Consciousness Viewed in the Framework of Brain Phase Space Dynamics, Criticality, and the Renormalization Group

To set the stage for viewing Consciousness in terms of brain phase space dynamics and criticality, I will first review currently prominent theoretical conceptualizations and, where appropriate, identify ill‐advised and flawed notions in Theoretical Neuroscience that may impede viewing Consciousness as a phenomenon in Physics. I will furthermore introduce relevant facts that tend not to receive adequate attention in much of the current Consciousness discourse. As a new approach to conceptualizing Consciousness, I propose considering it as a collective achievement of the brain' s complex neural dynamics that is amenable to study in the framework of state space dynamics and criticality. In Physics, concepts of phase space transitions and the Renormalization Group are powerful tools for interpreting phenomena involving many scales of length and time in complex systems. The significance of these concepts lies in their accounting for the emergence of different levels of new collective behaviors in complex systems, each level with its distinct ontology, organization and laws, as a new pattern of reality. The presumption of this proposal is that the subjectivity of Consciousness is the epistemic interpretation of a level of reality that originates in phase transitions of the brain‐body‐environment system. 1. Introduction. The metaphysical tradition, prevailing in the West since the 17th Century, views reality as objective in the sense of being accessible and, in principle, knowable to all observers. The study of mental phenomena such as beliefs, desires, thoughts, hopes, fears and conscious states of subjective experience, generally, conflicts with this position: it excludes the region of reality to which these subjective phenomena belong. Yet, as we know well from personal experience, these phenomena do exist. To accommodate this fact, Searl [122] proposed that the phenomena of subjectivity are realized in the brain as an Ontology to which we have epistemic access in the form of the features of our subjectivity. Expanding on this view, the subjectivity of the Mental is not merely an epistemological fact; rather the epistemic access points towards a (physical) ontology whose intrinsic properties (ontic states) are epistemically accessible as the features of subjectivity (for ontic and epistemic states, see Section 3.3). Thus, the central goal of this essay is to introduce a point of view that the Ontology of the Subjective is constituted within the framework, and under the auspices, of the laws of Physics and Biology. Emphatically, this is not to advocate a "naturalistic dualism" in the manner envisaged, …