I am (briefly) presenting a new way of understanding consciousness at the Science of Consciousness conference in Arizona in April. I won’t have the time to give a detailed description of it there, so I will be describing it’s explanatory power instead, hoping to generate interest in it. For example, in this novel paradigm, which I describe as responsive naturing, there is a description of human perception as biphasic.
While its genesis for me was a profound meditative event, and one well-known in traditional meditation practices for millennia, it has often been noted, but never completely developed, by philosophers going back to William of Ockham in England, Maine de Biran in France, and Charles Sanders Peirce And William James in the US. T.S. Eliot wrote a doctoral dissertation about it, and his poem, The Four Quartets, embodied it. And, of course, it’s been known in Indian philosophy for thousands of years. What has always held it back was our understanding of how reality works. But there is a way of seeing the world different.
By replacing physical causality with responsive naturing, biphasic perception explains how we experience fluid motion in film and video — which has no coherent scientific explanation today; how we experience spontaneous spiritual awakenings; how simple animals (and plants) can operate without brains, how psychedelic substances work — the genesis of Carlo Rovelli’s Loop Quantum Gravity was an experience he had while on LSD; and how our affective responses potentiate certain possibilities over others — your positive thought. That last being something I never connected with positive thought until I first read some of your posts here on Medium. This is my description of ‘affective response’ — I think you’ll see the connection — and remember, this is a new theory of consciousness, not a doctrine of positive thought:
Affective Response:
NB: there are links to definitions of the necessarily novel words that I use in this explanation here:
https://stilljustjames.com/glossary/#affective-response
An affective response is a feeling that arises integrally with the impersonal recognition of an action, called a propriogestæ, which is informed by a sæculum.
It is our affective responses to what is — positive, negative, or neutral — which opens up, and closes off, the possibilities of what may come next. But exactly what comes next is constrained to be coherent with what is already present in every context — yet not determinately so, for there is a creative spontaneity, sometimes more, sometimes less, in what comes next.
It is these affective responses that refine which course of coherent possibilities may become activated. But those possibilities which are activated are only advanced by our attention to them — they are not caused by our attention. What is finally selected, is the result of the spontaneously creative responsive naturing of all that manifests in our lives.
These responses, being localized as a perspective upon what is, are not definitive in and of themselves, but are additive, like a superposition of colors, or subtractive, like an attenuation of color saturation, and thus the possibilities are never determined, but are the creatively spontaneous paths opened by the combined affective approval, disapproval, and neutrality of all entangled contextual perspectives — some more possible than others, and some so assured as to be of the character of a ‘cause’. And these affective responses are not contained within form, for then they would be the result of, and not the impetus for, the information of the world.
In all of this, it is our attention alone, and our steering of our attention via our affective responses, that is always the enabler — always the instigator — of what comes, and so our ‘lived presence’ is just this: the attention we pay to the unfolding procession of events. If we do not pay attention, the procession of events is driven by other perspectives — what we might call “chance,” though the only difference from the description already given is our inattention — and so we can find our lives ‘out of control’.
