title: Self: an adaptive pressure arising from self-organization, chaotic dynamics, and neural Darwinism.
abstract: In this article, we establish a model to delineate the emergence of "self" in the brain making recourse to the theory of chaos. Self is considered as the subjective experience of a subject. As essential ingredients of subjective experiences, our model includes wakefulness, re-entry, attention, memory, and proto-experiences. The stability as stated by chaos theory can potentially describe the non-linear function of "self" as sensitive to initial conditions and can characterize it as underlying order from apparently random signals. Self-similarity is discussed as a latent menace of a pathological confusion between "self" and "others". Our test hypothesis is that (1) consciousness might have emerged and evolved from a primordial potential or proto-experience in matter, such as the physical attractions and repulsions experienced by electrons, and (2) "self" arises from chaotic dynamics, self-organization and selective mechanisms during ontogenesis, while emerging post-ontogenically as an adaptive pressure driven by both volume and synaptic-neural transmission and influencing the functional connectivity of neural nets (structure).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40100 Bologna, Italy.
authors.forename: Angela Alessia
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Bruzzo
authors.forename: Ram Lakhan Pandey
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Vimal
mesh_terms: D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003243:Consciousness; D004532:Ego; D006801:Humans; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics