Life, self-knowledge, entropy, space-time

Life is an ordered system maintained through the intake of energy against entropy and the stochastic imprint of time upon its development and evolution. Regardless of how the universe achieves self-meaning it will find it in the persistent organization of space-time at some location. Given the exploded nature of all the matter in the universe, the question begged is how much of the universe is required to be organized for it to achieve self-knowledge?

Brain-Universe Interface

Let's propose a starkly material version of consciousness as the product of the brain activity devoted to it. This not only describes the nature of consciousness as housed within a brain's neurological function but also sets the upper limit of consciousness and what brains can conceive. To end this discussion abruptly, the universe can only be conceived up to the limit of the brain. In so far as a brain's synaptic connections can be quantified and measured in terms of astronomical units, that is, 'stars in the Milky Way,' this rough analogy for understanding the size and complexity of the brain also displays the total possible complexity of what it can understand. And so we have to ask if there's an entry level into consciousness of the universe that the universe itself produces for the sake of its own existence. If it is a forest it has to produce a tree and finally an onlooker in order for a logical chain of events to substantiate its existence and its dynamics. 

Social order in a culture predominated by schizotypy

"For schizophrenia, whether one illness or many, is in its florid stage practically defined by certain characteristics which we have stated earlier were the salient characteristics of the bicameral mind. The presence of auditory hallucinations, their often religious and always authoritative quality, the dissolution of the ego or analog 'I', and of the mind-space in which it once could narratize out what to do and where it was in time and action, these are the large resemblances.

"But there are great differences as well. If there is any truth to this hypothesis, the relapse is only partial. The learnings that make up a subjective consciousness are powerful and never totally suppressed. And thus the terror and the fury, the agony and despair. The anxiety attendant upon so cataclysmic a change, the dissonance with the habitual structure of interpersonal relations, and the lack of cultural support and definition for the voices, making them inadequate guides for everyday living, the need to defend against a broken dam of environmental sensory stimulation that is flooding all before it--produce a social withdrawal that is a far different thing from the behavior of the absolutely social individual of bicameral societies. The conscious man is constantly using his introspection to find 'himself' and to know where he is, relevant to his purposes and situation. And without this source of security, deprived of narratization, living with hallucinations that are unacceptable and denied as unreal by those around him, the florid schizophrenic is in an opposite world to that of the god-owned laborers of Marduk or of the idols of Ur.

"The modern schizophrenic is an individual in search of such a culture. But he retains usually some part of the subjective consciousness that struggles against this more primitive mental organization, that tries to establish some kind of control in the middle of mental organization in which the hallucination ought to do the controlling. In effect, he is a mind bared to his environment, waiting on gods in a godless world" (pp. 431-432).

As quoted in Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"