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Dissipative structure and the mind-body problem
Medical Hypotheses I Medica/ Hvpofheses (1991) 34, 310-315 0 Longman Group UK Lfd 1991
Dissipative
Structure
and the Mind-Body
Problem
G. G. DUDLEY 7 1 East Street, Lexington, MA 02 173, USA
Abstract - A theory explaining the link between mind and body is presented which depends upon viewing personal awareness as a figure against the ground of infinity. It is proposed that a tendency toward dissipation, in tension with an opposite tendency toward structural integrity, determines both the ‘illumination’ and specificity of awareness. Mind, as an aspect of the awareness bubble, is envisioned as influencing the body via a regressive discrepancy in relation to the current organization of the body mass - a conclusion derived from the fact that the origin of the tension between structure and its dissipation extends regressively back to the time when self was infinite or boundless. This regressive discrepancy drives behavior in an expectable and therefore visible direction, i.e., non-existent. The entire thesis rests upon viewing reality as fundamentally personal, such that the linkage between a sensory field and neural activity can be explained on the basis of a simple gap between structure and its dissipation. The significance of this viewpoint for understanding the brain is briefly discussed.
‘. . . the supreme importance of the problem . . . prompts us to search ahead of the evidence from time to time . . . for any possible new insight. Even a partial solution that would enable us to decide between very broad and general alternatives like whether consciousness is cosmic or individual, mortal or immortal, in possession of free will or subject to causal determination . . . could have profound and far-reaching ideological implications.’ Roger Sperry (1)
body mass? How is it that intangible consciousness resides in a molecular house? What is the link between mind and body and how does ‘mind’ wilfully control behavior? To answer such questions, we need a theory which intrinsically explains the linkage of mind to body. I propose that a first step toward such a theory lies in a special application of the figure-ground paradigm. Why? Because the percipient self must, in its own right, have a ground against which it becomes aware of itself as an ‘illuminated sphere’ and within which sphere thoughts and objects are imagined or seen. In this paper, I will develop this thesis starting with some observations on the way in which ‘past’ and ‘future’ encase the conscious self in the ‘now’ of time.
Introduction Has the brain been expressly designed for maintaining some optimal condition of the ‘bubbleof-awareness’ which sits mysteriously amidst the Date received Date accepted
16 January 1990 19 June 1990
310
DISSIPATIVE
STRUCTURE
AND THE MIND-BODY
311
PROBLEM
Awareness as an interface Given that the past consists of highly-structured events, in contrast to the utterly non-descript future, awareness is distinctively inseparable from a spatiotemporal interface. The opposite poles of this interface are, in addition to the past and future, order and disorder, respectively. In other words, the dichotomy of ‘past and future’ holds the strong implication of a precise structural counterpart. Perhaps, accordingly, conscious awareness is encased not only between past and future, but between structure and its potential loss as well. The suggestion follows that awareness, inseparable from structure and its potential dissipation, may be equal to this interface, as opposed to ‘residing’ in it. If we envision ‘self’ as fundamental and hierarchically supreme in relation to physical structure, this becomes an intriguing possibility. In a microtemporal setting involving fractions of perceptual time, what do the terms ‘memory’ and ‘anticipation’ actually signify? An individual remembers the past, but anticipates the immediate future based on this past. The semantics are misleading. I suggest that making a distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘anticipation’ helps separate backward from forward, but that in a structural sense such terms are quite similar. That is, in anticipating the immediate future, a person is actually remembering what in a given context should take place next, so that when and if it does occur, a satiisfying match ensues. The immediate future is mere potential and has no anticipatable specificity. However, the term ‘anticipation’ does have a very special structural reference. That is, in the incipient or momentary absence of expected and therefore appropriate aspects of a sensory field an individual begins to ‘anticipate’ the nondescript future, in the probablistic sense of there being a sudden and growing likelihood of structural dissipation, curtailed only by an appropriate behavioral response. In this light, let us look at ‘past’ and ‘future’ as more than linguistic abstractions and attempt to discern their correlates within biological structure. To the extent that structure has become consciou:s, it is temporally sandwiched by what just happened and by what is just about to happen, which is to say that the conscious organism remains in a state of expectation. Within this closet of expectation the implication exists - that if an expected sensory field is not sustained (via saccades and other behavioral schemata) that something is seriously wrong, and that the organism
is moving to that precise measure a little closer to experiencing a novel and threatening situation - its own non-existence! This is not something the self has to stop and think about; it is just a physical fact that if expected events do not occur, something is structurally awry. In fact, the moment something of this nature is thought about, it becomes more of a reflective event, no longer a microtemporal phenomenon such as we are here discussing. So, in the overseeing of structure in the ‘now’ of time, the self and its physical house - albeit for an aversive action - are in ongoing danger of dissipation, if only as implied by the incipient absence of that which is expected in a given sensory field. That is, within each and every moment of awareness there is a fraction of time, just prior to an appropriate (and therefore expectable) result, when the possibility of dissipation dramatically increases - this increase having by its nature been incorporated into an averting response. It is important to realize that the reference here is not to major events, as reflectively anticipated by the conscious self, but rather to the continuation through time of a focal-ambient gestalt. This special moment of increased dissipative probability is fortunately almost invariably followed by an expected result, speaking in terms of a total, sensory field as distributed through space and time and involving the whole body as the instrument for bringing about a match with what is expected. That is, somehow a potential for an infinitude of self as the outcome of non-action has been encoded into the hierarchical organization of brain and body, in a manner which may ultimately explain the unity of perception and behavior. The illumination of self In the above context, I propose that - consistent with the figure-ground paradigm - an organism becomes ‘illuminated’ (i.e., aware of self and other) by virtue of being ‘too small’ (and therefore seeable), in contrast to and as part and parcel of an ‘anticipation’ of infinity - in the sense of a potential loss of boundary were it not for an ongoing intervening and saving action. That is, as infinity (boundlessness) is challenged by non-action, there is a change within structure that can be thought of as ‘too-small’ in comparison with some otherwise attainable and more desirable state. In effect, the organism has (to the measure of anticipating infinity) become too much the ground-of-its-ownbeing.
312 This illumination of the self as a unique phenomenon in space and time (in contrast to studying specific aspects of perception) is often taken for granted, but understanding the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of its existence may be the key to solving the mind-body problem. I propose that awareness as a stable event involves a familiarization with and therefore successful anticipation of one’s own smallness, manifesting as increasingly expectable and therefore matchable specificity. To grasp this concept, however, ‘smallness’ must be sensed to be inseparable from an implicative ‘anticipation’ of infinity/boundlessness. Such a process does not, of course, remain static. Rather, this process, by its nature, incorporates more and more expectable complexity within a given unit of expectational space-time as each complex in turn becomes the new expectable whole, the incipient absence of which continues to imply boundlessness, therefore serving steadfastly as the source of self-illumination, which is of course inseparable, in turn, from expectable specificity. In effect, focal perception and an ambient surround may derive from the fact that an organism becomes increasingly habituated to its own expectable smallness, according to the manner by which a relationship to infinity has been discretely incorporated into sensory analyzers and other structures in creating a capacity for preventing dissipation. This process can be envisioned as advancing to the point of subtle thoughts, feelings and complex imagery via what is in principle a simplistic habituation to previous, successful expectations. A common mechanism underlying behavior and perception, dependent upon infinity being ‘in here’ We can consider how a growing probability toward the dissolution of structure helps to simultaneously explain the underlying kinetics of behavior and perception. The premise is that the threatened loss of the ‘seeable’ (or ‘expectable’), as distributed throughout a sensory field, provides the driving ‘force’ for mind via a small-big discrepancy, resulting continuously in expectable perceptions - in effect, a unified behavior-perception team for minimizing expectational failure. In a bioenergetic context, I propose that kinetic activity, or ‘behavior’, is dependent upon the manner in which the novelty of non-self has been aver-
MEDICAL
HYPOTHESES
sively encoded within structure; that there is a profound structural reference as well as a perceptual meaning to the term ‘expectation’ as the minimizer of a contrast with infinity. To grasp how such reasoning specifically applies to anatomy and physiology, it is necessary to consider that each and every moment is related to an antecedent moment, with all moments being equahy dependent upon an infinity-related, spacetime interface, contiguously back to when the self was in fact boundless. It actually makes more sense to view the ‘anticipation’ of infinity from a regressive viewpoint, because, as mentioned, in comparison with a mythical future, the past alone is real, even referring back to one’s own non-existence! That is, ‘expectation’, implying the potential loss of self and structure, has a regressive and successive correlate contiguously back to the time when self and its physical house were less complex and more immersed. That is, ‘memory of the past’ may actually refer inclusively to the once boundless nature of self, and it may be that such memory is responsible for the ongoing illumination of self, in conjunction with structural activity designed for preventing a return to this boundless state. Since an infinity ‘out there’ cannot be easily envisioned as impacting upon structure ‘in here’, we can think of the total body mass as representing the infinity to which the conscious self is being regressively compared and via which comparison structure is focussed or ‘illuminated’ as too small in relation to itself. That is, if an implied return to an infinitude of boundary is the source of focal, self illumination, and if this possibility is to have a bearing on real structure and behavior, an anticipatory mismatch, with a corresponding anatomical discrepancy, will be somewhere internally present, as dynamically stabilized over many contiguous space-time frames. There are, in effect, two contrasts occurring during an act of perception. There is an ongoing contrast with boundary-less infinity prospectively or regressively (which are the same from a structural viewpoint). And there is a corresponding contrast within structure, as though in denial of current status the organism were smaller and organizationally less complex. I propose that this contrast is equivalent to a structural discrepancy that causes the kinetic release of appropriate (and therefore expectable) behavior. As Sherrington notes ‘.. . living bodies . . . are worked to the last detail by intrinsic hierarchical systems of an
DISSlPATIVE
STRUCTURE AND THE MIND-BODY
PROBLEM
immaterial nature . . . (which) is in truth, the concept of ‘self’ transgressing experience and invading the field of energetics as ‘cause’ (2). Corresponding to the extent that awareness is mseparable from a regression (involving contiguously smaller, less complex levels of organization), the perception of a focal, and therefore bounded image (in opposition to the anticipation of infinity) will, by definition, reflect the measure to which an organism has successfully contained regression and dissipation - as if the ‘seeing of an object’ were the actual process of creatively restoring one’s own boundedness (inseparable, after all, from structural specificity). The sensory field (combined focal center and ambient surround) will similarly reflect the degree to which boundlessness has been successfully thwarted, i.e., the extent to which the self has become immersed into expectable or focal-imagery as the method for minimizing an ongoing contrast with infinity and the concurrent structural discrepancy within the body mass. ‘Seeing’ from a dissipative perspective is, then, equivalent to a conviction of, or restored movement toward, boundedness (i.e., ‘as though bounded’ which is a match with current reality), in a self-oriented universe where focal awareness is just waiting to manifest. To summarize the gist of this implicatory (ifthen) thinking, it can be said that in the course of development, the capacity for actualizing the expected prevents any serious movement toward ultimate dissipation. A bounded and therefore immersive ‘image’ corresponds to a restored and sustained sufficiency of boundary in relation to the body mass. Boundedness, then, sits in a competitive relationship with boundlessness, with a dynamic tension as distributed through space and time, giving rise to an image and surrounding sensory field. The individual meanwhile, immersed in expectable perceptions, successfully experiences an ongoing sense of adequacy for the ‘task of life’ - meaning, translated into bioenergetic terms, that he feels ‘big enough for his own britches.’ Dissipative structure and neural organization Understanding the mind-brain relationship in the above terms will involve a more comprehensive way of looking at well-known aspects of neural organization. For example, a dissipative perspective adapts well to the fact that axial organization exists in a medial relationship to more lately-developed, neural structures. After all, the organis-
313 mic mass developmentally increases in a highlyspecific, small-big and medial-lateral manner, a fact so obvious that it is easily overlooked. In this regard, it is known that the bodily motions by which ambient space is apprehended are mid-brain dependent as opposed to the cortical dependence of focal vision (3), giving us a clue as to how an infinity-related factor may be encoded within biological structure. It is probable that retinal vision is but a subset of a far more encompassing principle of self-visibility. Vision substitution experiments with blindfolded subjects point in this direction (4). In these experiments, the subject manipulates a television camera whose inputs are transduced into tactile stimulation over an area on the subject’s back. After a period of training, a coarse image appears which, in spite of the subject being blind, ‘seems to come from in front of the camera.’ This type of experiment affirms the possibility that conscious perception is linked with an increasingly efficient expectation-reality match, the root of which may lie in creatively constraining the tendency toward boundlessness. If the possibility of structural dissolution truly participates in the production of self-visibility, it would then appear as though consciousness is the ‘ . . . very core or substance of which certain physical events . . . are composed and which physics itself may eventually have to take into account’ (5). The regressive aspect of awareness, suggests that sensory-transduced energy may be gated centripetally within the brain and then centrifugally in achieving an optimal, light-creating contrast with infinity. That is, insofar as during a given moment of perceptual expectation there occurs a regressive contrast within the body mass, somatotopicallyarrayed energy - mapped millimeter by millimeter on to the brain - will have fallen into a discrete, developmentally determined ‘hole’ (reticular gating?) to be thereupon driven through ‘expectational pores’ (thalamic to motor?), in dimming the light of self. It is known that there is a ‘hypnogenic circuit’ involving passage of frontal fibers into the lateral hypothalamus (6). If, ontologically, structure proves to be infinity-linked, sleep and a corresponding boundlessness of the self can be envisioned as the circadian end-result of a familiarization (habituation) with one’s own expectable boundedness. That is, as the day wears on the ‘conviction’ of boundedness (via the successive seeing of one’s own too-smallness) becomes so
314
strong that the ‘anticipatory’ gap becomes too weak to sustain consciousness and the individual ‘falls asleep’. This, in turn, corresponds to an extreme minimization of discrepancy within the body mass and therefore involves a waning of expectable, motor activity as well. The frontal brain, important in foresight and judgment, receives heavy input from a part of the brain known to play a key role in body image - the parietal association cortex. Given that consciousness is inseparable from foresight and oversees the activity of one’s body as a whole through a contiguous temporal interface, such areas will be particularly important to study from a dissipative perspective. For even though the ‘future’ is being planned, the organism remains convinced via current bodily activity as to its ‘future’ boundedness and accordingly expects certain immersive sensory patterns in the ‘now’ of time. It is relevant to the dissipative thesis that the hypothalamus, as a link between motor activity and the internal milieu, may be a ‘ponderostat’ for the ongoing regulation of body weight (7). That is, behavior, as regulated by hypothalamic and many other neural networks, may fundamentally be a mechanism for maintaining the status quo of the body mass. Temperature control may be a reflection of the efficiency of this process. One gets a sense for how every part of the body, inside and outside, is discretely mapped, with specific neural structures playing their respective roles in what, from a dissipative perspective, amounts to the ‘homuncularization’ of infinity. It may in this sense be true that ‘man is made in the image of God.’ The sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the nervous system, important to an understanding of both health and disease, may in their reciprocity similarly come to be viewed as reflecting a fluxing discrepancy of boundary in relation to the body mass, as the organism seeks an optimal balance between fear (as though boundless) and nurture (as though bounded). A dissipative perspective with its potential for delineating feedback pathways between the conscious self and a symptom, will be an enticing prospect to explore in this regard. That is, if one understands the physical basis of self, or the self-basis of structure, the meaning of a symptom can be envisioned as modifying what might be called the ‘size of self’ either in a positive or negative manner. Memory, key to the understanding of the brain, will be particularly fascinating to study from a dissipative viewpoint. For, if consciousness is fun-
MEDICAL
HYPOTHESES
damental, limbic and other memory-related structures - central to all that happens in the brain - will from a three-dimensional orientation come to be viewed as minimizers of an anatomical discrepancy, contiguously back through space-time to more immersive stages of physical development. In effect, what is thought, from an anthropomorphic perspective, to be ‘memory’ will, from a bioenergetic viewpoint, prove to be but the regulation and restoration of body mass. As mechanical as this sounds, it will paradoxically tend to change our thinking toward a more personalized interpretation of the universe. Conclusion
This paper describes in dissipative and implicative terms a unifying theory which may prove helpful for understanding the relationship between mind and body. The central concept is that an ongoing tendency toward boundlessness is constrained by the consequent ‘seeing of’ expectable sensory fields and that the perception of an image or thought reflects success in restoring structural integrity. The theory states that the possibility for dissolution of structure is simultaneously responsible for both awareness and underlying behavior, in a universe where ‘self’ is ontologically prior to physical reality. Because of its complex, homuncular nature a more precise structural correlate to awareness cannot, except in principle, be conceptualized at this point, even though as Sherrington notes there is at the core an ‘element relatively simple’ (8). In the words of Allport we still need to delineate the ‘isomorphic relation’ between brain events and the ‘configurational character’ of a given conscious percept (9). But, for starters, it would help to have a perspective that has more explanatory and unifying power than traditional dualism. It is my hope that this paper offers a step in this direction. References 1. Sperry RW. A modified concept of consciousness. Psychological Review. 76(6): 532 - 536. 1969. 2. Sherrmgton C. Man on his nature. Macmillan, New York; University Press, Cambridge, England, p 340, 1941. 3. Trevarthen C and Sperry RW. Perceptual unity of the ambient visual field in human commissurotomy patients. Brain 96: 547- 570, 1973. 4. Bach-y-Rita P, Collins CC, Saunders FA, White B and Scadden L. Vision substitution by tactile image projection. Nature, 221: 963 -964, 1969. Yale Univer5. Beloff J. The behavioral basis of perception. sity Press, New Haven and London, p 25, 1962.
DISSIPATIVE
STRUCTURE
AND
THE
MIND-BODY
PROBLEM
6. Mazzuchelli-O’Flaherty A L, O’Flaherty J J and Hernandez-Peon R. Sleep and other behavioral responses incluced by acetyl-choline stimulation of frontal and mesial cortex. Brain Research 4: 268 - 283, 1967. 7. Cabanac M, Duclaux R and Spector N H. Sensory feed-
315 back in regulation of body weight: is there a ponderostat? Nature 229: 125 - 127, 1971. 8. Sherrington. Ibid. 9. Allport F H. Theories of perception and the concept of structure. John Wiley and Sons, New York, p 129, 1955.
Dissipative
Structure
and the Mind-Body
Problem
G. G. DUDLEY 7 1 East Street, Lexington, MA 02 173, USA
Abstract - A theory explaining the link between mind and body is presented which depends upon viewing personal awareness as a figure against the ground of infinity. It is proposed that a tendency toward dissipation, in tension with an opposite tendency toward structural integrity, determines both the ‘illumination’ and specificity of awareness. Mind, as an aspect of the awareness bubble, is envisioned as influencing the body via a regressive discrepancy in relation to the current organization of the body mass - a conclusion derived from the fact that the origin of the tension between structure and its dissipation extends regressively back to the time when self was infinite or boundless. This regressive discrepancy drives behavior in an expectable and therefore visible direction, i.e., non-existent. The entire thesis rests upon viewing reality as fundamentally personal, such that the linkage between a sensory field and neural activity can be explained on the basis of a simple gap between structure and its dissipation. The significance of this viewpoint for understanding the brain is briefly discussed.
‘. . . the supreme importance of the problem . . . prompts us to search ahead of the evidence from time to time . . . for any possible new insight. Even a partial solution that would enable us to decide between very broad and general alternatives like whether consciousness is cosmic or individual, mortal or immortal, in possession of free will or subject to causal determination . . . could have profound and far-reaching ideological implications.’ Roger Sperry (1)
body mass? How is it that intangible consciousness resides in a molecular house? What is the link between mind and body and how does ‘mind’ wilfully control behavior? To answer such questions, we need a theory which intrinsically explains the linkage of mind to body. I propose that a first step toward such a theory lies in a special application of the figure-ground paradigm. Why? Because the percipient self must, in its own right, have a ground against which it becomes aware of itself as an ‘illuminated sphere’ and within which sphere thoughts and objects are imagined or seen. In this paper, I will develop this thesis starting with some observations on the way in which ‘past’ and ‘future’ encase the conscious self in the ‘now’ of time.
Introduction Has the brain been expressly designed for maintaining some optimal condition of the ‘bubbleof-awareness’ which sits mysteriously amidst the Date received Date accepted
16 January 1990 19 June 1990
310
DISSIPATIVE
STRUCTURE
AND THE MIND-BODY
311
PROBLEM
Awareness as an interface Given that the past consists of highly-structured events, in contrast to the utterly non-descript future, awareness is distinctively inseparable from a spatiotemporal interface. The opposite poles of this interface are, in addition to the past and future, order and disorder, respectively. In other words, the dichotomy of ‘past and future’ holds the strong implication of a precise structural counterpart. Perhaps, accordingly, conscious awareness is encased not only between past and future, but between structure and its potential loss as well. The suggestion follows that awareness, inseparable from structure and its potential dissipation, may be equal to this interface, as opposed to ‘residing’ in it. If we envision ‘self’ as fundamental and hierarchically supreme in relation to physical structure, this becomes an intriguing possibility. In a microtemporal setting involving fractions of perceptual time, what do the terms ‘memory’ and ‘anticipation’ actually signify? An individual remembers the past, but anticipates the immediate future based on this past. The semantics are misleading. I suggest that making a distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘anticipation’ helps separate backward from forward, but that in a structural sense such terms are quite similar. That is, in anticipating the immediate future, a person is actually remembering what in a given context should take place next, so that when and if it does occur, a satiisfying match ensues. The immediate future is mere potential and has no anticipatable specificity. However, the term ‘anticipation’ does have a very special structural reference. That is, in the incipient or momentary absence of expected and therefore appropriate aspects of a sensory field an individual begins to ‘anticipate’ the nondescript future, in the probablistic sense of there being a sudden and growing likelihood of structural dissipation, curtailed only by an appropriate behavioral response. In this light, let us look at ‘past’ and ‘future’ as more than linguistic abstractions and attempt to discern their correlates within biological structure. To the extent that structure has become consciou:s, it is temporally sandwiched by what just happened and by what is just about to happen, which is to say that the conscious organism remains in a state of expectation. Within this closet of expectation the implication exists - that if an expected sensory field is not sustained (via saccades and other behavioral schemata) that something is seriously wrong, and that the organism
is moving to that precise measure a little closer to experiencing a novel and threatening situation - its own non-existence! This is not something the self has to stop and think about; it is just a physical fact that if expected events do not occur, something is structurally awry. In fact, the moment something of this nature is thought about, it becomes more of a reflective event, no longer a microtemporal phenomenon such as we are here discussing. So, in the overseeing of structure in the ‘now’ of time, the self and its physical house - albeit for an aversive action - are in ongoing danger of dissipation, if only as implied by the incipient absence of that which is expected in a given sensory field. That is, within each and every moment of awareness there is a fraction of time, just prior to an appropriate (and therefore expectable) result, when the possibility of dissipation dramatically increases - this increase having by its nature been incorporated into an averting response. It is important to realize that the reference here is not to major events, as reflectively anticipated by the conscious self, but rather to the continuation through time of a focal-ambient gestalt. This special moment of increased dissipative probability is fortunately almost invariably followed by an expected result, speaking in terms of a total, sensory field as distributed through space and time and involving the whole body as the instrument for bringing about a match with what is expected. That is, somehow a potential for an infinitude of self as the outcome of non-action has been encoded into the hierarchical organization of brain and body, in a manner which may ultimately explain the unity of perception and behavior. The illumination of self In the above context, I propose that - consistent with the figure-ground paradigm - an organism becomes ‘illuminated’ (i.e., aware of self and other) by virtue of being ‘too small’ (and therefore seeable), in contrast to and as part and parcel of an ‘anticipation’ of infinity - in the sense of a potential loss of boundary were it not for an ongoing intervening and saving action. That is, as infinity (boundlessness) is challenged by non-action, there is a change within structure that can be thought of as ‘too-small’ in comparison with some otherwise attainable and more desirable state. In effect, the organism has (to the measure of anticipating infinity) become too much the ground-of-its-ownbeing.
312 This illumination of the self as a unique phenomenon in space and time (in contrast to studying specific aspects of perception) is often taken for granted, but understanding the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of its existence may be the key to solving the mind-body problem. I propose that awareness as a stable event involves a familiarization with and therefore successful anticipation of one’s own smallness, manifesting as increasingly expectable and therefore matchable specificity. To grasp this concept, however, ‘smallness’ must be sensed to be inseparable from an implicative ‘anticipation’ of infinity/boundlessness. Such a process does not, of course, remain static. Rather, this process, by its nature, incorporates more and more expectable complexity within a given unit of expectational space-time as each complex in turn becomes the new expectable whole, the incipient absence of which continues to imply boundlessness, therefore serving steadfastly as the source of self-illumination, which is of course inseparable, in turn, from expectable specificity. In effect, focal perception and an ambient surround may derive from the fact that an organism becomes increasingly habituated to its own expectable smallness, according to the manner by which a relationship to infinity has been discretely incorporated into sensory analyzers and other structures in creating a capacity for preventing dissipation. This process can be envisioned as advancing to the point of subtle thoughts, feelings and complex imagery via what is in principle a simplistic habituation to previous, successful expectations. A common mechanism underlying behavior and perception, dependent upon infinity being ‘in here’ We can consider how a growing probability toward the dissolution of structure helps to simultaneously explain the underlying kinetics of behavior and perception. The premise is that the threatened loss of the ‘seeable’ (or ‘expectable’), as distributed throughout a sensory field, provides the driving ‘force’ for mind via a small-big discrepancy, resulting continuously in expectable perceptions - in effect, a unified behavior-perception team for minimizing expectational failure. In a bioenergetic context, I propose that kinetic activity, or ‘behavior’, is dependent upon the manner in which the novelty of non-self has been aver-
MEDICAL
HYPOTHESES
sively encoded within structure; that there is a profound structural reference as well as a perceptual meaning to the term ‘expectation’ as the minimizer of a contrast with infinity. To grasp how such reasoning specifically applies to anatomy and physiology, it is necessary to consider that each and every moment is related to an antecedent moment, with all moments being equahy dependent upon an infinity-related, spacetime interface, contiguously back to when the self was in fact boundless. It actually makes more sense to view the ‘anticipation’ of infinity from a regressive viewpoint, because, as mentioned, in comparison with a mythical future, the past alone is real, even referring back to one’s own non-existence! That is, ‘expectation’, implying the potential loss of self and structure, has a regressive and successive correlate contiguously back to the time when self and its physical house were less complex and more immersed. That is, ‘memory of the past’ may actually refer inclusively to the once boundless nature of self, and it may be that such memory is responsible for the ongoing illumination of self, in conjunction with structural activity designed for preventing a return to this boundless state. Since an infinity ‘out there’ cannot be easily envisioned as impacting upon structure ‘in here’, we can think of the total body mass as representing the infinity to which the conscious self is being regressively compared and via which comparison structure is focussed or ‘illuminated’ as too small in relation to itself. That is, if an implied return to an infinitude of boundary is the source of focal, self illumination, and if this possibility is to have a bearing on real structure and behavior, an anticipatory mismatch, with a corresponding anatomical discrepancy, will be somewhere internally present, as dynamically stabilized over many contiguous space-time frames. There are, in effect, two contrasts occurring during an act of perception. There is an ongoing contrast with boundary-less infinity prospectively or regressively (which are the same from a structural viewpoint). And there is a corresponding contrast within structure, as though in denial of current status the organism were smaller and organizationally less complex. I propose that this contrast is equivalent to a structural discrepancy that causes the kinetic release of appropriate (and therefore expectable) behavior. As Sherrington notes ‘.. . living bodies . . . are worked to the last detail by intrinsic hierarchical systems of an
DISSlPATIVE
STRUCTURE AND THE MIND-BODY
PROBLEM
immaterial nature . . . (which) is in truth, the concept of ‘self’ transgressing experience and invading the field of energetics as ‘cause’ (2). Corresponding to the extent that awareness is mseparable from a regression (involving contiguously smaller, less complex levels of organization), the perception of a focal, and therefore bounded image (in opposition to the anticipation of infinity) will, by definition, reflect the measure to which an organism has successfully contained regression and dissipation - as if the ‘seeing of an object’ were the actual process of creatively restoring one’s own boundedness (inseparable, after all, from structural specificity). The sensory field (combined focal center and ambient surround) will similarly reflect the degree to which boundlessness has been successfully thwarted, i.e., the extent to which the self has become immersed into expectable or focal-imagery as the method for minimizing an ongoing contrast with infinity and the concurrent structural discrepancy within the body mass. ‘Seeing’ from a dissipative perspective is, then, equivalent to a conviction of, or restored movement toward, boundedness (i.e., ‘as though bounded’ which is a match with current reality), in a self-oriented universe where focal awareness is just waiting to manifest. To summarize the gist of this implicatory (ifthen) thinking, it can be said that in the course of development, the capacity for actualizing the expected prevents any serious movement toward ultimate dissipation. A bounded and therefore immersive ‘image’ corresponds to a restored and sustained sufficiency of boundary in relation to the body mass. Boundedness, then, sits in a competitive relationship with boundlessness, with a dynamic tension as distributed through space and time, giving rise to an image and surrounding sensory field. The individual meanwhile, immersed in expectable perceptions, successfully experiences an ongoing sense of adequacy for the ‘task of life’ - meaning, translated into bioenergetic terms, that he feels ‘big enough for his own britches.’ Dissipative structure and neural organization Understanding the mind-brain relationship in the above terms will involve a more comprehensive way of looking at well-known aspects of neural organization. For example, a dissipative perspective adapts well to the fact that axial organization exists in a medial relationship to more lately-developed, neural structures. After all, the organis-
313 mic mass developmentally increases in a highlyspecific, small-big and medial-lateral manner, a fact so obvious that it is easily overlooked. In this regard, it is known that the bodily motions by which ambient space is apprehended are mid-brain dependent as opposed to the cortical dependence of focal vision (3), giving us a clue as to how an infinity-related factor may be encoded within biological structure. It is probable that retinal vision is but a subset of a far more encompassing principle of self-visibility. Vision substitution experiments with blindfolded subjects point in this direction (4). In these experiments, the subject manipulates a television camera whose inputs are transduced into tactile stimulation over an area on the subject’s back. After a period of training, a coarse image appears which, in spite of the subject being blind, ‘seems to come from in front of the camera.’ This type of experiment affirms the possibility that conscious perception is linked with an increasingly efficient expectation-reality match, the root of which may lie in creatively constraining the tendency toward boundlessness. If the possibility of structural dissolution truly participates in the production of self-visibility, it would then appear as though consciousness is the ‘ . . . very core or substance of which certain physical events . . . are composed and which physics itself may eventually have to take into account’ (5). The regressive aspect of awareness, suggests that sensory-transduced energy may be gated centripetally within the brain and then centrifugally in achieving an optimal, light-creating contrast with infinity. That is, insofar as during a given moment of perceptual expectation there occurs a regressive contrast within the body mass, somatotopicallyarrayed energy - mapped millimeter by millimeter on to the brain - will have fallen into a discrete, developmentally determined ‘hole’ (reticular gating?) to be thereupon driven through ‘expectational pores’ (thalamic to motor?), in dimming the light of self. It is known that there is a ‘hypnogenic circuit’ involving passage of frontal fibers into the lateral hypothalamus (6). If, ontologically, structure proves to be infinity-linked, sleep and a corresponding boundlessness of the self can be envisioned as the circadian end-result of a familiarization (habituation) with one’s own expectable boundedness. That is, as the day wears on the ‘conviction’ of boundedness (via the successive seeing of one’s own too-smallness) becomes so
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strong that the ‘anticipatory’ gap becomes too weak to sustain consciousness and the individual ‘falls asleep’. This, in turn, corresponds to an extreme minimization of discrepancy within the body mass and therefore involves a waning of expectable, motor activity as well. The frontal brain, important in foresight and judgment, receives heavy input from a part of the brain known to play a key role in body image - the parietal association cortex. Given that consciousness is inseparable from foresight and oversees the activity of one’s body as a whole through a contiguous temporal interface, such areas will be particularly important to study from a dissipative perspective. For even though the ‘future’ is being planned, the organism remains convinced via current bodily activity as to its ‘future’ boundedness and accordingly expects certain immersive sensory patterns in the ‘now’ of time. It is relevant to the dissipative thesis that the hypothalamus, as a link between motor activity and the internal milieu, may be a ‘ponderostat’ for the ongoing regulation of body weight (7). That is, behavior, as regulated by hypothalamic and many other neural networks, may fundamentally be a mechanism for maintaining the status quo of the body mass. Temperature control may be a reflection of the efficiency of this process. One gets a sense for how every part of the body, inside and outside, is discretely mapped, with specific neural structures playing their respective roles in what, from a dissipative perspective, amounts to the ‘homuncularization’ of infinity. It may in this sense be true that ‘man is made in the image of God.’ The sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions of the nervous system, important to an understanding of both health and disease, may in their reciprocity similarly come to be viewed as reflecting a fluxing discrepancy of boundary in relation to the body mass, as the organism seeks an optimal balance between fear (as though boundless) and nurture (as though bounded). A dissipative perspective with its potential for delineating feedback pathways between the conscious self and a symptom, will be an enticing prospect to explore in this regard. That is, if one understands the physical basis of self, or the self-basis of structure, the meaning of a symptom can be envisioned as modifying what might be called the ‘size of self’ either in a positive or negative manner. Memory, key to the understanding of the brain, will be particularly fascinating to study from a dissipative viewpoint. For, if consciousness is fun-
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damental, limbic and other memory-related structures - central to all that happens in the brain - will from a three-dimensional orientation come to be viewed as minimizers of an anatomical discrepancy, contiguously back through space-time to more immersive stages of physical development. In effect, what is thought, from an anthropomorphic perspective, to be ‘memory’ will, from a bioenergetic viewpoint, prove to be but the regulation and restoration of body mass. As mechanical as this sounds, it will paradoxically tend to change our thinking toward a more personalized interpretation of the universe. Conclusion
This paper describes in dissipative and implicative terms a unifying theory which may prove helpful for understanding the relationship between mind and body. The central concept is that an ongoing tendency toward boundlessness is constrained by the consequent ‘seeing of’ expectable sensory fields and that the perception of an image or thought reflects success in restoring structural integrity. The theory states that the possibility for dissolution of structure is simultaneously responsible for both awareness and underlying behavior, in a universe where ‘self’ is ontologically prior to physical reality. Because of its complex, homuncular nature a more precise structural correlate to awareness cannot, except in principle, be conceptualized at this point, even though as Sherrington notes there is at the core an ‘element relatively simple’ (8). In the words of Allport we still need to delineate the ‘isomorphic relation’ between brain events and the ‘configurational character’ of a given conscious percept (9). But, for starters, it would help to have a perspective that has more explanatory and unifying power than traditional dualism. It is my hope that this paper offers a step in this direction. References 1. Sperry RW. A modified concept of consciousness. Psychological Review. 76(6): 532 - 536. 1969. 2. Sherrmgton C. Man on his nature. Macmillan, New York; University Press, Cambridge, England, p 340, 1941. 3. Trevarthen C and Sperry RW. Perceptual unity of the ambient visual field in human commissurotomy patients. Brain 96: 547- 570, 1973. 4. Bach-y-Rita P, Collins CC, Saunders FA, White B and Scadden L. Vision substitution by tactile image projection. Nature, 221: 963 -964, 1969. Yale Univer5. Beloff J. The behavioral basis of perception. sity Press, New Haven and London, p 25, 1962.
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6. Mazzuchelli-O’Flaherty A L, O’Flaherty J J and Hernandez-Peon R. Sleep and other behavioral responses incluced by acetyl-choline stimulation of frontal and mesial cortex. Brain Research 4: 268 - 283, 1967. 7. Cabanac M, Duclaux R and Spector N H. Sensory feed-
315 back in regulation of body weight: is there a ponderostat? Nature 229: 125 - 127, 1971. 8. Sherrington. Ibid. 9. Allport F H. Theories of perception and the concept of structure. John Wiley and Sons, New York, p 129, 1955.