The Reflexive Processuality of Nature

Information Theory, Consciousness and Process Physics

Author: Jeroen B.J. van Dijk
(jvandijk@all-is-flux.nl)

Abstract: 493 words

Mainstream physics usually tends to interpret the process of measurement as the transmission
of information-conveying data signals from the physical world to an external, target-repre-
senting observation system. Eventually, empirically adequate theoretical representations of the
system under investigation should thus be attainable. However, information is not just a
representation-enabling intermediary signal or the content of target-representing data sets, but
rather a nature-wide non-representational process.
Reminiscent of David Bohm’s active information, nature’s coupled dissipative
structures ‘in-form’ each other as self-organizing reciprocal dynamics continuously develop
within and between them. Like this, nature forms one huge processual whole of immensely
rich and complex forms of organization, such as galaxies, solar systems, and also the earth’s
sun-dependent biosphere with its abundant variety of life forms. Above all, however, it has
given rise to intelligent organisms whose mind-brains facilitate higher-order conscious
experience.
This experiential consciousness is not just a representational inner-projection of the
external ‘real world out there’, or some elusive ‘mental ghost in the material machinery of the
organism’s body’, but a naturally developing within-nature activity that can be characterized
as an ‘anticipatory remembered present’. In brain-equipped organisms this manifests itself as
action-triggering memory dispositions whose dormant firing potentialities come alive when
nerve impulses find their way through genetically predetermined, initially non-conditioned
nervous tissue. In line with Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection – a.k.a.
Neural Darwinism – locally seemingly random, but globally optimizing synaptic growth
strengthens busy neurons. This enables the formation of specialized, highly coordinated
neurocircuitry in which neural noisiness is essential for establishing the selection-based
development of adaptive coping and decision-making routines.
Remarkably, the neural activity patterns that help shape these life-supporting
performance repertoires can ultimately not be told apart from the various inner- and outer-
organism non-equilibrium cycles in which they participate. In fact, such reflexive flow
processes can be found everywhere in nature, forming one unified meshwork of process-
relational activity. Like this, outer-organism activity patterns are undeniably part of – rather
than apart from – the process of experience.
After all, nature’s capacity to self-organize via the cyclic activity of criticality-seeking
dissipative structures has eventually culminated in mass-scale self-referential noisy signalling
(i.e. ‘reentry’) in the mind-brain’s thalamocortical domain. Here, extraordinarily complex
reciprocal correlations are established that facilitate the binding together of the organism’s
mutually informative somatosensory and sensorimotor modalities into one integrated-
differentiated stream of experience.
As such, our higher-order conscious experience follows from nature’s process-based
reflexive informativeness – as a highly evolved confluent extension of it. Accordingly, as
suggested by Reg Cahill’s Process Physics, nature is to be regarded as a giant self-organizing
process-information system in which embedded dissipative structures are engaged in open-
ended evolution.
Analogously, Max Velmans’s Reflexive Monism – a philosophical view akin to
Whiteheadian-Griffinian panexperientialism – holds that the universe is one psycho-physical
whole containing all kinds of differentiated contents, including conscious organisms like
ourselves. And in so far as we are embedded organisms equipped with a dynamically evolved
conscious view on the larger embedding universe, we participate in a reflexive process
through which nature experiences itself.