Neuroecology: Modeling Neural Systems and Environments, from the Quantum to the Classical Level and the Question of Consciousness

Abstract

Perception shifts the surroundings of organism with nervous systems deeply inside the brain, creating an experiential environment from the signatures of physical surroundings. Setting out from these primitives for subjective experience cognitive abilities emerge that deliver a physical description of the self/world boundary as an end-product and allow us to develop a functional relationship with our environment. This view does not give physicality but subjective experience a primacy for the description of our world. However, by a kind of cognitive recursion we can try to physically describe the tight relation between the architecture of the experiencing agent with the phenomenon of conscious experience. In this article I present a sequence of testable relationships between brain dynamics at different scales and conscious perception. I argue that the most convincing physical connection between the information based structure of the brain and the primitives of experience resides in specific electron de-localizations at the quantum scale within ion conducting membrane proteins of electrically excitable cell membranes.