What It All Means: in search of the UNCC

We can learn a great deal about consciousness and the place of mind in nature by attention to how things have meaning to us. What something means to us is the expectations that are triggered in us by its occurrence. As if to illustrate that point, this leads to many interesting conclusions. The result of the analysis presented here is that a mind is recursively defined as a system’s in-formed structure (of its subsystem processes) which constrains its process of pattern propagation. It is present in all embodied and ecologically embedded natural systems which all have the tendency to persist via pattern inertia. Though mind is accentuated in living, adaptive and self-reproducing systems, such processes occur throughout nature in simpler form. The process of pattern propagation viewed iteratively is always self referencing via recent state factored into the process update dynamical equations. Such internal feedback is a prototype of self knowledge. The more state history or memory a system can utilize in making state transitions, the more self or agency it has. When we look at such systems from the outside or 3 rd person view, we ascribe cognition in the adaptive, self-preserving behavior. When we reflect on our own personal 1 st person historical record using our advanced human declarative memory or when we imagine other viewpoints (“What is it like to be a ___”), we experience consciousness in ourselves or imagine something like it in others. The physical universe is orderly starting from the behavior of simple physical systems that internally synchronize their subsystems and start moving in one direction with a unified response. This scales up to complex systems that can orchestrate coordinated responses to serve anticipated goals. We tend to attribute awareness to those systems that have more internally stored constraints, the memories and habits that provide self determination, rather than to those systems whose behavior seems constrained mostly by external forces or general principles rather than by personal history. Where internal memory is used to anticipate, make and evaluate predictions in search of the optimal next state transition, we attribute more conscious awareness, self determined choice and intelligence. However, a claim here is that general principles or “laws of nature” do not “govern” behavior nor do they have causal impact with any necessity. They always explain behavior only after the fact. The behavior itself is logically prior to the laws of nature, and the behavior can be viewed as the system’s naturally emergent choice. Natural laws are not to be used to explain emergent behavior in nature. Rather natural laws are emergent from the behavior we see in nature. This leads to the conclusion that there is a continuum of mind and awareness in nature with an unexpected central role for qualia. Qualitative experience is fundamental to all natural processes. The question that remains is not “Why are we not all zombies?” Rather we should ask “Is there a zombie in nature anywhere?” UNCC stands for UNiversal Correlates of Consciousness in contrast to the long sought NCC, the Neural Correlates of Consciousness. This view prescribes a different metaphor of how nature works and a new argument for panpsychism based upon a radical skepticism that results from applying cognitive neuroscience to science.