A NOVEL CONCEPTION

OF CONSCIOUSNESS

From:

The F-Model of Dreaming

5. FABRICATION— NOVEL

IT’S ALL A CONTEXTUAL DREAM. Here’s the thing— we cannot get far in forming an understanding of our private dreaming, without examining our phenomenological experiences, in general. Yes, there are several distinct mind states, but they are all part of the same nation—

you—and so, their borders necessarily overlap. In a completely vegetative state, nobody's home. The lights are out. But whether awake, or dreaming, or even lucid dreaming, we are having an experience of the world. Or, a world, anyway. In this special awareness, all of these states involve storytelling— telling a story to yourself, in particular. How is that possible?

A Narrative Oration of Volitionally Experienced Liminality: this is the story of Consciousness. A NOVEL conception. This is my answer to “what is Consciousness?” This acronymous framing is a simple model, not a Theory, proper. This is observation and report. Acronyms are easy to recall, and if we keep them short—seven-plus-or-minus-two chunks of information—they hit the sweet- spot for consideration in working-memory. Let’s consider...

NOO. As many an acronym does, my NOVEL contraction omits an extraneous preposition, dropping the “o” from “of.” However, if the second “o” were kept, we are left with the acronym NOOVEL, an interesting portmanteau itself. The word “noo,” standing alone, is a variant of the word “now.” After all, isn’t consciousness more or less synonymous with the experienced now? As a prefix, used when referring to the mind, “noo” means “combining forms,” from the Greek “noo-,” alternatively spelled “noos,” or “nous,” and represents the faculty of mind we call intellect, or intelligence, or rationality (distinguished from other faculties, such as the mechanisms of sensory perception). Again, somewhat appropriate.

What was considered an innate function of the mind since ancient times—the ability to delineate forms and recombine them to create useful and novel meanings—was reconfigured by Kant into the noumenon: “the thing in itself,” the real stuff that we can never directly know. Schopenhauer had to come along and revert the concept to its upright position, so that phenomena referred once again to the things we perceive, and noumena referred to the mind itself, or, to the mind’s capacity for synthesizing meaning from a chaotic sea of phenomena and phantasms. We are the meaning-makers. “We are the dreamers of the dream.”

NARRATIVE ORATION...

“‘Tell me, Socrates,’ said Phaedrus. ‘Do you believe the story?’ ‘The wise are doubtful,’ Socrates returned, ‘and I

should not be singular if I too doubted.’” — Hamilton (p273)

Gilgamesh is the oldest written story of which we have an original. In the Epic, the Uruk king Gilgamesh angers the town elders, who then whine to the gods. The crying incites the gods to form “Enkidu, a wild man who combines human and bull characteristics” (Hoffman). While Enkidu makes its way across the land to reach Gilgamesh, the King has a couple of dreams, and he asks his mother, Nin-sun (“Lady Wild-Cow”) for interpretation. In one dream, Gilgamesh starts off: “My mother, in the time of night I felt joyful and walked in the midst of the nobles.” Then stars appeared in the sky, and “the essence of Anu descended towards me,” and “I sought to move it; move it I could not!”

I myself had a very vivid dream once in which I saw a whole field of Enkidu- like characters. I did not know I was dreaming, and upon spotting them I ducked and hid behind a counter— they were standing right outside a glass door, the nearest creatures a few meters away. I’m not ashamed to say I was apprehensive and hid, though I may have lost out on a huge opportunity. As I understand it, Jung’s own Philemon dream-guide bore such a resemblance as these creatures. I didn’t sense evil, if I recall, but something powerful was there. Whether awful or awesomely good in that power, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find out “later.”

As for the stars in the sky, and the “essence of Anu” starring in our first-found story, we could find libraries of works trying to bridge us with the lights of Heaven. Hardly seems like a leap to propose there is likely a forced insight (which may have ran rampant in early humans) incepted after having dreamt an incredible dream, only to awaken below the Milky Way. Still wading out of dream-time, why wouldn’t he or she “understand” a link must exist between the wonder out there— wandering stars, Pleiades,[1] and all—and the wonders within. Or maybe I’m just a big fan of astronomy and oneirology. I too, have had dreams in which I would notice stars, and they may then move around or multiply, or both.[2] Then again, same thing has been happening in the night sky—while awake—the older I get. I half-joke about how, now that the sky is so full of our own lights zipping around at night, we wouldn’t even know if “alien” craft were holographing their way around up there, as well. Are some of these lights messengers from God, or aliens, or the robotic overlords— nothing seems too outrageous “these days,” when trying to account for the surreality of the story.

NARRATION. A narrative is an account, a chronological collection arranging the facts of perception. A narrative is that which makes a sequence stick together. “One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected” (Hume, p49). Out of all the possible schematic combinations we could arrange in sequence, in this moment right now, a very particular and unique story has been selected for, and no other. Narrative is—it must be—primarily directed internally. Though, by necessity, the story appears out there, in the game-field-hallucination (remember: just because it’s a hologram, doesn’t mean it’s fake).

Our native perceptua-letters and schemat-archetypes amalgamate into a story, via activation coherence between various perceptual forms. Sure, there is a world out there, probably, supplying the torrents of sensory data pinging our receptors, but this does not change so much as it supports a particular view: our view. Consciousness reveals a narrative, pre-equipped with scripts, displaying faces and shapes, all arranged in places, complete with inferred time-lines disguised as the distance between spaces. Scripts and short stories build from forms that are already present in the mind— either by way of genetic inheritance or incorporated through experience, and act as the skeletons supporting larger, more comprehensive narratives.

If the alphabet of our native language is conceived of as our senses (perceptions), we can then perceive the multi-modal model of the world called our life-story— just as it is. But what are these forms; how is a bombardment of pressure-changes, and air molecules tickling ear hairs, and electromagnetic waves activating retina cells...how does all of this, and much more, transform into the Conscious experience? Well, we can translate all of these events because our brains speak tesseract.

MIND AS TESSERACT DECODER. A tesseract is to a cube what a cube is to a square. It is said that we cannot portray a tesseract in our three-dimensional world, and we must rely on analogies. Wire-frame shadows are the go-to models when describing higher-dimensional images, from a perspective within “lower” dimensions. For example, a two-dimensional entity on a 2D plane cannot “comprehend” a cube. However, if we take a wire-frame cube and shine a light on it, we can then see its shadow casted onto a flat surface. The shadow is not the cube itself but gives an idea as to what a cube is, especially if examining the frame- shadow as it moves around. Using the same method, we can create 3D projections—based on formulas, not by actually illuminating higher-dimensional forms from behind—of 4D image-shadows, but because we are seeing this in the world we are used to, it is easy to get the wrong idea regarding what “four dimensions” means. Because, actually, we already live in a 4D world, and the human mind is a 5D processor.

We’ve been familiar with Descartes’s x-y-z spatial triad for a while now, and Einstein explained how time was twined with these, over a century ago. And yet, it may still feel awkward to combine these four dimensions together. It feels as if our experience is a smooth, continuous trajectory, with each moment seamlessly becoming the next. At best, what our brain’s experience must be is a series of overlapping frames— each an interpretation of what we want, in relation to how it’s going in the achieving. Lo, we do not see the world as a series of frames. Even though our experience is built of myriad cortical maps and their intercommunications, we only perceive a unified whole in the light of Consciousness. Let’s reconsider what 4D means.

Time is not like Cartesian geometry. Time is what Cartesian forms move through. Just like how the x-y flat square cannot be anything other than flat, if it moves through another dimension, it can act as if it is a 3D object. If you could see the iterative frames of a 3D form, or some overlap of frames—viewed from a 4D perspective—what would that look like? Perhaps it would be something like Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, except, as viewed in 3D, rather than on a flat canvas. Or, to envision four-dimensional reality, just take a look around. Not only are the 3D objects around you capable of moving across time, they are constantly moving about at great speeds, as are you.

If the Earth spins, it does so at about 1000 miles per hour (MPH). As the world turns on its axis it also revolves around the Sun, at 67-thousand MPH. The Sun orbits the Big Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way at nearly half-a-million MPH, and a “galactic year” takes 230-million Earth years to complete. Then, of course, all of the galaxies in our neck of the wood—our Local Supercluster—are racing toward the Great Attractor, or something beyond it, at 14-million MPH. And there is no reason to believe the spinning and racing stops there. But enough of the outer speeds— we could consider the speed of “little” things, like molecules and atoms and the forms they’re composed of. At a comfortable temperature, oxygen molecules in the air zip about at 900 MPH. The speed of light, celeritas, is 186- thousand miles per second. That’s pretty fast, but not as fast as the seams of space itself are unstitching. Galaxies are racing away from one another—that whole cosmic red shift thing—faster than the speed of light. But hold up, slow down— let’s freeze time for a moment and zoom-out to a particular location, in a specific frame.

The Earth-spin seems somewhat fast at 1000 MPH. And that 67k MPH revolving around the Sun— ludicrous-speed, right? Well, perspective can change the way things seem to be. Imagine you have a spaceship and can travel so that you are a few Earth-diameters distance away from our world. It would be hard just to keep up with the planet, as it orbits its star and rotates. Now, zoom away, fly that craft so that you are so far away from Earth that you can see the whole solar system, and from your vantage the Sun is the size of an orange. How fast is the Earth moving now? It must be falling around the Sun at that 67k MPH, still, but as

you are looking through your spaceship window, it looks as if Earth is floating, motionless. Remember, it will take one year to go around that orange, and one day to revolve on its tiny axis. This is a small taste of Relativity.

But what kind of a thing are we, that we could not only make up models of reality like this, but actually create tools and machines which can in-turn make dream-things become real? If everything I have said is true about these orbital speeds, you could, conceivably, fulfill a mission to build a craft that actually enables a view of the Earth, as if it were a small dot in an impossibly vast system— tethered in seeming-place to an orange fusion ball. If the world we live in, the experiential world, is made of 3D forms moving in a fourth-dimension, we are not only creatures which can perceive this, we are creatures which can manipulate 4D forms (3D things moving through time) in an even higher-order dimensional field— the human mind (which may imply that the mind is a kind of 5D “form” manipulator). What exactly did you think you were doing, when considering multiple alternate scenarios in the “future?” You were playing with tesseracts and pentatopes and other 4-polytopes. We are not just in a story. We create the meaning that is the story.

NOVELTIES. When a story is comprehensible, and the characters and themes can be weaved into a familiar narrative, information may be extracted and readily assimilated into pre-existent schema. However, when faced with a highly novel experience, one that “does not compute,” the mind either cannot go there, or else, it must somehow accommodate the new forms, by arranging a new category, schema, or script.

Valence processing—the coding of novelty—is exhibited in the ventral tegmental area, as it switches to a prominent bursting pattern during REM sleep (Wang, 2009). “This thing is not like the others.” Unsure how this thing behaves— or doesn’t—sentient beings tend to act cautiously when facing the unknown. Jung wrote in Man and His Symbols (1964) that “primitive peoples” are misoneistic, meaning, they “have a deep and superstitious fear of novelty...but ‘civilized man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of experiencing something new” (p17). Novelties are those instances in the story we didn’t know could even be part of the story. No warning, and there they are.

Freud shared an observation from Hildebrandt [1875], of “the striking facility with which dreams are able to weave a sudden impression from the world of the senses into their own structure so that it comes as what appears to be a pre-arranged catastrophe that has been gradually led up to...as though the whole dream had been leading up to that one event” (1900, p59). In retrospect, but rarely in the moment, the coherency of themes and the repetition of motifs throughout our life is...fascinating. Where do these narratives come from?

A narrative is a history, a report. It may be the history of what is happening now, but that begs the question: How much of now is predictive perception (anticipation of where we expect the ball should be, by the time we can get our hand over to where it should arrive), and how much is trace-recall (memory of where items and characters were, just before now, when their image actually activated our sensory receptors and sent the “evoked potential” wave ricocheting through our cortical maps, thus manifesting the corresponding perceptual forms inside of us)? It’s a bit of both, but mostly, the whole thing is dependent on what you are aiming for.

The narrative is the score. Right now, it is the whole orchestra...now, just that section...now, a solo. A narrative is enacted play by play, yet, each act—and the whole collection of chronicles—are all potentially part of your larger Narrative (lo, not all potential innate forms will be realized and activated in each life). Different scripts receive prominence, now and again, flowing above and below, often repeating in rhyming rhythms, as they go out, and then in.

VERBAL. While awake, or a-dream, memory is organized functionally into the form of narratives (Bruner, 1991). We sometimes wrap narratives up at a superordinate level within verbal language. Human verbal language operates at a level of abstraction and construal that is so meta, it imbues our minds with the emergent phenomena known as “planning,” or “consideration,” and with these, language enables not only inter-personal communication, but also intra-space, mental time-travel, and the ability to simulate scenarios. Imagination. Cognitive experimenting. Putting the work into working-memory.

An old conception of human consciousness had it relying on, and wholly shaped by, verbal language. Human as Homo linguae. Way it went, though, “language” meant the learned symbolism of sonic gesticulations— words. As if, without a word for a thing, that thing cannot be properly accommodated into—and manipulated by—the mind. Interesting proposition. To consider this statement, you are required to read it, process it, and possibly even form verbal-like agreements, or oppositions. All of this involves learned words. Schopenhauer admitted: “It is by the help of language alone that reason accomplishes its most important achievements” (p35). And yet, existing a priori to any specific words, the mind already knows how to manipulate and form meaning out of sensory experiences. There is an innate language the mind uses, behind and beneath and permeating all perceived forms. This is the language the mind uses to tell itself stories in its own tongue.

FIRST PERSON. Cadmus—legend tells—“introduced the alphabet into Greece” (Hamilton, p255). Ancient Greek was one of the first, if not the first, alphabets to properly represent human speech as it was spoken. Finally, text and sound and word were one. Certainly, there are advantages to using a textual symbol

system, enabling faithful rendering back and forth between written and spoken words. Then again, words—spoken or written—only label the felt experiences of a story, or an idea. The human brain was as large and as capable in potential as it is now, long before we used anything we would recognize today as verbal language. Maybe. Words and phrases are not the phenomenological reality in itself, right?

REPS. In the late 1930s, Frank Benford decreed a law which stated, that for certain types of data, the numeral 1 will appear in 30% of those data. The second cardinal unit will appear in 18% of instances, and the drop-off continues from there. Extending Benford’s Law to a broad study of English literature, G.K. Zipf ranked the 10 most common words in the language via an assortment of texts, and also divvied up the words’ individual contributions. “The” came in at number one, “of” at number two, “and” brought in the bronze, “to” came in at fourth-place, followed by “a,” and “in,” and “that,” in descending frequency. “Neck” came in at the 1000th ranking.

Of course, there must be an ordered ranking of things, but what was striking to Zipf was that “the” was about twice as common as “of,” and appeared thrice as often as “and.” Zipf formulated his own Law, which states that the most frequent word in a language will occur about twice as often as the second most frequent, and three-times as often as the third, etc.— the same logarithmic function Benford noticed. This actually holds true for all languages, even Esperanto. With words— as with most things—there are a few Giants, and many imps and sprites.

In English, “the” occupies nearly seven-percent of word-counts, and its runner up, “of,” comprises 3.5%.[3] Two words fill in ten-percent of our stories, and coloring with hardly a scant dozen-dozen words, we paint half of our textual canvas. There are many words, and plenty that deserve more mention, but all you really need are a few well-placed phrases, and a small collection of short yet powerful stories, to get most jobs done just fine. Use the best words— you don’t have to use them all.

WORDS ARE ACTIONS. Did you know that gestures are used by the person making the gestures to help activate (find) the words they are intending to draw- up (Wesp, 2001)? Concrete words—things such as nouns, which can be described in 3D space—are especially locked with the physical motor sequences those words are attached to. This is evident when using a tip-of-the-tongue (TOTT) paradigm: A clue is given, and participants are to come up with the word which describes the clue. The correct words are selected by the researchers to be generally known, but also hard to recall— rare. This forces a TOTT response. If participants are free to gesticulate and wave their hands around, they are likely to come up with this TOTT word, eventually. However, if their arms are made immobile and lexical activation is not facilitated by gesticulation, they never get past the tip. Like Watson made clear, cognitions—thoughts and self-talk—are behaviors, too.

LET SLEEPING DOGS LAY? In English, I can form every native word with letters from the pangram: A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Below that superordinate level of verbal language, there are the mid-level forms which are conjured up into the mind’s theater— the objects and places and characters evoked by our words and phrases and stories. When we read the words “hunger is the best sauce in the world,” those circuits corresponding to our own understanding of the sentence are activated, within the brain’s enormous association fields. When a string of words relates to our own experience, we nod, in understanding. “A similar proverb possessed by many nations,” confirmed Don Quixote’s “view, that proverbs are true, being opinions extracted from the same experience” (Jones, 1908).

A NEW KIND OF STORY-TELLING. Likely not anticipating what influence he would have, four centuries ago Cervantes wrote not only “the most important literary genre of the modern age, it can retrospectively be said that, among novels, Don Quixote was the first” (Cascardi, p58). Cervantes did not invent something whole cloth, completely new. Rather, he uncovered “new possibilities for the combinations of elements that preexisted it” (p59). Don Quixote was built from rich literary associations, but for all those stories that have been lost, Quixote remains, and for us, serves as a primary source of our own thoughts, even if we don’t recognize it. As is our relationship, also, with all of the great novels handed down afterwards.

Von Franz said that rituals “or religious customs can spring directly from an unconscious revelation experienced by a single individual,” and over long stretches of time the story becomes “beautified, and acquires definite forms. This crystallizing process” cannot be given, and “without personal knowledge of the original experience,” one is left to merely believe “what their elders and teachers”—or more likely today, their screens—“tell them about it. They no longer know that such happenings are real, and they are of course ignorant about how one feels during the experience” (Jung, 1964, p252-253).

We study the classics and travel to the great wonders, to learn how to read the world well, and also, to learn what makes for a good telling. Then, we may right what time is left ahead, even writing some of those perfect acts—already performed a million times before us—into our own narrative. Learn all the best stories, you never know when they might be useful. And tell the best stories, so as to ignite the lights wherever you roam.

BOLOGNA. Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, proposed that what we now perceive as our own thoughts were once experienced as external voices, communications from beyond. Not so long ago, mused Jaynes, those gods who talked with us became recognized as ourselves. Or— these became the stories we tell ourselves, and those we tell to others, and others tell to us. Put in highly scientific terms, they all emanate from what Steven Pinker calls the bologna generator (2002). Stan Walters said that sixty-percent of people cannot go 10 minutes without lying. Spinning a yarn. Dreaming.

Clara Hill wrote that “the language of dreaming makes use of two essentially human characteristics: our tendencies to use metaphors and to be inveterate storytellers” (Rosner, p127). As when awake, in dreams, we “are in a constant process of assimilating the variety and multiplicity” of our experiences, through the lenses of personal metaphors and scripts.

INNER & OUTER PERCEPTIONS. In Schopenhauer’s division of thought- types, we have the immediacy of perception from the senses which he likened to direct sunlight and then, as with “the borrowed light of the moon, we pass from the immediate idea of perception” over “to reflection, to the abstract, discursive concepts of the reason, which obtain their whole content from knowledge of perception, and in relation to it” (p32). There is the world as directly perceived, and there are our imaginings. But note the “knowledge of perception” part. We don’t acquire knowledge from perceptions, alone. We already have knowledge, regardless of experience, and this in-forms our perceptions. However, without testing ourselves, out there—in the field of forms—we won’t activate the whole story that already exists, in potential, within.

PSCIENCE. Schopenhauer wrote that the danger “of the sphere of abstract thought,” in contrast to temporary illusions “of the real,” is that an abstract thought “error may reign for a thousand years, impose its yoke upon whole nations, extend to the noblest of humanity, and, by the help of its slaves and dupes, may chain and fetter those whom it cannot deceive” (p32). He was warning us not to readily accept ideas which cannot be warranted through demonstration. If it is said to be, but never shown to be, is it really so? Who or what can you trust? Trust your Self— the perceiver and the creator, the voluble and ineffable, “the always already and the never quite yet” (Shipley). And when in doubt, do some reality testing.

SPOKEN LANGUAGE. Let’s talk Subvocalization.[4] Experiments have demonstrated that subvocalization facilitates certain kinds of meaning while we read. When subvocalization was blocked, by having participants count or say things like “cola-colacola...” aloud, this impaired their reading comprehension, but generally not their listening comprehension. The effect of blocking subvocalization was found to be specific to tests that required integration of concepts within or across sentences, as contrasted with tests that required only memory of individual concepts. Two hypotheses were offered as to why this occurred: a., subvocalization might result in a more durable memory representation—needed for integration of concepts—or, b., subvocalization may enable a “prosodic restructuring” of information, making sentences comprehensible. (Slowiaczek, 1980). As if, to understand a story, we have to “say” the story as it happens.

When wielding language masterfully, the sea of forms quake in frothy breaks behind our wake, as our own thought cuts colors and shapes through the waves— and we race towards self-fabricating fractal arrangements of our own creation. The building blocks of our story include all of the simple, singular percepts: sky blue, dawn orange, middle-C, 42 decibels, knee-pain, hunger, salt, diagonal line, cold, sweet, etc.

Consciousness does not weave its story using an alphabet limited to symbolic letters, but instead, assigns a symbol to every sensation— each color, sound, taste. Even though there are millions of possible colors we could use to paint a story, there are a few types of photoreceptors, basically speaking, with which we use to form any color. And there are only five taste receptors. The complexity of the forms around us are really, underneath, painted from a relatively limited palette (olfaction, though largely “unconscious” or diminished in humans, is an exception to all this, with a thousand different receptor types). How we combine those basic flavors will determine the course of our stories.

Choose only the best words and combine them into beautiful narratives. Nothing is more important than choosing your words carefully, especially those spoken to yourself. Beware the Borg who attempt to take your words away.

APHASIA. Aphasia is losing the ability to speak. In Broca's aphasia the person is aware of their issue— the words they cannot access are “stuck on the tip of the tongue” (Bick). In jargon aphasia, one is unaware of the problem, even as they spew “phrase salad.”[5] With confabulations, people make up stories without being aware they are doing so. In schizophrenia, the patients are actually talking to themselves—it is their voice—and “the voices” may be stopped by holding the mouth open. This is called “precluded subvocalization” (Bick, 1987). The “mouth opening maneuver” was also tested on normal participants—well, those who could…