Autopoietic Cycles: From Potentiality to Reflection

What is consciousness? Why does neural activity feel like something? This book proposes a new approach that bridges philosophy, neuroscience, and complex systems theory. The author introduces the structure of autopoietic cycles — a formal language that describes how stable, self-referential systems arise from stochastic fluctuations, becoming capable of building internal models of the world and experiencing them as subjective awareness. The book traces the path from cellular signal transduction to the hierarchy of cycles of consciousness, establishing empirical referents for each element of the structure using electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography data. The author demonstrates that consciousness is not an exclusive privilege of the brain, but a natural and ultimate expression of what makes matter active: the emergence of an internal correlational structure which, upon achieving coherent redundancy, begins to feel itself. The book introduces the concept of homotopy — a continuous deformation between the internal model and the environment — which allows mental causation to be understood as a structural property of the closed loop of self-reference. A separate chapter is devoted to the genesis of time: from immanent measures of correlation, through objective ordering of events, to the reflexive experience of duration. The book is addressed to philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and anyone seeking a language for understanding consciousness — without mysticism, reduction, or illusions.