As I grapple with selecting the next blog entry to publish on Of Two Minds, it seems like a good time to devote an entry to how I see my revision of The Two Tiers of Consciousness: A Physiological Paradigm progressing. Once I realized that the first-tier substrate that establishes the physical core of experience functions pre-empirically, I began to explore ways in which core processes have previously been observed and explained. These range from Plato’s conception of ideal forms to Freud’s hypothesized realm of the unconscious.
I have also tried to flesh out the differences between the two tiers, describe their respective characteristics and explore their relationship with each other. Readers should understand that I am not presenting, blog by blog, conceptual issues that have already been resolved in my own thinking. I am working through the inchoate ideas that arise and developing ways of expressing them as they continue to evolve. I often revise the words I am using to describe what I am trying to express in successive attempts to achieve what Richard Rorty refers to as a final vocabulary. I only recently developed the concept of movement-space to describe the pre-empirical sense of space we establish in our core of experience.
I repeatedly pose questions to myself about the functioning of the two tiers individually and in relation to each other that push me to develop my thinking further. In trying to understand the experience we have of self and place at the first tier, I realized that I had inadvertently stumbled into Dasein, Heidegger’s concept of being in the world. Philosophers who were previously opaque to me, like Michael Polyani, whose book I looked through once again last week, begin to make sense when viewed through the lens of the two tiers.
I have had a general idea of how the verbal-symbolic tier develops from the first tier of consciousness for some time, but I left it largely unspecified. I only began to unfold the necessary stages involved in this transition over the past week. I will be sharing these exciting developments in coming blog entries, interrupting whatever previously intended entries I was considering. My book revision is a work in progress, and I do not have rigidly held ideas about where it is headed.
When using intuition as method, directions change repeatedly without conscious intention. It reminds me of Freud’s metaphor of the man on horseback, the controlling forces of the ego attempting to direct unrestrained id urges. I would, however, reframe the metaphor in terms of visceral forces that dominate in the pre-empirically established core of experience at the first tier giving way to the articulation of good form that takes over as we recognize entities and events at the verbal-symbolic tier.
Once again, I find myself with too many ideas emerging at once to know which to develop first and what order is best for their presentation as blog entries. I will introduce new terms slowly and carefully and attempt to minimize grand leaps of thinking into Heidegger, Freud and Rorschach’s Test. I will also be as explicit as I can about the nature and function of the two tiers as ideas evolve and I struggle to keep up.
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