The Structure of Consciousness

The right brains of two interacting people are constantly interacting with one another simultaneously as the left brain interpreters (ego) talks back and forth. Who hasn't experienced talking about something at one level but at an implicit or even explicit level your focused on the affective language of the other?



You are embedded in a field of primary process facial-cues, vocal tones, and body language, all of which communicate the state of wellbeing or distress present in the other. Can you, for example, listen to a lecture who speaks with a strained voice? Or would you be preoccupied with the anxiety he is experiencing as he attempts to communicate with others? A situation like this shows how affective coherency, or "being confident", is a basic substratum atop which ideas and beliefs become effectively expressed. Take away this substratum, and that is pretty much all the other minds can focus on.

Thus, the emotional states of human beings are communicated at a primary, affective level through facial expressions, vocal tones, and body movements. It is at this affective-mimetic level that language evolves. It is, indeed, only in the generalization of attachment i.e. a prideful connection of selves, that languaging could ever hope to evolve.

So mimesis precedes language. Body-body communication of feeling, and being implicitly aware of this connectivity, precedes the evolution of self-conceptualization via-language. The bonobo shows us that 'neotinization' can happen in the absence of language, revealing the sufficiency of a cingulate cortex in regulating the social dynamics. Indeed, one may ask, is such a state of splendor a function of a brain-area, or is the brain-area mediating the expression of an ecological 'ebullience' - a surplus? What sort of brain-differences determine this? Bonobo and chimpanzeez hve different brains in exactly the ways you would predict: bonobos have larger anterior insulas - an area where feelings are represented in mentation - than chimpanzees, which reflects the bonobo tendency to resolve conflicts in non-violent ways. There was also a generally larger set of connections between the bonobo prefrontal cortex and the amygdala than the chimpanzee. Bonobo's provide an interesting counter-example to the image of nature as 'red in tooth and claw'; the bonobo is sweet, gentle, and rambunctious. It is a function of an ecology which protected it from frequent predation, and thus, to elaborate areas that would usually be inhibited by environmental constraints.

The left brain needs to know its feelings. Feelings are messengers of self to other; and facial expressions, voices, and body movements are messengers of the others feelings to the self. We are structured to be entangled with one another. Language us but the inner-structure of a general structure determined by the right brain.

Basic behavior - or morality, ethics, is the general parameter for consciousness formation. The "idea",or kernel, or what you are, is implicit in the actions animated by the behavior of others. This point, and its correlation with early brainstem development, means that your basic patterns of being are determined by how caregivers related to you in the first 2-3, that is to say, the emotional states they experienced as they related to you. The capacity of the caregiver to emphasize and recognize the reality of the babys specific emotional states underlies how well that baby's early self-brain is regulated. There is a correlation, or one-to-one correspondence, between a caregivers self-understanding, and the way they interpret and make sense of the cues of the baby. If the caregiver has unrealistic ideals, he will perceive negative behavior (not responding to a babies cries) as good "it'll make him tougher". A value such as being "self-reliant" could be imposed by deprivation; yet the assumption that self-reliance via self-deprivation is better willl be overlooked - overlooked because the person hyper-valuates his commitment to independence and individuality - that is, to his self-image of himself as being "sufficient in himself", or beign a "builder of my universe", which includes others i.e. family members. An exagerrated sense of self-agency will lead to an underdeveloped sense of allocentricity: that other peoples judgements affect you; they direct your behavior; indeed, you are made to act to conform to the values of salient others while experiencing such acts as purely your own. You take your convergence in intentionality with the other as a self-willed decision, rather than as a 'carrot' which completes the semiotic circle between the geometry of behavior between self and other. Recognition of the motivational state is where behavior is serialized, by which I mean, each act of recognition of anothers state confirms the others affection - his direction - and so girds him to speak and, in a symmetrical way, perform the same function on your communication processes



From such 'geometry', affects arise. "Are you listening to me!?" we say when a person isn't paying attention. A behavior - not listening to another person, is wrong, because it isn't symmetrical: it isn't something you would accept being done to you. But if its done, it sets up an affective process, which sets up a thinking dynamic, and which ultimately refers to a self-representation, or how this behavior is generally metabolized by the self (brainmind) in situations such as these. These processes tend to arise instantaneously, but their place is not the same; feeling is anterior, and directly about the behavior. Thinking is operating with reference to feeling, but is focusing on its mental objects, which threatens to dissociate from the category-situation created by the behavior i.e. the affect (shame/irritability/anger/depression) unless focalized. Hence, thinking and feeling need to be aligned; the mind must symbolize in languahe to properly manage feeling. It can only symbolize in language, however, if social situations reward the expression of such behavior.

This doesn't happen so easily because we are always going, and always responding, to a world around us.



Intentionality and attentionality are always entrained according to previous meanings and their associated physical objects. My life-world is constrained by these dynamics to flow in these sorts of ways.



Selves are entrained along a system of dynamics that structure our lives; we are already beholden to recognition dynamics - of which no self is in control; but above and in addition to this is the socioeconomic system which imposes constraints on the life process. It makes anxious people; and anxious people cannot function normally.



The above diagram seeks to represent three emotional states and correlates them with three parts of our body: the head, the heart, and the genitals. Fear, when it occurs, is a mostly mental experience; it precedes as a very subtle recognition the subsequent explosion of anxiety in the heart. You can feel the differential between the perception of the object that scares you, and the arousal that it causes. The fear is between perception and cognitive reaction; whereas the anxiety is a profound interruptionin breathing mediated by the sinoatrial nodes control on the heart.

Depression is most felt in the depression in sexual interest...

Your threads are on the university or college level of learning intricate stuff about the brain and how it relates to consciousness.
I’ll be honest and say much of it is too detailed and inticate for my simple mind to comprehend easily, but I do appreciate you putting the effort into such threads.

You are obviously a very intelligent person who I assume is either learning about how the brain works or is teaching it to others.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Have you ever read from Paul Foster Case?

super consciousness, subconsciousness, selfconsiousness

that is all that exists.

Life is solely learning how to control self consciousness, in order to allow super conciousness to properly suggest outcomes to subconciousness

Any thoughts on Graham Hancock?

For those who may not know, his 'THE WAR ON CONSCIOUSNESS' video was censored and banned by TEDx...

Perhaps the most prominent victim of TED censorship and idea suppression is none other than Graham Hancock, author of the now-censored TED Talk called, "The War on Consciousness." Although it was de-listed by TED, the video was archived on YouTube

As you'll see in this talk, the idea that humans might have consciousness was so offensive to the TED high priests that they felt the talk needed to be suppressed and "removed from circulation."

Graham Hancock and The War on Consciousness

Graham Hancock presents evidence on his belief that there is life both before and after physical death. We are not our bodies. We are our consciousness. And consciousness is the greatest mystery of science.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Basic behavior - or morality, ethics, is the general parameter for consciousness formation. The "idea",or kernel, or what you are, is implicit in the actions animated by the behavior of others.

Great thread! You're clearly at a level of psychology that I am of extreme interest to strive towards, so bear with me as my street psychology may be retarded...

My thoughts veer a bit on that quote as I envision this from a different angle of lens it seems. Maybe the foundation of basic behavior can't form if the given environmental parameters of reality aren't set in stone prior to even the most futile attempts at consciousness efforts. I am on page with the kernel aspect of what you said, but perceived realities prior to engaging in creativity demands a scope of environmental aspects for a holon to manifest creation, doesn't it?

If a two year old watches water being poured back and forth between two different sized cups while simultaneously asked "which cup is holding more water?", the child will not become convinced that they are equal in such terms due to their lack of environmental awareness. If realities of volume do not exist in reality, the animated behaviors of others would likely hold a different reality or value to their given environmental parameters is the I see it...

My views that consciousness is a system of steps that does not stop including more and more universal inclusions of self existence urges my theories. Individual levels of consciousness do not exist as a measure, but may better serve as a general indicator of ones reality that they behold. Once reality parameters are gauged, my logic jumps right back on board with what you indicate as a base of care given parameters.

Such thoughts would hold true for even later years in life with my theory holding truth, where say a consciousness injury had occurred in life. A caretaker of a middle aged person with Autism is raised by a saint. If spatial awareness is sequestered to internal being, than all the care in the world will still yield a lack of environmental consciousness. This does not need to even include a disorder to hold value.

Learning is my deepest desire and cherish to be wrong about anything and everything. If I am not learning something, it feels as if I am starting the channels of perish. Learning continuously changes my being, both physically and mentally. I yield to the 2nd brain/Mercentery system of belief, which indicates that our known brain can't handle all of the environmental factors of physical life. Realities of environment (diet) sets in motion a relayed set of realities to establish a consciousness based adaptation output that is best for overall vessel growth. Foods in that world can be viewed as the parental diet can in the human world. We are what we eat it seems.

My brain was depleted of energy and even it's abilities to regenerate, yet I consumed soda daily. Having ignored that my brain was operating on conditions of saving the 2nd brain's horrible dietary choice, it was a direct result that I was unaware of being unconscious to the reality that soda is a nuclear bomb to my digestive and immune systems. That particular consciousness level was hindered to my specific level in just that small fraction of many possibilities of consciousness, but it was the awareness of the reality that just a single human body encompasses millions of galaxies. My newfound awareness changed my future for sure, but it somehow magically rewrote my entire past as well. What my parents told me at my most fragile and unaware times holds some relevance to my being of present, sure. New environments creates new learning, which then triggers a reach out of support to teachers of whatever sorts.

If a parent tells a pair of 5 year old twins on Xmas eve that coal awaits those who don't sleep, and one believes in Santa while the other does not, their sleep world's will result in drastically different sleep patterns. One will wake up in a magical universe, while the other lives a new consciousness... one that includes their new reality while protecting the sanctity of witnessed happiness by their counterpart twin. The environmental capacity sets the tone of the parental capacity even, as the parent recognizes the silent cues that one of the two lives a new consciousness. With many blessings provided going forward, it is not out of the question that consciousness levels beyond the reality scope of the parent's exceeds or varies drastically based on environmental faculties. It may even be safe to theorize that parents offer so much energy to procreation based on their perceived needs of care in their elder years as the reality of death evades nobody, and people naturally desire safety and security in an unknown environment. Cases of such behavior would indicate that even adults search for the parents beyond procreation based on the environments that people desire for themselves and family.

When environmental capacities expanded for me to new sets of reality parameters that involved pushing the limbic system to serve the prefrontal lobes instead of vice versa my world's changed drastically. The emotional worlds expanded into new meanings, which clearly changed my past with the future at the same time. Parental reflections which were solely intended and real as all life were instantly defined as completely new parts to a whole, but lacking wholeness due to the reflection that the parental guidance may have had their own parameters. I'd further reflect that, "if my environments of past were altered in a positive or more conscious friendly effort of parental guidance structure, then would I have even found or lived the current conscious reality that I travel upon?' Lack of parenting in my realities has been one of the most joyous childhoods I could dream of now, and I credit the teachers of the schools of life that recognize a wanderer from afar as they wander themselves. I can promise that my past would be the result of my parental guidance by testimony if this thread were 10 years old, and I lived a different environmental reality though had my limbic system still been the captain of the vessel.

And now I wonder, would environment hold such a level of foundation to me personally had my emotions been running the show in current times?

Sorry to wander about in your thread. Great topic, and I will surely follow along! I would keep rambling, but I'd like to dig deeper into deep understanding of the brain. Thanks for the time and energy spent on a great topic!

So everything in this reality can be reduced to the material? All care instincts, understanding true intentions of others, it is all physical? Reading body language. Everything is simply a result of environment.

So something like Sheldrake's experiments with pets and owners is complete fiction? It couldn't happen with your view of reality.

Scientists Investigate If Pets Telepathically Sense When Owners Are Returning Home

In about 100 experiments with Jaytee, Sheldrake ruled out various ordinary explanations. Smart came home at varied times, ruling out routine. She came home in taxis, in friends’s cars, or by foot, all to make sure the dog wasn’t just recognizing the sound of her car from afar.

The Anticipation of Telephone Calls: a Survey in California

It is not uncommon for people to telephone friends or relations who say that they were just thinking of calling them. Likewise, many people have had the experience of thinking of a particular person, with whom they have not spoken to for a while, who then calls them on the telephone later the same day. Some domestic animals, notably dogs and cats, also seem to anticipate telephone calls from particular people, their owners, while ignoring calls from other people (Sheldrake, 1999).

a reply to: ClovenSky

I don't see how those things couldn't happen in an entirely materialistic reality. All materials are connected. There may be too many variables and moving parts to this physical material reality for any of us to fully grasp how when one moves it affects the other. The connections, synchronicity, and all things appearing psychic are really just physical moving parts in the universe as far as I can tell.

I tend to lean towards us being fully %100 our bodies and nothing more, but I really enjoyed Graham Hancocks tedtalk which was posted here- when the tv set is broken the tv signal is still there, wow! But even so, isn't the tv signal part of the physical universe yet? And who's to say that when the signal leaves the body or doesn't have a body to occupy that it is exactly the same as it would had been had it had a body to occupy? & I have used psilocybin mushrooms in the past, lol, and I have been to hell and heaven each and in my younger years I might've said that it sometimes felt like I was alive before I was born and that I chose to enter this life as if to challenge myself- if we exist in eternity then yes we exist before now, we are before and after, there is no beginning or end. But there's not enough evidence to truly satisfy or fully convince me. All visions could merely be hallucinations and psychosomatic responses to traumatic life and death situations, or like Graham Hancock so wonderfully puts it, from "conscious altering drugs" (I think thems the words) which happens to produce a very materialistic response in our bodies and changes our bodies.

I almost always enjoy Astrocyte's posts and the discussions it stirs. Thanks Astrocyte! Hoping all is well with you.

a reply to: Astrocyte

A most interesting correlation linking up the physical and emotional to what is believed to be the structure of consciousness, but I think there is more to it than that.

Thinking is operating with reference to feeling, but is focusing on its mental objects, which threatens to dissociate from the category-situation created by the behavior i.e. the affect (shame/irritability/anger/depression) unless focalized. Hence, thinking and feeling need to be aligned; the mind must symbolize in language to properly manage feeling. It can only symbolize in language, however, if social situations reward the expression of such behavior.

In face-to-face situations, being rewarded by others' positive expression and acceptance may be the driving force of forming the structure of socialization, this being a basic need most of us share, however is it really to be considered a shared type of consciousness? Or, simply addressing basic human physical and emotional needs? Could thinking to be aligned with operating with reference to feeling fit nicely into specific emotional need cases?

Children's personalities are normally formed at 7 years of age (some earlier), but new research shows that our personalities are always being reworked, so it seems we do get better with age. It is also revealed that we inherit personality traits via genetics and environmental factors (physical).

In online situations, can being rewarded by others' positive expression and acceptance (group thought) dissociate people from others' opposite experiences and thoughts, thereby causing the lack of conscience or closed-mindedness?

As for controlling my own universe, I say sometimes I can and sometimes I can't - there are those who can and there are those who can't. As for the structure of consciousness, for me, its whole cannot be explained simply. It brings to mind hearing a scientist describe our attempts to explain the search for ET: it goes something like this - If you extract a glass of water from the ocean and study it's contents and find no fish in the glass, does that mean there are no fish in the ocean?

You can understand consciousness only if you cease to regard it as a "thing". The great mistake (although an inevitable one, given the reductionist tendency of science) that scientists make in trying to understand consciousness is that they assume that it can be reduced either to its parts or to some global property of biological systems sufficiently rich in neurons. Neither is true, fortunately, or else humans would be merely machines pretending to be something else.
Consciousness CAN be understood, but only in terms of concepts that are trans-scientific because they refer to realities for which science has no model/theory (indeed, it might even deny their study as ideologically incorrect).

Welcome to Plato's cave, science. As long as you examine only the shadows on its walls and deny the existence of anything that lies outside them, you will never see what is "outside," only your own speculations. Consciousness does not reside inside the cave. Its centre is everywhere and its boundary is nowhere.

a reply to: Murgatroid


I very much disagree with his archeology, even if he and I converge in the belief that the social structure deliberately stresses people to control their consciousness.

You need to slow things down. Everyone, and everything, depends on the recognition that consciousness comes in discrete units, slowly developing from one moment to the next. Not just this: but consciousness is the liminal zone between the physical dynamics of your brain-body, and the dyadic structure of your personality, self, or ego. All of us have different 'ego-states', or 'self-states' (as relational psychoanalysis calls them), because each of us encounter different situations, or contexts, which channel or canalize our motivational states in different ways. We expect the world in different ways. This is what the brain diagram and the ecological scaffolding diagram are trying to describe: if you are in the social world operating as a social actor, the odds are against you ever gaining some sufficient self-knowledge to be a good person i.e. a person who regularly acts towards others in the way you would want to be treated.

Ideally, the golden rule is logical, and fair. But reality is so suboptimally structured, and each of us is entrained into this structure, that each of us more or less activates/structures the others by the way their body's reflexively represent feeling states (expectations) in relation to the environmental objects - or social situations - were in. We've all been traumatized; ergo, all of us react fearfully, which many of us experience simply as a bloated pride/ego state - a state which has skipped the whole threat part of the process (now dissociated into the preconscious) and goes straight to the entitled neediness to impose the will of the self on others.

So, while in the ideal, consciousness participates in the creation process, in the real, consciousness is in fact perennially "trapped" by the reflexive dyamics that each of us continue to enact - our of anxiety/frustration - and so this issue, our reflexive, unconscious mind, needs to be more fully understood if the liberties of conscious participation n the universe can ever be morally - and so, synergistically - interweaved with the cosmos.

This is a big issue, as there are very stupid and ignorant philosophies which under emphasize the significance of the self's exposure to the environment, and the fact that we are constantly reacting to the environment - cues - of others, because this is how the brain-mind works: it is trying to attune itself to the information content in the relational stream. If recognition is there - if compatibility is present - a 'constructive interference' occurs; the self becomes bigger because of the larger wave of dyadic interaction. If not; the opposite occurs. destructive interference cancels out both waves. This is felt as shame, discomfort, related to a fundamental disagreement between bodily (and ideational) states.

Trauma is dealt with through consciousness; there is no room for lazing about talking about 'going on being'. There is no going-on-being when your being is organized by cues around you. You need to interface if you're going to repair. Our instincts are not to be trusted until the process is complete! Then, we may go on being.

a reply to: InTheLight

In face-to-face situations, being rewarded by others' positive expression and acceptance may be the driving force of forming the structure of socialization, this being a basic need most of us share, however is it really to be considered a shared type of consciousness? Or, simply addressing basic human physical and emotional needs? Could thinking to be aligned with operating with reference to feeling fit nicely into specific emotional need cases?

In early life - as a baby - the early brainstem represents and controls the whole cycle of perception and cognition; yet there is no consciousness of self in the baby. My 8 month old nephew is mesmerized by the tiniest little things; his hand; objects he can move through space; he loves rotation, and of course, loves putting the object in his mouth. Consciousness is there - mentation. But it is a very deep absorption in simple states: movement, objects, physical relations. Right now he is weaving his self together, and its from this weaving process that the self - as an integrated, neurodynamical entity - is formed.

But can you ever abstract his mental experience from the smiling or doting face of a mother? Or a father? Initially, it is just body-heat; the mothers body heat (one object) up against the baby (another object). But for the baby, it is the interaction - or combinatino of both objects - which creates the mental state he experiences. The feeling of goodness is not an evolutionary or biological given: it is received, nurturted, and cultivated into being by other human beings (or social mammals). The entirety of our selves is a structure that exists on this sub-structure of attachment, created by the caregiver-infant relationship, and augmented and stimulated into further development by the enlivenment of others who, in seeing your cuteness, cannot but help but recognize the uniqness of your being.

We should all be very skeptical of what historical religions have to say, insomuch as religion and state have mutually evolved with one another. This means, simply because humans are organized from the bottom-up, that we can't change our nature - or societies, or religions - without acknowledging how deeply suboptimal our belief systems towards the mind have been. The self is entirely a function of attachment, and yet a love-deprived society can create the impression that the self is different from love; that conscioiusness, or motivation to know, can exist without the primacy of an attachment process between self and object. The object - the Other - is capitalized because it is basically the other half of our psychological process. This is what Vygostky got from a cognitive perspective, but infant researchers and developmental psychologists developed further.

I for one am reconciled to this view - and its a beautiful one. If you are adapted to a less-loving image of the universe, or yuor self, you may find it overwhelming; but this is merely a reaction between your existing belief system (and your attachment to it) and a more expansive and encompassing one.

There still remain fronteirs to be crossed. The universe for humans (in my opinion) becoems more interesting and subtle from here on out; hopefully leaving the chaos and trauma worship of the past behind.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
a reply to: InTheLight

In face-to-face situations, being rewarded by others' positive expression and acceptance may be the driving force of forming the structure of socialization, this being a basic need most of us share, however is it really to be considered a shared type of consciousness? Or, simply addressing basic human physical and emotional needs? Could thinking to be aligned with operating with reference to feeling fit nicely into specific emotional need cases?

In early life - as a baby - the early brainstem represents and controls the whole cycle of perception and cognition; yet there is no consciousness of self in the baby. My 8 month old nephew is mesmerized by the tiniest little things; his hand; objects he can move through space; he loves rotation, and of course, loves putting the object in his mouth. Consciousness is there - mentation. But it is a very deep absorption in simple states: movement, objects, physical relations. Right now he is weaving his self together, and its from this weaving process that the self - as an integrated, neurodynamical entity - is formed.

But can you ever abstract his mental experience from the smiling or doting face of a mother? Or a father? Initially, it is just body-heat; the mothers body heat (one object) up against the baby (another object). But for the baby, it is the interaction - or combinatino of both objects - which creates the mental state he experiences. The feeling of goodness is not an evolutionary or biological given: it is received, nurturted, and cultivated into being by other human beings (or social mammals). The entirety of our selves is a structure that exists on this sub-structure of attachment, created by the caregiver-infant relationship, and augmented and stimulated into further development by the enlivenment of others who, in seeing your cuteness, cannot but help but recognize the uniqness of your being.

We should all be very skeptical of what historical religions have to say, insomuch as religion and state have mutually evolved with one another. This means, simply because humans are organized from the bottom-up, that we can't change our nature - or societies, or religions - without acknowledging how deeply suboptimal our belief systems towards the mind have been. The self is entirely a function of attachment, and yet a love-deprived society can create the impression that the self is different from love; that conscioiusness, or motivation to know, can exist without the primacy of an attachment process between self and object. The object - the Other - is capitalized because it is basically the other half of our psychological process. This is what Vygostky got from a cognitive perspective, but infant researchers and developmental psychologists developed further.

I for one am reconciled to this view - and its a beautiful one. If you are adapted to a less-loving image of the universe, or yuor self, you may find it overwhelming; but this is merely a reaction between your existing belief system (and your attachment to it) and a more expansive and encompassing one.

There still remain fronteirs to be crossed. The universe for humans (in my opinion) becoems more interesting and subtle from here on out; hopefully leaving the chaos and trauma worship of the past behind.

Strange how our existing belief systems can change in the twinkling of an eye when we look deeper.

www.wired.com...

originally posted by: Sheye
Your threads are on the university or college level of learning intricate stuff about the brain and how it relates to consciousness.
I’ll be honest and say much of it is too detailed and inticate for my simple mind to comprehend easily, but I do appreciate you putting the effort into such threads.

You are obviously a very intelligent person who I assume is either learning about how the brain works or is teaching it to others.

BS = Bull Shiite
MS = More Shiite
PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper

Mind boggling word salad is on par with meaningless gibberish. What makes someone really intelligent is being able to teach others. If people can't understand what you are talking about you will not get very far in life.