Biosemiotic aspects of consciousness in search of signs of life and their connection to consciousness as a telonomical principle
Keywords:
Biosemiotics, consciousness, quantum neurology, quantum coherence, cellular machines, microtubules, biophotons, Penrose, Popp, HameroffAbstract
As much as philosophy, science has wanted to explain human consciousness as the product of biological processes. Intelligence, intuition, knowledge, emotions, the ability to reason, perception, among other integrated capacities in our psycho-biological experience, accompany us ontogenetically and phylogenetically. But there is no consensus regarding the origin of consciousness. Whether understood from a scientific or philosophical point of view, it no longer seems possible to attribute consciousness solely to human beings, as if ethology were able to access organisms at the cellular and molecular levels and thereby establish a comparative ethology. We will occupy ourselves with the living being in its entirety in order to determine very concrete aspects of «perceiving the surroundings», the umwelt of Jacob von Uexküll. This article treats neural-biosemiotic features which can direct us to signs or signals that suggest consciousness or to characteristics which pertain to the transmission of information and their subsequent response. We will speak of modern biosemiotics, with regard to the signals that stimulate information in cellular machines, in order to transcend the sense of the cellular machine, when signs of perception exist, as much as for its self-organization as for its environment (the emergence of consciousness). For this we will focus on the biophysics of microtubules (Hameroff Penrose) and of the biophotons applied to the synaptic processes of the brain (Fritz Albert Popp).
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