Co-evolution of consciousness and operating systems (Коэволюция сознания и операционных систем)

Without the brain, there is no human consciousness. Just as there is no life outside the cell, there is no consciousness outside the activity of the brain.

How meanings exist and what connects them

In my view, thinking is the process of the life activity of meanings, emotional activity is their reactive capability, and will is the measure of the organization of meanings. Love, however, is the organizing force. Thinking, through love, organizes emotional activity – specific psychic reactivity. Previously, my formula did not include love. I believed the following: emotional activity is specific psychic reactivity, thinking is the organizing force, and will is the measure of this organization. But meanings also exist in computational machines, and yet no one would dare call the functioning of a computer a life activity or psychic activity. It is love that imbues meanings with vitality. Love provides their affinity, reactive capability, reproduction, and, overall, their ability to sustain themselves. Love is the anti-entropy in the world of meanings. I will elaborate below on the role of love in the life activity of meanings.

So, what are meanings?

Since I consider the psyche to be an organism similar to a multicellular biological organism, I have identified its elementary "cell" – a compartment of the psyche: the meaning. Initially, I understood the life of meanings to be analogous to the life of cells in a multicellular organism: they divide, reproduce, differentiate, replicate, age, are eliminated, and undergo processes similar to apoptosis, necrosis, and so on. In short, they live according to their own laws.

However, if we consider the psyche as an organism, these laws cannot be reduced to biological concepts and definitions, even though meanings, while linked to neurons in the brain, are neither neurons themselves nor their direct associations. Nevertheless, their existence is closely tied to neuronal associations and the states of these associations.

Meanings are memories of the states of functional systems of neurons. These states are constantly formed in response to external and internal stimuli, enabling both conditional reflexive reactivity and the more sophisticated rational activity that, while based on the brain's reflexive activity, qualitatively surpasses it in diversity and adaptive potential. A meaning is essentially an instruction or narrative about some collective action of neurons that proved to be either highly adaptive or maladaptive. It is the outcome of a competitive process in decision-making, either winning or losing. This can be compared to recording successful or unsuccessful chess games, which can later serve as guidelines for more adaptive strategies. These instructions and narratives are "recorded" by the same mechanisms – neurons.

These functional neuronal systems mirror what is happening in their neighbors. They copy the behavior of neighboring systems but overall perform a function inherent to nervous tissue: reflecting what is occurring in the external and internal environment. The difference is that these functional neuronal systems focus almost exclusively on reflecting the actions of similar functional systems.

Why do they do this? Possibly because it is a way to compete for metabolic and energy resources. If a neighbor succeeds at something, it makes sense to try to replicate that success.

A functional neuronal system, which copies or encodes the actions and states of similar systems, constitutes the smallest compartment of the psyche – its "cell," or meaning. The life of meanings involves self-reproduction, multiplication, differentiation, integration, and hierarchy. The analogy for the reproduction of meanings is unlikely to be found in processes like mitosis or meiosis; it is more akin to the branching of trees, though mitosis extended over time can also be visualized as a tree-like structure. This ability to create such functional systems, along with its degree, can be referred to as the affinity of meanings.

The psyche is the life of neurons, recorded in the language of neurons—a book that constantly rewrites and republishes itself, authored by a vast collective. The number of neurons in the brain is enormous but finite; they can be counted. However, the number of meanings cannot be counted. This number rivals the largest numbers in the universe.

A bit more metaphorically about the life of meanings

The reproduction of meanings is an inevitable consequence and manifestation of psychic activity – a mechanism of its self-sustainment. It is as much a mystery as the mystery of life itself. The intuitive insight of Christians in the apostolic age elevated love to one of the highest religious values and identified it with God. Even today, it is impossible to imagine psychic activity without love. Yet, defining its significance, or its very essence, remains elusive when trying to achieve a consensual definition.

Perhaps only an analogy can help illustrate its nature – an analogy with gravity. Gravity may be perceived as a force, but it is more accurately understood as a property of curved space-time. Similarly, love is not a force but a property – a property of the continuum in which the laws of psychic activity operate.

Additionally, love might be defined as an anti-entropic force or as the law of attraction for meanings.

Love, understood as the life activity of meanings – with their affinity, complementarity, and reproduction – is revealed to us daily at the personal level of organization. Personality is the external side of the organism of meanings. In the interaction of these organisms, we perceive love.

This kind of connection extends beyond interactions between individual thoughts – it also shapes other forms of meaningful relationships, such as love for one’s homeland, for God, or for a scientific idea. All of this is love – a value for humanity that surpasses life itself. One cannot help but recall the words of the Apostle Paul about love, with their many forms of beauty: the beauty of prophecy, of mathematical formulas, of poetic expression, and of moral sentiment.

It is, of course, possible to try to exclude love as a term when describing the affinity of meanings by applying terminology from information theory, especially since, when discussing meanings, such an approach naturally suggests itself. In this case, one could describe the interaction of meanings using terms like semantic connections, signal connections, or informational connections. Love could then be assigned a specific field within the theory of meanings – perhaps as a particular manifestation of meaningful activity within the framework of psychic activity, characterized by its inherent emotional reactions.

It is also possible to exclude love entirely from the realm of meaningful activity, to psychologize this feeling and classify it as a subjective entity, leaving unresolved the question of why this feeling, among the many experienced by humans, remains the most important. Why are most human aspirations tied to it?

Alternatively, one could biologize or psychologize the term, interpreting it within existing physiological or humanitarian frameworks or cultural traditions (such as literature or art). However, this would likely ignore the fact that love pertains specifically to human activity – it is fundamentally a rational activity.

Describing love as a particular case of informational interactions is, in my view, not entirely accurate, though it is occasionally appropriate. It could be interpreted as a conscious affinity of meanings, or the experience of information – a combination of signals integrated into the structure of the self, transforming external stimuli into internal experience, and so on. Other, more or less precise formulations could also be found, reflecting important properties of love or significant consequences arising from it.

The informational approach is both productive and indispensable in describing the life of meanings. However, it is insufficient without considering the concept of love, especially when discussing the life activity of meanings and self-sustaining meaningful entities with internal mechanisms for maintaining their non-equilibrium states. Thus, love can be relocated from the realm of poetry to the realm of science by being incorporated as a concept within the theory of information. This is valid if we consider the achievements of human genius to be equivalent and evolutionarily systematic. Drawing on the revelations of prophets, the words of the Apostle Paul about love, and the discoveries of scientists at the dawn of cybernetics, we might suggest that concepts describing phenomena of the same order – though expressed in disparate semantic systems – can evolve into scientific and modern interpretations. This, in my view, applies to a multidimensional term like love as well.

If love becomes a terminological part of the theory of information, it will also become an object of its study. Such integration is essential for advancing our understanding of the evolution of material forms.

Music and the mind

At first glance, this may seem like an unexpected topic. Yet, the German philosopher G.W. Leibniz was right when he suggested that music is how the human mind calculates itself. Music is a sequence of sounds imbued with meaning. However, not just any sequence of sounds acquires meaning. Only certain sequences, following specific laws, acquire meaning, primarily directed at the emotional activity of humans. A signal evokes emotion, emotion crystallizes into thought (an image, concept, or conclusion). Music is comprehensible (and deeply experienced) regardless of language or ethnicity because it carries non-verbal codes.

What came first: verbal or non-verbal codes? It's unclear. Likely, verbal codes, as they are easier to implement and more essential for organizing social structures. Music, it seems, is a later achievement of humanity, emerging in connection with religious rituals to induce similar and uniform states of consciousness. Thus, music serves a communicative function, alongside verbal language, pantomime, and mimicry (gestures, dances, etc.). In musical language, perhaps more than in verbal language, a universal object-oriented code is reflected. I believe that human consciousness is primarily musical, and only then verbal. The code of human thoughts and feelings should be sought in musical notes.

The verbal code is the subjugatorof the musical one, translating the emotional into a rational language. Human consciousness consists of two subsystems: the musical and the verbal. Their functions differ due to their varying degrees of goal-setting. The verbal system is selective, choosing specific goals, while the musical subsystem forms a range of variations for goal-setting. The verbal subsystem selects meanings from the musical subsystem, translates them into the language of goal-setting, retains them, and reproduces them when needed. A sequence of musical notes serves as a way to verbalize musical meanings.

What forms first: the musical or the verbal subsystem of consciousness? I believe the emergence of the musical subsystem occurs later and is related to the subordination of emotional activity to thinking. Thinking, as an organizing process, uses music to symbolize, retain, and, if necessary, reproduce certain emotional states and levels of wakefulness associated with it. Thus, experiencing music is closely linked to the organizing influence of thinking on emotional activity. Moreover, intuition and creative activity are also tied to the musical subsystem of consciousness. That said, I acknowledge that this question is ambiguous and requires more thorough analysis, which cannot be undertaken within the scope of this book.

Returning to the question of whether words or music appeared first, I hypothesized that words emerged earlier in phylogeny and preceded music in ontogeny as well. Phylogenetically, I associated music with religious rituals and words with practical collective actions.