And, reversing the direction of the coding, looking at how material impacts of the environment on the environment are decoded in this identity relation,
we can see, in the horizontal relation, that
the identity decodes the material impact of the environment on the cell population by reference to the genes realised in DNA molecules in the species genome.
Well, at this point in Part 1, we went on to show how sensing, conscious processing, emerged from just these sort of identifying processes.
However, consciousness couldn’t emerge in this scenario — the reason being that there was no integrated Medium (Senser) for the process of “identifying identifieds” (sensing) to unfold in.
Instead of an integrated population of neurons functioning at the ontogenetic timescale of a single organism, here the population consists of instances of a species genome, and the identifying process unfolds at the phylogenetic timescale of species.
The flipside of this is that consciousness is an evolution that unfolds in ontogenetic time.
So we can move straight on to Part 2b now, and consider the the external manifestations of these internal processes.