Consciousness and Liquid Crystals

Consciousness is probably related to the liquid crystalline physical state of animal brains.

Thermoaesthetics
7 min readFeb 19, 2022

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This is an abstract painting by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s called “Nova Aurigae.” It looks like a fluid mixture of colors with many swirls or spirals and there’s something that looks vaguely like a face emerging from the chaos.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s “Nova Aurigae.” Photo from WikiArt. Public domain.

“In this scheme of things consciousness is an emergent property of the liquid crystal, which need be no more mysterious than the ‘wateryness’ of water or the ‘colour’ associated with a wavelength.”

— R. K. Mishra, “The ‘Mind’ — Brain Relation: A Physical Analogy” (1965)

Contents

States of Matter
Universality and Aesthetics
Excitement
Learning and Knowledge
Fluidity, Disorder, Dynamism and Learning in Idioms
Solidness, Order, Stasis and Knowledge in Idioms
Works Cited

States of Matter

The liquid crystallinity, ordered fluidity and dynamic stasis of living matter and especially brains is evident in the way other parts of the local universe exist exclusively in either fluid or frozen states and can therefore only freeze or melt, respectively, while life and brains can participate in both transitions. There’s a range of environmental temperatures at which we don’t melt into a dynamic, chaotic fluid or freeze into a…

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Thermoaesthetics

A concept of aesthetic complexity based on universal animal preferences for mixtures of simple, more and less exciting physical and psychological opposites.