The Roots of Our Conscious Version of the World
I have now completed Part I of my revision of The Two Tiers of Consciousness: A Physiological Paradigm. The first part of the revision is descriptively titled “The Two Tiers of Consciousness Provide Two Levels of Conscious Awareness.” I focused solely on making a convincing case for the existence of the two tiers and showing how the continuous physical core develops into the differentiated conscious version of the world we know. I didn’t begin this revision with the idea of creating two sections, but the blog entries have naturally divided themselves that way.
The pre-empirical substrate I proposed for the first tier of consciousness in Of Two Minds #8 provides a basis for understanding psychological observations that would otherwise be confusing. These phenomena include the Platonic ideals, the deep structure for language, and both the Freudian and Jungian concepts of the unconscious. The first-tier core of experience provides the depth of wisdom required for the mysterious processes of intuition and what William Blake called Creative Imagination. It explains how we know what is right for us even when we don’t know why.
As I completed my blog entries in Part I, I deliberately put aside questions of how the ground established at the first tier impacts the specific form of the conscious version of the world we develop at the verbal-symbolic tier. Since we have no awareness of this developmental process as it occurs, the ideas that I will be developing in Part II feel more speculative. I want to avoid using psychological constructs that are justified with assumptions implicitly shaped by existing language structures.
I call Part II “The Conscious Version of the World We Develop is Grounded in the Undifferentiated Core We Establish.” In Part II I will use the physical core of experience as the roots for a new psychology. The physiological substrate I proposed for the pre-empirical core of experience will ground my thinking as I extrapolate to a new perspective on the behavioral knowledge we accumulate about the world. I want to avoid what I discussed in Of Two Minds # 7, being led in circles of repetition by thinking processes that are grounded in existing psychological constructs.
The behavioral assumptions of psychology are implicitly grounded in the linguistic systems we use to describe them. I will address this problem more completely in later blog entries. Philosophers encounter this problem when they rely on the “phenomena” of “sensory experience” (the psychological construct of sensations) as grounding for an “empirical” approach. I hope to avoid this problem by beginning with a physiological substrate and extrapolating to behavioral phenomena we have either experienced directly or observed.
The pre-empirical core of experience functions like the roots and trunk of a tree and the conscious version of the world we develop like its branches and leaves. What’s hidden below the surface is the basis for what develops and manifests itself for all to see. The pre-empirical substrate of sensory, visceral, mirroring and vestibular inputs grounds the development of the behavioral constructs that I will be describing in Part II. The behavioral framework that develops is likely to differ from the existing psychological constructs we know. I cannot know in advance where intuition will lead, but I will follow its direction as long as it continues to be productive.
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