The 'consciousness' of the living state: Extending the Baars global broadcast model across physiological subsystems

For the broad spectrum of cognitive biological phenomena having 'dual' information sources, isolation from crosstalk between them requires more metabolic free energy than permitting correlation. This allows an evolutionary exaptation leading to dynamic global broadcasts at multiple scales, similar to the well-studied exaptation of noise to trigger stochastic resonance amplification in physiological systems. Entropy gradient models adapted from nonequilibrium thermodynamics lead to an index theorem in which analytic solutions of empirical equations describe different possible topological modes. Not only is the living state characterized by cognition at every scale and level of organization, but by multiple, shifting, tunable, cooperative broadcasts that link selected subsets of those structures to address problems. As for animal consciousness, the 'stream' of cognitive physiological broadcast is constrained by the riverbanks of embedding context, expressed in terms of systematic regularities of an enveloping environmental information source and the limitations imposed by developmental trajectory