The simplest mathematical model of consciousness
Division of Epidemiology, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York City, New York, United States
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Neuroscience, Cognitive Disorders
- Keywords
- Arrhenius' law, crosstalk, evolutionary expatation, information theory, metabolic free energy, mitochondria
- Copyright
- © 2014 Wallace
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. The simplest mathematical model of consciousness. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e484v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.484v1
Abstract
Adaptation of the Arrhenius relation to cognitive process explains how an order of magnitude difference in the rate of metabolic free energy metabolism for neural tissues translates into many orders of magnitude increase in the rate of assembling sets of cognitive submodules into the temporary, tunable, 'global workspace' coalitions of consciousness, much faster than such closely analogous processes as wound healing, immune response, and gene expression. The model strongly contradicts Tononi's 'panpsychic' integrated information treatment of consciousness.
Author Comment
This is a particularly simple mathematical model of consciousness that strongly contradicts Tononi's 'panpsychic' integrated information treatment of the phenomenon.