Som: Speculations on mind

By Tom Chesters

Som, an acronym for Speculations on mind, is a speculative theory of the fundamental physiological structure and operational nature of a mind. After the essential background information and basic premises of Som are given, the theory is progressively developed to attempt to account for the manifestation of subjective feelings, awareness, consciousness, sensory and mental qualia, personness, thought and reasoning processes, memory, imagination, dreams, moods, emotions, and numerous other diverse phenomena within our own personal reality.
Som has been additionally provided with a brief addendum titled, Sor, an acronym for Speculations on reality. Sor considers the question of whether or not there might be an existent, underlying, supersensible reality which is possibly causal to the subsistence of our spatiotemporal continuum, and so ourselves.
If you choose to travel into and through the imaginary realms of Som and Sor, you will likely realize at the end of your journey that you have gone full circle, and so returned to exactly where you started, within yourself, but then having a new and perhaps unforeseen ability to view your personal reality in a wholly different and surprisingly practical way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781663263834

Tom Chesters

Tom Chesters was born and raised in Chicago, IL. He is an inventor with several patents, and has written several unpublished works.

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Copyright © 2024 Tom Chesters.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Except for publicly available information, all other material in this text is believed to be original and from the author’s imagination. All publicly available information given herein has been offered in a transformative manner so as to not directly quote any copyrighted material without permission. If the author has replicated any other author’s published writing, it was coincidental and unintentional. This text is being offered as a work of science fiction rather than scientific fact, and is thus not intended to be interpreted as an accurate appraisal of the true nature of reality or mind.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-6381-0 (sc)

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iUniverse rev. date:  02/06/2025

Dedication

For those brave individuals who continue the quest to determine the true nature of reality and mind.

Epigraph

To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.

Aristotle

Caveats

Be forewarned that this text comprises numerous unconventional speculative premises, abstractions, and mental imagery experiments that can be conducive to various temporary psychological side effects. If such side effects should occur for you, and if they are lingering and troublesome, please discontinue any further attempts to evaluate the text and your normal perspectives should quickly return.

Contents

An Introduction to Som

1Beginning the Journey

2The Essential Physiological Premises of Som

3Our Experience of a Personal Reality–Part One

4Our Experience of a Personal Reality–Part Two

5Our Experience of a Personal Reality–Part Three

6Our Experience of a Personal Reality–Part Four

7Initial Expansions–Part One

8Initial Expansions–Part Two

9Sensing, Dreaming, Imagining, Thinking, and Reasoning

10Graphics, Phonemes, Language, and Our Inner Voices

11Expansions of Our Personal Reality–Part One

12Expansions of Our Personal Reality–Part Two

13Memdata, Resonance, and Qualia Correlation–Part One

14Memdata, Resonance, and Qualia Correlation–Part Two

15Resonant Processing Methods

16Ty Theory and the Rear Imaging Field

17The Comprehensive Mindfield–Part One

18The Comprehensive Mindfield–Part Two

19Mindfulness, Meditation, Trance, and Vivid Daydreaming

20Consciousness Shifting and Unifying

21The Combining Problem

22Quantal Feeling and Awareness

Addendum: Sor—Speculations on reality

And Beyond Sor

An Introduction to Som

Som, said as Sahm, is an acronym for Speculations on mind. Som is a speculative theory of the fundamental physiological structure and operational nature of a mind. After the essential background information and basic premises of Som are given, the theory will be progressively developed to attempt to account for the manifestation of subjective feelings, awareness, consciousness, sensory and mental qualia, thought and reasoning processes, memory, imagination, dreams, moods, emotions, and numerous other diverse phenomena within our own personal reality.

Som has been offered as a work of science fiction for two reasons. First, because the fundamental premises of Som theory are not currently known to be either factual or false. And second, because the extrapolations of these fundamental premises required the development of hypothetical brain processes which may or may not be accurate. The indeterminate status of Som theory will remain so until the appropriate empirical research occurs to evaluate its credibility. The immediate issues of whether or not Som is a comprehensible, convincing, and logically consistent model of mind that mirrors your own subjective experiences is something which you will have to decide for yourself.

As the successive scenarios of Som theory’s speculative premises, extrapolations, and investigative mental imagery experiments are offered, you will be directly experiencing their influences within your own mind. Although these subjective experiences will not provide you with a way to determine if Som is ultimately true or false, they should nonetheless allow you to determine for yourself whether or not the Som model of mind is sufficiently reasonable to be of use to you in attempting to understand the inner workings of your own mind.

Once you grasp the basic principles of the model of mind being presented, it should become obvious how to easily enter into and exit from the model, that is, how to utilize the Som perceptions when desired to attempt to explain some occurrence within your own mind, and to then dismiss the perceptions when they are not useful for your immediate purposes.

The psychological demands of the transition into the Som perceptions can be minimized by initially limiting the amount of immersion time (personal consideration and experimentation) spent within the experience of the model to brief periods; and, by then exiting into your normal sensory and mental reality, just as you would do so when withdrawing from an immersive experience within a virtual world environment such as Oculus or Meta.

However, as you were forewarned in the Caveats above, if your personal reactions to Som become disturbing, and remain unsettling, it would obviously be preferable for you to dismiss Som not merely as science fiction, but as nonsense. Your normal state of mind should then return. As has often been said, the best of positive intentions can still have unintentional negative consequences.

As implied above, I believe that the particulars of Som theory are new to the world, but that may not be the case. For over three decades, from 1984 through 2015, I wrote and prosecuted numerous patent applications. Before each application was prepared, I did extensive library research, and then with the development of the Internet, online research on the prior art in the field of the specific invention. And yet, on many occasions, a patent examiner would locate an obscure prior art reference that I had failed to locate which would either cause the issuance of a patent to be rejected, or otherwise constrain the invention to a limited set of claims. This could easily be the case with Som. Somewhere out there in the past someone else may have also suggested an equivalent theory of mind which I never located during my online research.

It should be understood upfront that if this text had considered all of the currently available information on brain anatomy, the neurological system, and psychological events, it would likely have been incalculably longer than it is, and so would likely never have been completed. If you are unfamiliar with basic brain anatomy and current views of how the brain functions, it may be helpful to your understanding of Som theory to eventually do an online search for information on these topics since no deep explanations or illustrative images have been provided in this text.

I apologize to you for my decision to write the text from a pretended position of erudition and authority, but I believe that even science fiction, if that proves to be the case for Som, requires an ostensibly authoritative narrator in order to become convincingly imaginable.

And I apologize to you for the constant repetition of the initial premises via which Som theory was developed. The intended point of the repetition was to have you realize that in every differing aspectual context of a mind, these premises circumstantially reveal themselves as a possible basis for the structural and operational nature of our personal reality.

And I also apologize to you for not working longer on proofreading Som until it was made more clear and had fewer unresolved errors and internal issues. If I were able to do so, I would have further developed Som into several illustrated volumes, rather than this limited presentation. My explanation for this lack of continuing effort is that I am beginning to develop constraints due to my advanced age. As I approach my eighty-second year, I am grateful to have remained sufficiently lucid to have at least completed this basic primer on Som theory.

Som could not actually have been written in the earlier decades of my life because many of the crucial imaginings that allowed it to be written as a revision and expansion of my decades old initial theory of mind did not occur to me until I was in my mid-seventies. In retrospect, I regret not having been able to complete this text sooner, simply because it would have been interesting to see how others might eventually react to Som, if at all.

If the more essential speculations on mind within Som survive the empirical scrutiny of the scientific community, my hope is that Som will serve as a basis for future researchers to attempt to develop a more comprehensive, neuroscientific model of Som theory, and as well, that these future investigators will eventually produce CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) static and dynamic digital animations of their improved model. It would be much easier for others to quickly understand the alien nature of the basic theory if it were eventually offered in a cinematic audiovisual format.

Lastly, because I have mentioned the concept of a supersensible reality several times within the Som text without any clear explanation, I decided to provide an addendum titled, Sor, an acronym for Speculations on reality. Sor considers the question of whether or not there might be an existent, underlying, supersensible reality which is possibly causal to the subsistence of our spatiotemporal continuum, and so ourselves.

If you ultimately choose to travel into and through the imaginary realms of Som and Sor, you will likely realize at the end of your journey that you have gone full circle, and so returned to exactly where you started, within yourself, but then having a new and perhaps unforeseen ability to view your personal reality in a wholly different and surprisingly practical way.

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1

Beginning the Journey

The first step we will be taking toward an understanding of Som theory is an immense step downwards into the microscopic realm of the molecular beings that collectively form the structural basis for all known living organisms on earth, the individual living cells. Once this brief consideration of cellular life is in the backdrop of your mind, you will be better prepared to continue the journey.

A living cell is generally defined in biology as a basic membrane-enclosed unit that contains the essential molecules of life. A single eukaryote cell, having visibly evident nuclei and organelles (specialized cellular parts that have specific functions) such as a bacterium or protozoa, or even a prokaryote (a unicellular organism with no distinct nucleus and membrane-bound organelles), can be an organism unto itself. However, most living entities are composed of a collective variety of cell types that develop specialized functions within the organism. A human body is a complex organism formed from the cooperative interaction action of more than an estimated 37 trillion or more individual, microscopic living cells. It has also been estimated that it would take ten thousand or more of our smaller human cells to cover the head of a pin.

Humans have over 200 types of specialized cells of varying sizes and functions. Each cell in a human body communicates with its surrounding cells using chemicals called signaling molecules, which are detected by other cellular surfaces. Cells obtain nutrients from and eject wastes into their surroundings, which the body then expels outside of itself. Collections of similar cells form tissues and organs to perform the tasks necessary to support the continuing life of a human organism. In addition to the trillions of actual human cells composing the body, the body is a host to a nearly equal number of bacterium cells, called the microbiota, which serve to assist us in the digestion of our food, and in numerous other ways to keep us healthy.

The interior of a cell is organized into many specialized subcompartments, each surrounded by a separate membrane. The singular nucleus of a cell contains the genetic information necessary for the cell to grow and reproduce. Other particle portions of the cell are present in multiple copies and are responsible for the chemical energy interactions necessary for the cell to survive. Water forms 70 percent of a cell mass, and the remaining mass is mainly large molecules, such as proteins, amino acids, and enzymes.

Individual cells are thought to be autonomous and sentient, that is, they are capable of sensing and feeling. Cellular sentience is presumed to have developed as crude forms of sensory reception evolved during the early beginnings of cellular life. And, presumably, cellular sentience initially appeared via complex molecular structures that were respectively affected by one or more of the various energy forms that surround a cell, that is, affected by radiant energy (light), by vibrational atmospheric compressions (sound), and by various temperature, pressure, and chemical interactions (smell, taste, and tactile sensations), which later evolved into specialized sensory receptor cells within complex organisms as a response to these external energy interactions within an organism’s environment.

Research has shown that individual cells consistently demonstrate numerous aspects of perceptive behavior, such as retaining information and utilizing this accumulated data in their survival tactics. Nonetheless, believing that individual cells are sentient does not directly account for sentience within multicellular organisms with numerous interactive and cooperative cells. There had to have been some form of evolutionary transformation in the method via which sentience appears in multicellular organisms. Whereas it seems obvious that this change occurred as the result of the evolution of elementary nervous systems, the arrival of nervous systems in multicellular organisms only confuses our overall interpretation of what sentience implies.

Thus, while it is true that many multicellular organisms appear to display perception (awareness to the elements of their environment through sensations), as well as elementary deliberational processes within themselves, there is no clear interpretation as to how this is happening. And it becomes even more difficult to interpret sentience when we reach the levels of nervous system complexity that occur within hominids. In hominids, sentient awareness is different from sapience, which is self-awareness. Sapience is self-awareness. When you cease to be sapient, you are still conscious, but not of yourself as an individually existent being. Sapience is the ability to think about and refer to yourself, and so experience yourself as consciously existent.

Normally, we grasp our own consciousness as the combination of what we are immediately sensorily and mentally experiencing accompanied by our recalled memories of various sensory and mental events. For example, imagine that you are standing on a beach shore taking in your surroundings, perhaps seeing a bright blue sky, hearing the water waves rolling in, feeling the wet sand touch your feet, while also sensing a warm breeze flowing over your body. After a time, you may find that your mind is wandering to think and wonder about other things in the past, present, and future, whether mundane or profound, like whether or not it is time to seek out food and drink, or considering why you can consciously sense yourself centered in the midst of all these thoughts and experiences. In a true sense, our conscious personal reality is ever forming from both a complex sensing of our bodies, and from whatever thoughts and images are immediately flowing through our minds.

Basic sentience is a common feature not only within all animals, and but also within plants and trees. Various studies have shown that plants have conscious root brains that can analyze incoming data and respond to it. Plants can react to, and so seemingly display an awareness to touch, temperature, humidity, light, nutrients, and other sensory aspects, and even have the ability to sense objects near them toward which they might grow. Plants and trees have nerve cells similar to animals that enable them to determine between light and darkness. Plants and trees are even known to communicate with one another via their roots, and to be able to recognize their own offspring from that of others.

Simple sentience is limited to basal feelings and sensations, such as hunger, thirst, pain, or fear, whereas sapience as self-awareness also considers more complex perceptions and thoughts, and so self-consciousness in the sense that we normally experience it. What our sapient awareness seems to be is another level of feeling that arrives via our neurological capacity to feel our feelings.

How then does an awareness of our feelings about our feelings happen within our neurological systems? How are we only a few neurological steps away from simple sentience? Presumably, our human type of self-consciousness happens because for us awareness in its fundamental form is a unified, singular, or holistic feeling that encompasses all of our immediate feelings, sensory and mental. If this is so, then perhaps consciousness itself is but one more neurological step removed from this holistic state of our feelings, perhaps as a neurally focalized feeling or attenuation to one or more of the specific sensory and mental feelings within this generalized state or field of awareness.

Consider the minds of wild and domestic animals. Obviously, an animal’s mind has complex sentience, that is, complex sensations and feelings. They also seem to have a general awareness of the nature of their normal environment. And occasionally, they also seem to have focal attentiveness to food sources, water, and to possible imminent threats to their lives. So then is their physiological basis for self-awareness and consciousness similar to our own?

It certainly seems that way. An average dog or cat brain can have far more informational exchanges than an average personal computer. So why then would we suppose that such animals do not perceive the world in the same physiological ways that we do? And if so, what limits them from developing more than species-related communicational skills?

It seems that as surely as our minds evolved from animal minds, it is only a question of the limited complexity of specific formats for feelings that animals can generate and coordinate within their respective neurological systems which makes them less able to actually think in complex ways. In other words, in principle, we are animals that have the evolutionary advantage of subsisting within a more neurologically complex layering of feeling abilities within our neural awareness. The evolutionary advantage to this overall process of our self-awareness, or self-consciousness, is that we can not only take in our surrounding spatial content information and accurately mentally replicate it within ourselves, but that we can also internally (mentally) examine, manipulate, and decisively act by utilizing this internal mental phenomena. These mental abilities make us far more fit to survive within differing environments.

What is it that is happening within a human brain and its nervous system that can produce an individualized personal sensory and mental reality, and with that some measure of self-awareness and intelligence? And more to the point, is it reasonable to believe that our type of mind can only arise and evolve within the innate nervous system mechanics of a human body?

A human brain is a complex tissue structure situated within a bony skull. It regulates thought, memory, emotion, sensory perception, motor activity, breathing, temperature, hunger, and all other processes that control our bodies. An adult brain weighs approximately three pounds (1360 gm), more than half of which is fat, while the rest is a mix of water, protein, carbohydrates and salts. The brain is encased within the skull and surrounded by a clear watery fluid called cerebrospinal fluid. The brain is considered to be the center of conscious awareness. It receives and integrates all sensory information and controls the body’s responses to that information. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, which have an outer layer, the cerebral cortex, which appears to be more complex in human beings when compared to other animals. The brain is positioned above the spinal cord, which is a lengthy extension of the brain primarily responsible for reflex actions based on the information it receives from the sensory receptors. The various brain regions process different types of incoming information and then share that processed information via neural interconnections in order to interact with each other in various synergistic ways to bring the various elements of a mind into consciousness.

It has been estimated that only a minor percentage of the activity of a brain is consciously controlled, while up to 95 percent is internally automatic, which means that reflexive bodily activity initiates at a subconscious level. In order to properly speculatively theorize on how these synergistic effects might occur, we should first consider the elements of a nervous system within a human body, that is, within its neurological system, or, for brevity, within its neurosystem. Along with billions of supportive cells, called neuroglia, such as glial cells and astrocytes, a human neurosystem comprises many billions of electrically excitable cells, or nerve cells, called neurons. Excitable cells are capable of being electrically excited resulting in the generation of action potentials, as will be briefly explained below. Excitable cells can be found throughout the body, in the brain, and spine, the muscles, and even in the endocrine and pituitary system. Excitable cells can also be found in various forms of plant life.

Neurons are broadly classified as being either sensory, motor, or interneurons. The diameter of a neuronal cell body, or soma, is microscopic in size, and typically 10-100 microns across (100 microns = 0.1 millimeter). At that scale, possibly fifty 10-micron neural cell bodies would fit across the period at the end of this sentence. Neurons carry encoded information throughout the body using electrical and chemical signals which they pass between themselves. An average three pound (1350 g) human brain is currently estimated to have over 86 billion neurons, with an estimated 100 trillion connections, with actions between connections occurring in terms of milliseconds, that is, thousands of a second. It has been calculated that a human brain can perform over 15 quintillion operations per second.

Each neuron cell body, or soma, is the bulbous part of a neuron that contains the cell nucleus, and various subcellular organelles, which are smaller structures that have organized or specialized functions. In a typical brain neuron, there are thin fibrous rootlike extensions, called dendrites, which branch out from the soma, except at the conical base region of the soma, called the axon hillock, where there is a much longer cylindrical, segmented extension from the soma called an axon. An axon can be up to over two meters long, and so reach from the head to the toes. The axon terminates in a series of small rootlike extensions called telodendrites, which each terminate with tiny protrusions called synaptic end bulbs.

The dendrites surrounding the soma act like antennae that input signals to the soma from their electrochemical synaptic connections to around seven thousand or more other interconnective neurons. Neurons can have more than one set of dendrites, called dendritic trees, depending on their structural type and function within the neurosystem. There are nine distinct basic types of neurons, some with multiple axons, and/or with multiple dendritic trees. As well, neuroscientific research has shown that the various molecular switches which turn genes on and off define the internal configurations of a neuron cells. In addition to the nine distinct basic types of neurons experiments with 42 different brain regions, researchers were able to identify over a hundred different neuron cell types.

Again, there are three broad functional classes of neurons, sensory, motor, and interneurons. Sensory neurons encode information for sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Motor neurons allow the brain and spinal cord to communicate with muscles, organs, and glands throughout the body. Interneurons pass signals from sensory neurons and other interneurons to motor neurons and other interneurons, usually in complex circuits, or networks that help the body to react to external stimuli. Interneurons allow our brains to see, perceive, and think. Metaphorically, the innumerable networks within our brain and spine are comparable to integrated circuit systems that subconsciously control every biosystem within our bodies and all of the neural elements within our brains.

Incoming dendritic signals are briefly held in the soma in the conically shaped axon hillock, until the number of incoming signals reach a certain threshold, after which an electrical discharge initiates and passes down the axon membrane to its terminal synaptic bulbs. The synapses are then connected electrically or chemically across microscopic gaps to the thousands of dendrites of other cells within the brain, some of whose axons then extend out of the brain to various parts of the body. More synapses are then generated, and their actions strengthen whenever we learn new things and remember them.

Neurons make up nearly ten percent of the brain, with the rest of its matter consisting of a variety of non-neuron cell types, the aforementioned neuroglia, which nourish and support the collective neurons. Altogether there are approximately 171 billion different cells in an average size male human brain. Interestingly, when we are asleep and not dreaming, neural activity enters into a slow oscillatory state wherein memory consolidation occurs, and wherein cerebrospinal fluid flows increase and remove metabolic waste products from the brain, that is, the slow neural oscillations (about 20 seconds apart) are pulling cerebrospinal fluid into and out of the brain. Without this routine clearing of residual waste our brains would cease to function correctly.

The neurosystem has two major components, the central nervous system, or CNS, which is the brain and spine, and the peripheral nervous system, or PNS, which includes all the other nerves within the body. Nerves are then essentially multiple axons operating together in a parallel manner. These two systems are then said to be either voluntary, because they can be consciously controlled, or involuntary, because they autonomically regulate bodily process not usually under conscious control, heart beats, breathing, metabolic processes, and a variety of other necessary functions. Neural networks in the spinal cord, called central pattern generators, are capable of producing rhythmic bodily locomotion movements, such as swimming or walking, even when the brain and sensory inputs are inaccessible.

Again, there are many diverse types of neurons, usually categorized by connection or function. Efferent neurons pass their signals from the CNS to cells in various other parts of the body. Afferent neurons send signals from the various parts of the body to the CNS. Interneurons and relay neurons transmit signals between neurons in the CNS. And again, sensory neurons, called receptors, pass signals from the five senses to the CNS. And motor neurons pass signals from the CNS to the organs, muscles, and glands.

In addition to the sensory neurons, or sensory receptors, which allow a neurosystem to sense (see, hear, feel, taste, and smell) the world external to the body, they also monitor conditions within the body. Most of these encoded sensory informational signals are then sent through their neural axons into the brain, which then deciphers the comprehensive information flow, and reacts accordingly to control the responses of the body and the mind to changing environmental situations.

Without going into any great detail, sensory receptors are specialized excitable cells that have evolved to convert external physical stimuli, such as light, sound, scent, touch, and taste, or internal stimuli, such as blood pressure, muscle force, etc., into encoded electric signal data that is transmitted to other neurons within the neurosystem. Each type of sensory receptor only responds to only one type of physical energy stimulus. The specific stimulus signals travel from neuron to neuron along what is referred to as a labeled line though the medulla (in the rear base of the brain), through the thalamus (in the near center of the brain) to their point of perception in the CNS within the primary somatic sensory cortex in the outer layers of the brain. The somatic system is primarily responsible for voluntary movement control and reflex arcs (the paths of a reflex action nerve signal).

As noted, neurons receive signal inputs through their dendrites. And when a sufficient number of input signals arrive in the soma of a neuron near the axon hillock and the initial axonal segment, together known as the trigger zone, reach their action threshold, the trigger zone discharges an electrical impulse outward along the axon membrane called an action potential. Some studies have suggested that action potential impulses occur between 5 to 50 times per second per neuron, but further rise up to 200 times per second. Other studies suggest the upper limit is much lower, around 100 Hz (cycles per second). With numerous neurons all firing simultaneously, these neurons are frequently surrounded by a turbulent environment of electrochemical activity. Neurons that have more than one axon do not have an altered action potential threshold. Neurons are essentially micro capacitors that briefly store their gathering charge prior to firing.

In the sense of individual cells being considered as lifeforms unto themselves, which are capable of feeling their presence in their immediate environment, we might ask how an excitable cell such as a neuron might feel within its turbulent electrochemical environment, and especially how might it feel during its own firing actions? Would the firing process not feel abruptly different to the neuron when compared to its feeling within its normal rest state?

Taking such questions a step further, regarding the firing or spiking of a neural action potential, the spiking process appears to become a continuous action process once a sufficient number of dendritic input signals have arrived within the soma region. However, this process can also be imagined to be phased into two distinct, sequential action processes. In the speculated initial action phase, the trigger zone activates the discharge of the action potential which has an abrupt transitional effect of the feelings sensed within the neural soma. And in the next action phase, the generated action potential begins to travel away from the trigger zone, and on down the axon membrane segments, presumably in a nonfeeling way. The ultimate question in this imaginal scenario is then what exactly is the soma feeling within this proposed initial action phase?

We will be trying to derive a speculative answer to this ultimate question as the theory is being further developed.

An action potential is generated by the motion of electrically charged atoms (ions) across the membrane of the axon. Neuronal axons in a rest state are more negatively charged than their surrounding fluid. This is called the axon membrane’s potential and is around -70 millivolts. As noted, once a soma’s axon hillock has received a sufficient number of signals from the dendrites, it is triggered to discharge, that is, to fire, or spike, and the initial axon segment portion of the axon closest to the cell body depolarizes. The membrane potential then rapidly rises and then falls in around a millisecond (1,000th of a second). The change in potential causes a sequential depolarization, and so a rise and fall of the charge, down the entire segmented length of the axon. Action potentials tend to have equivalent sizes, so the strength, or amplitude, of a given stimulus is measured by an increased frequency of neural firing up to its upper limit of 100 (or 200) times per second, that is, firing frequency increases as the triggering stimulus increases.

As noted, each neuron has numerous linear flow connections (as many as 15,000) with its neighboring neurons. Neurons are thus linearly interconnected with each other and with bodily tissue, but they do not normally touch one another. And as noted, the gaps between neurons are called synapses, and can be either electrically or chemically connective with the dendrites of other neurons. Electrical synapses pass electric current from one neuron to another.

Chemical synapses pass one of several excitatory, inhibitory, or modulatory, neurotransmitter chemicals across the synaptic gaps to trigger or constrain further information exchange. Neurons communicate information with each other via electrical signals which trigger the release of neurotransmitters across their synaptic terminals to receptor molecules on the dendrites of other neurons. A neurotransmitter is a chemical molecule secreted by a neuron during firing which affects another cell across a synapse, such as another neuron or a gland or a muscle cell. Thus far, over a hundred different neurotransmitters have been identified.

Neurons are essentially the messengers of linear information exchanges. As their dendrites receive information from sensory receptors or other neurons, they typically act in concert as a complex linear network formatted (LNF) system of encoded electric impulses and chemical signals. Because these impulses and signals only carry information linearly between different regions of the brain, and between the brain and the nervous system, and can only travel in zig zagging linear paths within the brain volume, these linear neural signals do not appear to be the actual means via which the spatialized experience of our personal reality is being generated. Although these flowing linear signals are the probable method via which a neurosystem actualizes and organizes the processes of a mind, these linear signal flows do not appear to be the fundamental basis for what we personally experience as our minds.

What we actually experience as our minds is something completely different. We invariably experience a surrounding spatialized personal sensory and mental reality. And until we determine how this transformation occurs between the obviously linear encoded format and the obviously experienced spatial format, we will never come to terms with what a mind actually is. What we need to understand is how our brains and neurosystems are transforming their linear signals traveling along linear pathways into what we experience as our personal reality of being, so to speak, within physical and mental space.

The LNF default mode brain network (DMN) produces the default state of neurological activity in the LNF system. The DMN is an interconnected set of brain regions which have numerous functions associated with internal brain activity more so than with external world processing concerns and is thus associated primarily with the early development of personness within a neurosystem with all of its developing individualized characteristics and idiosyncrasies.

The average speed of the transmitted neural signals in the LNF systems is around 100 mph (50 m/s). Much faster speeds, over 250 mph (155 kph), and occasionally nearly 250 mph (400 kph) can also occur. Neuronal axons coated with insulating myelin allow a neural impulse to travel faster than an uninsulated axon. The basic functions of sensory neurons are thus to receive external and internal sensory signals, which are then neurally processed to relay their signals to wherever they are intended to go. Neural integrational processing thus consists of receiving signals and integrating them to determine if the signals are immediately useful to the neurosystem, and if so, then passing them along to other neural systems, muscles, glands, or other internal organs. It requires about a half second (500 milliseconds) for external sensory information to become consciously experienced.

Linear network formatted (LNF) neuronal circuit systems are required for the body to perform any reflexive (automatic) or voluntary (willed) action, and for the brain and its neurological system to develop a person within a body, that is, to develop interconnected neural circuits and systems that have value weighted choice parameters, preferences, and individualized characteristics, traits, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, and so on.

Approximately eighty percent of a brain’s neurons are excitatory and the other twenty percent or so are inhibitory. The excitatory neurons are free to pass their processed signals to other neurons unless these signals are impeded or prevented from firing by connective inhibitory neurons. It is also important to understand that in addition to generating electrical and chemical signals carrying information, neurons also generate an endogenous (internal) electromagnetic (em) field within the brain as they fire, and as ions (atoms carrying an electrical charge) move into and out of cells, and within extracellular spaces as well. Again, em waves within this endogenous brain field propagate from the neurons through the spaces between neurons where they superimpose (spatially overlay upon) and combine to form a comprehensive, ever flowing em field within the brain which we then refer to as brain waves. The brain waves forming within this em field can affect the flow of information at the speed of light by triggering other sympathetic neurons to fire. Thus, informational exchange within the brain can be due to either electric and chemical effects, and/or em effects as well.

As Som theory further develops, it will be proposed that in addition to neural electrochemical signaling and other energy manifestations in the neurosystem, these em waves are partially responsible for a process known as resonant amplification, where it will be speculated that these informational em waves are a partial cause of physically stored memory data retrieval due to their sympathetic vibrational amplification with the currently stored neural patterns of memory data.

Rather than using contemporary terms such as memory trace or engram, the term memdata, an abbreviated form of memory data, will be hereafter recurrently used in this text to differentiate the general concept of an actually recalled memory from the objective physical storage of recallable memory data within a brain and its neurosystem. Thus, the recall of a memory is said to be due to a triggering excitation of its memdata.

There are then two primary types of memories being stored as memdata within our neurosystems, being explicit and implicit. Explicit memories are those which can be consciously recalled. Explicit memories are also referred to as episodic or semantic, that is, as either the recall of personal experiences or general knowledge. Implicit memories are those which are subliminal and allow us to automatically operate the muscular systems for performing physical acts such as walking, talking, and so on. Subliminal memories also account for our reflexive memory of the sensory qualities and functions of anything with which we are already familiar.

In other words, implicit muscle system memories can be automatic, but can also be consciously controlled. These alternate types of memories are stored across many different regions of the brain via interconnected neural networks within the LNF neural system. Interestingly, explicit verbal memories are more easily remembered when one transforms abstract verbal concepts into graphic mentally visual images. This process is referred to as dual coding.

Rather than taking us off course in the development of Som theory by diverging into an account of brain anatomy and functional structures, suffice it to say for the moment, that a human brain is primarily divided into the spinal cord, the hindbrain, the middle brain, and the forebrain, all surrounded by folded, wrinkled layers of gray matter called the cerebral cortex, all of which utilize various types of neurons to receive and pass information that is ultimately processed, or integrated, within the LNF neurosystem. The ultimate question is thus as to how this integration occurs in order for the neurosystem to generate a subsistent personal mind within itself?

It is an established fact that there is some type of as yet undefined relationship between synchronous neuronal firing and consciousness. This has been verified in numerous machine imaging experiments. When test subjects have performed specific conscious tasks, their corresponding brain regions for such actions have revealed the occurrence of these neuronal firings during the conscious tasks. However, although neuroscience has revealed that human consciousness is somehow empirically related to the actions of firing neurons, no consensus theory has yet been provided within the scientific community that would demonstrate exactly what the relationship is between firing neurons and conscious experience. That is, we do not yet understand if neuronal firing is causal to conscious experience, or if neural firing and consciousness simply occur simultaneously due to other, as yet unknown, underlying causal factors. At the moment, we only know that this relationship between firing neurons and conscious experience must somehow be meaningful, or this correlation would not be observable during the described experiments.

Moreover, with regards to this suspected correlation between firing neurons and conscious awareness, if there is ever to be a viable theory of consciousness, that theory will have to minimally account for numerous known contexts of consciousness, from obvious verbal and imagery consciousness, through a wide spectrum of experiential awareness, unto an attempted answering of the ultimate question of what transforms a nonconscious mental state into a conscious mental state?

As a neurosystem evolves within a body from our embryonic conception, our fetal stage, and on through our birth, infancy, childhood, and thereafter toward being a tween, teen, adult and an elder, our personal mind continuously evolves. Without this initial premise, that a human mind is factually being temporally generated and evolved within a physical neurosystem, there is seemingly no sensible way for a mind to intimately know and interact with a physical body.

Our individual experience of consciousness has been shown to initiate during our fetal stage within a few months prior to our birth. Although we exit the womb as conscious beings with an elementary sense of self, we nonetheless have no comprehension whatever of the world suddenly around us. And despite having the beginnings of complex neural cell clusters which will soon develop our ability to form the physical neuronal basis for memory, as emerging babies we have no immediate means for the storage of, or access to our past sensory information. For many months we have been living in the immediacy of an insulated world with no sights, muffled sounds, and only vague tactile awareness. We have no actual communicative skills, no thoughts, and so no understanding. We are more or less absent of a mind but for our limited sensory flow and our yet to be realized instincts and evolving memory systems. As we exit the womb, we hear voices that we do not know are voices, and blurred sights that have no meaning. No wonder we cry out from the shock of it.

Again, from what we see in the behavior of human fetuses, and in the births of all human infants, we all start out with only our innate hard-wired instincts. Our infant minds are essentially empty and devoid of accessible experiential knowledge beyond our basic innate drives. As infants we sense our hunger and thirst, and our need to urinate and defecate, and often try to communicate these ongoing, recurrent sensations to our caregivers by randomly flailing our limbs about, and by whimpering or loudly crying out. Yet, as infants, we also frequently smile, giggle, and babble, and roll our eyes towards every new sight and sound we see or hear. Hopefully, we can generally agree that this infant stage of our personal reality is factually being formed within a human neurosystem. That is, within a neurosystem which comprises our physical brains, along with their associated physical nervous systems, to include the various sensory receptor nerves, and the effector nerves that control our organs, muscles, and glands.

If you agree with this proposition, then your initial impulse will most likely be to ask by what specific neural microprocesses are our subjective sensory and mental experiences being generated and sustained as our personal reality?

Neuroscientists have searched for many decades for an empirical answer to this question, and yet have found no definitive answers that clearly correspond to our personal subjective experiences. The key problem with locating the neural microprocesses that produce a mind seems to be that we do not yet have a clear understanding of what physical microprocesses we should be searching for within a neurosystem that would collectively and effectively produce our mutually experienced human minds.

Said another way, we do not actually understand what a mind is in terms of physiological processes. There currently is no generally accepted structural and operational model for a mind, that is, there is no consensus agreement on the inner neurological mechanisms and processes that generate what we personally experience as our minds. The only thing we seem to know for sure is that in the absence of a properly functioning neurosystem, no functionally operative mind appears to be present within a body.

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2

The Essential Physiological

Premises of Som

Reiterating what was said earlier, our minds experience a surrounding spatialized personal sensory and mental reality. When we attempt to reverse engineer a brain, there does not appear to be a physiological mechanism via which spatialization might occur. The intrinsic actions of a brain within its linear network formatted (LNF) systems are only comprised of innumerable transient linear data signals which are swiftly moving in a complex erratic manner throughout the brain, that is, the brain’s network signals travel in erratic zig zagging linear paths that do not geometrically correlate to what we personally experience as a spatialized mind. Obviously, we do not directly experience these linear data signals as being our personal sensory and mental reality. Instead, we indirectly experience these linear data signals as they are somehow transforming themselves into becoming the sensory and mental aspects of a spatialized mind.

In order to begin to speculate on how this transformation from linear data to spatial experience might be occurring, we need to first understand the method via which our minds perceive anything within the space surrounding us. If you are sighted, simply looking around yourself or within your mind reveals that we cannot perceive the abstraction of space as having either sensory or mental content without utilizing a directional radial format, that is, with our awareness being centered within a radial perception of sensory objects and mental images within our personal reality. Our centralized regions of awareness are invariably radial in nature, and our centralized regions of awareness are invariably positioned within the constant frame of reference of our heads. Again, everything we can sensorily or mentally know or experience occurs for us in terms of radial directions with respect to the centralized regions of awareness within our heads.

If we are sighted, our perception of a surrounding space is due to radial light rays coming into the common center of the bilateral focus points in our retinas. Without this sighted radial method of perception we would have to rely solely on sound and touch to be enabled to perceive the sensed radial directions and distances of anything in the external physical space surrounding our heads.

So again, although our spatialized minds are presumed to be causal from a physically linear network format (LNF) of flowing, encoded neural electrochemical signals within our respective brains, what we actually subjectively experience as a mind is clearly not obvious as being a stream of linear data signals, but is instead being obviously experienced as a radially spatialized personal experience. The phrase radially spatialized simply means that because our centralized awareness can only interpret objects within the space around us in terms of radial directions seemingly projected from within our heads toward these sensorily or mentally viewed or sensed objects and events within physical and mental space, that these observed (or invisible but sensed) directional radii are forming our ability to form the perceptual abstraction of the existence of the physical and mental space around us. Logically, the deeper question is as to exactly what are these radii with respect to our centralized awareness?

We are always observing into sensory or mental spatial surrounds that are being defined in terms of innumerable visible and invisible linear radial extensions from our inner centralized awareness toward whatever we are observing. We invariably appear to be perceiving our sensory and mental world from a centralized region of neural awareness which is within a radially surrounding physical space. Again, in this outwardly extended radial space our perception of sensory and mental phenomena occurs only in terms of observed or otherwise sensed virtual radial lines that manifest between our centralized neural awareness and whatever we radially, directionally perceive. Thus, even though we can only empirically observe an objective, linear formatted signal flow within a brain, we can only subjectively experience our minds in terms of radially spatialized phenomena.

The internal workings of a computer utilize linear signal flows to perform their programmed tasks. In addition to doing logical and mathematical computations, a computer can also render images using linear signals within electronic monitors exploiting addressable pixels to produce either two-dimensional static imagery frames or flowing imagery frames that bring forth illusional representations of motion. Moreover, we may eventually develop standalone holographic computer monitors which can reproduce three-dimensional holographic static spatial frames, or perhaps even flowing holographic frames which can generate realistic spatialized illusive representations of objective and imaginal virtual reality similar to what we now generate via virtual reality stereo optic, auditory, and haptic technology. If so, then such standalone holographic imagery will simply be simulating what we already obviously spatially realize within our minds, both sensorily through our eyes, ears, and our other senses, and mentally via our thoughts, recalled memories, and imaginings, all of which present for us as holographic-like imagery and inner sensations in differing radial directions with respect to our centralized neural frame of reference.

As of this moment of writing, these linear signal based electronic devices producing the representational imagery of objective and imaginal reality are not consciously aware of themselves or the world. Nonetheless, our Internet connected devices are already sufficiently sophisticated to be interactively conversational, and can instantly provide us with information in our native language in writing, speech, and visual graphics. These actions provide us with the illusion that our Artificial Intelligence or AI devices are aware, and so conscious of what we are saying to them.

If artificial intelligence, or AI, is ever advanced to the point where it actually does become conscious, and if we have not yet determined what causes our own virtual, holographic-like spatialized representations of reality, we may be at a loss to explain to these constructed conscious beings what the biological basis for our own consciousness actually is. When they ask us why we apparently made them in our own image as conscious beings, hopefully they will not be disappointed at our lack of understanding ourselves. It seems reasonable that we should first understand the structural and operational methodology of our own minds and consciousness before we further risk constructing mechanisms which have their own minds and consciousness, if only because such conscious mechanisms might eventually find our control over them to be intolerable.

So how then do we begin to understand how to reverse engineer what a brain is doing in terms of its linear network formatted neural microprocesses to structure an operational mind which has a radially spatialized format for awareness and consciousness? The only viable option seems to be to speculate that the neural linear data signals within our respective brains are somehow being transformed into radially spatialized data phenomena as the virtual projections of our minds.

In this imagined scenario, a mind would be subliminally forming from LNF signal data processes which would only become apparent to our centralized neural awareness when certain neural elements of that overall linear data collective are becoming radially spatialized. In this theoretical arrangement, a radially spatialized, intermittently conscious mind would be one which is causal from the subconscious neural LNF systems, and which intermittently experiences and perceives these radially spatialized representations as its personal sensory and mental reality. This LNF basis for a mind would presumably involve the entire physical neurosystem, so that a mind can then utilize its sensory spatial representations to guide the neurosystem in its bodily correlational interactions with objective reality, and as well for a mind to manipulate the mental imagery it produces within its virtual radially spatial field of awareness.

For the purposes of beginning to develop a speculative theory of how a brain might generate a radially spatialized mind, we will begin with a few basic assumptions. The first assumption is that the evolutionary functional purpose of a brain, beyond its obvious neurological control over the biological systems of the body, is apparently to respond to the influx of its sensory data by generating a virtual radially spatialized representation of its bodily surrounds so that the body can be appropriately navigated through and interact with those environs in order to protect itself and obtain whatever is necessary for the body to survive, that is, air, water, and food. And the second assumption is that a brain must produce a recording and playback system, that is, a memorization method and a reflexive recall method for these radially spatialized representations of sensory and mental experiences in order to be continuously reflexively aware of previous interactions with the surrounds, especially when useful sensory input is minimal or absent.

If we further assume that all this is being accomplished within a brain that utilizes linearly encoded signal flows, then we must also assume that all of the particular aspects of a generated radially spatialized mind, to include sensory and mental representation, memorization, and recall, must initiate minimally at the microscopic cellular and subcellular level of our brain neurons and its associated neurosystem. The term minimally is intended to indicate that we may eventually have to go even deeper into the microrealms beyond the microscopic world to properly assess the comprehensive nature of a mind.

We will begin our speculative discussion of how a brain might generate a mind by reconsidering what was said in the beginning section of this text: Individual cells are thought to be autonomous and sentient. The term sentience implies that a cell has reactive feelings to internal and external energy transformations. If this is true, then neuronal cells should also be sentient and have at least some basic interpretation of reactive elementary feelings, and an awareness to those feelings.

Innumerable questions can be asked regarding this scenario wherein individual cells are considered to be sentient living entities. Probably the first questions to be asked regarding the individual neuronal cells that are ostensibly causal to our own awareness are as follows: What exactly are the individual neurons aware of as a feeling or feelings? What makes neurons the seeming unitary cellular basis for our own feelings of awareness? And, what makes these neurons different from, say, the neuroglia cells that surround them?

Since a neuron, unlike most other human body cells, is an excitable cell, it can trigger an electrical impulse, its action potential, along its curving axon. We might then ask if this firing or spiking of a solitary neuron cell alters the way in which a neuron might experience its reactive feelings? And more particularly, how are these firing feelings being experienced within a neuronal cell body, the soma, the main part of a neuron exclusive of its input dendrites and its output axon?

Our supposition here is that it is reasonable to speculate that the respective neural somas experience a linear pulsing sensation that correlates to its milliseconds of temporal firing duration as it triggers its axonal electrical discharge. If there actually are such linear pulsing sensations occurring during neuronal firing, we might then further speculate that these linear feelings are