Consciousness, Cognition and Crosstalk: The Evolutionary Exaptation of Nonergodic Groupoid Symmetry-Breaking (SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology)

This book makes application to the dynamics of arousal and distraction, and to other examples. A modified version of the Kadanoff picture of phase transitions in consciousness emerges from the Morse Function itself in a surprisingly standard manner, closely associated with the breaking of groupoid symmetries driven by fundamental equivalence class algebras. Although this is far indeed from the familiar world of physical theory, it should be possible, on the basis of the probability models developed in the book, to develop new statistical tools for the analysis of observational and empirical data regarding cognition and consciousness. Preface 6 References 7 From the Notebooks of Charles Darwin... 8 Contents 9 About the Author 11 1 Setting the Stage 12 1.1 Introduction 12 1.2 Some Biological Context 13 1.3 Some Mathematical Context 14 1.4 Information and Free Energy 16 1.5 Basic Variables 17 1.6 On Integrated Information Theory (IIT), or Down the Rabbit Hole 18 References 19 2 Embodied Cognition and Its Dynamics 21 2.1 The First Round 21 2.2 The Second Round 27 2.3 Toward a Third Round 28 References 29 3 Examples and Extensions 31 3.1 Introduction 31 3.2 Arousal 32 3.3 Distraction 33 3.4 Distraction and Arousal Under Fixed Delay 35 3.5 Two-Mode Dynamics 38 3.6 Multi-mode Dynamics 39 3.7 Environmentally-Induced Cognitive Failure 41 3.8 Optimization Under Delay and Resource Constraint 43 3.9 A Remark on Multiple Delays 44 3.10 Network Topology and System Cognition Rate 45 3.11 Expanding the Onsager Approximation 46 3.12 Reconsidering `Delay' 46 3.13 A More Radical Program 47 References 48 4 Phase Transitions 50 4.1 Introduction 50 4.2 A First Model Class 51 4.3 A Second Model Class 55 4.4 Desensitization/Coma 57 4.5 Shadows: Inattentional Blindness 58 References 60 5 Discussion and Conclusions 62 References 64 6 Mathematical Appendix 66 6.1 Groupoids 66 6.2 The Data Rate Theorem 67 6.3 Morse Theory 69 6.4 Higher Dimensional Resource Systems 71 6.5 Distraction and Iterated Free Energy 72 6.6 Biological Renormalizations 73 6.7 The Tuning Theorem 76 6.8 Some Topological Remarks on Symmetry-Breaking 78 References 79