Metabiology of the mind

Metaphysics extrapolates the findings of physics (along with those of philosophy) into a general ontology. If one makes a distinction between inanimate and animate nature, then a metabiology is logically responsible for a general ontology of life. It not only generalizes the findings of biology and physics, but also provides a theoretical framework that results from the peculiarity of life in relation to inanimate nature.
When we speak of life, we always mean the structure that arises from the autocatalytic principle of life. It is the central difference between life and non-life. This circumstance must be taken into account by means of a methodological distinction.
If one reconstructs this autocatalytic principle historically, at a certain point one arrives at the neuronal way of orientation of living beings in the world and finally to human consciousness.

The need for a biological metatheory is obvious. Even if physics takes care of biological processes, it only ever does so on parts of an organism. These parts, however, are lifeless in themselves, they only come to life in interaction with the entire organism. Life is not a single concept, it is a structural concept that describes a structure. Of course, the findings of physics, biophysics or biochemistry are indispensable for research, but not as a designer for an ontology, but as a supplier of puzzle pieces. From this point of view, the pluralistic scientific community is indispensable for research in all directions.

If we look at life as a structure, it becomes clear, as it were, that life cannot be reduced to a vis vitalis or to an information inherent in things. Otherwise, dualism through the back door would come into play again.
Nor does the quantum level play a role, because the specificity of life, i.e. its structure, only arises at the level of the molecules.

From this point of view, metabiology must not be reduced to physics. Take predictive coding, for example. The concept was developed as a machine learning method and transferred analogously to the brain. Here it may apply to individual internal processes, but it does not serve as a general explanation of the functioning of the brain as a prediction machine. This is an arbitrary attribution that assumes that the ontology of the brain consists of making predictions. Assuming that life strives to maintain a dynamic equilibrium, criticality seems to be resolved in equilibrium rather than calculating probabilities. Of course, probabilities play a selective role, for example in the assessment of whether an obstacle can be overcome. But to proclaim this as an ontology is physicalism.
And criticality in particular is a good example of the difference between physics and biology: in living systems, criticality is reversed by inhibitory neuron assemblies in order to achieve dynamic equilibrium. A process that does not exist in the inanimate world.

And just as important is the formation of categories. No matter from which perspective we look at the brain, it is always the same brain. Sometimes we use the language of physiology, sometimes that of psychology or philosophy. It's like when we translate a sentence into different languages, the sentence always remains the same.
So one time we talk about an electrochemical process, the other time about a thought, a sensation or a feeling. We could use these different languages simultaneously, but we have to be careful not to use one to explain the other or establish causality between them.

If we try to establish a correlation between the languages, this also means that every expression of life, every thought or every sensation must be assigned a physiological process. There is no thinking that proceeds without physiology. Or rather, all thinking is physiology. And all physiology is thinking, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether arbitrary or involuntary. So there is no dualism between a physique and a mind.
Mind or consciousness must therefore be explainable from physical reality and of course includes all relationships within it.

Thinking and feeling arise as the joint firing of neurons, i.e. neurons form patterns. It is better to say that holonoms are formed, because this term rather reflects the multidimensionality in which multimodal stimuli are combined.
Holonoms are more or less stable multidimensional patterns that are more or less open to coupling with other holonomas or stimuli and form a heteronomous structure overall.

The brain is a highly complex orientation machine that integrates all sensory stimuli.
This is exactly the difference to the current AI. With its binary approach, it does not produce any thoughts.
It's not enough to excite a bunch of artificial neurons. Who is then the bearer of the experiences, i.e. of consciousness? There is no subject of experience. So there is nothing that can be described with the concept of the I. This is only possible on the basis of an autocatalytic, autopoietic system.

The philosophy of mind, as well as cognitive neuroscience, would do well to collaborate on a metabiology of mind.

At the beginning, we spoke of metaphysics ontologizing physical knowledge. Metabiology can also use such ontological conclusions, but it must first transform them into its own framework. For example, if the theory of dynamical systems describes phase spaces, trajectories and attractors of a passive inanimate system, these are components of a living system after their transformation. The attractor is then no longer a passive 'point of attraction', but an agent that actively changes the entire system, thus shaping state spaces and generating new trajectories.

Let's take the concept of information in the sense of an ontological concept of structure, as developed by Integrated Information Theory. If it is transformed into a metabiology, it becomes dynamic and changeable. Information is then no longer just a rigid physical concept, but can be described in terms of density and thus in terms of causal force, which gains influence over areas of lower density by means of information or structural gradients. With a bundling of such local densities known as a superstructure, the orientation machine brain could be ontologically justified as the seat of consciousness and I.

Without a metabiology of mind, brain research, as well as the philosophy of mind, will continue to sleepwalk between utilitarianism (which should not be underestimated) and philosophical speculation.