Explorations in the House of Consciousness

Explorations in the House of Consciousness

1. A house locked tight: I observe the house from all sides and search for a way to enter its impenetrable façade without success.

2. The behavioral nature of consciousness: I discover a key, the premise that consciousness is a behavioral response, and the doors open wide.  

1. I enter the house and begin to explore.

3. Thoughts and thinking: The first room I encounter involves conscious thoughts.  

1. My behavioral premise regarding consciousness exposes a difference between thoughts and thinking processes.  
2. Thoughts are revealed as conscious tools to enhance thinking processes.   

4. The self that uses the tools: A question remains regarding who it is who uses the tool of consciousness.

1. It can’t be the conscious self I think myself to be.
2. The self required precedes the creation of conscious thoughts.
3. It somehow must involve all of who I am.

1. My entire physical organism
2. My whole self
3. My physiological self

5. Using the tool of consciousness: I look for new ways to use the tool of consciousness.

1. New ways of using consciousness to prompt thinking processes begin to present themselves.
2. They are ways of keeping consciousness from taking complete control.
3. I learn to deliberately assuming an assistant role in thinking processes.
4. I develop a consciousness toolbox filled with useful techniques.

6. Perceptual possibilities: The second room I encounter involves perception.

1. My behavioral understanding doesn’t seem to apply, and I am unsure how to proceed.
2. How can perceptions be behavioral?
3. J. J. Gibson’s theory of affordances resolves these issues.
4. Perception is an active behavioral process that involves developing the skills required to access what the reality constraints we encounter allow.
5. It is necessary to actively engage the world to discover its possibilities.

7.  Feelings and emotions:

1. Feelings elude precise behavioral descriptions.
2. Emotions and feelings remain vaguely defined.
3. Emotions and feelings occur without a sense of conscious control.
4. Our conscious awareness of exactly what we do stands in contrast to our vague understanding of why we do those things.
5. This lack of awareness does not involve the Freudian unconscious.
6. The visceral processes that guide our choices are embodied as affects in our actions as the forces that make those movements possible.
7. We must consciously observe, explore and recognize these embodied affects to develop conscious affective experiences of how we feel.

8. The adjoining room involves creativity:.

1. This room is closely connected to the visceral processes essential for the affects that underlie feelings and emotion.
2. Visceral processes are personal, and they reflect our wants and needs.
3. Visceral processes guide the force and direction of the actions we initiate.
4. This personal guidance enables us to free ourselves from repetition and discover original lines of response that are authentically our own.
5. Visceral processes are our source of creativity and wisdom.

9. I discover the first tier of consciousness in the basement:

1. It is the foundation upon which the entire house is constructed.
2. It physically grounds us as we contact the realities we encounter.
3. Yet, this first tier is unvoiced and undifferentiated, and it remains unrecognized consciously.
4. Our encounters at the first tier stamp we do as our own and infuse all our actions with a sense of place.

10. I revisit the other rooms:.

1. My understanding of the other rooms is changed by my awareness of their first tier foundation.
2. Thoughts and Thinking: Thinking processes take place in the first tier and articulate conscious thoughts within the second tier.  Sensory-motor inputs to the first tier generate family resemblance based identifications that enable us to recognize the entities we define within our conscious version of the world at the second tier.
3. Perceptual possibilities: Possibilities arise in the first tier as affordances are encountered and new entities are identified and recognized within the conscious version of the world we create in the second tier.
4. Feelings: Visceral processes are poorly differentiated and unrecognized as feelings when they arise within the first tier.  They thereby provide a substrate for the emotions we differentiate behaviorally in the second tier.
5. Creativity: The visceral processes that guide our unvoiced physical encounters in the first tier are the basis for both original thoughts, intuitions, and new perceptions, discovered affordances.