Cognitive paradoxes and brain mechanisms

Abstract

It is generally agreed amongst philosophers and neuroscientists that the main obstacle between the science of the brain and the conscious nature of the mind is rooted in an objective-subjective dichotomy. It is further common to classify natural sciences in terms of their epistemological values and their ontological existential attributes. As a result, one concludes that a computer that is useful for studying nature, such as the conscious mind, is not itself part of nature, or as phrased differently by the noted philosopher, John Searle, ‘there are no Turing Machines in nature! However, the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler, by declaring the famous dictum, ‘it from bit’, did impart a somewhat different approach to the true nature of reality. To reconcile the two contrasting portraits, a different picture, based on the principle of self-reference, will be presented, and applied to the brain-mind problem. It is demonstrated how this principle imparts a thermo-qubit syntax, i.e., ‘bit from it’, for communication between increasingly more complex physical systems. Altogether, the steady state situation produces negentropic pockets for quantification and storage of information. The communication protocol entails cognition mechanisms that display unexpected equivalences that prompts fundamental interpretations of general optical illusions such as Necker’s cube, the Rubin vase, and the Spinning Dancer. The derived syntax also embodies an interesting deconstruction of the recently observed dodecanogram brain signal, experimentally elucidated by Anirban Bandyopadhyay and his team.