In discussions it sometimes seems to me that people want more than this. They want the real itself, and next they tell me that I cannot give them that. I know.

The complexity can, in my opinion, be illustrated as follows. If

On the other hand, terms like “objectivity” and “subjectivity” are very complex in this context. One problem is that objectivity presupposes objects and therefore it presupposes subjectivity. Other problems are things like that the real in

What we name “causality” with regard to the real, becomes an “if-then relation” within the theory about it. More strictly “causality” means something like “if-then projected onto the real.”

So we at least have relations within a theory, between a theory and the real, and within the real. Ordinary language can hardly deal with this, so my theory will keep being a bit of a muddle, I fear.

I have made things even more complex than this by explaining that one can theorize about something within numerous interpretations, With regard to consciousness this is important because I want to entail all possible, common sense interpretations of consciousness. How else can I try to falsify my theory? Of course there are many aspects of consciousness which one can measure, but all the measuring in the world alone would not convince me of anything, for the simple reason that we are not talking about something which is physically measurable, or at least, if it is, then we should prove through other means that this is so.

The way to do this for me has always been to show how something works in one interpretation, and next how it works in another interpretation, all the while showing how all interpretations, and the real, are related:

Another trap is that one might make the mistake to re-define consciousness in order to be able to claim that one has uncovered it.

An extra problem with regard to this is that one may mean different things when referring to consciousness. However boring, we will have to analyze it to be able to explain to each other what we mean to say.

Energetically “foregrounding” means “creating an attention-pattern and all that goes with it.” Subjectively it is that which stands out when you look at something, and it is also that which you will remember.

Something can be foregrounded on many different grounds. Something can foreground itself to you because of its emphatic presence, or because of its excellent beauty or ugliness, or, in the theater and in movies, because of the use of light or by placing something in the center of the stage or screen.

This implies that someone other than you yourself can foreground something to you, and you can foreground something to someone else, or to yourself. As such the foregrounding of images can be interpreted socially too. In humans the use of language is very important, of course.

Most important to me now is the temporal interpretation of foregrounding in which one takes what is foregrounded as the result of something that was foregrounded previously. This can be interpreted both subjectively and socially – that is intra-subjectively and inter-subjectively. The intra-subjective, temporal interpretation is important because it entails most neural connections and a great feeling of freedom. The social interpretation is about the actions performed in the world and the reactions from out of the world. One may make the mistake to think that this is much less important because the number of synaptic connections inside our brains is overwhelming, but inside our brains we have all the freedom, while socially we certainly have not.

Foregrounding can be understood both temporally and non-temporally. Temporal foregrounding is by nature both reproductive and productive. This is nothing special. Attention gives a constructive aspect to everything.

We may conclude that attention does not only lead to immanization, it also leads to temporalization. If it can also create punctuation – without a too strongly neurotic fixation – then we have consciousness.

In the energetic interpretation the most immanent neurons, that is, in this interpretation, the most active neurons, that is the attention pattern stand on the foreground. The transcendent, energetic ‘image’ (actually just an activation pattern) is the background of this image. This can be experienced subjectively too. For example, what stands to the foreground in a movie, is that which is immanent. This is also what will be remembered, and it is what defines the working of the movie.

Speaking about foregrounding in the material interpretation is not really sensible, except maybe when one would view material matters dynamically in the sense of materials being moved around, and so on. This will be important for measurements and scans regarding the working of our consciousness, but it is not something which I want to delve into.

At the foreground most of the dynamic interpretations of images come together, including social and, for example, educational interpretations. This is not to say that there are no transcendent relations, but those are not comprehensible by methods which I have used. Except in very general terms, or in very simple systems, only mathematicians may be able to say something about transcendent relations.

With regard to vision we foreground only five things at a time. I am not certain whether hearing has its own attention mechanism – possibly three-fold – and sense of touch may be even more limited. I just don’t know.

Because of the exhaustion of the attention-mechanism, and other reasons, we can or do not foreground the same five things for long. If, after six or so seconds, you’re still looking at the same, simple thing, your mind tends to wander off and something else is foregrounded. That is one of the grounds of how a temporal image is created.

If I remember well this was also the way in which the Prague Structuralists have tried to define what it is for something to be a true Work of Art. In their theory, the essence of a beautiful painting is that, although the work itself is static in a material sense, it contains movement in the sense that your mind can endlessly wander about it without ever getting bored.[^]

[^]In searching for the literature about this I found a book by K. Elam: “The semiotics of theater and drama.” (1980). I’ve read some of it many years ago. Much to my surprise I found in it both a Czech word for foregrounding, “aktualisace,” which was at first used to describe the foregrounding of the language itself in poetry, and a Russian one, “ostranenie,” which means ‘making strange’ (page 17/18) – that is, by the way, a method of foregrounding often used by Bertold Brecht in his theater work. Elam also writes, for instance: “From the first, the Prague theorists – following Otakar Zich, conceived of the performance structure as a dynamic hierarchy of elements” (page 16). Prague theorists also emphasized, for instance, “the transformability of the hierarchical order” (Honzl 1940, p.20). The Russian word comes from Russian Formalists. It is through these two groups that the ideas of De Saussure found, through the work of Levi-Strauss, their way into anthropology. I read that Jan Mukarovskÿ, a leading Prague structuralist, analyzed movies made by Charlie Chaplin in 1931, which I did too, 50 years later, in one of my Dutch writings, to prove my point.

In ‘doing’ this, or, in this ‘happening’ to you, my neural machinery, or an animal, you shift from one static image to the next, each image overlapping the previous one, and the next, at least transcendentally.

This temporal foregrounding can quite enlightening be illustrated by a simple memory-trick. Take a list of absurd images, or words to which you can imagine things. Imagine them two by two. It is enough to see the pairs before you for less then a tenth of a second, but you must really wait until you see this image. I promise that you will have remembered it for at least a view hours, and if you repeat it ones or twice at a later time, you might remember it for the rest of your live.

Try it! Remark that, if you start with the first image from the list, the images you remember next come into your mind one after the other. After seeing the first image you would not have believed to have remembered any of the rest, but there they come..., automatically, and mechanically.

Remark, further more, the temporality of the process. My idea is that in fact every temporal image works more or less on this principle.

The difference is that a ‘real’ image is more complex. Within a ‘real’ image there are more interconnections, both immanent and transcendent. Immanently, there are more, well integrated attention patterns reproducible. Transcendentally the activation pattern with regard to the biological neural hierarchy will make more sense, and this will help in pattern completion too.

You can illustrate this to yourself by combining the images you used above into a single image. You must have more then five. Try to see all the elements at ones in the same image. You will not succeed, because there are more than five elements. Yet in trying to, you will gain an image of the whole scene.

How is this possible? It is possible in time – that is in the temporal dimension. This should make the reality and importance of temporality irrefutable to you.

A television program is a temporal image. If you watch a program, and ask yourself what is foregrounded in your mind, these are usually things which are foregrounded in the television program too. If the images change quickly, as is usual in television programs, then you will usually remember at most three items per shot. For a longer shot this may be more, because then your attention gets a chance to scan the image. You may have the illusion to have remembered the whole image, but when you try, afterward, to see a certain detail, which you know must have been there, then you will not succeed. For instance, you saw a person, you know he must have worn shoes, but what color where they? You will not know outside the three things you attended to, except, of course, when it is a familiar program to you.

On the other hand, if you happen to have a, let’s say, well gathered mind with regard to something, then you may register a very complex event instantly, which you can study afterward, through which you can reconstruct what happened. You can do this through the immanization of lower neural levels, and you can do this with regard to more or less prototypical situations.

The point is, that different shots from a television program will overlap qua content, much the same as with our memory trick. Within our neural network this overlap leads to associations. Essential is that these are not necessarily successive shots. In case of a television program which is part of a series of programs, there may even be an overlap between different programs. This said, usually successive shots do have overlap, if only, for example, because the room stays the same. View people are conscious of it, but there has developed a language of how to make a movie. The camera will, in a movie made for a big audience, not jump from one image to the next in any possible way. Within a scene a camera may, for instance, follow someone’s eyes, or it follows someone walking in the picture, and so on. It will never move ‘without cause.’

Remark, that the camera and its movements, and the shots as they follow up on each other, are representative of our attention mechanism. The makers of the television program watch the world in about the same way as we could do. Our attention does not hop around unintelligibly, so the makers of a television program cannot do so either.

Next to the serial structure of all images following up on each other one after the other, the main structure of a movie is formed through the overlap between shots which are not successive. These overlaps form, in our neural network, the associations which give the movie the complex structure which is like the structure of images in our mind. A simple example is when a known place is again in the picture, or a known car, person, and so on.

Detectives give us the nicest examples. These are contests in image-reconstruction. The facts build up slowly, and have all possible relations. At the end, all possible suspects are called together, and the definitive relations are laid out. There is always at least one fact left unknown to the audience until the end, so that the detective will always win – or am I stupid?

I look at it this way: Clearly – and almost by definition – only one transcendent image can be formed in the neural network, since, in the energetic interpretation, the transcendent image is the spread activation of the network. But the attention-mechanism tries to create five of them, and that’s how they all get mixed up.

We feel to be able to wander about in our consciousness of things, but despite this in our culture we also feel consciousness to be something which we have here and now – am I right? If we think consciousness is inside our head, then we tend to think of it as entailing our whole brain, or something like that, in fact making it as vague and as complex as possible so that we may understand why we cannot understand it. As you may have grasped, I am going to tell you that this is all nonsense.

The possibilities interpretation only ‘really’ (but not materially, nor objectively, nor energetically, nor empirically) ‘exists’ in subjective and inter-subjective interpretations. This does not mean that, with some creativity, it cannot be studied energetically, materially, or objectively at all, since existing possibilities can be assessed from there too – after all something is possible because it may become real. It is just that something which is possible need not be real, not in the sense that the real is the impossible, but in the sense that, when you imagine the possible, you are in fact really imagining it, and that makes it a real image. As such, the objective interpretation can be seen as part of the possibilities interpretation, but not the other way round. Since the possibilities interpretation is in many ways just another name for the subjective interpretation, the subjective and objective interpretations do not coincide either – as Kotarbiñski noticed too.

An important property of (temporal) images is that you can only (self-consciously) know to have had them afterwards, that is, when you look back at them. Self-consciousness is that which you know to have been conscious of. In the real world it can, of course, not even be an issue that something could know something of itself without temporality. Self-consciousness is inherently temporal.

The possible, non-existing, future, temporal image stands in contrast to this. It includes a whole lot of possible images, which we wrongly experience to be able to look at self-consciously in the subjective interpretation, but in doing so, it is, objectively spoken, not a possible image anymore, but a real image which is constructed temporally. This ability requires the programming mechanism. The programming mechanism allows our mind to wander of, while holding on to important principles, reality, and so on. It is an art, and a sport, to use one’s programming mechanism well – and, of course, to use one’s brain well.

It may seem strange to some people that I speak of possibilities as if they are real, but what else is a well trained, intelligent neural network, than a whole lot of possibilities? Possibilities are a part of us because we cannot imagine that we cannot imagine, even when we do not imagine ‘something’ yet. Call it energy or hope if you like, technically it is, first, just an immanent neural network that is stimulated from inside and outside itself, and of which the next steps in practice are never fully predictable. Secondly we may perceive of these possibilities as possibilities, because with the aid of our programming mechanism we can try out any possibility, while returning to an earlier state of mind if it leads to nothing. Without the programming mechanism we would not have this kind of “counter-punctuation.”

I ones saw a program on the British Broadcasting Service on this topic. Figures and examples showed that students know less (!) about something after they are lectured about it. The example of learning the past tense of verbs shows that this is actually quite normal but that wasn’t the way it was treated in the program.

The program was also about our ordinary, ‘intuitive’ understanding of things versus our scientific understanding. The example used was that wood is made up out of air – carbon from carbon-dioxide – and water, and not soil. Not one of the highly educated, juvenile students had understood this, either directly after the lesson or after having been graduated – the former is normal but the later certainly should not have been so. I tried it on my own, adult, university-bred friends too, and they hadn’t got it either.

I wouldn’t like anyone to quote me on this, but in fact it seems that one can only become conscious of something which one is in a sense already conscious of! – and if you are not, then your mind will be blind to it or get muddled. That is why you will have to come back on things time and time again. Put this way it seems quite paradoxical, but it isn’t.

Punctuation is a break in speech. It is not only a moment to breath air, it is also a moment to breath neural activity. According to Lacan it is our ego, which stops, and punctuates the Other. I interpret this as the immanized, gathering structure, stopping the load of words coming from our inner speech “machine,” while all the time having taken in the result of the chatter as if it is a productive image, and returning error or mirror signals in the more or less the ordinary way. One problem is that these error signals always are too late, so we have to correct ourselves in speech, or when writing we have to rewrite what we wrote.

For the taking in of the meaning of our words the programming mechanism is important. The combination of the seven attention mechanisms of the programming mechanism, of holding on, and yet shifting along with the words, collects a pile of meaning, so to say.

My guess is that the moment of punctuation is partly decided on by a kind of satisfaction of certain neural structures. This is also a satisfaction of the ordinary attention mechanism, that is there has to be something to attend to. Something which is clearly nonsense will be good enough too, but vagueness will just tend to keep the machine going in growing sentences – I suddenly understand why I am writing all this.

Punctuation is not only to be understood in the sense of the dot we write behind a sentence. It can entail almost anything, and qua structure it is equal to the immanent, gathering structure, mostly for the simple reason that it is caused by it – if I am right.

People and things we come about in our lives are mirrored inside of us. James Fernandez wrote about this in talking about metaphorical predication of things upon ourselves, for instance in rituals or mass-demonstrations.[^]

[^]James W. Fernandez. 1986. Persuasions and Performances. The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Jacques Lacan – and Salvador Dali too – spoke about paranoid knowledge. Further more, it is, of course, in confirmation with the theory of Vygotsky – and Aristotle – on language and thinking, which I agree with except for the fact that I guess dialogue, and identification with persons and things having a dialogue or interaction, comes before speech.

I have stated the importance of identification with regard to learning to use our motor abilities in chapter 7 page 146.

Why does this mean that we cannot be conscious of it? Because a neural network is, usually, one big network, in which everything is connected with everything. Children may develop multiple personalities which defy this, of course, but that is an exception which, by the way, qua neural principle can be explained mathematically.

The point is, that it actually is wrong to say that it is the foregrounded attention patterns which ‘form’ our consciousness. One might just as well say that it is the state of the network as a whole. But this is a state which, qua being a state of the whole brain, is, next to perception and immanization, largely determined by the attention mechanism. Sensors, immanized neural network, and attention mechanism are all connected together such that to a certain activation of the neural network there grossly is a certain attention pattern. How do we identify this, and where do we find this identification? In the attention-pattern! That is all.

Even if I am wrong with regard to the importance of the attention mechanism, then this temporality will still be essential to consciousness. It will just be very much more difficult to explain and comprehend consciousness, for instance if one more explicitly takes into account consciousness and attention in lower neural levels.

The same is true with regard to immanization. Immanence might not be as central to consciousness as this book may have suggested, but that does not alter the importance of temporality.

Why didn’t I say so earlier? Well, my fear is that many people will again be thinking of consciousness in terms of ‘a state of consciousness,’ or even worse, in terms of ‘brain-waves’ or whatever. The point is, that a neural activation state is nothing – well, “nothing,” at least it is not consciousness. Why? Because there is no state of consciousness. If you could freeze your neural activation, you might just as well be death, no matter what neural activation state you freeze. Consciously it is empty – except, maybe, when one would attribute consciousness to individual neurons, but then we are not talking about us, but about these neurons.

If we cannot be conscious of it directly, then what is the use of all this immanization? I have tried to explain this in chapter 6, while speaking about part-whole structures. I have also spoken about it as a kind of double work, done at different neural levels. In order to recognize something, we are helped very much by lower level immanization. But in order to become really conscious of it, it has to become recognized at the highest neural level.

Rarely but firstly “subconsciousness” may refer to that what is, within a lower neural level, conscious in a temporal sense. It is, however, dominated and overwhelmed by top-level attention, but it is not completely dominated by it.

As such I refer to consciousness in lower level, neural structures. This sub-consciousness is qua consciousness temporal too, but we cannot be self-conscious of it, except maybe as some vague intuition or feeling. Such consciousness probably plays a role with regard to qualia we experience.

If neural activation in lower neural levels cannot “live” a temporal live on its own with regard to some aspect, then I think one cannot say it is there subconsciously, since it will be fully absorbed in ordinary consciousness. More precisely, if neural activation does not cause any independent, temporal recurrence whatsoever, then it won’t reach the status of neither consciousness nor subconsciousness. So consciousness and subconsciousness really only exist in a very well trained and immanized brain – such as in people who have a multiple personality syndrome.

Secondly “subconsciousness” may refer to that what we might be conscious of in a second if it would only interest us, or if it would only be pointed out to us. I can still remember quite vividly how, as a child, I immediately recognized verbs and nouns, and so on, in my language as soon as it was explained to me. Yet I do not think that I was in any way conscious of it before this explanation. I was not even subconscious of it qua experience in the sense of the previous interpretation. I was made conscious of it by a teacher.

Subconsciousness is about lower level immanence, recurrence, and temporality. This subconsciousness is just as temporal qua structure as consciousness is. Parts of the thalamus are sometimes thought to have such a subconsciousness too, and there might be many more of such brain structures. What would happen if our top-level attention fails to put its ‘will’ on them…? Psychosis, causing self-destruction, causing depression?

This also explains why I do name neural levels a little below the attention mechanism meaning levels. Meaning, just like concepts, is not something which we are truly conscious of. But if we sit in a chair and start directing our attention to the meaning which we attribute to something, then it will slowly become conscious. That is to say, it will not itself become conscious, but it is relatively easy represented in higher level attention patterns, that is consciousness. Our subconsciousness can make it conscious to us if we ask it to do so.

If I find the time, then I hope to delve into this sometime.

This said, a well immanized mind can, subconsciously, that is through lower, immanized neural levels, grasp rather complex situations, which can be made conscious afterward. For this immanization is essential, and for immanization attention is very important.

This said, as a check I ask myself: Are there non-animal, natural phenomena having exactly the structure I name above, ergo having consciousness? What about weather systems?

Further more. Taking the statement above I could make a minimal neural machine with a handful of neurons, which can attend to two things and do this alternately, possibly even with a programming mechanism. Should we call such a machine conscious, or even self-conscious?

For any sensible consciousness and self-consciousness we need, of course, a certain complexity. There may be extraterrestrials who think we, humans, are not conscious of anything because we are too simple to have it. They may herd us like sheep. Complexity usually gives us more degrees of freedom with regard to the content of consciousness – if it keeps functioning.

In semiotic terms consciousness is a Qualisign, a Rheme and an icon, just like the color red, which is nothing without something being red. When we think of consciousness, instead of consciousness of something, then we think of our own consciousness, that is consciousness of ourselves, as a Qualisign. In other words, just as the color red, it does not exist on itself.

It seems counter-intuitive to me to let the definition of consciousness depend on something which is external to it, being that which the consciousness is about, in other words the content of consciousness. One might ask oneself, what else consciousness is subjectively other than content? But is content necessarily ‘aboutness’? What if I, more or less randomly, program an attentive neural machine which has no senses whatsoever. In other words, there is content, but this is not a content of something. It is just utter nonsense – much like we see in psychotic people. Could this be a conscious machine? I tend to say yes, I just cannot communicate with it.

We have the same problem with weather-systems. The weather may be a temporal, partially recurrent, and complex system, but what is it a system of? Of the sun, the rotation of the earth, and the waters on earth? Certainly not in a mirroring way. The weather does interact with the world. There might be some structuration, for instance in the form of water-, and earth-temperatures influencing the weather such that they stabilize each other. But seen this way, qua consciousness of something, the weather system is just too simple. What is important is that there is no attention and hardly any immanization. So essential to consciousness seems to be that consciousness is not transcendent.

On the other hand, one could also distinguish between transcendent, vague consciousness, that is a transcendental, temporal image, and immanent, clear consciousness, that is an immanent, temporal image. I prefer this option, since it makes clear that consciousness of recurrent, temporal structures is relative. It is determined by immanence, and complexity, where complexity is to be understood as degrees of freedom. It is nearly impossible to speak about more transcendental, temporal images other than in mathematical and statistical terms.

If we are conscious of five things at a time, then why can we not be conscious of a couple of hundred, or thousand things, maybe in a lesser sense? Not that I really excluded this technically, but I referred to it as construction and reconstruction, and later as subconsciousness, which actually is a very complex topic. The mixing of attention, further more, has specific functions, also with regard to consciousness, for instance association, which I think are difficult to implement with too many points of attention. But, yes, very strictly speaking subconsciousness is part of consciousness, and maybe we will some day be able to make a machine which can attend to thousands of things at the same time. But all this changes nothing to the fact that temporality and recurrence are essential, and these two require memory, and also for instant memory the attention pattern is essential.

Another, complex question is whether it is sensible to speak about consciousness as something existing apart from self-consciousness. Because of our self-consciousness it surely is difficult to comprehend consciousness without self-consciousness. But if we keep in mind that consciousness is in practice always consciousness of something, then things become more clear. Even if we doubt self-consciousness in some animals, it is clear that many of them are conscious of their surroundings. One might say that consciousness as a First, is an idea which comes from self-consciousness. But consciousness as a fact is not.

In what sense do lower level attention mechanisms constitute our consciousness? Is it maybe only because of the fact that the programming-mechanism cannot reach it directly, that I conceive of them as being at most subconscious, while in fact they are just as conscious, but not self-conscious? In other words, the consciousness which is forgotten may entail much more than what I attended to. This is different from a possibilities interpretation. It is even unlikely that this lower level consciousness can be foregrounded, for the simple reason that it is not physically located near the attention mechanism. How could we know? Well, according to my theory in a sense there should be lower level consciousness, but it should not be too independent (in a healthy person). One may ask whether, and how, it forms a whole with the rest of consciousness. I think I have largely described this in speaking about our inborn neural hierarchy and the knowledge therein, and how this is related to foregrounded knowledge. The term “preconsciousness” may be attributable here, instead of “subconsciousness.” Further more, consciousness at different neural levels will be interwoven, in as far as they cause each other, at each others lower levels, which does not mean that we self-consciously understand this. So self-consciously consciousness may often be unconsciousness. In other words, “unconsciousness” in fact always means “un-self-consciousness.” This is to be distinguished from non-consciousness. It might be then, that we are much less self-conscious then we think we are. We’re just animals.