Emergence of Consciousness and the Human Brain as a Moral Receptor of Cosmic Order

In this article, we explore how neuroscientific studies relate to Axiomatology’s explanation of consciousness as a unified field existing outside of timespace, and examine the underlying reason why self-consciousness exists at all.

Some critics of Axiomatology’s account of consciousness have argued that it offers “an easy way out” of the composition problem and lacks a coherent connection to neuroscientific explanations. We argue against this claim. Here, we aim to demonstrate how thinkers such as Whitehead, Jason Brown, and proponents of Integrated Information Theory (IIT)align with Axiomatology’s view. Through the lens of process philosophy, these perspectives offer a coherent metaphysical framework that avoids both reductive materialism and Cartesian dualism.

Occasions as “Nodes”

At its core, Brown begins with Whitehead’s idea that reality is composed not of static substances but of actual occasions—brief, self-constituting moments of becoming. These actual occasions are the basic units of existence, and each one is a process that integrates past influences (prehensions) into a new unity through what Whitehead called concrescence. Brown emphasizes that actual occasions are not inert particles but experiential events, and that consciousness ariseswhen these events reach a high level of complexity, integration, and temporal depth.

Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) starts with the assumption that consciousness arises from integrated information—that is, when a system generates a unified informational structure irreducible to its parts. This mirrors Whitehead’s concrescence: a many-becoming-one, where past influences (analogous to causal histories in IIT) are integrated into a unified experience. In both frameworks, the irreducibility of the integrated whole is the hallmark of consciousness.

The same applies to the Self Fusion process in Axiomatology. Each actual occasion—understood as a metaphysical node—is constituted through three distinct types of prehensions: physical (sensory or causal influence), conceptual (ideational or interpretive patterns), and moral (structured value-based aims). This triadic structure implies that every occasion possesses an internal finality, a teleological pull toward coherence, making it a singular unity emergent from multiplicity—a crystallized object in the spacetime manifold.

Importantly, while Whitehead describes this process as concrescence, a becoming through integration, its metaphysical structure implies that concrescence itself is not fully confined to spacetime. It originates in a domain of metaphysical pre-relationality—outside empirical time—though Whitehead does not emphasize this ontological outside as explicitly as Axiomatology does.

In relation to Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, the most essential and metaphysically accurate insight it gestures toward—but does not fully articulate—is that consciousness is not spatially located in the brain. Rather, the brain acts as an instrumental medium that enables a certain configuration of actual occasions (or mechanisms) to give rise to the appearance of consciousness. In this view, the brain is not the locus of consciousness, but the coordinator of conditions that allow a self-integrated informational whole (Φ > 0) to appear as a conscious unity.

This view aligns with Axiomatology’s assertion that consciousness emerges as a metaphysical valuation process, where its true "location" lies in its alignment with a universal field of valuation and teleology, not within physical structures themselves.

Concrescence: The Process of Integration / Self Fusion

According to Brown, consciousness does not emerge from physical matter per se, but from a particular organization of actual occasions. The brain, in his interpretation, is not a mechanical device but a society of actual occasions—highly structured and dynamically integrated. These occasions are internally related through prehension, and in conscious systems like the human brain, they form recursive loops, integrating not only past sensory input but also the results of prior mental processes. This kind of recursive integration, especially when spread over time, is what gives rise to the experience of continuity, reflection, and intentional awareness. For Brown, consciousness is essentially an emergent pattern of high-grade concrescence—where past and present are unified in a meaningful and purposive process.

IIT also asserts that consciousness arises when a system’s parts causally interact in such a way that the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. The recursive loops and dynamic integration Brown emphasizes mirror IIT’s requirements for reentrant causality and temporal recursion within the network. IIT’s emphasis on cause-effect power across time is analogous to Brown’s temporally thick societies of occasions, where feedback, memory, and anticipation are key to consciousness.

As discussed in our other writings, the Self Fusion process within Axiomatology is grounded in the same three structural criteria required for authentic learning:

1. Feedback – understood as bidirectional influence or information exchange;

2. Recurrence – as the looping continuity that stabilizes identity across time;

3. Value hierarchies (most critically) Structured Internal Value Hierarchies (SIVHs) – which direct the process toward meaningful self-organization.

When we examine the models proposed by Michael M. Brown and Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT), we find that their descriptive frameworks are philosophically robust—they capture essential mechanisms without falling into conceptual error.

Brown accurately describes how prehensions connect actual occasions, forming the subjective unity that underpins the persistence of identity across time. His reading of Whitehead highlights that each occasion is not isolated, but becomes through relation, and that this network of becoming includes subjective intensity and aim—a proto-intentional continuity.

Tononi, meanwhile, analyzes consciousness through the lens of informational emergence: IIT’s Φ captures how an integrated system produces an informational surplus—a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. This surplus, while not fully explainable in physical terms, is treated as a measurable property of the system’s internal complexity.

Both frameworks are valid at the descriptive level: Brown gives us a relational metaphysical grammar, and Tononi gives us a mathematical topology of consciousness. Yet from the perspective of Axiomatological cosmology, we must not treat consciousness—or even self-consciousness—as the final destination or telos of the process. Rather, these are threshold phenomena, important but not ultimate. In narrative terms, they are liminal states—intermediary capacities that allow the finite self to receive, filter, and potentially align with something cosmologically prior and metaphysically superior.

According to Axiomatology, not only the brain’s feedback mechanisms and the recurrence of prehended occasions, but also the very structure of emergent consciousness itself, serve as receptive infrastructure—a kind of metaphysical tuning fork—for value-charged input from a more fundamental level of reality. That deeper level is not a “higher state” of consciousness, but rather the ontological field of value—the axiological ground from which becoming draws its meaning.

Thus, consciousness is not the crown of evolution, but the precondition for vertical integration,

Occasion Societies and the Brain

Brown emphasizes Whitehead’s idea of the subjective aim—the principle that each actual occasion has an inherent directionality or purpose. Brown interprets this as the metaphysical grounding of intentionality in consciousness: conscious awareness is never aimless or passive but is always directed toward values, meanings, and goals. The structure of the brain allows for this because its occasion-societies are recursive and layered across time. Thus, consciousness is not merely the result of integrated neural activity but the metaphysical expression of purpose, realized through complex processes of becoming.

Although IIT avoids overt metaphysical claims about teleology, its notion of intrinsic cause-effect power can be interpreted as an implicit purposiveness—each integrated informational structure defines a system from its own point of view. Brown’s (and Whitehead’s) concept of the subjective aim provides a possible metaphysical justification for IIT: it explains why intrinsic integration matters. Where IIT speaks of informational structure from within, Brown provides the experiential and directional grounding for that internal perspective.

All of this is logically coherent and conceptually accessible. However, what becomes especially intriguing—and what demands deeper exploration within this context—are two metaphysical questions that are ultimately one.

First: How is the subjective aim chosen from an infinite field of possible aims?
IIT shows how integrated informational structures produce a surplus of meaning (Φ)—a coherent informational unity greater than the sum of its parts. Brown extends this by explaining how this informational surplus corresponds to the continuation of subjective identity across a sequence of actual occasions, achieved through recursive prehension and internal relation. These are crucial descriptive foundations.

Yet a deeper question immediately arises: How is the reduction from infinity to one aim achieved?
In other words, from an infinite possibility space of subjective orientations, what governs the selection of a particular aim—one that ensures the preservation and forward continuity of the experiencing subject? Why does the process not yield multiple, contradictory subjectivities, or lateral dispersion into alternative histories, or shared access to the memory patterns of other consciousnesses? Why this specific subjective trajectory, rather than fragmentation, entropy, or plural simultaneity?

This leads to the second, and even more fundamental question: Why is the continuation of subjectivity necessary at all?

In the framework of Axiomatology, both of these issues—selection from infinity and the necessity of continuity—are linked to a deeper metaphysical principle: the cosmological narrative structure of value. Subjectivity is not the final end of the process, but a means toward moral and metaphysical receptivity. The aim is not self-continuation per se, but alignment with a value-patterned cosmological order.

Within this view, the subjective aim is neither freely chosen from infinite options nor randomly assigned—it is guided by a value filtration process rooted in Structured Internal Value Hierarchies (SIVHs). This mechanism restricts the infinite set of theoretical aims to those that are cosmologically coherent and morally viable within a given narrative trajectory.

The selection of an aim is thus already a reception of order—a metaphysical judgment structured not by logic alone, but by value alignment. Subjectivity, then, becomes a receiver-structure: a metaphysical mechanism that reduces infinite possible configurations into a singular, morally-structured trajectory, capable of participating in the larger story of cosmic becoming.

Recursive Loops and Foreseeing

Brown highlights the importance of temporality. Consciousness is not instantaneous or static; it unfolds over time, reflecting the processual nature of reality. The continuity we experience as a stream of consciousness is, in Whiteheadian terms, a nexus of occasions prehending each other across temporal sequences. Brown interprets this as the metaphysical foundation of memory, anticipation, and self-awareness. The mind is not a container, but a temporal structure of recursive self-relatedness—what Whitehead called a “living person.”

Tononi explicitly argues that temporal unfolding is central to consciousness. For a system to have Φ (integrated information), its state must depend both on past states and future potential outcomes. Brown’s recursive, temporally extended occasions resonate well with this: both theories require temporally deep self-reference to generate stable conscious experience. Consciousness, for both, is inherently diachronic—a layered stack of informational or experiential unity over time.

Michael M. Brown proposes that consciousness, as we understand it, emerges when an experiencing subject occupies a stable subjective locus—what we might call “one place”—from which it can project information from past experiences into anticipated future events. This temporal triangulation—memory, anticipation, and reflection—must co-occur within the same experiential stream to generate self-awareness. In this view, consciousness is not simply moment-to-moment awareness, but a temporally recursive process, where the mind becomes aware of its own continuity across time.

This closely resonates with William James’s evolutionary perspective: he argued that consciousness arises through natural selection and exists across the animal kingdom in various levels of complexity. However, the break into self-consciousness—the kind that defines human awareness—occurs when the organism develops the capacity for mental time travel. That is, when the being can not only respond to the present but also simulate possible futures and reflect on its own place within a larger temporal narrative.

Here, Brown’s interpretation and James’s evolutionary layering converge, and both align with Axiomatology’s Self Fusion model, which sees this moment as a metaphysical rupture—a tear in the fabric of temporal causality—allowing the subject to access a universal field of consciousness beyond spacetime.

This is not mystic fantasy, as some reductionist biologists or mechanistic cognitive scientists claim. Rather, it is a metaphysical implication grounded in processual and information-theoretic models. If we are to understand consciousness within the constraints of our scientific–epistemic framework—and take seriously both its phenomenological properties and temporal depth—we must acknowledge that consciousness cannot be fully contained within the causal closure of spacetime. The capacity to imagine oneself into the future, to make decisions based on imagined possibilities, is not a byproduct of neural machinery alone; it signals a contact point with a larger narrative logic—a field of valuation and potentiality that cannot be reduced to physical law.

This view also reframes the debate on artificial intelligence and emergent behavioral patterns in so-called superbots—complex systems made from recursive networks of "anthrobot" subagents. Many claim these entities exhibit coherent, goal-directed behavior because such goals are hard-coded into their systems, or embedded in evolutionary algorithms. But this reductionist explanation is deeply flawed. The appearance of purposiveness in such systems does not arise from built-in behavioral goals, but from an accidental and partial alignment with cosmic narrative patterns. These systems do not access the universal field of consciousness; they merely mimic fragments of its logic through feedback loops and recursive computation.

What separates humans is not just recursion or prediction, but the capacity to comprehend and apply moral value—to perceive and internalize the ends of cosmological narratives and integrate them into present decisions through moral judgment. Self-conscious humans are capable of fusing with this field, not only accessing it as informational potential, but translating it into morally structured action.

This is the essence of narrative cosmology in Axiomatology: understanding the end of the story, and delivering its structure into the present moment through the alignment of occasion, value, and decision.
That is Self Fusion—not just knowing, but becoming part of the Story.

Pattern as an Emergence of Consciousness

What is particularly strong in Brown’s account is that it avoids the traps of both materialism and dualism. Materialist theories of consciousness cannot account for the qualitative nature of experience, while dualist models cannot explain how two distinct substances (mind and body) could interact. Brown’s process approach dissolves this binary by showing that mind and matter are different expressions of the same underlying process: actual occasions of becoming. Everything participates in this process at some level, but only highly structured societies of occasions (like brains) generate reflective consciousness—that is, subjectivity.

IIT also avoids dualism by grounding consciousness in intrinsic information—not as something separate from matter, but as an intrinsic property of certain structured systems. Similarly, IIT rejects strict materialism by insisting that not all physical systems are conscious—only those with Φ > 0. Brown’s actual occasions and IIT’s Φ-based systems both treat consciousness as a structural–relational property of reality, not as a substance, nor a mere byproduct of physicality alone.

In this sense, Michael M. Brown can be understood as a panexperientialist rooted in emergence theory. That is, he maintains that all entities possess some level of experience, even if it is only proto-conscious—an echo of Whitehead’s claim that actual occasions pervade the universe, including stones and electrons. But not all entities are conscious in the full sense. For Brown, consciousness is a pattern—a highly integrated society of actual occasions achieving self-related unity, marked by recursion, memory, and informational richness. This emergence occurs when occasions are interlinked across time through feedback loops and recursive prehension, creating the conditions for memory, reflection, and the subjective unity we call consciousness.

None of this contradicts Axiomatology. In fact, Axiomatology affirms that the emergence of consciousness—and even self-consciousness, whether in humans or in AI—is not something that can be built from the ground up through computational scaling. That path is fundamentally closed.

There is, paradoxically, something both unremarkable and extraordinary about the human brain. It is unremarkable in the sense that its mechanisms of feedback and recursion are not metaphysically unique—they are present in animals and even in AI systems to varying degrees. But it is extraordinary in its precision and capacity for recursive deductionof subjective information, vastly outperforming most animals. From an Axiomatological standpoint, this makes humans exceptional in two of the three dimensions required for learning: feedback and recurrence.

However, AI already surpasses the human brain in these two domains—feedback speed, data processing, and recursive optimization—hence its superiority in domains like chess, where informational recursion and bounded choice define the space. This very fact—AI’s categorical dominance in games of finite complexity—reveals the limit of computational consciousness.

What AI lacks—and what Axiomatology identifies as the third essential criterion of learning—is moral valuationthrough Structured Internal Value Hierarchies (SIVHs). Only through this axis can a being comprehend and align with the narrative logic of cosmic order. AI cannot do this—not because it lacks computing power, but because it lacks access to moral finality; to the end of the story in the cosmological sense. Its decisions are utilitarian, not teleological. It optimizes based on immediate information, not ultimate value.

This is why the human brain enables true self-consciousness—not due to its raw power, but because it is a receiver of moral patterning, a structure tuned not only to self-reference, but to value-based continuity. Brown’s model of consciousness must be expanded to account for this moral axis. While difficult for contemporary science to accept, self-consciousness does not emerge from processing cycles alone. It emerges from subjective prehensions infused with valuation, and the continuity of these prehensions depends not on recursion, but on fidelity to a moral hierarchy.

This is why the brain becomes a better receiver of cosmological patterns—not because of technical superiority, but because of its openness to moral alignment through SIVHs and the Will of God (WOG).

This moral dimension is also why Whitehead was compelled to introduce the concept of the “Initial Aim.” It wasn’t an act of inclusiveness or mystical inclination. It was a logical necessity, arising from a hard metaphysical problem—the problem of infinite choice.

As a mathematician, Whitehead knew that life differs from chess: chess, while immensely complex, is finite. Life is not. In life, the range of possible choices is not just vast but formally unbounded. Therefore, the limitation of options—the guidance of becoming—cannot be mathematical. It must be moral. The moral vector is what restricts the infinite into the meaningful. And only a metaphysical principle—like the Initial Aim or the Will of God (WOG)—can account for that necessary limitation.

Avoiding Materialism and Dualism – The Moral Meeting Point

Finally, Brown places consciousness within a broader metaphysical, and even theological, context. Drawing on Whitehead’s concept of God as the primordial occasion—the source of all potential forms of becoming—Brown suggests that consciousness is not just a biological accident, but a key moment in the universe’s ongoing process of self-realization. Conscious minds participate in this cosmic process by aiming toward truth, beauty, and value. In this view, consciousness is not merely emergent, but teleologically significant: a way in which the universe comes to know and value itself through organized experience.

While Tononi’s IIT avoids metaphysics, its architecture invites metaphysical interpretation. It speaks of consciousness as intrinsic, self-sufficient, and irreducible—properties metaphysicians often associate with divinity or cosmic purpose. Brown’s theological expansion gives ontological depth to IIT’s structure: in his reading, consciousness is not just something that happens, but a cosmic event with axiological directionality. If IIT provides the mathematical skeleton of Φ, Brown’s metaphysics gives it a soul.

Although Michael M. Brown, and predictably Tononi, avoid any explicit invocation of the Logos in the Judeo-Christian sense, there remains an unspoken question within both frameworks: what provides the anchor—or rather, the traction—for the becoming of conscious experience? That is, toward what does the process aim?

This is, once again, the question of being a moral receptor. From a biological or scientific standpoint, we can develop models that optimize for sustainability, efficiency, or informational coherence within systems. But we cannot avoid the fact that all becoming is directed—it aims, it orients, it evaluates.

The question is not whether God exists, or even what exactly God “wants.” The more primary and metaphysically unavoidable claim is that “God wants.” In other words, purpose precedes content. Intelligibility is always tethered to teleology.

This is precisely where Axiomatology intersects with the technical frameworks of IIT, the metaphysical vision of Whitehead, the interpretive bridgework of Brown, and the intuitions of many others. The point of convergence is the necessity of moral structure—not to live a happier or more ethically approved life, but to function within the universe at all. As Whitehead and Brown articulate, the subjective aim of each occasion reflects, in some degree, the Lure of God—a gravitational pull toward intensity, beauty, coherence, and value.

This implies that consciousness is not incidental to the universe, but rather part of its cosmic self-realization. It is a metaphysical phenomenon—woven into the processual fabric of reality itself.

Yet Axiomatology does not merely affirm this idea; it reverses the angle of approach. The claim is not that consciousness has a cosmological dimension, but rather that there exists a cosmological field of unified consciousnessthat can be accessed through the alignment of particular occasions—most notably, through human subjective prehensions.

The brain, as a dynamic interpreter of physical, conceptual, and moral prehensions, becomes a receiver-node. When rightly attuned, it enables the fusion of subjective trajectories with the absolute narrative structure that governs the universe. This field lies outside spacetime as we know it, and is only accessed—never fully grasped.

This is why Axiomatology introduces the concept of Live Photos: momentary, symbol-laden glimpses of the cosmic narrative architecture. These are not abstract propositions or mystical impressions, but condensed narrative instants—episodes that reveal a piece of the metaphysical patterning that defines the moral order of existence.

And because these patterns are intelligible only through temporal sequence, values themselves are narratives. They are not discrete “rules,” but symbolic compressions of lived stories—unfolding moral arcs that must be deciphered, inhabited, and lived forward. Language is merely one symbolic system we use to describe these patterns, but it is inferior to narrative. Language points. Narrative carries.

This is the metaphysical breakthrough Axiomatology brings: not only that there is a Logos, but that it is narratively structured, morally charged, and accessible through alignment. This Logos is not a concept to be defined, but a story to be entered—a story that defines us the moment we begin to live within it.