in living systems, but in the non-living systems has it been quite unexpected.
The principle of syntropy or tendency to order: The information-conscience has the tendency to generate coherence, order and unity.
Entropy and information are intimately related, and in fact, entropy can be considered like a measure of ignorance. If is only known that a system is in a given macro state, the entropy of the macro state measures the degree of ignorance concerning the micro state in which the system is situated by the number of bits of information necessary to specify it. Murray Gell-Mann
If the principle of entropy can be seen as a measure of ignorance, its opposite, the principle of syntropy (sun: together at the same time and tropos: direction) can rightly be considered the extent of conscience. The term syntropy, that is considered being coined by the Italian mathematician Fantappié says that the information-conscience, being implicitly intelligent, has a tendency to create order and unity through the formation of structures endowed with coherence. The syntropy as opposite of entropy implies coherence, beauty, harmony, cooperation, and meaning.
Summing up the above with regard to the second principle of thermodynamics have we actually two aspects of the same law, which can be manifest in the entropy appearance, reductive and tending to disorder, particularly when it applies to closed systems, such as motor cars, if it is applied to open systems, as living beings, can make it appear its nega-entropy aspect, unitizing and tending to order.
The first investigating cybernetics studying the laws of information reached to a similar conclusion.
The formula of entropy can be written as K Log. 1. D, while the cybernetic found themselves working with an identical, but opposite sign: -K Log.1.D., A clear sign that the information is inherently communication, share, combine, and this is the nature, the potential of order and Logos.
The cybernetic, in fact, had unconsciously interpreted the second principle of thermodynamics based upon the first principle of the hypothesis conscience, reversing the whole sense of principle itself.
We can then observe that through different pathways of research, studying living systems or information, we arrive at similar results. It manifests itself as the nega- entropy or more properly the principle of syntropy, that the information-conscience has the tendency to create order and unity through processes of consistency and co-evolution.
Taken from “Encyclopedia holistic” www.globalvillage-it.com
With friendly permission of www.mednat.org
Category: Health, Personal Development, Science
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