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Consciousness:
Concatenating Choice
A human is “more significant than a star.” A star creates atoms.
In turn, the cosmos concatenates atoms into molecules, and molecules
into macromolecules, continually creating the physical world. A
human creates spiritual worlds atop the physical world by mimicking
the creative power of the universe—for example, by concatenating
letters into words, words into sentences, and sentences into
paragraphs. Humans are creative microcosms made in the image of the
creative macrocosm.
This exceptional creative power of humans is a consequence of
evolution. Over many millions of years, a neuronal algorithm evolved
in the primary sensory areas of the cerebral cortex of mammals that
bestowed an external consciousness of space. Seeing visual
‘scenes’ beyond detecting visual ‘features’ gave mammals an
evolutionary advantage over amphibians, reptiles, and fish. More
recently, over scores of thousands of years, a more plastic version
of this algorithm extended into the expanding frontal cortex of
humans conferring an eternal consciousness of time.
Contemplating the past, present, and future allows humans to imagine
and choose alternative spiritual worlds.
The external and eternal consciousnesses don’t simply transmit
information from the external world into the human brain; they create
internal information. Concatenation in the brain creates internal
information like concatenation creates information in the physical
world. A signature of information created by concatenation is the
information hierarchy.
The human cerebral cortex holds an information hierarchy rising from
“unimodal” primary sensory and motor areas to “multimodal”
association areas to “transmodal” association areas in the
frontal cortex. That this hierarchy is assembled by repetitions of a
common neuronal algorithm is suggested in that the neocortex utilizes
the same six-layered circuitry throughout. However, the algorithms
in the primary sensory and motor areas and the association areas have
at least two notable differences. First, the latter are higher in
the information hierarchy of the neocortex. Second, the latter have
a much longer, if any, critical period of plasticity after which much
of the neuronal circuitry gets hardwired. As a result, eternal
consciousness in humans is freer and more transformative than
external consciousness in mammals.
The universe itself is an information hierarchy. At the foundation
of this hierarchy is spacetime. It is proposed that the concept of a
deterministic, continuous spacetime be replaced by one of a
nondeterministic, quantal space(choice). The concatenation of
space(choice) to quarks and electrons to atoms to molecules to
us may underlie our free will.
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