Science and Consciousness: Models and Challenges

The book offers a hypothetical answer to the following questions: What is intelligent behaviour? What is information? What are the mental states? How do they occur? How do we cause our actions by our thoughts? The reply is based on the conjecture of what the author calls an ‘informational collapse’. The informational collapse should be considered in analogy to the gravitational one. – The super-critical concentration of information should lead to an informational collapse – a condition in which information changes its physical condition – from structural order, it becomes the singularity of an informational ‘black hole’. This singularity continues to ‘absorb’ or rather to produce information. The book also considers the semiotic approach to the study of intelligence. Special attention is paid to the issue of the missing link between natural causality and intelligent behaviour, to which it offers a particular reply. The work is of specific interest to the general interdisciplinary philosophical, scientific, engineering and technological community dedicated to or tempted by the theme of information and consciousness.