**2. What is a concept: opinions and attempts at explanations**

Concepts are categories or groupings of types of experience. In this paper, the concept of *iteration* is in view. This 'concept' is a descriptor for processes, for which both a *processual ending and also the unending* are not determined, is left open by the grammars. Both ways are supposed to exist. The experience of human bodies in temporal space attests to endings to happen. But as previous beliefs in Gods (and today's life sciences) confirm, there are processes that are indeed unending. Apparently, for humans, regardless of which language they speak, there is also a potentially double experience of both bounded and unbounded iterations, generated on the basis of an "inherent kinetic dynamics [i.e.] the experientially grounded affective-cognitional-proprioceptive/tactile-kinesthetic foundations of those dynamics" ([9], p. 36). This inherent kinetic dynamic provides a wealth of experiential input. This experiential input creates variations of sensory qualities and their functions in relation to the needs of a body, for example, structured as right–lefthand functions, and/or as airborne and, incrementally, structure born sounds that develop from tone *signals* (alert, alarm, animosity, also trust, liking, affection, and other emotive underlays) to more and more developed sign systems.

The sign systems that have been developed in the languages of this world, all have the means to communicate—*and to form concepts*—on the basis of the experience of human bodies living in a world that is conceived according to the needs of human bodies. The concepts constructed by human consciousness reflect formative bodily awareness, bodily motivated perceptiveness, and requisite categorizing of experience. "A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world ([10], p. 443)."

### **2.1 Consciousness: the organization of energy in the brain**

Obviously, the *concepts of rainbow*, *lightning*, or *cloud* are grown out of the ability to form them. And what is this ability about? A controversially discussed primary cause is human consciousness as a system that organizes the input of experience and the resulting system of mental processes by building on a neural substrate, in a process of "emergence of conscious mental processing from the neural activity carried by the underlying biochemical principles of brain organization" ([11], p. 1). Is human consciousness then a purely physical phenomenon? In the following, 'energy' is in focus. Is 'energy' a purely physical phenomenon?

*Evidence from neurobiology indicates that the brain operates on the principle of energetic processing and that a certain organization of energy in the brain, … can … reliably predict the presence and level of consciousness. Since energy is causally efficacious in physical systems, it is reasonable to claim that consciousness is in principle caused by energetic activity … ([12], p. 8)*

The denoting of the conceptual entity of iteration by response numbers, that is, *not* by an awake state of awareness, does speak to a directedness of the organization *Configuring a Concept - On Iteration and Infinity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100453*

of energy in the brain. The verbal input of the text that is read is obviously a source from a feedback system that works on and with words, and *also with the syntactic structure* which organizes the word order.

*Feedback systems are self-referential: one part of the system casually affects another, which in turn affects the first. Such systems are apt to generate behaviors that are an irreducible property of the system as a whole ([12], p. 7).*

In total, it is obviously the case that the awareness and sensing of particular experiences are being noted at varying levels of consciousness. Feedback systems and energy in the brain should surely be involved. Do these driving factors then solely reflect the organization of energy in the brain? I would want to keep this question unanswered up to the point, at which other aspects have been brought to the fore.

### **2.2 Consciousness: internal broadcasting**

Feedback systems and energy in the brain are surely driving factors of the processes which happen in the brain and the body. The question is whether personal awareness is just a weak offshoot, that is, the end-product of non-conscious processing. The commentary below seems to confirm this latter aspect.

*The experience of consciousness is a passive accompaniment to the non-conscious processes of internal broadcasting and the creation of the personal narrative. In this sense, personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them. Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting ([13], p. 1).*

Oakley and Halligan further suggest that the sense of agency and self has a role to play in human lives. "We argue, however, that central to the traditional domain of consciousness is a personal narrative created by and within inaccessible, nonconscious brain systems where personal awareness are end-products of widely distributed efficient, non-conscious processing …." (p. 13). They further suggest that personal awareness "lacks adaptive significance like rainbows or eclipses" (ibidem)

Neither Oakley and Halligan, nor Peperell ascribe an agentive-reflective consciousness function to the brain. They rather stress the non-conscious processing as fundamental to the living with an identity of a self ("with a personal narrative"), the latter as the end-product of a non-conscious processing.

#### **2.3 Conceptual organization, its experiential** *substance***, and processual dynamics**

In the following, I will refer to authors who attempt to find out about the question of how the self, that is, the end-product of 'non-conscious' processing, comes about. They stress the *qualities* of the first-person perspective, and the *levels of experience*, that allow for actively anchoring words in human communication and thought.

#### *2.3.1 Jose Musacchio: the transparency of experience*

Musacchio highlights the difficulty as follows: He suggests that "…the most misleading factor in the understanding the nature of the mind and conscious

processes is the *transparency*<sup>1</sup> of experiences and the imperceptibility of the neurobiological processes that realize them" ([14], p. 425).

*Transparency reflects the biological advantages provided to organisms by avoiding the proliferation of superfluous sensing and the regress implied in sensing the sensors and analyzers ad infinitum. The downside of simplicity and the price for biological efficiency is that through introspection, we cannot perceive the inner workings of the brain. Thus, the view from the first person perspective creates the pervasive illusion that the mind is nonphysical. Sensing the environment requires encoding information into neural surrogates, which I conceive as contingent processes that when incorporated into conscious processes become qualitative experiences (ibidem).*

Such qualitative experiences (*qualia*) are also shared by the living beings that we call animals. "Experiences have high biological value, because … they allow [all] organisms to make intelligent choices (ibidem)"

The phylogenetically conserved neural structure that allows for qualitative experiences relies on the information received by the senses, and then on being processed by pathways in the brain. "Colour, motion, depth, shape, contours, distance, etc. are processed in multiple cortical areas" of the brain ([15], p. 72).

We normally perceive bodily experience as very different from thought. When realizing the complexity of the interplay of a body and a functioning brain, the picture changes.

*"[C]onsciousness and the self are neither a thing nor a substance, but a collection of processes, which include sensations, perceptions, and memories. … [C]onsciousness and the self are a collection of dynamic processes, which incorporate not only the current experiences, but also all our current thoughts, memories, and emotional states" ([15], p. 78).*

As is obvious, Musacchio's reasoning concretely informs the view that the sign systems, notably the sign systems of the world's languages, are all based on the experiential reality of human bodies. No concept would have been formed if there was not a 'collection' of bodily processes, including 'sensations, perceptions, and memories', firstly, as concrete momentary experiences, and also as chains of experience that are reflected from conceptualized pictorial, verbal, or other sign-system experiences.

The nested and interlaced cellular structures of our bodies, with the brain in the role of an aligner control unit, are the non-conscious resources, the underlay of our consciousness. When describing the cellular interplay with the view to learn more about 'how' we arrive at and 'live' with the experience of being conscious, various authors explore specific ways and stress somewhat different aspects. In the following, I give a summary account of the aspects highlighted by Fuchs [16].

#### *2.3.2 Thomas Fuchs: the body as a point of conversion*

Cells, and higher organic units, are the building blocks of organs whose interplay results in the wholeness of an experiencing body, and the brain configures elements of experience "into resonant patterns that form the basis of integral acts of life" ([16], p. 169). The wholeness of this experience is not found inside a body alone. Like bodily processes belong to one processual dynamics (sensations, perceptions,

<sup>1</sup> my italics

*Configuring a Concept - On Iteration and Infinity DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100453*

memories), elements of an Umwelt are equally focused on and are also functional for a wholeness of the conscious experience of being in a situation.

*Let us take the example of an instrumental action such as writing a letter. In order to do so, I pick up a pen that was previously outside my perception, but had already been preconceived by my imagination. It is also suitably shaped for being held by my fingers and has an expected weight. In other words, my lived body already anticipated the pen through its habits and protentions (p. 138).*

The gist of this observation declares an Umwelt as part of the 'personal' consciousness that relies on the input of a processual interplay of the nervous systems of a body. In a similar vein, Fuchs remarks: "There is no 'pure' pain, no 'plain' seeing or hearing. Conscious experience is not put together from components at all; it is, conversely, from components at all; it is conversely, a *primary unified process* or a '*stream of consciousness*', which differentiates into specific activities and achievements according to the particular demands of the situation" (p. 48).

To sum up, Fuchs posits that consciousness is everywhere. It is nourished from all regions of the body, brain, and an Umwelt. What is called the 'mind' is thus not a solitary cellular entity. "[T]he brain as such does indeed not contain more consciousness than, for example, the hands or feet; only as a whole is the living creature conscious, does it perceive or act. (p. 136)" During perceiving and acting, *meaning* plays the role of explicating the directions and purposes of perceiving and acting. Fuchs compares the role played by consciousness to the 'Necker's cube' for explicating the wholeness of the seemingly diverse spectrum of perspectives it can represent. The 'subject' is revealed as embodied, whereby the body is the 'point of conversion'. Fuchs cites Merleau-Ponty, stating that consciousness is "neither mere *consciousness* of the body nor objective *physical body*. (p. 75)" He summarizes: "A person's life acts therefore both exist in an inner and outer sense—they encompass lived experience *and* expressive behavior (p. 82)".

#### *2.3.3 Mark Johnson: continuous nestings of cellular connectivity*

Johnson argues for a nondualistic, nonrepresentational view of mind as "a process of organism-environment interactions ([17], p. 117) that relies on neural maps. Higher up the neural-structure chain the organizing structure of experience combines, e.g., perceptual fields by creating image schemata (center-periphery, compulsion, attraction, blockage of movement, "to name but a few aspects of what Leonard Talmy calls 'force dynamics' ([17], p. 137).

*The bodily logic of such force schemas will give rise to specific inferences that we draw, based on the internal structure of the schemas. For instance, objects move at varying speeds, they move along trajectories, there is a rhythmic flow to their movement, they start and stop, etc. (Johnson, ibidem)*

The cellular processes of human bodies all occur in nested systems, which combine in hierarchies of further overarching nestings, experienced as 'up-down, compulsion, attraction, blockage, scalarity'—thus, reflecting ever-ongoing connectivity of the cellular units of living bodies. With different contexts of everyday life, adapting the needs of the body to the momentarily available resources is an ongoing process. The needs of the body are experienced by variations of 'feelings' that require a response.

*Because we must continuously monitor our own changing bodily states, we are exquisitely attuned to changes in degree, intensity, and quality of feelings. Such*  *experiences are the basis for our sense of the scalar intensity of quality … In other words, because the qualities (e.g. redness, softness, coolness, agitation, sharpness) of our experience vary continuously in intensity, there is a scalar vector that applies to every aspect of our qualitative experience (Johnson, 138).*

There are then various directions of continuous cellular connectivities, usually described as the effects of a 'mind'—in three dimensions: "[Y]ou need a human brain, operating in a living human body, continually interacting with a human environment that is at once physical, social, and cultural. … no brain, no meaning; no body, no meaning, no environment, no meaning" (p. 155).
