Looking Over the Two Tiers
We establish a core of learned, but unvoiced physical experiences at the first tier prior to the differentiation of a conscious world of entities and events. The experiences within that core are pre-empirical in the sense that they are established by an innate physiological substrate without conscious mediation. We are aware that we are physically engaged in what we are doing at the first tier even though we are unaware of the specific actions we are taking. Those actions are unvoiced and consciously undifferentiated. The physical movement sequences initiated at the first tier enable us to learn how to do the things we do, but they don’t involve conscious knowledge of what we are doing. Since experiences at the first tier are not differentiated into entities and events, the “knowing how” we develop is not incorporated into our conscious knowledge of the world.
Psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists generally agree that we learn about the world through our actions. This is what is meant by gaining knowledge through empirical experience. By actively engaging the world, we discover what the realities we encounter allow and what they do not (affordances and invariants in Gibson’s terminology). We then learn to recognize the entities we identify, and we make assumptions about how they function as we develop consciousness at the verbal-symbolic tier.
It is extremely useful to differentiate the realities we encounter into entities and events even though we simplify them with our designations and assumptions when we do this. The differentiated world we create is not reality, and it conforms to our expectations because we create it in accordance with our own assumptions. The simplified world of entities and events we create enables us to both control and investigate the realities we encounter. Do they function in accordance with the working hypotheses implicit in our assumptions, or do we need to identify new entities or modify previous assumptions? When Francis Bacon proposed a framework for science, he was formalizing a function that humans had been using for a long time.
Pre-empirical experiences involve a continuous flow of physical encounters with the realities that surround us. We do not control these realities; we respond to them guided by an ongoing stream of sensory and visceral processes with unvoiced intricacies and complexities. Our responses to the events that take place in the conscious version of the world we develop, in contrast, are predicated on a selected subset of sensory and visceral inputs that we have consciously recognized. Responses at the first tier of consciousness are not constrained by this process of identification and recognition. The intricate complexities and nuanced subtleties involved in the pre-empirical processes that generate first-tier experiences would be impossible to articulate as discrete entities and causal sequences. They remain unvoiced and unrecognized in the knowledge structures we develop.
The unvoiced complexities incorporated into the physical core of experience at the first tier convey a wisdom that we lose contact with when we develop conscious awareness at the verbal-symbolic tier. We simplify the world to gain control, but we distance ourselves from the depth of our encounters with reality when we do so. We have, however, continuing access to the core of experience at the first tier as a source of intuition, envisioned possibilities, wisdom and creativity.
The richness of the physical core of experience cannot be described in terms of the simplified version of entities and events we create at the verbal-symbolic tier of consciousness. The conscious version of the world we create includes all of our accumulated knowledge but not the “know-how” we bring to everything we do. The functioning of our physical core remains in the background, unvoiced and unknowable. This background functioning provides a broad, positive substrate for who we are in contrast to Freud’s concept of the unconscious as a repository for repressed urges and intrapsychic conflicts.
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