I have been writing unpublished manuscript books for the past forty years as I’ve developed my thinking about the brain, behavior and consciousness. In many ways, I have been writing the same book over and over again, expressing my intuitions more clearly and developing my insights more completely each time. This culminated in the present book, The Two Tiers of Consciousness: A Physiological Paradigm, completed with my wife, Joan, that is available for purchase on this website.
In the six months since completing this book, my process of receiving intuitions and developing insights has continued as it has throughout these forty years. The concepts that emerge from this process will surely lead to yet another revision. This time I want to make the process transparent to those who are interested by presenting it in blog entries that describe what happens as ideas emerge and I struggle to give voice to intuitions I don’t yet fully understand.
I didn’t begin this project intending to use intuition as my creative source. I gradually realized that I was using intuition as my method for developing new concepts, but it took much longer to accept that I could do this in my thinking about the brain and consciousness and still be scientific. Along the way, the sharp distinction between my evolving method and the ideas I was developing disappeared as the process I was using to develop my thinking merged with the concepts of brain functioning I was writing about. I will give two examples.
About twenty years ago, midway in my project to date, I thought that I had discovered a new way of thinking. I was working under the premise that the thoughts expressed in consciousness were the product of thinking processes that took place within the greater self of our brain-body system. I realized that if I could confine my conscious thoughts to probes and questions, my greater self would often deliver a response in the form of an intuition. I was greatly excited by this discovery, I authored my first version of a guidebook to describe it, and I began to use it as a tool to fuel my own thinking processes.
I only recently fully understood the second example even though its roots are woven into my early thinking about the brain. I have previously written about the importance that the nature of the experience we develop has on the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate. When we are more fully involved in what we are doing, we question and explore the situations we encounter more fully and develop a richer experience base. As I worked on my project over the years, I became increasingly aware that I could not be generating these ideas without my years of clinical experience as a neuropsychologist. I envisioned this accumulated experience as an unvoiced storehouse that I could draw upon intuitively to inform my thinking.
It is only since the completion of The Two Tiers of Consciousness six months ago that I have formulated the concept of an unvoiced physical core of experience as the source of intuition. I had the sense as I was completing that book that “perceptual” was not the correct way to designate the first tier of consciousness. Perception involves a process of recognition that only takes place within the verbal-symbolic tier. In the book, I describe the physicality of first tier encounters, but I hadn’t yet fully digested its implications.
The intuitive process of thinking requires both the accumulation of an experience base and the acceptance of a secondary role for consciousness. I am still learning what this means. In my blog entries, I will open this process to my readers as much as I can as I continue my project transparently.
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