Consciousness viewed in the framework of brain phase space dynamics, criticality, and the Renormalization Group.pdfVIP

Chaos, Solitons Fractals 55 (2013) 3–12 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Chaos, Solitons Fractals Nonlinear Science, and Nonequilibrium and Complex Phenomena journal homepage: /locate/chaos Consciousness viewed in the framework of brain phase space dynamics, criticality, and the Renormalization Group Gerhard Werner Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, TX, United States article info Article history: Available online 4 November 2012 abstract The topic of this paper will be addressed in three stages: I will ?rst review currently prominent theoretical conceptualizations of the neurobiology of consciousness and, where appropriate, identify ill-advised and ?awed notions in theoretical neuroscience that may impede viewing consciousness as a phenomenon in the physics of brain. In this context, I will also introduce relevant facts that tend not to receive adequate attention in much of the current consciousness discourse. Next, I will review the evidence that accrued in the last decade that identi?es the resting brain as being in a state of criticality. In the framework of state phase dynamics of statistical physics, this observational evidence also entails that the resting brain is poised at the brink of a second order phase transition. On this basis, I will in the third stage propose applying the framework of the Renormalization Group to viewing consciousness as a phenomenon in statistical physics. In physics, concepts of phase space transitions and the Renormalization Group are powerful tools for interpreting phenomena involving many scales of length and time in complex systems. The signi?cance of these concepts lies in their accounting for the emergence of different levels of new collective behaviors in complex systems, each level with its distinct macroscopic physics, organization, and laws, as a new pattern of reality. In this framework, I propose to view subjectivity as the symbolic description of the physical brain s