The alternative pursued here in this website is the Emergence with life Continuity: higher levels are rooted in lower ones, but they are not exhausted by lower-level description.
And Attractors are the prime principle forming basins , a precondition for Emergence.
Life itself is Emergent, thermodynamically self maintaining , continuous pattern across time as a perfect ” Prediction control system” . Which gets compressed into identity token a stable pointer summary , as Self ( narrative Attractor).
Life, memory and consciousness are three expressions of one underlying principle …different scales of same process . Memory is the stored bias in dynamics, a reusable trajectory in state space , and the resultant Life exists because past biases the future.
With Neurons memory stops being just as a stored bias in matter and information , and becomes stored in neural dynamics with time . When memory becomes self referential the epic … Conciousness Emerges : a trajectory through a high dimensional memory space.
This perspective becomes especially important when discussing consciousness. Consciousness is often presented either as a complete illusion generated by blind neural machinery or as a mysterious substance beyond science altogether. Neither extreme is satisfying.
Human experience suggests that consciousness is real in the strongest possible sense, since all inquiry appears within it. At the same time, the content and structure of consciousness are clearly shaped by embodiment, neural dynamics, development, language, memes and culture.
The task, then, is not to deny consciousness or to mystify it, but to place it within a layered account of nature in which its subjectivity emerges from, depends on, and yet in some important sense exceeds mere mechanism.
I have chosen to begin my pursuit here from Origin into the Physical Sciences and also with Philosophy in nature , where Information and Energy are both One and same … in infinite Order of Emergence but within temporal dimensions.
In Philosophy creation is subtle Infinite emergence of Infinite from itself ( ‘ Purnam ‘). But Fundamental Physics finds the same start with a Big bang … from Point horizon
The Deep Continuity
What's remarkable is there is no sharp boundary between physics, chemistry, and biology:
>Physical basins of energy minima to begin with , having minimum information or memory creates
>chemistry with reaction equilibra and stoichiometric constraints ,leading to
>metabolism with haemostatic flux states, and energy book keeping.
>Signaling with thresholds, switch states for contexts.
>>DNA : gene regulatory network (GRN) : deep attractors arrive that encode locked identity with stability over lifetimes.
This foundation makes way for emergence of Shallow Neural attractors in different regions of brain : which are task, activity pattern and context dependant , perceptual, neuromodulated , tightly body coupled with energy costs and, related metabolic requirements.
They control stimulus locked functions, memory , motor and Affective drives .
These are policy control attractors.
This would emerge as Self : a narrative attractor …and in order also launch Consciousness , as the Crown jewel we all are seeking for…. !
Attractors depend upon the most fundamental predictor
The master ratio : Energy vs Information
Interpretation :
*High E/I = deep attractors ( example : GRN : DNA , Cell fate)
* Low E/I = Shallow attractors (Neural policy : cognition)
When E/I drops below a Critical threshold , shallow policy control becomes viable,
And all new Emergent states at these Energy / Information ratios are exclusively unique .