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 ...

Perception is an intentional action through space in time by which the finite brain explores the infinite world. By acting, the brain thrusts its body into the future spacetime of the world while predicting the sensory consequences. Through perceiving its actions and their results, it remembers its predictions, its actions, and their consequences. To perform these operations the brain, through chaotic dynamics, constructs and uses finite perceptual matrices of spacetime and infers causation. Perceived time differs from world time in ways that are determined by the neural mechanisms of intentionality. In particular, perception of the self in action, through the mechanism of preafference, gives structure and content to the concepts of continuity, contiguity, duration, temporal order, cause, and effect. Perceptual scales are expanded beyond kinesthesia by conversion of time into space, such as by clocks and calendars. Remembered time differs from perceived time in being dependent on awareness, which makes it episodic, fragmentary, and subject to large variations in rates of time lapse in the flow of meanings. The attribution of causal agency to objects and events in the world results from anthropomorphization in accordance with the neural mechanisms of the internal perception of intentional action.

In a passive information processing system a stimulus input gives information, which is transduced by receptors into trains of impulses that signify the features of an object. The symbols are processed according to rules for learning and association and are then bound into a representation, which is stored, retrieved and matched with new incoming representations. In active systems perception begins with the emergence of a goal that is implemented by the search for information. The only input accepted is that which is consistent with the goal and anticipated as a consequence of the searching actions. The key component to be modeled in brains provides the dynamics that constructs goals and the adaptive actions by which they are achieved.

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

Perception is an intentional action by which the finite brain explores the infinite world. By acting, the brain thrusts its body into the future spacetime of the world while predicting the sensory consequences. By perceiving its actions and their results, it remembers its predictions. To perform these operations the brain, through chaotic dynamics, constructs and uses finite perceptual matrices of space, time and causation. Perceived time differs from world time in ways that are determined by the neural mechanisms of intentionality. In particular, perception of the self in action, through the mechanism of preafference, gives structure and content to the concepts of contiguity, duration, temporal order, cause, and effect. Remembered time differs from perceived time in being dependent on awareness, which makes it episodic, fragmentary, and subject to large variations in rates of time lapse in the flow of meanings.

Semantics is the essence of human communication. It concerns the manufacture and use of symbols as representations to exchange meanings. Information technology is faced with the problem of using intelligent machines as intermediaries for interpersonal communication. The problem of designing such semantic machines has been intractable because brains and machines work on very different principles. A solution to the problem is to describe how brains create meaning and then express it in information by making a symbol as a representation to another brain in pairwise communication. Understanding of the neurodynamics by which brains create meaning may enable engineers to build devices with which they can communicate pairwise, as they do now with colleagues, though not with words, but with shared actions.