| I. basic consciousness | |
| a. brain area | brain stem & thalamus |
| b. organ system | circulatory/pulmonary & sense organs minus skin, nose and tongue |
| c. neurotransmitter(s) | GABA & glutamate |
| i. psychological construct(s) | mood (a la Thayer), attribution (judging co-occurrence & causality), affective reasoning (e.g. Iowa card sorting); psychophysics |
| ii. emotional spectrum | engaged-bored |
| iii. diseases | narcolepsy, seizure disorders/epilepsy |
| d. developmental stage | 0-5/6 months (when depth is perceived); physiological (Maslow) |
| e. lifecycle stage | conception to start of third-trimester |
| f. evolutionary stage | eukaryotes, proteins, viruses |
| g. cosmological stage | collapse; time and space and all-particle created |
| h. space-time/info.gathered/learning | space-time (subject to optical illusions and time dilation/constriction)/instantaneous (short term info. gain, immediate behavior change)/no learning |
| i. Behavior | sleeping, existing, focusing–likelihood behaviors will be enacted eventually = 1 |
| j. person | not differentiable from environment |
| k. environment | not differentiable from person |
| l. chakra | 1. muladhara – root |
| m. sephirot | 11. malkuth – the kingdom |
| n. color | black & white |
| o. Freudian phase/concept | oral stage |
| p. OCEAN traits | n/a |
This may be the most difficult “self” to explain because no self-awareness is needed to experience it though it is required to be able to write and talk about it. An amoeba has a way to sense what it needs to about its environment and this may even feel a certain way to an amoeba but no amoeba can reflect on this feeling. The base case self has a sense of being alive and awake and must exist for a self-concept to arise but it does not have to have a third-person vantage point on itself. Already this gets confusing. An amnesiac who cannot remember moment by moment, that forgets after a millisecond and has no senses, does not experience space or time and is not differentiable in terms of awareness of its surroundings from a non-living thing. The brain tries to give a 1-to-1 exact replication of what it sees and hears, within a certain frequency range, the highest resolution and fidelity “picture” refreshed at the fastest rate it can but this still is an estimate of the true measurements of the world around us.
Subjective relativity dictates that there will always be a discrepancy between our estimates without instruments like rulers and stopwatches and depending on the nature or state of the observer, not just the observer’s location, time and space can be contorted.
Sound is waves that give the dimensions of a space given its point of emanation and time it takes to be perceived as well as the texture of the environment, hence sight and sound are lumped together with this aspect of self.
Because we do perceive time and are not amnesiacs, no two moments can exist ate the same time just as no two objects even occupying infinitesimally small spaces can be in the same location, except for in the quantum realm, time and space can be said, in the beginning, to have collapsed in on itself when all of matter and time existed for a moment in the same spot at the same time to then create the concepts of distance, space between matter, and time, the existence of matter at multiple moments in the same position. All living and non-living things for that matter exist in this space-time, only the living must use imperfect senses to know the world around it.
What really characterizes this type of consciousness is that it makes no judgments about its surroundings, just assesses it, and learns instantaneously almost about its environment, with visual perception being updated every possibly thirteen milliseconds by one MIT study’s estimate or 30-60 times a second according to older estimates. This self only moves when its heart beats and lungs breathe, it does no locomotion other than moving its focus about. We identify as a conscious point embedded in a physical environment. That is the most basic sense of self one can have.
Now to explain the table. This project here also stemmed from a desire to ascertain what umbrella function can be assigned to the disparate brain areas where a single neurotransmitter (NT) is predominant. For example, dopamine is not just the reward circuit neurotransmitter but also has to do with disorders of movement, so what do these two functions have in common? They have to do with assessing the success of an action from feedback as to whether the goal of said action was met. The main excitatory and inhibitory NTs in the brain are GABA and glutamate. Hence, I associate them functionally with simply being alive with a nervous system ready for action.
Subjective relativity, the idea that the size of and rate at which an entity sees determines how space and time measure up, also dictates that humans are a hop, skip, and jump away from a Higgs boson, the smallest particle that is a predecessor to all matter. That a gigantic being whose heartbeat lasted a few minutes would see evolution in a flash and, therefore, would see the first particle and humans as linked in a chain of developmental steps that are hard to differentiate. By the same token, ancient spiritual teachings are analogies to scientific concepts that could only be intuited centuries ago. NTs are one step in the link between particle and consciousness linking our mind to its natural history.
Lastly, the self is just an easy concept with which to categorize things like psychiatric and neurological disorders. And, from an evolutionary standpoint, it is easy to view the NTs and their functions as evolved to signify certain person-relevant aspects of the environment and this function being decoupled from reality in diseases or psychiatric disorders. Above all, these concepts of the self offer a mnemonic device for also remembering everything from developmental stages to chakras to psychological subdisciplines, from stages in evolution to components of the Freudian mind. The unifying dimension of these selves is their implications for the components of Lewin’s B = pe equation.
The p represents the internal state, drives, feelings, thoughts in a particular domain, B is obviously the actions associated with a domain, and e is what we are assessing the environment for, the input in a certain domain. Space-time is the fabric of this environment the rate and type of info being gathered in a domain.
In this first case, p and e are not differentiable; the only behaviors available are waking or sleeping. Space-time can be space and time but also what is being overlayed on space and time that is valuable behavior-relevant information and in the case of the most basic consciousness is still not abstract for the on/off system and is defined as it is in physics. We sense space and time with this self as accurately as possible. This self has no long-term memory and gathers info on spaces and time almost instantaneously but does not retain any of it and acts, or moves its focus instantaneously as well; short-term acquisition and short-term behavioral changes characterize movement through this psychological space-time.