Bioenergetics: A key to brain and mind

Natural life is chemical. Chemistry, not abstract logic, determines and constrains its potentialities. One of the potentialities is cognition. Humans have two equivalent cognitive systems: the immune and the nervous ones. The principle of functioning is the same for both: rooted in the previously acquired and embodied knowledge, the system is intrinsically generating many new chemical states and the environment selects and stabilizes appropriate of them. From the fundamental level of complicated brain chemistry ("biochemese") higher levels emerge: the physiological ("physiologese") and the mental ("mentalese"). Processes are causal at the basic chemical level; they are mere isomorphic, tautological translations at the other levels. The thermodynamic necessity to maintain correlations in the complicated chemical system and to generate variants makes the nervous system energetically expensive: it runs continuously at full speed and external inputs only trigger and modulate the ongoing dynamics. Models of the brain as a universal computer are utterly inadequate.