General Organizational Principles of the Brain as Key to the Study of Animal Consciousness<1>

In this paper a framework to study consciousness in animals is proposed which is based on (i) a hierarchical organizational feedback model of the central nervous system, (ii) the separation of a given mental state into two components, i.e. an invariant part, and a variant part, which are separately related to the organization of the central nervous system, i.e. 'a neural network' and 'momentary active connections within the neural network determined by inand output of this neural network' respectively, and (iii) phylogeny based on the invariant part or the presence of a neural network. Consciousness is defined as a property of neural networks of self-organizing systems dedicated to dealing with rapidly changing environments affording flexibility of behavioural patterning.