Whad’ya Know?

In his work “Planetary Technoetics: Art, Technology and Consciousness” Roy Ascott describes a paradigm shift that needs to take place as combined reality research continues. Of striking interest to me is that within the definition of technoetics (the combination of art, technology and consciousness) that as difficult as it has historically been to answer the question “what is art?” It may be significantly more difficult to answer the question of “what is consciousness?” The author sites work of Jeremy Narby who studied the subculture within indigenous peoples of South America. He believes that the ability of the shaman to “know” possibly comes from their connection to their own DNA. The idea is that the DNA carries information and the ability for cells to communicate with each other. The cell to cell communications are being studied as scientists have identified quanta of energy emitted from various plant cells termed biophotons. Roy further goes to term this as a part of various Mixed realities he terms vegetal reality.

In trying to uncover further information about vegetal reality I came across another author and “Consciousness as Evolutionary Process based on Coherent States”

http://www.lifescientists.de/publication/pub2003-04-11.htm. Similar to Ascott the author is concerned with defining consciousness. His thought is to use physical and biological structure in order to define consciousness. After many physical comparisons the author summarizes with the following conclusions which I found quite interesting.

“These interactions between actual and potential information, based on this reference point of Descartes, opens the way for understanding the basis of the human consciousness and probably also the steps of further developments into "global" forms of consciousness. We may distinguish 4 different basic forms:

(1) Self confidence according to the reference point of Descartes: I am, resulting from the transformation of the physical existence of the body into "doubts" and back to the control, and so on.. The end of this process is the adjustment of actual and potential information.

(2) Identification (awareness) according to the transformation of the actual information of the physical existence of matter or radiation into "doubts" and back to the control, and so on. This leads after adjusting actual and potential information to the confirmation of You are or It is.

(3) Prediction: Repeated transformations of the actual information of the physical existence of different objects into the possibility field of the potential information under adjustment of the potential information of the memory which provide boundary conditions in the control processes. The transformations are again finished as soon as there is an equality of actual and potential information. The result is a statement: It will be.

(4) Memory and Inspiration. Repeated transformation and re-transformation of potential information of the past and the presence. After adjustment of these probability distributions the statement will follow: It could have been or It could become.

Step (1) is very basic for the reference system of consciousness itself, step (2) allows social interactions, step (3) is the basis of scientific development and step (4) is most necessary for creativity and responsibility within a society. The consciousness develops under natural conditions from step (1) to step (4), and it involves more and more non-local actual information into this process. Insofar, evolution is the development of coherent (probably even squeezed) states into an increasing framework of a global ethics. To some extent it seems that this contradicts the Darwin principle. However both principles, Darwin´s and consciousness evolution, work for the "survival of the fittest". While these "fittest men" are not known in Darwinism, before they have died, a clear picture of them is known in this approach of consciousness development.”