Pepperell’s Organization of Energy

Artist and perceptual scientist Robert Pepperell suggests that while energetic activity is fundamental to all physical processes and drives biological behavior, consciousness is a specific product of the organization of energetic activity in the brain. He describes this energy, along with forces and work, as “actualized differences of motion and tension,” and believes that consciousness occurs “because there is something it is like, intrinsically”—from the intrinsic perspective of the system—“to undergo a certain organization of actualized differences in the brain” (Pepperell, 2018).

Pepperell laments that “energy receives relatively little attention in neuroscientific and psychological studies of consciousness. Leading scientific theories of consciousness do not reference it, assign it only a marginal role, or treat it as an information-theoretical quantity. If it is discussed, it is either as a substrate underpinning higher level emergent dynamics or as powering neural information processing.”

He argues that “the governing principle of the brain at the neural level is not information processing but energy processing,” although the information-theoretic approach can complement the energetic approach. Pepperell puts “information in the biological context as best understood as a measure of the way energetic activity is organized, that is, its complexity or degree of differentiation and integration.”

While “information theoretic techniques provide powerful tools for measuring, modeling, and mapping the organization of energetic processes,” he says, “we should not confuse the map with the territory” (Pepperell, 2018).

In comparison with mainstream brain organization frameworks at the global level or localized, Pepperell offers, as an alternative or complementary way of thinking, how the energetic activity in the brain is organized. The challenge for the model is why energetic processing is associated with consciousness in the brain but not in other organs, like the liver or heart. Pepperell claims that energetic activity in the brain efficiently actuates differences of motion and tension that make the difference, perhaps via dynamic recursive organization – the “appropriate reentrant intracortical activity.”

“If we are to naturalize consciousness,” Pepperell concludes, "then we must reconcile energy and the mind.” Treating the brain as a difference engine that serves “the interests of the organism is a natural approach to understanding consciousness as a physical process” (Pepperell, 2018).