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Saturday August 22nd, 3:30 - 4:30 pm
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Because some of you asked:
Here are the monthly orientation statements from the course guidebook of the On Being Conscious Course:
Month 1 Orientation: Global, State, Naturalized
The first month teaches the student how to enter GSNV. This is more difficult than it sounds. The ordinary educated mind has been trained to begin with separated things. It asks what a thing is, what properties it has, what causes act upon it, what category it belongs to, and what function it performs. These are not useless questions. But they are not first questions in GSNV. GSNV asks first: What is the global state within which this phenomenon appears? What evaluative field gives it salience? What co-variant motion-relations hold it in form? What potential does the field make reachable? What has been subtracted by the dominant interpretation?
Month 1 therefore performs a kind of decontamination. The student learns the first principles of GSNV and begins to identify the malwares that block them.
The month ends with OntoEdit, because GSNV requires an interpretive discipline. Without OntoEdit, students often use GSNV terms while remaining inside lower-level thought-forms. They say “field” but still mean “context.” They say “co-variance” but still mean “correlation.” They say “potential” but still mean “possible future.” They say “mind” but still mean “brain.” OntoEdit trains the movement from lower-level interpretation to metaphysical contact.
Month 2 Orientation: Mindedness (On Being Conscious)
Month 2 introduces one of GSNV’s most important moves: mindedness is not first a thing inside a brain. Mindedness is the dynamic region between arousal and satisfaction. This shift opens a wide comparative field. It allows us to study plants, animals, humans, and machines without reducing them to one another. It also prevents two familiar errors. The first error is anthropocentric narrowing: only beings with human-like consciousness count as minded. The second error is inflationary projection: every responsive system is treated as conscious. GSNV avoids both by distinguishing responsiveness, mindedness, intelligence, consciousness, and self consciousness. Mindedness is broader than consciousness, but it is not identical to mere responsiveness. It appears where arousal, evaluative field, schema, action, and satisfaction form a dynamic loop.
Month 3 Orientation: Motion-Relations
Month 3 builds the metaphysical core. GSNV does not begin with substance. It does not begin with isolated objects bearing properties. It begins with motion-relations. Motion has no meaning without relation. Something moves only relative to a frame, a background, a reference, a gradient, another body, a rhythm, a boundary, or a possible satisfaction. Direction is not metaphysically simple. Approach and withdrawal depend on frame. Agency depends on what invariants are selected. Motion-relations allow GSNV to rethink causality, potential, form, agency, and life
Month 4 Orientation: Trophic Lift and Topological Spaces
Month 4 teaches students how GSNV understands novelty. Modern discourse often uses “emergence” when something new appears. But emergence is too often a placeholder. It names the fact that something new appeared without explaining what changed in the possibility space. GSNV asks more precise questions:
What new properties, processes, and powers appeared? What prior reachability conditions had to exist? What trophic necessities structured the transition? What paths closed? What paths opened? What topology governs the new space? What kind of evaluative field was formed?
This is the work of trophic analysis.
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