Consciousness and controllability: looking for a legitimate temporal code in the brain

RESUMO

Consciousness can be treated as a process by which the central nervous system controls unstable or nonconvergent varieties of representations. Translated into voluntary control over actions, consciousness, in this aspect, may represent a style of computation that works over unstable objects. Through the synchronized combination of modalities of oscillations, we internalize blocks of ordinary language, having the sensation that our mental representations are propositional and nonreducible to cerebral events. Bifurcations and chaos at hte neural level of processing can be candidates to the events that summon conscious control to exert its role. The function of consciousness would be resetting nonconvergent series of events; the form by which it works can be seen as a type of topological computation that appears in phase-transitions; the contents of consciousness are oscillations and synchronization that couple several series of processes and their possible descriptions in ordinary language; the primary feeling of being conscious, qualia, is an emergent property of large amounts of oscillating neuronal assemblies that are recruited during the propagation of an error signal among different loops that try to solve the task. The sensation of volunteerism and of free will is compatible with a deterministic, nonmechanic, view of the process in which consciousness exerts control, vetoing or allowing presumed actions and interpretations of perceptions to go on.