Dynamical Unstable Processes in the Brain: A Biologically Inspired Communication Mechanism from “Unconscious” to “Conscious” Actors

The specific aim of this article is to illustrate a possible model to explain and better define in future, the emergence of a conscience like ability from the normal brain operations. We consider the normal behavior of the brain to be highly dynamic and use the chaos theory to formalize it. The emergence mechanism is explained in terms of the synchronization and filtering capabilities of the single computational units (from single neurons to specific brain regions). To obtain such results we suggest the use of the filtering operation as a read/write operation that uses the unstable dynamics as a distributed processing and memorization device. The main focus of this article, though, is only on the read operation. These mechanisms provides the basic building block to go from an unconscious, purely biological and physical, behavior to a pre-conscious (“core consciousness”) one in which the single elements of the conscious perception can be altered according to a specific target that can violate the underlying biological/physical laws. In other words, it is possible to define the emergence of the basic building block of the conscious behavior (qualia?): that is the simultaneous presence of the elements from different perceptual systems (vision, tact, smell etc.). These lists of simultaneously present elements, that changes in time according to the interaction with the external world, form the lists of elements to be brought in a Global Workspace Theory based system.