Cellular organization provides the fundamental platform for exchanges
between life’s integrated processes and the environment. Cellular processes convey
adaptive information about the environment. Time-organized processes and
information contained within living organisms are a source of fitness. The energy flow
between single cells and the world forms a communication channel indissociably made
of organic matter and information. This flow occurs under the informational principles
of natural selection. However, the information built up into biological systems needs to
become information informing about itself to transcend across levels of abstraction,
such as described in Hofstadter’s strange loops. A working car engine expresses the
“processual” expectation of its human designers: gas flows, then ignites, pistons move
and so forth. The engine has no awareness of these expectations. The expectations are
implicit to the designed physical structure. The processes that mediate physical and
informational relationships of living organisms also have expectations built into them.
Such expectations result from a selective natural history based on evolutionary
constraints.
Keywords: Car Engine Expectations, Cellular Inference, Consciousness Original
Platform, Evolutionary Constraints, Emergence of Agency, Evolutionary Fitness,
Hofstadter Strange Loop, Intelligent Design, Informational Relationships, Life
and Consciousness, Matter and Information as Single Entity, Natural Selection,
Origin of the Subject, Original Integration of Information, Processual
Expectations, Phenomenology of Consciousness, Signaling, Single-Celled
Organisms, Subject-World Dialectic.
