Section II: Differentiating the Core
As I have been writing and posting blog entries over the past six months, my book revision has naturally divided itself into two distinct sections. The first section focused on the concept of an innate, genetically given substrate that establishes a core of experience at the first tier of consciousness prior to the differentiation of entities and events in the verbal-symbolic tier. I needed to establish the legitimacy of this entirely new way of thinking about consciousness.
I discovered connections to a range of phenomena from Plato’s ideal forms to Chomsky’s deep structure for language to Polyani’s tacit dimension and the Freudian unconscious. These deep thinkers about human functioning each encountered the unknowable, unvoiced core of experience at the first tier of consciousness and tried to interpret what they had discovered. The two tiers of consciousness provide a basis for understanding the phenomena they encountered.
I gradually worked out how the pre-empirical substrate functions in Section I of this book revision and showed how the component systems contribute to establishing a core of experience. I proposed a plausible version of how the transition from an unvoiced continuous core to a differentiated world of entities and events might take place. I described both the enormous advantages of creating a differentiated world and the inevitable distance from underlying realities this involves. I also showed how the two tiers can be used in complementary fashion to gain control over the differentiated world we create and yet still retain access to the creative potential of the physical core.
In Part II, I will consider the specific ways in which the physical core of experience grounds the entities we differentiate and the assumptions we make when we assemble them into events. I will propose three innate forces or propensities as well as the visceral processes that guide them. I will extrapolate from these genetically given propensities to the personality variations we develop as we encounter shaping forces in the environment. I will also show how the visceral processes that guide our propensities ground the emotions we later differentiate.
I am now ready to begin this complex task. How do the experiences established in the continuous physical core provide grounding for the conscious version of the world we differentiate? How do the three innate propensities translate into discrete forces that shape our personality? In what ways do their guiding visceral processes differentiate into specific emotions? I will rely on intuitive guidance to lead me through these questions even though I feel intimidated by the enormity of the process. I will remain focused on the physicality of the propensities and their visceral guidance as I engage this task. I will try to avoid existing psychological categories that revolve around themselves as I extrapolate directly to a new behavioral space yet to be developed.
I ask my readers to consider the concept of the two tiers that I presented in Part I separately from the more speculative extensions into personality and emotion I will be proposing in Part II. I am likely to get things wrong at times as I sort through the complex interactions between propensities, mirroring constraints and shaping environmental forces. I offer Part II as a first step toward a new psychology that can be constructed on the grounding established in Section I.
The core of experience at the first tier is unknowable, and in Section II, I venture across this space to develop a new understanding of personality and emotion with few tools and no safety net. I will rely on the physiological substrate I proposed to ground my thinking as I access the intuitive guidance I need, and I will continue this process as long as it remains productive.
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