ABSTRACT
What does
it mean to keep an “open mind”? In casual conversation it’s a popular phrase with
enough common sense to negate much need for debate about what the speaker means.
Someone with an open mind might be considered considerate, equanimous, empathetic,
a good listener, curious, or flexible in opinion. In Western culture an open-minded
person might be receptive to new ideas, possibilities, and interpretations, suggesting
that they successfully maintain an engaged yet dynamic mental relationship to various
subjects or challenges. Yet in science’s nascent study of consciousness, the notion
of a mind “opening” is complicated by the field’s inability to clearly articulate
what a mind is, let alone how, or into what, it might open. It
is the purpose of this research to present the biological significance of “open-mindedness”
in order to discuss possible phenomenological implications pertaining to neural
correlates of consciousness (NCC). In his seminal book The Open Work, Umberto Eco
describes “openness” as a phenomenon of conscious organization that “locates the
infinite at the very core of the finite,” and “invites us to conceive, feel, and
thus see the world as possibility.” Utilizing the methods of Mechanics, Dynamics,
Aesthetics (MDA) analysis, my critical phenomenological inquiry extends Eco’s lens
of cultural semiotics into quantum biology to provide key insights for understanding
the aesthetic role of field dynamics in qualia physics—as interpretive events (i.e.,
watching a film, tasting a dessert, or drawing). In particular, pairing Eco’s semiotic
analysis of openness with Hameroff and Penrose’s OR Theory concerning cognitive
qualia-producing architectures such as microtubules, raises how sensations between
organisms and the Zero Point Field (ZPF) are absorbed, integrated, and transmitted
through quantum Stochastic Electrodynamic (SED) information states proposed by Joachim
Keppler. Therefore, we can say that living systems are those systems that have adapted
their material capabilities (including fundamental principles of self-organization
and complexity in common cognitive architectures like awareness and attention) to
perceive and critically interpret coherently. That is to say—biology has evolved
to make meaning through its very aliveness. Our conscious ability to open our minds
in order to interpret and communicate our sensations, thoughts, and complete experiences, therefore reveals a radically multidimensional
bio-geometry and biolinguistics based on a field dynamics, which Eco’s work
constructs. Via an aesthetic information theory, Eco describes this phenomenon as, “a practical level of poetics
that acts as programmatic projects for creation.” The writings of Rumi, Husserl,
Dewey, Emerson, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and others confer depth to the emergent mechanics
of perception found throughout biotic systems. Eco’s ideas thereby provoke discourse
on the role of openness within recent theoretical works by Jeremy England, Anirban
Bandyopadhyay, Robert Lanza, Deepak Chopra, Ervin Laszlo, Giulio Tononi, Stuart
Kauffman, Walter J. Freeman, Robin Carhart-Harris, Mark P. Mattson, Robert R McCrae,
Selen Atasoy, Katherine Peil, Terence Deacon, and David Chalmers. Unlike models
of consciousness that arise from closed, local computation, I argue that the phenomenon
of open mindedness unifies cultural and scientific concepts of consciousness as
life’s critical integrative force.