Consciousness as Recursive, Spatiotemporal Self-Location
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- University of Queensland, Australia
- Document Type:
- Manuscript
- Date:
- Received 20 October 2009 18:17 UTC; Posted 23 October 2009
- Subjects:
- Neuroscience
- Abstract:
At the phenomenal level, consciousness can be described as a singular, unified field of recursive self-awareness, consistently coherent in a particular way; that of a subject located both spatially and temporally in an egocentrically-extended domain, such that conscious self-awareness is explicitly characterized by I-ness, now-ness and here-ness. The psychological mechanism underwriting this spatiotemporal self-locatedness and its recursive processing style involves an evolutionary elaboration of the basic orientative reference frame which consistently structures ongoing spatiotemporal self-location computations as i-here-now. Cognition computes action-output in the midst of ongoing movement, and consequently requires a constant self-locating spatiotemporal reference frame as basis for these computations. Over time, constant evolutionary pressures for energy efficiency have encouraged both the proliferation of anticipative feedforward processing mechansims, and the elaboration, at the apex of the sensorimotor processing hierarchy, of self-activating, highly attenuated recursively-feedforward circuitry processing the basic orientational schema independent of external action output. As the primary reference frame of active waking cognition, this recursive i-here-now processing generates a zone of subjective self-awareness in terms of which it feels like something to be oneself here and now. This is consciousness.
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- License:
- This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
- How to cite this document:
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Peters, Frederic. Consciousness as Recursive, Spatiotemporal Self-Location. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2009.2444.2> (2009)
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Other versions of this document in Nature Precedings
Version number Document title Date v1 Posted 31 October 2008 Other versions of this document elsewhere on the web
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