This paper reviews evidence from neuroscience and quantum computing theory in support of the notion of autonomy in the workings of cognitive processes. De®cits in speech, vision, and motor abilities are described to show how cognitive behavior is not based just on incoming sensory data. Active agents, to which the conscious mind may not have access, are described. Recent developments in quantum computing, of relevance

Abstract: Fundamental approaches bypass the problem of getting consciousness from non-conscious components by positing that consciousness is a universal primitive. For example, the double aspect theory of information holds that information has a phenomenal aspect. How then do you get from phenomenal information to human consciousness? This paper proposes that an entity is conscious to the extent it amplifies information, first by trapping and integrating it through closure, and second by maintaining dynamics at the edge of chaos through simultaneous processes of divergence and convergence. The origin of life through autocatalytic closure, and the origin of an interconnected worldview through conceptual closure, induced phase transitions in the degree to which information, and thus consciousness, is locally amplified. Divergence and convergence of cognitive information may involve phenomena observed in light e.g. focusing, interference, and resonance. By making information flow inward- biased, closure shields us from external consciousness; thus the paucity of consciousness may be an illusion.

It is widely accepted that consciousness or, in other words, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the brain or, in other words, material brain activity. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, will be surveyed. It will be pointed out that they make different epistemological assumptions, refer to different neurophysiological levels of description, and adopt quantum theory in different ways. For each of the approaches discussed, these imply both problematic and promising features which will be indicated.

Bergson (1896) left us a conception of virtuality much different than what is understood today. Perception, he stated, is virtual action. This concept was embedded within a holographic framework and within a model that established the relationship between subject and object in terms of time. The invariance structures of Gibson provide the information for driving the action systems and partitioning the environmental field into a virtual subset as Bergson required. When applied to the problem of the brain’s imposition of a scale of time upon the universal field, where the brain is viewed as a dynamical system, this model reveals relativistic implications demanding a far different conception of perception and action.

Even though intuition is recognized as imperative in strategic thinking management literature is surprisingly silent on the issue. This inquiry thus provides an historical and hermeneutic review of philosophical, psychological and management theory on intuition. It reveals that philosophers conceive intuition as rational while psychologists tend not to. Philosophers do so primarily because intuition is anchored in Ideas, Forms and Archetypes, which are perceived as a priori laws governing and conditioning all existence. The argument is that intuition is the ontological foundation for any normative theory of rationality. Implications for the rationality debate are discussed. Three levels of intuition are discerned and contrasted with analytical thinking. The first and second levels correspond to intuitions from the personal and collective unconscious experience respectively. They can be either introverted or extraverted. The third level corresponds to what some philosophers call the non-dual, integral state of mind. An empirical study including personal interviews with 105 Norwegian top managers indicate that in strategic thinking more emphasis is put on intuition than analysis, especially in exploration of new terrain and technology. They define intuition primarily in accordance with level one. In describing its key features they focus on foresight, new ideas and synthesis. Finally Myers Briggs Type Indicator ® was applied, revealing that they have a strong personality preference for intuition.

Epistemology is traditionally classified as one of the fields of philosophy, and some psychologists have been content to leave it to the philosophers. In my opinion, the problem of how we know is an absolutely basic concern of psychology, but whether you consider my remarks to be psychology or philosophy I really do not care, as long as you are willing to grant me that the problem is a fundamental one. Naively, it seems to us that the outside world, the world around us, is a given; it is just there. I look out and see you sitting in front of me; around you I see walls that enclose the room and stop me from seeing farther. But my world, the world I live in, does not seem to stop at the walls; beyond them, in the same continuous space, there are cities, roads, rivers, oceans, all of which have some determinate loci in my picture of the world. We all feel as if our experiencing of the world around us were quite direct. However, the apparent immediacy of this experience has to be more or less illusory because we know that every bit of our information about external things is coming in through our sense organs, or has come in through our sense organs at some time in the past. All of it, to the best of our knowledge, is mediated by receptor activity and is relayed to the brain in the form of Morse code signals, as it were, so that what we experience as the "real world, " and locate outside ourselves, cannot possibly be anything better than a representation of the external world. (Epistemologists can argue about whether it is even that, but I am willing to take for granted the existence of a physical world that is being represented.) The afferent nerve impulses that link the representation to the reality are extraordinarily dissimilar to either, however formally considered. This is the point of Brunswik's (19S2) lens analogy: information about 1 This article was the presidential address delivered at the meeting of the Western Psychological Association,

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neurocomputation involves discrete signals communicated along fixed transmission lines between discrete computational elements. This concept is shown to be inadequate to account for invariance in recognition, as well as for the holistic global aspects of perception identified by Gestalt theory. A Harmonic Resonance theory is presented as an alternative paradigm of neurocomputation, that exhibits both the property of invariance, and the emergent Gestalt properties of perception, not as special mechanisms contrived to achieve those properties, but as natural properties of the resonance itself.

Our understanding of qualia is extremely weak when considerations of time are brought into play. Ignored has been the fact that the scale of time imposed by the brain on the events of the matter-field already defines quality, and that there is an essential “primary memory ” or continuity of time that underlies all qualitative events. This weakness is magnified when the concept of qualia is applied to form. The origin of the dilemma lies in the fact that the problem of qualia is posed in the context of an abstract space and time. When the time-evolution of the matter-field is taken as indivisible or non-differentiable, the problem can be reposed. It becomes a problem of the optimal specification of properties of an already qualitative matter-field at a particular scale of time.

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