Dissipation, consciousness and the unconscious

In this paper, we review the dissipative quantum model of brain and some of its recent developments. The model emphasizes the fact that the brain is open to its environment, with outgoing and incoming flows of energy, matter, and information. For a living brain, these flows are always active; they can be enhanced or reduced, never fully eliminated. This characteristic is crucial for understanding brain activity, which is indeed described by the dissipative dynamics, and is fundamental to generating the phenomenon of consciousness. We briefly discuss several results derived from the dissipative model, including the hidden territory of the unconscious, the process of constructing meanings out of information, the dynamic nature of memory, which reveals to be memory of meanings rather than memory of information, the nature of mental activity, the observed chaotic activity of the brain, its fractal self-similarity, its social dimension, the formation of linguistic forms and concepts. Additionally, we address the concept of the brain’s entanglement with its environment, and of free will, limited to the formal frame of the Bayes rule derivation.