1a. I focus therefore I am. The most basic form of consciousness. We use the idea of focus to orient ourselves in physical space-time. We identify as this point in space. The environment is analyzed in terms of distance, shading, depth, color, etc. Behavior is limited to changing focus, sleeping, being awake and therefore is easy to predict.
1b. I feel (my body) therefore I am. We use the mental image of our bodies to move it through space-time. We identify as one with our bodies. The environment is analyzed in terms of sustenance and comfort (e.g., textures, objects’ appropriateness for consumption). Behavior in this domain is predictable and includes feeding, drinking, and moving toward and away from extremes in temperature and lack of or abundance of food and water.
2a. I am not you therefore I am. We have some idea of where we are in the food chain and human hierarchy. We identify as master of or slave to our domain; we scan the environment for animate dangers and fight or flee or negotiate with humans. Behavior is still somewhat predictable based on objective place in hierarchy and limited to aggression, fear responses or with humans deescalation tactics.
2b. I do therefore I am. We problem solve; we do things with secondary goals in mind other than survival from procreation to fencing. We identify with an ego that is good at some things both extrinsically and intrinsically rewarding and bad at other things. We are our self-esteem. The environment including our bodies relation to the outside world for cues of success and failure to achieve a goal through action.
3a. I think, therefore I am. The most complex level of consciousness and symbolic thought along with the social self (3b). We identify with the train of symbols we call thoughts (words, images, memories, feelings, etc.).
3b. I am therefore I am.
4. I construct/create therefore I am.
5. I am you therefore I am.
There are eight ways we conceptualize being a person each with its own implications for sensing the environment (e), thinking/feeling (p), and behaving (B). And B/E = p/m x e/c2. Each pair of these selves considered in order are related stepping stones from basic consciousness/feeling to symbolic thought and classic self-awareness.
All forms of learning and memory are represented from instantaneous info. gain and no retention to long-term training (conditioning) and long-term memory and everything in between including instantaneous and short-term retention and requiring a single exposure leading to long-term retention.
Each self has a bipolar emotional spectrum associated; perhaps these are the real universal feelings. One of the implications of these emotional spectra is that perhaps they reconceptualize our ideas about what the targets of psychiatric medications are and each universal emotion as an evolved system meant for example in the case of the existential self, SSRIs might have more to do with adjusting or opening back up the window for learning about your social health and episodic memories; they don’t help reinterpret things in a positive light, that’s for their new experiences to do.
We are all of these selves at once but not.
Subjective relativity has two parts: (1) time goes faster for slower beings and slower for faster beings so that if we were the size of atoms, we could see not even in the quantum realm do things really exist in the same spot at the same time, to a hummingbird we move slower than to a galaxy-sized being to whom we are blurry like particles are to us. (2) Something that develops over time is the same entity at all stages. Space and time became the duality in everything. The caterpillar is the butterfly. We are self-aware particles. The electromagnetic spectrum has the same-ish number of categories as selves as taxonomic kingdoms as chakra etc.
Implications for quantum mechanics might be that two things, like two people’s vantage point on an event can exist as a representation of the same physical space-time in two people’s minds simultaneously. Hence there is no real paradox.
Each self is like an overlay on our visual field, assessing for different things in our environment (e) and their implications for the person assessing. In each domain, different behaviors (Bs) arise depending on what the person sees and where the person lies in terms of their baseline position in each of these domains. For instance, is my relational self paranoid and fearful that people will treat me like I’m lower in the hierarchy because I am naturally insecure. This is the p variable in B = pe. People become much more predictable and therefore safer to be around if we know their p settings and therefore how they are biased in their assessment of e.
To be continued…