I have been writing about the many ways in which we have awareness of and are confused by the unvoiced presence of the first tier of consciousness. It occurred to me that many readers haven’t read The Two Tiers of Consciousness: A Physiological Paradigm and are hearing about “two tiers” for the first time. I would like to offer a brief historical account of how my thinking about the brain and consciousness arrived at this point. A more complete review, The Progression of Insights in the Guidebook Project, is available in the articles section of this website.
Forty years ago, I began my project with the conviction that we do not have the degree of conscious control over the things we think and do that we believe we have. I knew that the greater complexities of our brain-body system involve processes that are not available to conscious awareness. I saw these processes as a more complete representation of who we are and as the generative source of our behavioral choices.
I initially referred to this greater version of who we are as the big self, and I envisioned an important difference between the thinking processes of the big self and the thoughts that are expressed in the little self of consciousness. I later began to refer to the big self as the whole self while retaining the general concept of brain-body complexities that operate outside of conscious awareness to generate the behaviors we initiate in action. I realized for the first time that our conscious thoughts, feelings and perceptions are also behavioral. They are articulated in the same form of linear causal sequences that characterize the actions we initiate, but they are expressed as potential verbal statements or imagined as a series of potential physical movements. I envisioned consciousness as made possible by our ability to formulate behavioral sequences while inhibiting their motor outflow.
A few years ago, I became dissatisfied with the concept of a whole self that represents all of who we are but is otherwise left undefined. I had previously identified physiological systems that were involved in whole self processes, and I organized them into a physiological paradigm to serve as a substrate for whole self functioning. This enabled me to discover a flaw in my prior thinking about the whole self. The complexities of the brain-body system in themselves could not account for the intricacies and subtleties we develop in our behavioral choices. Complexity by itself could not account for our increasing behavioral sophistication without a means of accumulating behavioral experience.
I saw that our physical encounters with reality take place first, before we develop the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness. We add conscious identifications and descriptions to the physical core of experience we accumulate at the first tier as a second tier of consciousness. The physical core of experience we develop serves as grounding for the designations and descriptive accounts we add.
I began these blog entries with a conception of two tiers of conscious awareness already in place. This understanding is still very new to me, having emerged in my thinking only sixteen months ago. I continue to develop the implications of this insight in my weekly blog entries. The concept of a physical core of experience at the first tier of consciousness has already stimulated my thinking about the brain and behavior in a variety of new directions. I will be exploring these ideas as they evolve in the weekly entries to Of Two Minds.
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