Manon Van Hoorebeke This emerges from an early evolutionary recognition of ground and gravity, getting a footing and a grasp (literally) and seeing the behaviors of ensembles as movements of their parts. Modern brains abstract all these things.

Thanks dear Karl Sipfle . I was looking for that word "ground" but couldn't remember it, hence, "floor" and "earth" lol.

Regarding your response, I am not sure we are on the same page. What you said is about evolutionary bases that allow our brain to register the ground always as down below (based on proprioception received from the inner ear as well as other proprioceptive clues) and act accordingly. That was not my question, and I know this already.

So your answer was about the "functional" mechanisms of cognition that allow us (or a robot) to function properly in gravity. But I was not talking about possible cognitive mechanisms of 3D navigation. I am not talking about cognition. I am talking about consciousness, and not even the whole consciousness, but only the phenomenal part of it.

I was asking about the phenomenal layer of our experience (phenomenal consciousness), in which there is no reference to compare anything with anything.

Even talking about it becomes difficult, especially if your mother tongue is not English. But let me explain more in the hope that I can convey the concept:

1. We are not even sure if the external ground is phenomenally experienced as down below (within our subjective representation of the world [our phenomenal consciousness). We just assume that the ground is at the bottom. There is no down or up in our mental imagery, unlike a TV screen where there is real matter and real gravity to act as a reference for deciding which side is the top and which side is the bottom.

2. As a matter of fact, as you and anybody know, the very image that our eyes' retinas capture is actually upside down. So if anything, it is even more likely that we are seeing upside down; i.e., the "up" side being experienced down below, However, we seem to be not aware of this and assume that it is the up "at the top".

3. So if there is no reference allowing us to determine which side of our phenomenal experience is the "bottom", then why and how do we experience some part of our mental imagery at the bottom and some other part at the top?

Why is that so?

How does it work?

Again, I am not talking about cognition. I am talking about consciousness, and not even the whole consciousness, but only the phenomenal part of it.

OK, so I write about this, the purely phenomenal level of our experience is a few true raw feels like pain and pleasure (Layer 1). Multiple instances of these plus information yield higher feelings, which are often called qualia (Layer 2), such as "the feeling that something (or myself or the focus of my attention) is "down" or "below" or at the bottom (which is also why my answer is more related to your question than might first appear). Information is involved, it is not pure feeling by the time you get to a typical quale, ie, you are already partly cognitive. Layer 2 is hardest one to understand, especially if you don't already accept the almost as hard Layer 1.

The feeling of down there is recall from somato-motor experiences. Everything about at-the-bottom is experience and brain wiring, nothing else.

The eye flipover thing is the brain synchronizing/calibrating arms and legs with vision.

Vision and somato-motor (kinesthesia-motor) are fused as you know. Internal abstraction of both gives a bottom sense to even quite abstract things.

So you see there is a reference- whatever we get form wiring and whatever we get from experience and whenever we move in space, that is cognitive information we acquire and not affective/phenomenal. If by your definitions cognitive requires active thinking then just call it cold information.

The only part of your mind that is information-free, zero cognitive are the most primitive glimmers of feeling. Everything else is built.

Your question is a nice example to use in explaining the Four Layer Architecture and in particular STFC.

Thanks dear Karl Sipfle . I find your answer quite interesting and agree with most of it, except for that you are still talking about access consciousness, but are mistaking it for phenomenal consciousness.

Exactly the problem lies where phenomenal consciousness has no reference to it. So attributing any information (such as proprioception) to it makes it no more "phenomenal", but simply functional and computational; i.e., access consciousness. --> You are still talking about cognition.

Vahid Rakhshan This is where you need to throw prior models aside where they tend to mislead you. Read afresh only the words I wrote.

In practice, everything we think and do we also feel, because though distinct the cognitive and feeling are woven very tight and early.

With a moment's thought you might see that there will be experience as described. Ask more if necessary.

Thanks

Karl

Thanks dear Karl. So you mean that you are proposing a new model which differs from those prior models? That's totally fine. I can read it and try to understand what you mean without any presumptions. However, there is one major problem: Your comment uses terminologies that are defined in the first place by those very "prior models" but with new, personal meanings assigned to them by you.

Using another model's terminologies and assigning new, personal definitions to those terminologies can cause a lot of confusion. For example, it appears that your concept of phenomenal consciousness is similar to the concept everybody else calls "access consciousness".

In this case, I fully agree with you that "Karl Sipfle's phenomenal consciousness" (which is equivalent to everybody else's access consciousness) has informational references to it.

Lol. I'll have a look when next I have time.

Nice :)