Approach to Consciousness through
Hierarchical Metastatic Evolution

Ron Cottam, Nils Langloh, Willy Ranson & Roger Vounckx

Metastatic Evolution

            In the search for a universally coherent description of our surroundings we must be able to consistently account for both the inanimate and animate aspects of nature.

            Living entities must respond to external threatening stimuli in order to survive. If we set aside the pre-supposition that animate and inanimate entities are fundamentally different [1], then this criterion applies to all recognisable structures, and the existence and auto-recognition of a simplified approximate model of an entity and its environmental relations will be of paramount importance for rapid stimulus-response and therefore survival in a hostile environment. This, then, is the meaning and utility of a metastate, which "contains" information about a structure in an easily manipulable form.

            We choose as our starting point David Bohm's [2] proposition that explicit or observable order in the natural environment is directly derived from an underlying implicit or enfolded order. We then invoke a primitive form of evolution, where the emergence of structure corresponds to the formulation of a "locally sufficient" approximating metastatic representation of an otherwise disordered or chaotic region of the universal phase space.

            The development and stabilisation of a single metastate demands that its degrees of freedom reduce to those consistent with the contextual approximation, eliminating any capacity for communication with dimensions which have been excluded from the reduced set. This is equivalent to the establishment of orthogonal dimensions.

            If the existence and state of a specific entity is to be coherent with nature as a whole, then there must be constant communication between that entity and the complete assembly of others which go to make up the natural environment. This requires relaxation of the metastate's dimensional localisation towards a universal nonlocality.

            We are now faced with an apparent contradiction, in that universal coherence requires continuous communication between all stable metastatic entities, yet the necessary presence of a communication restriction eliminates the possibility of instantaneous correlation in a causally coherent domain. Clearly any resolution of this contradiction will impose a limitation on the precision with which multiple metastates can be simultaneously defined. This corresponds to the Heisenberg uncertainty which appears in considerations of quantum interactions, and equivalently to the consequences of Feynman's "summation over all paths".

            The primary implication of coupling all dimensions or degrees of freedom back into a common nonlocal "database" or "backplane" is that orthogonality is relaxed on moving away from a defined metastate towards nonlocality, and this makes it possible for otherwise orthogonal dimensions to be successfully coupled, but at the price of an increase in the number of associated degrees of freedom and a consequent reduction in the speed with which the coupling can be achieved.

            The two most important aspects of the maintenance of universal coherence, therefore, are firstly that perfectly defined metastates cannot communicate directly with each other, and secondly that any communication which does occur must take place at least partially through the causal chaos represented by nonlocality. The complete range of possibilities between these two extremes can be modeled by a modified recursive form of Dempster -Schafer [3, 4] probability.

            Accurate interpretation of an environmental context also demands the availability of accurate models, and a reliable mechanism for choosing which of these representations should be used. The human brain uses just such a combination of rough-and-ready and slow-but-accurate responses [5, 6] in dealing with the requirements of environmental survival. Concretely, it seems probable that the most successful operational compromise between accuracy and speed of reaction will be given by a multiple hierarchical metastatic structure similar to the query-reflection formulation proposed by Langloh et al. [7].

Rules for Metastatic Emergence

            We suggest that there is no fundamental difference between localisations of all kinds, from quantum quasi-particles to perceptions to living entities, and that all of these constitute metastates whose appearance obeys the same consistent set of rules of emergence.

1. All observable structure is emergent. One major implication of this is that mathematics itself must be treated as an emergent structure. We must reconsider the relationship between information processing and mathematics; it is reasonable to consider mathematical structure to be a result of evolutionary processing, and not the mechanism by which it proceeds.

2. Any coherent structure is a metastate. There is no fundamental distinction between the representations of elementary particles, of macroscopic entities, or even of the universe itself. This also implies the possibility of multiple relationships between the different levels of a hierarchical description, and between the various levels of descriptions of different entities.

3. A metastate is the entity. Consistently with Einstein's theories we should not attribute to reality an instantaneous universally-recognisable objective character. The only instantaneous reality we can correctly refer to is that pertaining to a local observer's context; it makes no sense to maintain that there is a "real" entity "hiding" behind the metastatic representation. An entity appears in its contextual world directly as its metastate, as a contextually stable approximate of its complete meaning.

4. A metastate's stability is contextually dependent. We can postulate a tendency towards emergence of a specific local approximative metastate, but the reality of its appearance and its observability will depend on the local conditions within which it must stabilise.

5. One and the same entity may appear as a number of different metastates. In a simple system these may be hierarchically sequential, but there is no obvious implicit requirement for rationally coherent relationships between different metastates. We could however anticipate a tendency towards hierarchical sequential relationships in a system exhibiting near-equilibrium in the relevant region of the phase space.

6. All the metastates of an entity are contextually real, and only contextually real. From one and the same viewpoint it makes no sense to describe a diamond as both a crystal and a collection of atoms, for example. It is unlikely that both of these representations will be simultaneously coherent approximates to the relevant regions of the universal phase space, and their mutual simultaneous identification would in all probability lead to logical inconsistencies or incompleteness (as found by Antoniou [8], in extending classical quantum theory to large systems).

7. If the relevant contexts are simultaneously real, the metastates are also simultaneously real. It is difficult to argue against this, except by invoking an observer outside of the universal phase space, and therefore uncoupled from it and irrelevant. The implications, however, are enormous! This corresponds to the invocation in "normal" reality of a "multiple worlds" description of nature corresponding to the tentative propositions which have been made for quantum systems [9].

8. An observation consists of the interaction of a subjective metastate and an objective metastate. Whilst it may at first appear that these characters are both objectively defined, they only have meaning if we accept that both metastates can and will be simultaneously subjective and objective, and that both operate as observer and as observed, but that their interactions are unlikely to be reversible when summed over time.

9. Whilst unobserved individual metastates can be characterised as having a latent reality or capability for reality, it is the interaction of subjective and objective metastates which generates the property of reality in an observation. This is consistent with quantum theory, which describes only interactions at different instants of space-time, and not what occurs or exists between these instants.

10. Scale is a purely inter-metastatic phenomenon in that interactions depend on the metastates involved, and not on a structure which lies behind them. The existence of strong apparent effects of scale in nature itself supports the view that the universe itself must equivalently be considered a metastate.

Only Consciousness...

            We propose that the emergence of metastatic localisations from the nonlocal universal background is nothing other than "the second half" of the quantum-jump which is invoked in transitions between the permitted states of a quantum system. Simplistically, an inter-state transition will consist of first the degradation of conditions suitable to support the initial state's existence, then decay of that state back into nonlocality, and subsequently the emergence of the new state, which can now be sustained because the contextual conditions have been modified by the initial state's disappearance.

            The stabilised existence of a single localised entity must also be a continuous dynamic phenomenon, as the only way that the entity has of judging the suitability of its current metastate is by communication with the complete universal assembly of other entities through the nonlocal "backplane". A stable state is one which resides in an at least locally-consistent cost-addressable minimum which imposes a degree of provisional stability.

            A metastate depends for its continuance not only on control of its surroundings or context, but also on self-referencing as a means of stabilisation: it must exhibit not only external consciousness but also a degree of self-consciousness. Uniquely external consciousness can engender self-destructive development; self-consciousness on its own will leave the entity wide open to attack by external agents.

            Although the degree of self-consciousness may be continuously variable from a maximum depending on the complexity-controlled capability right down to zero, there is no such freedom to eliminate completely external consciousness; a minimum is imposed by the global implications as described by objective science; an entity cannot exclude itself completely from the context of the universe by purely internal processes. This is an artifact similar to that of the externally imposed minimum referred to as the zero-point energy which is found in the energy-based form of quantum mechanics.

            We can identify in this manner the entire field of near-equilibrium physics as the minimal description of the universe when it is considered as an "inanimate" system, or as its ground state when describing it as a single entity or quantum. This then recognises the ground state of any quantised entity as being equivalent to its description as an "inanimate" object, higher unoccupied states as higher degrees of the capability for coherent consciousness, and higher occupied states as higher degrees of consciousness itself.

            The more effectively a system can compute responses to external threats, the better will be its chances of survival. In order to respond to threats within a permitted limiting time-scale, it is necessary to be able to process sufficient information to evaluate suitable responses, but it is also important for all of that information to be able to auto-correlate. And this has to take place in a causal domain which is characterised by its limited communicative capacity! It is the spatial information processing density which must be maximised, and not simply the quantity of processing.

            Rationally constructed and operating computational machines can exhibit extremely complicated behaviour, but their information processing density is irrevocably coupled to the physical size of their individual processing elements. Complexity is that property of a language expression which makes it difficult to formulate its overall behaviour even when given almost complete information about its atomic components and their inter-relations [10]. Complex systems are not automatically subject to this limitation of elemental size, and through causal chaos they can explore their phase space [11] and generate new information in a manner which is more related to their characteristic Lyapounov exponents [12].

            In this portrayal of the relation between emergent metastates and the universal natural environment, the only emergence is of consciousness itself, and other conceptions in terms of life, awareness or reality are other forms of description, and not descriptions of other forms.

References

[1] Weber R. Meaning as being in the implicate order philosophy of David Bohm: a conversation, 440. In B. J. Hiley and F. D. Peat, eds, Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1987.

[2] Bohm D. (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

[3] Dempster A P. (1967) Upper and lower probabilities induced by a multivalued mapping. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 38, 325-339.

[4] Schafer G. A Mathematical Theory of Evidence. Princeton University Press, 1976.

[5] LeDoux J E. Brain mechanisms of emotion and emotional learning. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2, 191-197, 1992.

[6] Davis M. (1992) The role of the amygdala in fear and anxiety. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 15, 353-375.

[7] Langloh N, Cottam R, Vounckx R and Cornelis J. Towards distributed statistical processing - aquarium: a query and reflection interaction using magic: mathematical algorithms generating interdependent confidences. In S. D. Smith and R. F. Neale, eds, ESPRIT Basic Research Series, Optical Information Technology, 303-319. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1993.

[8] Antoniou I. (1995) Extension of the conventional quantum theory and logic for large systems. In Einstein Meets Magritte. VUB Press, Brussels.

[9] Everett H. 'Relative State' Formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Rev. of Mod. Phys. 29, 454-62, 1957.

[10] Edmonds B. What is Complexity? - The Philosophy of Complexity per se with Application to Some Examples in Evolution. In Proceedings of Einstein Meets Magritte. VUB Press, Brussels, 1995.

[11] Nicolis G. Oral presentation in the 2nd European Conference on Artificial Life, Brussels, 1994.

[12] Nicolis G, and Prigogine I. Exploring Complexity, 21. Freeman, New York, 1989.
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