A useful perspective on animal behavior is its recursive nature, or part-whole hierarchy. Con­sidering this from the bottom up, animal societies have been viewed as "superorganisms". For example, the ants in an ant colony may be compared to cells, their castes to tissues and organs, the queen and her drones to the generative system, and the exchange of liquid food amongst the colony members to the circulation of blood and lymph. Furthermore, corre­sponding to morphogenesis in organisms the ant colony has sociogenesis, which consists of the processes by which the individuals undergo changes in caste and behavior.

Such recur­sion has been viewed all the way up to the earth itself seen as a living entity. Parenthetically, it may be asked whether the earth itself, as a living but unconscious organism, may not be viewed like the unconscious brain. Paralleling this recursion is the individual who can be viewed as a collection of several "agents" where these agents have sub-agents which are the sensory mechanisms and so on. But these agents are bound together and this binding defines consciousness. A distinction may be made between simple consciousness and self-consciousness. In the latter, the individual is aware of his awareness. It has been suggested that while all animals may be taken to be conscious, only humans might be self-conscious. It is also supposed that language provides a tool to deal with abstract concepts that opens up the world of mathematical and abstract ideas only to humans. Edelman (1992) suggests that selection mechanism might be at work that has endowed brains, in their evolutionary ladder, with increasing complexity. But this work does not address the question of holistic computations at all. From an evolutionary perspective if the fundamental nature of biological computing is different from that of classical computers then models like that of Edelman cannot provide the answers we seek. We cannot also accept the line of reasoning according to which complexity, once it crosses a certain threshold, leads to consciousness and, furthermore, beyond another threshold leads to self-consciousness.

Holistic Processing and Quantum Models

Neura activity in the brain is bound together to represent information; but the nature of this binding is not known. The brain constantly reorganizes itself based on the information task. Now quantum mechanics has provided a new understanding of the physical world although its philosophical implications are quite contentious and murky. Quantum mechanics is a theory of "wholes" and in light of the fact that the eye responds to single photons, a quantum mechanical response—and that the mind perceives itself to be a unity, one would expect that its ideas would be applied to examine the nature of mind and of intelligence. But for several decades the prestige of the reductionist program of neurophysiology made it unfashionable to follow this path. Meanwhile, the question of the nature of information, and its observation, has become important in physics. The binding problem of psychology, and the need to postulate a mediating agent in the processing of information in the brain, has also brought the "self" back into the picture in biology. Oscillations and chaos have been proposed as the mechanisms to explain this binding. But we think that the strongest case can be made for a quantum mechanical substratum that provides unity to experience. Such quantum mechanical models of consciousness have attracted considerable attention. Quantum computing in the style of Feynman (1986) is considering the use of lattices or organo-metallic polymers as the apparatus; but the idea here is to perform computations in a tangled manner that can provide speedup over classical computers. This research does not consider the question of modeling of mind. It has been argued, that it is not possible to simulate quantum mechanics on a traditional computer. If it is accepted that intelligence has a quantum mechanical basis, then it follows that Turing-machine models of intelligence are inadequate. This, in turn, leads to several questions: What hardware basis is required before intelligence can emerge out of a quantum structure? Does intelligence require something more than a quantum basis, the presence of the notion of self? Microtubules, the skeletal basis of cells that consist of protein polymers, have been pro­posed by Hameroff and others, as supporting quantum mechanical processes. It has been suggested by Frohlich (1975) that Bose-Einstein conden­sation might be responsible for quantum coherence in biological structures. Frohlich's model requires large energy of metabolic drive and extreme dielectric properties of the materials. The large scale quantum coherence is predicted to appear in the frequency range of 10¹¹ to 10¹² Hz and there is some evidence that such oscillations actually take place (Grundler and Keilmann, 1983). Hameroff and his associates, have suggested that water in the microtubules provides this quantum coherence. But it is not shown how quantum coherence can leap across the synaptic barrier. This work also does not deal with the issue of what structures are needed before consciousness can arise. Most significantly, this does not address the issue of the self-organizing ability of biological systems. Study of animal intelligence provides us with new perspectives that are useful in repre­senting the performance of machines. For example, the fact that pigeons learn the concept of sameness shows that this could not be a result of associative response to certain learnt patterns. If evolution has led to the development of specialized cognitive circuits in the brain to perform such processing, then one might wish to endow AI machines with similar circuits. Other questions arise: Is there a set of abstract processors that would explain animal per­formance? If such a set can be defined, is it unique, or do different animal species represent collections of different kinds of abstract processing that makes each animal come to achieve a unique set of conceptualizations? One striking success of the quantum models is that they provide a resolution to the determinism- free will problem. According to quantum theory, a system evolves causally until it is observed. The act of observation causes a break in the causal chain. This leads to the notion of a participatory universe. Consciousness provides a break in the strict regime of causality. It would be reasonable to assume that this freedom is associated with all life. But its impact on the ongoing processes will depend on the entropy associated with the break in the causal chain.

A universal field

If one did not wish for a reductionist explanation as is inherent in the cytoskeletal model, one might postulate a different origin for the quantum field. Just as the unified theories explain the emergence of electromagnetic and weak forces from a mechanism of symmetry breaking, one might postulate a unified field of consciousness-unified_force-gravity from where the individual fields emerge. Eugene Wigner (1961) spoke of one striking analogy between light and consciousness: "Mechanical objects influence light—otherwise we could not see them—but experiments to demonstrate the effect of light on the motion of mechanical bodies are difficult. It is unlikely that the effect would have been detected had theoretical considerations not suggested its existence, and its manifestation in the phenomenon of light pressure." He also acknowledged one fundamental difference between light and consciousness. Light can interact directly with virtually all material objects whereas consciousness is grounded in a physico-chemical struc­ture. But such a difference disappears if it is supposed that the physico-chemical structure is just the instrumentation that permit observations. In other words, the notion of a universal field requires acknowledging the emergence of the individual's I-ness at specialized areas of the brain. This I-ness is intimately related to memories, both short-term and long-term. The recall of these memories may be seen to result from operations by neural networks. Lesions to different brain centers effect the ability to recall or store memories. For example, lesions to the area VI of the primary visual cortex lead to blindsight. These people can "see" but they are unaware that they have seen. Although such visual information is processed, and it can be recalled through a guessing game protocol, it is not passed to the conscious self.