The term fractal was coined by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975, and is derived from the Latin word "fractus" which means "fractured." One of the key properties of fractals is that fractal structures cannot be described adequately in Euclidean geometric terms, because fractals have what effectively is an extra or fourth scalar dimension of measurement of size.

Fractals have fine "grained"("fractured") structure in which the whole structure undergoes recursive iteration at different scalar levels. What makes fractals chaotically complex("chaos" as defined in the mathematical chaos theory) structures is the arbitrariness of the incidence of recursive structure at the small scale. Fractals are said to haven "scale invariant" self-similar structure because the large scale structure of the fractal is reproduced at arbitrary scales of overall structure.

The mathematics describing fractal structures is of special importance in science because nature seems to have taken especially to fractal geometry in the design of its complex structures. Mountain ranges, the structure of biological tissues, clouds, coastlines, and snow flakes approximate fractal structures. Mathematicians technically define a fractal as a structure with a "Hausdorff dimension greater than its topological dimension." This definition, of course, might not convey any meaning to the layman. But it is enough to understand that by maquillaje de noche definition we know that not all self-similar structures are fractals. Some self-similar fractals are smooth and regular enough to satisfy the conditions for description in Euclidean terms, and are, therefore, not described as fractals.

This article presents a fractal model of biological consciousness. The use of the term "consciousness" is reserved, in this article, exclusively in reference to self representational powers of an autonomous self organizing system as may possibly be implemented in an artificial intelligence system, for instance.

Autopoiesis refers to the capacity of a system for self organizing, self structuring behavior by means of self referencing behavior. That is, a system striving for self-maintenance autonomy must be equipped with some means of representing its own structure to itself in aid of self-organizing behavior. With regard to an intelligence system the primary significance of self-consciousness is with regard to the powers of self-organizing autonomy that it may confer on the system. When a system builds internal models or internal representations of itself as aid to self-organizing autonomous behavior, the system falls under pressure to develop "realistically" fine-grained self-models because the capacity of the system in question for self-organizing behavior will obviously depend on the extent to which the system can accurately represent the fine details or minutiae of its own structure in its "inner"self-representations. Stringent requirements of self-perpetuating behavior in a self-conscious system therefore leads the self-organizing system on the leash into the entrapment of the notorious problem of vicious regress of structure.Where the overall structure of such a self-conscious process fulfills the formal definition of a fractal structure we describe the self-conscious system as exhibiting fractal self-consciousness.