The Emergence of Contentful Experience

There are many facets to mental life and mental experience. In this chapter, I attempt to account for some central characteristics among those facets. I argue that normative function and representation are emergent in particular forms of the self-maintenance of far from thermodynamic equilibrium systems in their essential far-from-equilibrium conditions. The nature of representation that is thereby modeled — an interactive, pragmatic form — in turn, forces a number of additional properties of mental process, such as consciousness being inherently contentful and from a situated and embodied point of view. In addition, other properties of interactive representation make strong connections with the central nervous system properties that are found to realize mental experience, such as a field organization of oscillatory and mutually modulatory neural processes.