A review of Dr. Richard Pico's book: Consciousness in Four Dimensions
The Mind-Body Problem Solved
The story told here is a two-part scientific odyssey into how consciousness may have come into being, and how it is linked inextricably to the evolutionary unfolding of the universe.
It is speculative science backed up by medical and neuroscience research, at its best.
The first part is the story of how life got up and running: That is, using evolution to boot-strap its way out of the chaos of the universal energy background field, from the primordial pre-biotic soup, into its own bilayered semi-permeable, protected phospholipid cellular membrane.
The second part provides the details of how cellular life came about, and how, under the environmental pressures of the Cambrian Exchange, led to the neuron. And how, from there, the neuron, the real hero of the story of consciousness, led to the nervous system and eventually to the brain, and to the brain's more complex neurobiological organization.
It was this complex organizational machinery that led to a neuromechanical processing output we now recognize as an "idea."
The complex machinery producing this output is what most of the book is devoted to. The endpoint of that neuromechanical processing is what we now know as consciousness.
There is no ghost in the machine. It is neurobiological processing all the way down: from the external world up to the brain and back.
When the two parts of the story are explained as one linear continuously intertwined story. What results is a full-scale heuristic model of what the author calls "biological relativity."
Why he calls his theory biological relativity, gets to the heart of why this theory is not just eclectic but also convincing.
The theoretical thread that connects the parts of this model are the postulates that posit that there exist only three thermodynamic entropic orders: the Big Bang, life, and consciousness; and, that all matter follows the laws of evolution thermodynamics and general relativity.
In a universe where everything is some form of energy, it is Einstein's 4D frames of reference that define structure and function in various stages of "coming into organizational existence," as well as what we call reality: a 4D reference frame that holds matter together as a unit at a fixed place and time. Local reference systems moving relative to each other, alone define, connect and give action-potential to the three thermodynamic ways of organizing matter. Here, order, information, energy and entropy are used interchangeably.
Since the Big Bang's energies swirl, wax, wane and in some cases allow self-organization, the evolution of the cell was almost inevitable. And, in any case, was the first and arguably the most important triumph over entropy and the second law of thermodynamics.
Over millions of years, the cell learned a few tricks of its own. One was how to wean itself from complete dependence on the chaotic background energy field. It did this by walling itself off and sustaining its existence through its own internal energy source called metabolism. The second trick it learned was how to make copies of itself.
Third, by its very nature the brain binds in time sensory information and derives higher order and dimensions from it. There is no choice in the matter. In the prefrontal regions of humans, this fundamental neural process creates the fourth dimension of our sensory worlds. The propagation of this reference system actually operationally defines consciousness.
With the benefit of a local 4D frame of reference, these products became the cell's structure and function. Together they constituted a new reality; a new thermodynamic entropic order.
This 4D reference system, along with the structure and function inside the cell, defined life. Life exists only as a unit and has no dimensions other than age.
This motif, of "binding-in-time" of electrochemical reactions to create novel order, and novel biomechanical products, naturally would be used again to create the third entropic order of consciousness.
And thus, to shorten a very long and complicated story, we can foreshadow the rest of the story by simply saying that when cross-modal neuronal signals reached the prefrontal integration module (PIM) deep inside the brain, they too learned another novel trick: how to "bind-in-time," present cross-modal signals with past memory inputs, thereby, for the first time in the history of the universe, connecting "past" inputs from memory, with "present" inputs from the nervous system streams.
This was the game changer.
Consciousness is the moment-to-moment production of a single biomechanical output called an idea.
The idea is the result of billions of disparity computations taken from inputs across the entire nervous system.
The cross-modal processing of "past" and "present" signals, also added a third time dimension along with a 3D mental image of this systemic output.
This ability proved to be unique to higher animals, and constituted the third and final entropic order. One that, among other things, allowed the creation of a 4D homunculus, whereby both the internal and external environments could be mapped in 3D, thereby defining the "self" and the "I"; giving us Bayesian-type predictors, as well as imagination, awe and wonder.
The beauty of this theoretical framework is that it is not only guided by evolution, thermodynamics, and general relativity, but also by inductive use of the latest neuroscience and medical research, especially split-brain probing and interrogation.
It is also parsimonious and complete in the Occam's razor sense: it explains everything in the simplest way possible with no untidy leftover dangling theoretical threads. We have all the pieces in one place, we know why they exist, and how they are used.
How we got from the chaos of non-life, to the second thermodynamic entropic order of life, is another matter that is both interesting and speculative.
One version, which in hindsight seems all but obvious, is that, instead of moving directly from a "rock" to an "amoeba," as was theorized in the "make life in a test tube from the primordial soup experiments" of the 1950-70s, it seems that life moved indirectly from a rock to spending millions of years producing "prelife primordial soup products."
Then one day, almost magically, non-life climbed the background thermodynamic energy threshold into life. By then, the primordial soup had already produced most of the products needed to get life up and running.
What exactly is a neuron?
Of course it is a cell, but a very special one indeed. It has been described as a "stand-alone" unit of proto-life. It is a cell that talks to other cells, creating the most complex network known in the universe, the human nervous system.
The evolutionary strategy adopted by neurons was essentially this: as complexity increased, they formed larger more functional units: from cells to groups of cells, to neurons, to groups and then networks of neurons, to neuronal modules, to brain components, to major brain subunits; and from there, to the full brain with its newest addition, the neocortex; and from there on to what we have today: connected brains called culture.
Interestingly, "body maintenance," taken care of by the autonomic system, is a job that predated the brain and still exists even in animals without a conscious mind. These "proto-mental" capacities were important antecedents to the mentality that eventually encompassed what we have come to know as consciousness.
Thus, in a scientific tour de force, the author has explained convincingly how we became conscious beings and how we differ from animals lacking a conscious brain. Five stars
