Consciousness: a unique way of processing information

In this article, I argue that consciousness is a unique way of processing information, in that: it produces information, rather than purely transmitting it; the information it produces is meaningful for us; the meaning it has is always individuated. This uniqueness allows us to process information on the basis of our personal needs and ever-changing interactions with the environment, and consequently to act autonomously. Three main basic cognitive processes contribute to realize this unique way of information processing: the self, attention and working memory. The self, which is primarily expressed via the central and peripheral nervous systems, maps our body, the environment, and our relations with the environment. It is the primary means by which the complexity inherent to our composite structure is reduced into the “single voice” of a unique individual. It provides a reference system that (albeit evolving) is sufficiently stable to define the variations that will be used as the raw material for the construction of conscious information. Attention allows for the selection of those variations in the state of the self that are most relevant in the given situation. Attention originates and is deployed from a single locus inside our body, which represents the center of the self, around which all our conscious experiences are organized. Whatever is focused by attention appears in our consciousness as possessing a spatial quality defined by this center and the direction toward which attention is focused. In addition, attention determines two other features of conscious experience: periodicity and phenomenal quality. Self and attention are necessary but not sufficient for conscious information to be produced. Complex forms of conscious experiences, such as the various modes of givenness of conscious experience and the stream of consciousness, need a working memory mechanism to assemble the basic pieces of information selected by attention

Evolution and biogeography of seagrasses

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. Seagrasses are an organismal biological group united by their ability to grow in marine environments. As marine flowering plants they have evolved a combined suite of adaptations multiple times enabling the four known lineages containing species of seagrass to survive, and thrive, in the sea. Unlike many other biological groups of plants however, seagrasses are all derived from a single order of flowering plants, the Alismatales. This order, being derived early in the evolution of the monocotyledons, is comprised predominantly of aquatic plants, of all forms- emergent, submerged, freshwater, estuarine and marine. A review of seagrass fossils suggests that new discoveries of seagrass fossils along with confirmation of some earlier finds lead to a clear signal that some seagrass species had a wider distribution in the past compared with today. The discovery of new fossil sites should be encouraged as this will likely produce important valuable information on the evolution of this group. In general the biogeography of seagrasses suggests that these organisms evolved successfully in the Tethys Sea of the Late Cretaceous. However, the modern division into two groups, temperate and tropical tends to suggest that at some point an ecological separation occurred in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. There are a disproportionately large number of temperate seagrass species in southern Australia and there is significant endemism shown in Posidonia, Amphibolis and a unique species of Halophila (H. australis). The use of genetic and genomic techniques has begun to explain these distributions but we can expect a much bigger picture to emerge in the near future