To explain how stimuli cause consciousness, we have to explain causality. We can't trace linear causal chains from receptors after the first cortical synapse, so we use circular causality to explain neural pattern formation by self-organizing dynamics. But an aspect of intentional action is causality, which we extrapolate to material objects in the world. Thus causality is a property of mind, not matter.

Brain systems operate on many levels of organization, each with its own scales of time and space. Dynamics is applicable to every level, from the atomic to the molecular, and from macromolecular organelles to the neurons into which they are incorporated. In turn the neurons form populations; they form systems, and so on to an embodied brain interacting intentionally with its environment. Each level is "macroscopic" to the one below it and "microscopic" to the one above it. Among the most difficult tasks are those of conceiving and describing the exchanges between levels, seeing that the scales of time and distance are incommensurate, and that causal inference is far more ambiguous between than within levels. That holds for the relation of action potentials from microelectrodes to whole brain activity seen with new techniques for brain imaging: fMRI and PET. A new recourse is to conceive, identify and model an intervening "mesoscopic" level, which is a local selforganizing neural population. Its characteristic activities consist of 'spontaneous' action potentials and EEG dendritic activity. Mesoscopic neurodynamics gives a clear understanding of self-organized chaotic patterns of neural activity in primary sensory areas when significant stimuli arrive. These patterns are created with each sniff, glance, or movement of the head and hands. They are triggered by sensory input, but they are not the result of information processing, and they are not representations of stimuli. They are manifestations of the way in which brains make and test hypotheses. The patterns show that brains do not take information into themselves. They formulate expectations as hypotheses and test them by taking action into the environment. They are not data-driven; they are hypothesisdriven, and all ...

Emotion is defined as a property of intentional behavior. The widespread practice of separating emotion from reason is traced to an ancient distinction between passive perception, which is driven by sensory information from the environment, and active perception, which begins with dynamics in the brain that moves the body into the environment in search of stimuli. The neurodynamics of intentional behavior is reviewed, with emphasis on the limbic system that controls the autonomic and neuroendocrine systems in the brain and body, directing them for the support of the musculoskeletal system that is executing the behavior. An essential part of intentionality is learning from the sensory consequences of one's own actions. The perception of emotional states through awareness involves global states of cooperative activity in the forebrain, which have internal contributions from the many parts of the brain that join in making these states, and inevitably there are contributions from the sensory systems of the body that implement and signal emotional states. The distinction between "rational " versus "emotional " behaviors is made in terms of the constraint of high-intensity chaotic activity of components of the forebrain by the cooperative dynamics of consciousness versus the escape of subsystems owing to an excess of chaotic fluctuations in states of strong arousal. Aquinas.txt 2 Walter J Freeman

We humans and other animals continuously construct and maintain our grasp of the world by using astonishingly small snippets of sensory information. Recent studies in nonlinear brain dynamics have shown how this occurs: brains imagine possible futures and seek and use sensory stimulation to select among them as guides for chosen actions. On the one hand the scientific explanation of the dynamics is inaccessible to most of us. On the other hand the philosophical foundation from which the sciences grew is accessible through the work of one of its originators, Thomas Aquinas. The core concept of intention in Aquinas is the inviolable unity of mind, brain and body. All that we know we have constructed within ourselves from the unintelligible fragments of energy impacting our senses as we move our bodies through the world. This process of intention is transitive

The key tenet for understanding brain and mind is that all knowledge of the world derives from perceptions that are created by anticipatory neural activity emerging in the brain. That activity moves the body through the environment while simultaneously predicting the changes in sensory input that accompany actions. Brains learn about the world by assimilating to the sensory consequences of their self-organized intentional actions. The essential problem for neurobiologists is to describe the synaptic mechanisms by which neurons interacting in massive numbers create the patterns of anticipatory neural activity that control behavior. Three mechanisms of pattern creation in neurodynamics are described. First, a transient from perturbation by a stimulus drives cortex from its prestimulus operating point in state space without changing cortical dynamics. This is explicit breaking of symmetry by an imposed forcing function. The pattern of relaxation on return to the prestimulus state gives the evoked or event-related potential. Second, a change in cortical dynamics is induced by a stimulus accompanied