After I completed The Two Tiers of Consciousness: A Physiological Paradigm, the first new line of thinking I pursued involved a possible connection between the ideas I was developing about the first tier of consciousness and Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Jung discovered aspects of the unconscious that could not be explained in terms of the Freudian personal unconscious. He thought of the collective unconscious as involving a more universal set of forces that were largely alike for everyone. He imagined that the collective unconscious was innate and genetically given. I wondered whether the unvoiced physicality of the first tier might represent the innate substrate that Jung envisioned.
I began to feel less critical of Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious once I realized that he had been struggling to articulate an elusive phenomenon that was related in many ways to my concept of the first tier of consciousness. It seemed likely to me that the physiological substrate that generates first tier experiences is innate and genetically given even though I knew that it was not experienced in the same way by everyone.
This new way of conceptualizing the first tier led me to stop referring to it as perceptual and to fully embrace it as the product of an innately given physiological substrate. This first-tier substrate enables us to develop a physical core of experience that provides unvoiced, continuous grounding for the entities and events we describe within the verbal-symbolic tier. It is pre-empirical in the sense that it is established in an undifferentiated landscape that hasn’t yet been defined in terms of the designations and descriptions we later add. It is pre-empirical because it generates experience without conscious mediation or control. This innately given substrate guides our movement sequences as we encounter reality without conscious involvement.
The basic functioning of the innate substrate that generates experiences at the first tier of consciousness is difficult to understand because it is unvoiced and unknowable in terms of our conscious version of the world. First tier experiences take place prior to the differentiation of the entities and events that define the realm of conscious knowledge. What is this physical, pre-empirical core of experience?
There is a well-established difference between knowing how (to do the things we do) and knowing what (in the sense of explaining or describing) we are doing. We say that we rely on “muscle memory” to carry out the movement sequences involved in our actions even if we have no idea what this means. Those who are tasked with writing detailed instructions for a job they learned through experience know firsthand the challenge involved in giving words to an otherwise wordless task.
Everything we do involves the physical initiation of the movement sequences that enable us to carry out the task. These movement sequences are physical, and they involve what we call muscle memory whether they are simple or complex and whether or not we assign them verbal designations or descriptions. If we were to consciously intervene in an attempt to control these movement sequences, we would interfere with our ability to smoothly execute them. There is a flow to even the most complex and extended movement sequences that is only possible without conscious involvement. These sequences are under the control of first tier systems that neither involve nor require conscious intervention.
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