isocosm: The full spectrum of levels of organization in the universe, ranging from the  smallest spatial or temporal scales (the microcosm) to the largest (the macrocosm), viewed without prejudice as to their possible or potential ability to harness or synergize with the capacity of the universe around them in conscious experience and behavior. Although the conscious systems of the isocosm are interactive with and informed by internal and external systems and phenomena at many scales, their imaginative, emotive, cognitive, and executive functions (or analogous functions in primitive conscious systems) may enable them to evaluate options, construct patterns and initiate causal series in potentially creative and effective responses to considered aspects of their environment and history.

A Hyopthetical Quantum Gateway between Consciousness and Self-Organizing Complexity

The term isocosm, which I coined and defined above, could be interpreted to embrace a theory of consciousness I have been developing. This theory is intended to suggest possible criteria for distinguishing between conscious and non-conscious systems. As suggested on the homepage, a clear distinction between conscious and non-conscious systems may help to define the "empirical domain" of a new science of conscious systems.

The isocosm, on this view, is a way of characterizing the universe that postulates the computational or conscious initiation of causal series via wavefunction collapse and its entangled consequences in systems ranging from atoms and molecules to unicellular and multicellular organisms, people and communities, ecosystems and biospheres, stars and solar systems, galaxies and clusters of galaxies, to superclusters of galaxies and the universe or multiverse. The isocosm is furthermore characterized on this view by the ability of such quantum mechanically informed systems, in virtue of their highly "tuned" electromagnetic coherence, to alter the patterns of vacuum fluctuations at systemic scales, thereby altering the probabilities of particle behavior internal to the systems and the wavefunctions that describe them. Thus the isocosm would include systems at many scales that are electromagnetically configured to alter and engage the potential of the vacuum in creative responses to their environment. On such an interpretation, the isocosm would be the natural and evolving home of fundamental or evolving "life" at many scales which exports problems or options via the entrainment of vacuum fluctuations and retrieves computational or conscious solutions or choices via the entangled consequences of wavefunction collapse.