Mirroring
I have included mirroring, the reciprocal response we have to other people, as a component of the physiological substrate for pre-empirical functioning, even though it remains a poorly understood phenomenon. It qualifies as pre-empirical because it functions without conscious control or awareness. It is thought by many to be critical for human bonding. I believe that mirroring is the basis for the social nature of a human species whose members bind themselves into tight family structures and who naturally form communities wherever they live. Mirroring plays a pivotal role in determining who we become, and it does so without direct conscious involvement.
Mirroring provides the crucial first step toward the transition of human consciousness from the undifferentiated physical core of experience at the first tier to the world of entities and events at the verbal-symbolic tier. Mirroring makes it possible to differentiate specific features in the otherwise seamless reality we encounter at the first tier. As we respond to others through mirroring, these pre-empirical responses involve a personal, visceral component that provides a basis for personal resonance. Our mirrored responses incorporate authentic aspects of who we are. We dwell longer in the presence of the others we resonate to, differentiating them from the landscape as personally significant. We identify these significant others as entities that we learn to recognize in the conscious version of the world we create.
The human species uses the differentiating force of personal resonance made possible by mirroring to identify the significant entities and describe the events that comprise our conscious version of the world. We learn to recognize the things that matter to us, and we make assumptions about how they function based on the important ways in which they are useful for us. We move beyond a diffuse, conscious sense of physical involvement at the first tier as we develop a personal framework of differentiated, significant features. Mirroring provides the basis for differentiating features at the first tier and developing a world of entities and events at the second tier.
I cannot prove this assertion about mirroring. When using intuition as method, I often accept insights that provide a plausible line of understanding and follow their implications as long as they continue to be productive. I have done this repeatedly since I began my project forty years ago, and several lines of thinking have taken me very far. My initial idea that our thoughts and actions are guided by our greater selves needed clarification and correction over time, but the basic premise held true and eventually led to the insight that consciousness itself is behavioral.
In the book, The Two Tiers of Consciousness: A Physiological Paradigm, I continued to draw from my initial premise regarding consciousness in postulating the existence of two tiers. I was then able to develop the concept of the first tier as pre-empirical, and this led directly to including mirroring as one of the pre-empirical systems central to developing the physical core of who we are.
The conscious version of the world we each create is personal, defined by our interests and interpreted through our assumptions. Such a world of differentiated entities can only be created in accordance with the personal significance that the entities we identify have for us. Mirroring provides the conduit through which we imbue the realities we encounter with significance, differentiate them into entities and learn to recognize the world we know at the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness.
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