This one revisits the "consciousness from heat" topic that was identified by one poster as particularly unclear in the Reciprocality papers, adds a discussion of MDMA, and proposes a novel reason for a particular habit found in many mappers.
Reciprocal Cosmology has two arrows of time. The one we see is called the "re-creative" arrow. On it, the universe is organising itself into ever greater complexity. It does this by the spontaneous appearance of structure, which then grows before our eyes into great big structures. The other arrow runs the other way, and it called the "creative" arrow. On it, the universe is decaying from a highly ordered Big Bang (which is in our future) to an undifferentiated blur. The spontaneous appearance of structure that we observe is just the recombination of structures in our future, that have on the creative arrow, fallen apart and then recombined in smaller, weaker form.
This trick of structures falling apart and then recombining on the creative arrow is how the whole spacetime phenomenon of the universe holds itself together. It gives rise to, and is facilitated by, what we see as the fractal geometry of nature. All structure, absolutely all structure anywhere and anywhen, is in fact a decay product of the "final" state on our re-creative arrow, the Big Bang of the creative arrow.
Re-appearances of structures on the creative arrow might be likened to what happens when you choose the wrong synch rate for your monitor. Instead of getting one nice clear X cursor, you get a whole bunch of self-similar X's all over the TV. There is no "random noise" in the universe - just heavily entangled order like a message that's been through the DES algorithm.
The Reciprocality model argues that this self-seeding by fractal back echo is how the main game of the universe is played, at all levels. There is always a thermodynamic (re-creative) explaination for everything. There is also a self-organising (creative) explaination for everything. Sometimes one explaination will be more plausible than the other. Finding Reciprocal Cosmology in "3: Reciprocal Cosmology" is clearly best explained re-creatively. But finding it in "6: History" is best explained creatively.
(This overall pattern has primarily been concealed by the way the Ghost Not has caused us to misinterpret the astronomical red shift data as indicating an expanding universe, while in fact it can be taken to indicate a contracting universe more self-consistently.)
There's a wonderful description of the work of Bennett in "The Feynman Lectures on Computation", Addison Wesley 1996, ISBN 0-201-48991-0, pp 137-184. The bottom line is, information == energy. A medium containing ordered information releases energy as it randomises itself. This idea gets particularly subtle when one considers curious information such as the second million digits of pi. It looks like the random data on the tape sitting next to it. Butto a computer that has just ground out the first million digits of pi, it isn't random at all! It contains information!
Information is in the eye of the beholder - it depends what information the beholder has got. Now add to this the fractal (we should really say "multifractal") geometry of nature. It's certainly there - we can Barnsley IFS compress any visual field down to about 1% of its seemingly necessary bandwidth, and will probably do better when we get really fast machines and Dr. Barnsley tells us how he does it. Now we know why it's there we can use it.
The paper "4: Consciousness" describes how it is possible to get waves of heat travelling through the brain, stimulated by fractally ordered inputs, particularly through the eyeballs. The squashy stuff in the brain then does judo on the fractals. They become their own information and beholders, because fractally ordered waves of heat have the opportunity to spontaneously cool, just like people use anti-noise to get rid of unwanted sound energy. The proposed evolutionary pathway for this was to improve cooling in a hot, dry climate. To enhance the strategy, our ancestors took to finding the hidden fractal order (deep structure isomorphisms) in their life experiences retrieved from chemical memory as well. That is how we get awareness out of degrading waste heat, according to the circular causality we see all over Reciprocal Cosmology. Another way of looking at this is to say that because the inputs to the brain are not random, we can use this fact to produce an apparent exchange of information and energy with the future, inside the arbitrary system boundary of our skulls.
So in this model, what is conscious? The brain? It is just a resonator. What is conscious - what is knowing itself - is the ordered but hidden data coming at the brain from all around. It is the universe that is conscious, using the brain as a node. Seemingly spontaneously self- constructing data come at the brain, and building up layer upon layer. Reciprocality often has science in one hand, mysticism in the other.