A functional composition of consciousness

The functional composition of consciousness: a theory of mind.



Part/ial consciousnesses, conditionality and inter-relationality

The present moment passes into the next and becomes a part of the Mnemosyne of experience, the ever-receding content of experiential memory that serves to form the substance from which what we call consciousness emerges. Consciousness itself can be understood as the sensory-streaming reactivity of the present moment filtered through the sieve of Mnemosyne, which produces a set of reactions as effects. Based on the contents and quality of this Mnemosyne, and its interactivity/sensationality with the present-experiencing, a 'moment of consciousness' emerges which is the sum effect of this interactive process.

The present moment writes itself upon the past, its own past, as continuous alteration of the Mnemosyne of consciousness, both adding to and changing the weights and meaning of what is already contained within it. As previous meaning-content/s is stimulated based on present moment experiential interactivity this content itself is changed to varying degrees. This then, of course, changes the emergent quality and content of the present moment experiencing, giving to consciousness new flavors, qualities, sense and essence. Both the present moment inter-relational sense-experiencing and the Mnemosyne of consciousness’s past experiential continuously change one other. This explains how the more we experience sensory stand-still or deprivation of the senses the more this interactive changing begins to redouble and reflexively reflect back upon Mnemosyne, having as it does then less outward trajectory in which to release itself. Silence invites change in the contents of the mind, just as overstimulation or constant activity deaden and tend to wither this potentiality for change.

The present experiential meaning-content is 'written' directly into the most recency of the Mnemosyne; each moment builds upon a long continuation of past moments all tied and sutured together by complex inter-relations of mutual conditionality and dependency: point A here relies in its being-A on multitudes of various connections to other points B, C, D, E... Nothing is isolate in the mind for everything emerges from everything else, each emergent form/object/event of consciousness attains to varying degrees of relative conditionality and/or autonomy with respect to that from which it has emerged as a event/object/thing. This process is continuous and constant, and taken to the nth degree produces the complex, rich and deep content and potentiality the various and interchanging components of which react to the present sensory experiential stream of awareness to produce an experience similar in image/quality to that a hologram. The form, content, image, feel, sense, proprioceptive qualia are all generatively distilled from the innumerably great and immeasurably deep and subtle inter-relations between the vast contents within Mnemosyne and the present experiential sensory-stream of active consciousness. So there are essentially two spheres of consciousness, similar and highly inter-related—and mutually conditional and dependent—but also very distinct: the sum of all previous experiential content, Mnemosyne, and the present moment of sensory-streaming experiencing.

Yet even this complex inter-relationality productive of a moment of consciousness is nowhere as simple as that: there are near-infinite variations of scope, breadth, quality, inclusivity and exclusivity, potency and power within every single relation, since its "harmony" can bend and change at any moment to resonate with, touch upon, encompass or be encompassed by more and more, originating from anywhere within the contents of total receded experiential memory. The rules and logics of this potentiality and how it particularly actualizes within moments of consciousness are the indirect object of study for the various "sciences" which aim inward, such as psychology, literature, poetry and philosophy.

This dichotomous productivity-as-potentiality of actualizing unifications between past- and present-sensational contents also projects itself forward into "the future", into the mind's image-content space which is imagined through the abstraction of certain or other conditions of temporality with respect to the meaning/contents within Mnemosyne, its "objects of thought". Embedded temporal conditions are subtracted away to a sufficient degree so that the object may be seen without regard to this conditionality, and thus its meaning becomes free to "wander the mind" and find more meaningful attachments which otherwise would have been forbidden to it through the impositional constraints of time. This plethora of new abstract relationalities creates a rich potency from which new meaning may be generated. This meaning can then be related to that to which it is similar minus the subtracted temporal conditions, and from this relation may be derived certain common features or principles which are then used as a basis for determining the "likelihood" or "relevancy" of the projected content in question. In this we imagine what "could be" or "may be" or "will come to be" (also "what could have been"). This is drawing and tracing, directly deriving implications from the present into the present's own potentialities. These derivations stem from content freed from temporal object-conditionality are able to directly uncover conditions which have not yet come to be, giving us access to a future-present—we can plan, anticipate, set a goal or purpose, envision. The extent of the accuracy and potency of this access is contingent upon many factors, not the least of which being both the active power of consciousness of the individual—the deep harmonies of its constancies of thought, the extent to which powerful principles and logics relating to this thought have been abstracted and concretized, and the freedom this mind has attained from over-determining influences of extraneous and external conditions of confinement and environmental limitation—and the degree of proximity that the projected future-present has to the actual future-present.

This complex, mutually conditional and self-reflective/reflexive inter-reactivity between the temporal spheres of consciousness is what creates the "holographic" multi-dimensional depth to which a moment of consciousness attains. This is literally "a reality" in the mind, an experiential world/s rich with depth, sense and meaning, produced by combinations between inner and outer sensations. The further interactions of the logics of these sensations produce then new sensations, sum-like effects, the effects of which, directly sensed-experienced, lead to still more abstracted and derived objects of sensation and thought. Sense reflects into itself to produce deeper sensations, more summational and comprehensive sensings, and from these arise qualia, the indirect proprioceptive 'meta-sense' of the entire "sensational realm" itself—what the mind/contents of consciousness "feel like".

Each present-moment's meaning-content/s that end up being projected upon and then embedded within Mnemosyne also attain certain types and qualities of relations to those previously embedded content-meaning/s already contained within and constitutive of Mnemosyne. The degrees of similarity herein attaining between the most recently embedded content/s and more receded past contents forms a sort of "relational web" the geographic terrain/relief of which is indicative of more foundational similarities or dissimilarities contained within these relational elements. The present-moment active consciousness which processes its experiential sensory streams with respect to the embedded contents of Mnemosyne always senses on many levels, and not the least of these being an indirect sensing (read sensing as merely "a being-affected-by") of the extent of the topographical relief attained within these inner-Mnemosynal terrains. This factor is used as an indication of the extent of consistency between various contents of past experiences, which can therefore also be used to give indication of the degrees to which present sensory experiential contents coincide and enmesh with each other, or do not well coincide or enmesh. Mnemosyne can then be visualized somewhat like a topographical map projected across time, certain "points" above or below those surrounding it, a sort of graph of change spanning backward into one's remote past. The overall more similarity that attains between these various points the more stable or consistent the emergent forms of consciousness will be, having as they do then a more consistent and unchanging frame from which to draw its content-meanings productive of this present moment of conscious in its experiencing-projecting. Likewise, certain vast dissimilarities between multiple embedded past contents of Mnemosyne may produce rifts into which the present functional-formative moment of consciousness is unable to penetrate, unable to derive or extract contents from. This would be an example of "closed” or “repressed” memories. These continue to directly influence the quality of consciousness through the shadows they cast based on their absence where consciousness comes within sufficient proximity to these veiled objects and consciousness's mechanisms of derivation and extraction are foiled from a more complete and synthetic productivity therein.

We can actively re-valuate these more disharmonious, heterogeneous contents from our Mnemosyne in order to "smooth" or refine them into better symmetry and synchronicity with the rest of our experiential Mnemosynal content/s. This is active thinking or feeling, directly and introspectively re-forging the conditions and contents of mind. Thinking and feeling, intentionally and openly, gives direct access to the contents of mind, and provides that these contents themselves are malleable as a result. What is needed are higher "wills", purpose and direction to which contents being intentionally altered are subjected, these higher laws then being those around and toward which contents begin to gravitate and re-orientate. This active, intentional self-working and creating produces, over time, more stability of consciousness, more constancy of the emergent forms of consciousness, more sensationality with respect to these forms and their relationalities and potentialities, which is to say a greater sensitivity and degree of sensation and meta-sensation (qualia, proprioceptivity) of mind. One grows wider, deeper and more sensitive to the minute inner tracing of one’s mind and heart. Likewise, the more one does not take direct control of one's active possibility for synthetic re-working and redistributions of the contents of consciousness is also the degree to which one becomes inadvertently bound up within and subject to the dissimilarities and inconsistencies therein - one becomes more or less a product of embedded contradictions and impossibilities at the expense of more expansive and totalizing reconciliations, and this impossibility frustrates the synthetic productive-producing inter-relationality of the present sensory experiential consciousness as it seeks out various useful and relevant meaning-contents from its Mnemosynal-formative conditions, constraints and implications.

Duty and the ethical sense, active and passive consciousnesses

Because Mnemosynal contents are projected through the sieve and focusing lens of the present sensory experiential, the conditions of the present moment - its environment/s - are experienced as limitations, barriers and restrictions upon its otherwise possibilities; its possibilities for actualizing upon the present productive moment of consciousness are limited and restricted to the same extent they are created and freed. We experience constantly the restrictivity of the environment/s in which we are at all times situated, be these environments physical, emotional, social, mental, real or imaginary. The geometries, the shape/s of these restrictivities constitute a patterning which we then sense directly only in that we experience this limitation indirectly, as a shadowy inverse of the impossibilities for our otherwise potentialities. This sensing of the implicit and constant limitedness which conditions our present moment/s of experiencing (our active/real consciousness) is interpreted and given meaning firstly as duty, and this is the origin of the ethical sense. Duty-to as a being-constricted-by, being subject to the indirectly sensed confines of our environmental situational embeddedness. We are bound within these confines which serve as conditioning factors for us, and the "duty" imposed upon us is the limit of our ability to transgress these limitations. Rather than sensing directly these "negative conditions" as objects of/for consciousness (which they are) we instead error and implicitly encounter these limitations based on a form of object-lessness, object-loss, an un-graspability and indiscernibility, a lack of material power/objective reality because these contents are those by which our more salient, immediate and 'positive' contents of consciousness are conditioned, differenced by and unable to see/grasp within their own natures. We firstly make sense of, reconcile, make possible the encounter/experience with the feeling of this vague often indeterminate limitedness-conditioning as an inherent obligation imposed upon us by the world/s: we can do this, we cannot do that. This is experienced as obligatory because we are unable to more actively and directly objectify the actual limiting conditions themselves, unable to draw them comprehensively within the confines of object-cognitional meaning. Thus we are bound by what we "do not understand" and this generates the sense of obligation, a feeling of duty as the initial form under which the encounter with these limits obtains. The mind thinks: if we are unable to do this or that, certainly we must be obligated by, bound to to this constraining fact. It is a very short step from "can and cannot do" to "must and must not do"—as a result of highly active and potent social conditioning/meme influence over human evolution, we have, for the sake of social functioning and the continued cohesiveness of social relationships and hierarchies, projected constraint-limitation inward, identifying it with ourselves to a large extent and internalizing these limitations as obligatory behaviors, sentiments, thought-patterns. This is also accomplished through the human desire to feel in control of itself, to project a sense of self-determination across every situation. Thus where we encounter limitation, social or otherwise, we tend to associate with this a feeling of desire, intention in order to "choose" to comply with that which serves as our conditioning limit. The combination of socially regulating power and psychological internalizing have established, over time, the various conditioning limitations to which we are subject as duties, obligations. This is: the "ethics" of "making a choice" which we "must make". And of course once this ethical sense is established it takes root and begins to grow beyond its initial genesis, it comes to apply to lesser limitations and even limits which could be more easily surmounted, as the mind finds more and more personal-psychological and social utility in the feeling of being obligated to do this or that.

The less active, largely passive consciousness does not break free from this sense of duty. Rather the feeling of duty/obligation is given further meaningfulness through its injection into various available forms/images from within the contents of Mnemosyne. Thus there is an artificially generated ethical sensibility: "I must do, I must not do" as an interpretation of the "I can do, I cannot do" conditions of limitation to which one is subject. Once this ethical sense is birthed—which occurs at the moment in which consciousness has developed so as to be able to sense (read: be affected by) its own inner-sensational potencies and therein extract a certain degree of its own embedded conditions by which these emerge—this sense becomes a useful tool that is appropriated toward other ends within consciousness, a form that is easily applied wherever less than discernible or understandable limits/conditions are sensed-encountered. For example, a social situation which is too subtle and nuanced to be fully cognized under the available concepts and language terms borrows some of the ethical sense for itself, imbuing this social phenomenon with a feeling of obligation. Other examples would be a limit of knowledge, for example the limit of understanding of the more ultimate origins of oneself or one's world, or a limit of activity, for example the inability to accomplish a certain feat with respect to the imposed laws of nature, becomes understood, given into meaningful embeddedness within Mnemosyne under the form of the ethical sense, as duty or obligation. The secondary, subsequent objectifying of this form itself gives rise to the more image-oriented, positive object-contents such as, for instance, God or the gods, fate, karma, eternity, heaven or hell. These ideas serve to objectify the form/s under which the ethical sense obtains, and at this point there is very little within the frame of human meaning and experience which has not been to some extent touched and colored by the ethical sense.

The passive consciousness is satisfied with this sense of imposed duty against itself, imposed by its world/s situated conditions and objectified under certain or other forms and images which sufficiently coincide with its own previously meaningful contents of consciousness. The more active consciousness, however, seeks rather to further extract conditions from this duty, to see itself therein and that which leads it to a more full sensation and encounter with the ethical sense. This is the ethical sense more directly encountered, with its logics and conditions more directly perceived. At this point the reliance on the formal images under which this ethical sense has previously been objectified begins to wane (i.e. we lose “God”, we have no more use of gods). This consciousness is able to pierce directly into the sense of duty and to derive it more fully with respect to itself, generating a more comprehensive and powerful ethical sense as this sense is progressively freed from the images and forms in which it had previously been objectified-confined. Eventually this ethical sense is abstracted enough to where it is seen as derived from within every moment of consciousness, the entire vast sphere of Mnemosynal content and every inter-relational event of any present moment of consciousness yields a discrete ethical sensibility; at this point this mind disassociates the ethical sense and the ’imperative of duty’ enmeshes with the entire subjective world/s-reality, the consciousness then becoming most sufficiently and therefore also least necessarily bound to the objectified ethical sense. This is the ethical sense reified. It should also be noted that as an effect of the dictates and requirements of the evolutionary-selective history of man he has come to associate the ethical sense with many activities and with many diverse and largely arbitrary experiences and activities of common social or daily life - these socially- or personally-adapted mores, which borrow from the utility of the ethical sense, tend now to be largely dissolved by the active consciousness which has reified its ethical sense to the level of its total world/reality. The ethical sense seen nowhere becomes the ethical sense seen and dispersed everywhere and into all things, effecting a vast universalizing of conscience within and across all manner of conscious experiencing.

This more active mind experiences its duty as both to itself and to its world/s-reality at large, rather than, as is the case with the passive consciousness, to certain or other image-objectifications of the conditions of certain of the meaning-contents of its Mnemosyne. This reified ethical sense is still that which emerged and continues to emerge from (directly or indirectly) sensed encounters with the limiting conditionality of one's present and past experiential consciousness and Mnemosyne, but this sense has now been condensced and refined into an originary essence, a functional form operating intermedially within the ‘gap’ between the temporal spheres of consciousness, the present moment of sensory conscious experiencing and the past-extracting of embedded Mnemosynal content-meanings. This functional element allows for deeper and more powerful relations between these sphere, in effect it establishes a new ground of commonality on which new potencies of extracted and projected potentiality may be based. This new ground becomes a central element to the comprehensivity-constancy of the inter-relational consciousness productive of the "I" of experience, the self-sense of being one entity rather than being not-one. In other words this entity passes through a self-sense of oneness to a sense of its own vast discursivity, of its own not-one, and then through the reification of the ethical sense passes as an originary new object and universally medial functionality passes back into a new self-sense of being-one which attains to a new ground of cohesive power. This cohesiveness allows for new vast unifications across the spaces of this entity, re-workings of Mnemosynal contents with direct appeal to a stronger sense of self-unification that asserts a powerful (re)organizing effect upon the contents of consciousness. With respect to this new ethical functionary are new possibilities for more totalizing organizings brought into being, and the possibility for steering and directing consciousness and it’s systems and operations in certain or other directions, which is to say teleologically, is found. Thus we see that it is duty/the ethical sensibility that provides a possible medium through which the consciousness can attain to its own self-transcendence.

Particular, abstract and literal consciousnesses

A particular consciousness is that which tends to think-encounter-project under largely closed and self-contained, arbitrarily contrived forms. It thinks particularly in terms of a crude "this" or "that", here or there, yes or no. Its experiences are distilled into a finite number of reducible forms themselves directly contingent upon certain relations to assumed irreducible principles. It is the relation of these concretes to each other that then produces a semblance of a consciousness. This consciousness experiences only a fraction of its true potentiality for sensation and meaning-projecting possibility because it binds itself up within crude forms/images that attain to a "positive" (closed) meaning only. The logics of this consciousness thus being equally crude and linear, simple logistical operations upon the surface level of thought, which lends this consciousness to the tendency to never break out of its contrived-imposed linear mode of experiencing. We can see that the inter-relationality between the temporal spheres of this consciousness is relatively shallow with only the most salient of meanings extracted from its embedded situatedness. This is a superficiality of potentiality that in its overt nature is more an unconscious automatism and reactionism which loses the ability to relate to its own actual conditions and possibilities, for it cannot actively sense and extract conditions or implications from its own Mnemosyne nor can it project these extracted contents upon a temporally-subtracted field of possibility. This consciousness therefore has become most necessary and least sufficient to itself. This is the typical sort of consciousness of the "average human", the sort of consciousness which our world-societies actively produce in the majority of cases.

In contrast, the abstract consciousness is that which has learned to out-think itself to a certain extent, to skirt the edges of confining cognition and conceptuality to encounter more discursive, abstract and tangental conditions emergent from the machinations of the interactivity between the temporal spheres of its consciousness. Within the improved scope and range of this interactivity, freed from undo constraint and imposition by crude forms and unsensed limitations is born a new capacity for relating between the various contents and experiences of consciousness. This opened field in turn produces vast new possibilities for the present moment sensational consciousness to construct and project new meaning and experiential possibilities from its Mnemosynal extractions, e.g. it is vastly more able to create knowledge for itself, to process and derive actual conditions and implications from all manner of its experiences. As the logics of the abstract consciousness are more expansive and less restrictive than those of the particular consciousness it is more able to expand and grow naturally, to change and adapt, to produce and create. The abstract consciousness elevates ideas into a position of primary importance and focus, rather than, as is the case with the particular consciousness, focusing its energy on more self-closed and concrete objects of thought and surface-level sensory manifestations. The abstract consciousness transcends the particular consciousness, building upon it to become a new sort of mind.

In contrast to this, the literal consciousness is the sufficient synthesis of the abstract consciousness with respect to particularity, which is has previously overcome. To synthesize oneself deliberately with respect to past obstacles one has already supplanted and overcome represents the limit of the self-power of the abstract consciousness, which has to accumulate the strength within itself to bear the image of itself with respect to its most sufficient other, that from which it emerged, particularity itself. When the abstract consciousness submits its new potentialities and logics to those of particularity, and is able to do so without compromising or losing its abstractivity, the abstract logics are focused through a lens and magnified as the formative logics of particularity - such as for example those of limitation and insensibility - are projected within the others of their own conditions, dissolving the particular logic into a new, "higher" form and synthesis that situates these logics within a new potency and scope of potential sensibility. This synthesis leads to thinking-experiencing literally as opposed to superficially or abstractly, as a synthesis of particular with abstract, where content is seen as it is, as highest potentiality written upon pure conditions of actuality. That which previously escaped the abstract consciousness, which loses a large part of itself as a condition of its own heightened sensitivity, is re-caught and re-directed back within the sensational mediations of the literal consciousness which is now able to focus immensely on the object/s of its sensation, directly encountering and experiencing the sum of this object, its logics and conditions and its situatedness with respect to its local environ/s. The literal consciousness in this powerful sensation and experiencing-projecting does not, unlike the abstract consciousness which also attains to powerful experiencing and sensing, lose itself or lose sight of its own contextualities and conditionalities. Nothing escapes from the literal consciousness.

This literal consciousness now grows with respect to the degree to which it is able to expand both the range of its sensibility to its inner and outer environment/s as well as the power of its influence within this range. The extraction and abstraction powers of the literal consciousness are, with respect to those of the abstract consciousness, without limit, just as those same powers of the abstract consciousness are, with respect to those of the particular consciousness, also without limit. The literal consciousness is able, essentially, to sense what it senses, to encounter under so many multitudes of form and possibility that so little content is lost that a least sufficient object may be ascertained clearly, and this ascertaining may be allowed to most necessarily influence other conditions of this consciousness, projected with or without respect to any other conditionality and possibility within it. Within the literal consciousness the two spheres of temporal consciousness, the present-moment sensational consciousness and the past-Mnemosynal inter-relationalities of content/meanings across time are actively synthesized as Mnemosyne is now able to be more completely brought into the conditions for the present moment, as the present moment of consciousness has grown wide and deep enough so as to be able to contain more and more of the receded experiential content. This synthesis produces a new way of relating between the consciousnesses, and each is reborn within the direct image of the other. .

It is of course easy to see that this analysis is an attempt to "experimentally" derive a model/schema as an understanding of consciousness. In no way should the analysis be taken as positing what consciousness "is" but rather as an attempt to explore a possibility for a model-representation of consciousness in a functional/structural/compositional sense. I am curious to what extent such attempts to model consciousness rationally, in "pure thought" sort of derivation can be said to be successful.

Ultimately I would like to expand and further develop this sort of model of consciousness into a more complete system, at which point a juxtapositional meta-analysis will be done with respect to value-ontology. The present analysis can be seen as an attempt to better explicate the possibility for a rationalist-abstract model of consciousness, which would in a way, due to its reductionistic-empirical nature, act as an antagonism and counter-force posited against a more "organic", "non-scientific" or "phenomenological" value-ontological approach to understanding "what consciousness is".

In this way we win the possibility for better explicating two somewhat counter perspectives, using one against and for the other. I am unsure whether a synthesis would emerge from this, or whether one perspective would act merely to refine the development of the other.

That being said, there is a lot of work ahead of us in terms of developing a compositional model of consciousness as a system, as well as developing a more value-ontological approach that would work "from the ground up" rather than "from the top down", organically rather than empirically, phenomenologically rather than (merely) analytically.

James S Saint wrote:

When you finally come to see what consciousness is, you will feel a twinge of embarrassment from how your subconscious kept you bemused for so long concerning something so simple as to be mundane.

The general set-up can certainly be called simple, we can sum up "what consciousness is" in only a few short sentences. And yet this hardly does justice to the sheer immensity and depth of this consciousness, and not even to mention the possibilities and potentialities of this consciousness. It appears "simple" only from a distance, only in the most abstracted-generalized form possible that still affords actual understanding.

"Subconscious" here meaning perhaps only the unknown/unknowable elements involved in conscious manifestations? What bemuses us is a sense of unidentifiability that extends even to the highest emergent expressions of consciousness, so naturally we tend to over-emphasize the particulars in order to win a semblance of a sense of certainty and constancy. We can be certain about these particular experiences, their substance and sense to us, and so elevating the value of these to consciousness generally creates an illusion of certainty that succeeds only because it disguises layers of experiece underneath, more abstract and essential to consciousness itself.

In this same manner, to cling to the particular-ist abstract-general conceptual understanding of "what consciousness is" we re-enact this suppression of the more subtle and expansive (and uncertain) possibilities of self-conscious understanding for the sake of retaining a sense of certainty and control-closure. Thus this is certainly not what I would advocate here, and indeed despite how "simple" this conceptual/functional understanding of "what consciousness is" may be, as well as despite how "accurate" or descriptively powerful it may be, we cannot fall into the position of failing to be immediately and powerfully affected by the sheer immensity, unfathomable depth and complexity that constitutes consciousness. We must always marvel and be amazed when we stare at this consciousness, despite how well and precisely we are able to abstract a most-general conceptual form-al understanding of the structure/s or function/s of this consciousness.

The "simplicity" of consciousness is certainly far from being a mundane simplicity - rather we might call it, at this higher level of encounter and understanding, a deceptively simple profundity.