Theory of Mind | The Seamstress of Sense as a Well of Knowing

Despite knowing 'awareness' vividly and intimately, its enigmatic nature still eludes us. This causes us to ponder its qualitative character and wonder what exactly is consciousness?  Adapted from my book The Baseless Fabric of this Vision: what follows is a unique and original theory of mind. It is one that understands consciousness to possess a formal structure similar to that of a quantum field while framing it as a "well of knowing" and "seamstress of sense." I hope you enjoy it.

All that any of us have ever known is a world filtered through various sense organs. Defined by a unique geo-historical origin, every human being — every "witnessing presence" — has only ever known their own perspective; their own mind’s representation of how the world might be. We do not perceive the world as such and ignorance defines the boundary of our being outskirts of this sphere; it is formed of an unfathomable amount of knowable yet out-of-reach information.

Consciousness is immaterial; it’s not something we can bump into or grasp in any way. In this respect, it seems to possess a substantiality that directly opposes the world of matter as we commonly encounter and conceive of it.

We live consciousness as an amalgamation of sensation, a unifying movement that sutures sense. The capacity to ‘bear witness’ is in reality a mechanism that grasps and sews together various “modes of being in touch with the world.” Taken together, these form a single, unified impression or image, always extended in space and flowing through time.

To capture everything that a single human consciousness reveals and contains, in even a single instant, would exceed the capacities of propositional language. A catalogued description would have to include the kaleidoscopic field of vision, the felt being of every inch of their body, every ache, pain, and internal sensation, any overarching or underlying mood, any possible emotional quale, their current desires and the contents of thought, any scents, sounds, or tastes, and a reference to the very ineffability of consciousness itself.

Let’s take this moment to make the case that everything consciousness knows is a sense. In the preceding paragraph we articulated the many aspects of reality that it is in touch with. Some are made by us, that is, we make some things the case, (social institutions, regulations, and laws) while other portions of consciousness are not made by us but instead are presented to us. This portion is the That which exists apart from us, or that which we don’t make the case. Regardless, every “way” in which consciousness can grasp something, it is known to it as a sense.

For instance, knowing by way of the heart — to be in touch with various emotions — is to have access to an unbounded sphere of experiencing. A domain made manifest by the public nature of our being, where every emotion is known as a sense. One regarding the way in which something is, in this case, how “the self” feels. Knowing with the head, via cognitive rationality, the province of thought is a (possibly higher order) sense made possible by our already complex form of consciousness. Unlike the emotions, the contents of thought is not bound to the self but can know of its relations to external reality.

A Seamstress of Sense

By coherently distilling a phantasmagoric scene and presenting it to a witness, as the witness itself by way of a unity of sense, consciousness may best be understood as a seamstress of sense and well-of-knowing.

As the seamstress of sense, consciousness is the mechanism that weaves together the raw data received by the various sense organs and looking-back on them knows them by what they have provided. She is a seamstress not restricted to the five primary senses first identified by Aristotle but incorporates somatosensory embodied being, emotions, thinking, and self-consciousness as further “senses.” The braids with which she weaves are the “knowable avenues” that consciousness is capable of grasping. These threads are never empty but are “full” of phenomenal qualities, information, and data.

In line with our grand image of reality as a crystalline fractal of Infinite proportion, we are free to geometrically model these braids as open-ended “dimensions” available to consciousness. Generally speaking, as with the structure of special relativity’s unified spacetime, consciousness has three “spatial” dimensions, and one “time” dimension: we think, feel, sense, and do. Its “spatial” dimensions have that aspect because that’s how they are for us, they are, in a sense, determinate Being.

Thinking is spatial because it concerns itself with the relations of discrete conceptual objects. Feeling because it concerns itself with the expansion and contraction of the experiential self as seat of all-knowing. Sensing because it defines bodily being. Vision, for instance, so far as consciousness is concerned, is the environment, its very spatial extent. While its “temporal” dimension of doing is expressive of indeterminate Becoming. In conscious experience, will and the arrow of time express one and the same movement. The arrow of which is singularly directed because it signifies the endless registration and computation of mutually interacting and proliferating degrees of freedom.

More than this though, the field of consciousness is not relegated to a four-dimensional arrangement but has available to it indefinitely many dimensions in which it may vacillate. Just as the imaginary number line is not relegated to the real, but nevertheless departs from it, so too does consciousness have access to “dimensions” that lie above and beyond the Euclidean plane of thinking, feeling, and sensing. To see how they are dependant upon but nevertheless depart from one another consider an “imaginary” number.  An imagery number is like a real number — indeed, they are as existentially actual as real numbers are with regards the province of mathematics — but instead has a value in an orthogonal dimension with respect to its real counterpart. The combination of real and imaginary numbers results in complex numbers.

With regards a physical field theory, when we speak of a field’s configuration classically, we assign to every point in space a real number. This number is meant to indicate the value of that field’s determinable property (say, its mass density or gravitational potential) at that location. Quantum fields use complex numbers to assign values to spacetime points. This is because at any “point,” there may be more than one determinable property (or one determinable property that has a value in multiple dimensions) lying — in a similar fashion that separates real and imaginary number — in a particular dimension. Furthermore, quanta are characterised by imaginary numbers because they possess both a phase and amplitude and defining them at a single spacetime point requires their use.

Consciousness as a Quantum Field

In this precise sense, consciousness is a kind of quantum field as it has a “value” in multiple dimensions at once. To see my meaning and further analyze consciousness with the ontology of the Infinite, a “sense” codifies a “direction” or “dimension” that awareness can see, move, and oscillate in. Each of which is unbounded. “Death,” Wittgenstein reminds us, “is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”[1]

Sight, along with the other four primary senses, are “directions” available to awareness, each a “dimension” of experience rich in phenomenal qualities (qualia), and degree of depth of complexity. Conscious awareness always has a portion of itself invested in these many variated sense modalities as well as shining some of its light on thought processes, bodily sensations, memory and the generative apparatus that begets a coherent image of the self itself.

Every sense is without limit in the sense that there is always more to uncover. One might say that the visual field is but a mere portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, or that the human ear only hears between certain frequencies, and you’d be right. But this does not mean that the fields of experiencing them are. There is always more to see beyond the horizon, more kaleidoscopic arrangements of colors in the scope; more complex orchestral symphonies of sound.

As an example of “depth,” we can speculate that sight — as a “dimension” belonging to the field of awareness — is qualitatively richer for the mantis shrimp than the human being. We live human vision but know by science that it is the combinatory result of three “channels” of color (red, green, and blue). The mantis shrimp, on the other hand, is privy to twelve channels of colour and can even detect ultraviolet and polarised light. By this, we believe that its phenomenal consciousness, the world of its vision is profoundly different, probably far more vivid — psychedelic even — than that of our own. The visual field of the mantis shrimp, when understood as a field-phenomenon, is activated and actualized to far greater degree than humans are able, to a far greater “depth.”

Modeling the mantis shrimp as a quantum system — as we shall later do with all autopoietic, self-constituting organisms — we might say that the amplitude depth of that portion of its wavefunction that deviates and samples the electromagnetic field and is lived by it, as its own visual field of vision, is activated to a greater degree than the human is capable.

All the while, every creature endowed with an eye, no matter how complex, samples the self-same field. As Schopenhauer rightly observed: “We are only that one eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures.”

In seeing, we all see one and the same “thing,” actualized to greater or lesser degree, for it is the field of consciousness itself. The degree that an organism is capable is dependant only on the complexity of its constituting apparatus. The mantis shrimp’s visual system being more complex allows it to unfold and compute more information contained within and regarding it.

Not limited to sight, but relevant to every sense that any and every creature everywhere has ever accomplished and achieved is a unique expression and activation of the great sea of sentience; the timeless, unitary, universal field of consciousness.