John Mark Norman

This foreword serves as a gateway to the group of papers on the BAL-looping framework. It is written entirely outside the framework’s vocabulary – without technical terms such as neuronal proxies, PTD, looping, and so on – and covers four things: 1) First, for readers not familiar with the philosophy of mind, it explains the gist of what is meant by “subjective experience.” This down-to-earth explanation may also be useful to readers familiar with philosophy of mind, but who may have drifted away from the essential significance of subjective experience in life. 2) It sketches the core mechanism in plain terms: “incipient activity in the language output channel, suppressed from reaching the brain’s motor area (so it never produces actual speech), can still cause resonance in the language input channel. The brain learns to attend to that resonance, and this attention creates every mode of subjective experience.” 3) It discusses an aspect not treated directly in the other papers: why people have conventionally tended to overlook the possibility that conscious perception is generated by the same underlying functional operation as the other modes of subjective experience. 4) It makes a point not often stated in the BAL-looping papers: “...this is not just intellectual knowledge – it genuinely changes the way you see yourself. Your relationship to subjective experience changes once you understand the BAL-looping framework.” (This foreword, dated May 31, 2026, is the same as the version dated December 3, 2025, but with the addition of topic 3.)

What if Hylas and Philonous had known about the BAL-looping functional framework when George Berkeley set forth their famous Three Dialogues? This hypothetical Fourth Dialogue presents what they might have said from this new point of view. When the place of conscious perception in brain function is shifted from input to output, they happily find that they can finally agree. What seemed like irreconcilable differences – between the idealist and materialist views – vanish once they isolate a confusion between a transitive and a reflexive relation in subjective experience. It turns out that Philonous had rightly sensed that conscious perception has the character of something communicated by mind, but had mistakenly assumed that the communication was from one mind to another. But then, when Hylas points out the reflexive relation advanced by the BAL-looping framework, everything clicks into place for Philonous, who then states, “no one becomes an immaterialist simply for the sake of denying an external world. ... My conviction was born of experience – born of seeing, plainly, that what I perceive cannot be made of matter. It must come from mind.” This shows how an age-old opposition in philosophy can dissolve once conscious perception is shifted from the input to the output side of mind. That is, it originates from an incipient signal deep in the language output channel (far inward from the phonological stages, so it is not inner speech) that naturally resonates in the input channel, which delivers only the gist of its meaning back to the brain. This inversion from input to output is especially interesting when considered in light of another inversion advanced by the BAL-looping framework – namely, the rejection of the universally held belief that an operation of recollection necessarily implies a prior session of subjective experience. As in the framework’s explanation of Alfred Maury’s guillotine dream, the subjective experience involved in dream recollection does not need to have occurred before each successive emergence of subjective experience during the process of recalling a dream, or anything else: it can appear for the very first time as each segment, detail, or overview unfolds during the recollection process. (Working Paper – December 14, 2025; includes small adjustments to enhance the clarity of the December 10 update and to give a brief functional description of looping in a nutshell)

This glossary introduces key terms from the BAL-looping framework, explained in detail in Seven Dialogs between Haplous and Synergos. According to this functional framework, every mode of subjective experience begins when the brain learns to attend to the natural resonance created by incipient activity in its own speech output channel. This is a special case of what neuroscientists call neural reuse; in this framework, it is defined as BAL-looping. Grounded in evolutionary theory, the BAL-looping framework makes falsifiable predictions and treats every term as functional and material, never abstract. It begins with the brain at large (BAL), the overall brain-body system whose cybernetic goal-seeking behavior relies on an internal model of the environment. Elements of that model that stand in for entities, qualities, or relationships in the external environment are called neuronal proxies. To communicate these proxies, humans have an additional component which in functional terms acts as a proxy transfer device (PTD) – commonly called the language faculty – enabling the transfer of proxy configurations from one brain to another. The PTD’s outgoing channel for speech carries activity that creates a corresponding resonance in the receptive channel. The BAL discovers that it can attend to this resonance while withholding the final motor act of speech, allowing it to activate proxies internally. This can be described as a repurposing of the PTD – not by rewiring it, but by applying its natural resonance for a new function. This process underlies every mode of subjective experience. In comparison to other theories of consciousness, this framework is more parsimonious insofar as it only involves demonstrably real functional elements and relationships – sensory input, the internal model of the environment, behavioral output, the PTD, and neural reuse – eschewing any further theoretical layers, while still retaining its robust explanatory power. The glossary can be read independently as an introduction or alongside the Seven Dialogs as a review. Readers seeking a fuller treatment – building from cybernetic and evolutionary first principles into a consistent account of subjective experience – are encouraged to consult the Seven Dialogs. (Working Glossary – Updated on April 27, 2026 – Same as the April 14 version, except for adjustments in the entry on the Tape Illusion of Memory to prevent a dogmatic reading that could have implied a restriction on the order of recollection. The explanation was changed to clarify that any dream content – including details from the “middle” or “end” – may enter subjective experience in the first instants after waking, whether as part of a nebulous skeletal overview or as a specific recollective anchor. The restriction is not on order, but on processing capacity: since subjective experience requires real-time resonance, many details will still enter awareness for the very first time only later, successively, as the recollection process unfolds. These changes refine the explanation to prevent misinterpretations due to the Tape Illusion itself; the underlying framework remains stable and unchanged.)

This book-length series of dialogues presents a functional model of consciousness called the BAL-looping framework, which accounts for all forms of subjective experience – including recollection, imagination, and conscious perception. The model begins with a basic principle: any functioning brain, even a nonhuman animal brain, must build an internal model of its environment, using internal stand-ins called neuronal proxies to represent things in the world and guide goal-directed behavior. In humans, language adds a new capability by allowing these proxy configurations to be transferred from one person to another, activating in the listener the same internal patterns that would arise through real-world interaction. This bidirectional channel of expression and reception is called the proxy transfer device (PTD). In infants, a further step emerges: through the scientifically validated process known as neuronal reuse, the brain gradually begins to anticipate its own expressive output. When this happens, the brain at large can access the meaning of that potential expression through proxy activation – just as it would when grasping the gist of a PTD-transmitted message from another person. The result of this shortcut from potential expression to experienced meaning is what we normally refer to as conscious experience. About the format of presentation: because the framework involves a sequence of tightly interdependent concepts, it is developed through a fictional dialogue between two interlocutors – a method used by thinkers like Plato, Galileo, and Berkeley to hone new ideas with more precision than is possible through expository prose, as it allows ideas to be approached from multiple angles, naturally. The seven dialogues unfold in sequence: I. Basic Mechanics – how animal brains model the world and pursue goals, and a brief introduction to the PTD; II. The Gateway Opens – how the human brain gains and uses an added function: predictive reuse of expressive output; III. Dreams and Reconstruction/Construction – how dream phenomena validate the model; IV. The Hardest Questions Become Clear – more validations from split-brain cases, blindsight, and various previously hard-to-explain phenomena from daily life; V. They Saw It Before – how ancient thinkers caught glimpses of the framework, expressing their insights through myth, religion, and philosophy; VI. An Emergent Realm – an extension of the model to society; VII. Ethics and Integration – applying the framework to ethics, meaning, and eudaimonia. (Updates in May 2026: May 1 – minor revisions to a few sporadic passages to clarify that the dialogues focus primarily on human PTD-based looping, while leaving open the possibility of nonlinguistic forms of looping in other animals; also clarifying that the account of ordinary dream construction does not necessarily apply to some lucid dreams; May 19 – slight clarifications made in the “split-brain,” “humming the same tune,” and “life flashing before one’s eyes” sections in Dialogue Four, making them more immediately intelligible, especially for readers less familiar with these phenomena. No substantive change has been made to the framework itself.)

Philosophical accounts of concept mastery often wrestle with how to draw a meaningful line between deep understanding and mere competence – or worse, a kind of linguistic mimicry grounded in social deference (cf. Burge 1979). While externalist approaches have illuminated important dynamics of linguistic and communal coordination, they may leave underexamined the internal, functional state of the individual mind, a gap Rabin (2018) exposes by showing that mastery is not reducible to belief, inference, or intuition, though he stops short of specifying any functional process. The present paper offers a mechanistic framework that attempts to clarify what may be happening inside the individual cognitive system during this shift from deference to mastery. Grounded in cybernetic principles, the framework treats the brain as a unified control system – referred to here as the brain at large (BAL) – and distinguishes its global operations from a developmentally emergent internal feedback process, termed looping, which builds upon the expressive pathways of a proxy transfer device (PTD). Mastery, in this view, is not a matter of social status or external alignment, but a specific, internal functional achievement: the BAL’s ability to deploy well-integrated neuronal proxies (operational correlates of concepts) with autonomy, relying on looping as a strategic tool rather than a crutch. In this way, the framework re-centers the phenomenon of understanding within the brain’s own organizational dynamics – offering a concrete alternative to purely social or abstract philosophical accounts. (Working Paper – updated November 14, 2025, with correction about Burge’s arthritis example)

This paper offers a functional reframing of split-brain phenomena – but not one developed for that purpose. The framework described here was originally constructed to explain core features of brain function: perception, imagination, planning, internal modeling, and subjective access. Only once the model was complete did it become clear that it also accounted – with striking precision – for the puzzling dissociations observed after callosotomy. That unplanned alignment lends weight to the structure itself. To frame this model, we treat the brain as a functional whole – what we call the brain at large – understood as a global cybernetic system responsible for goal formation, environmental modeling, and behavioral control. Within this system, we identify a specialized subsystem: the proxy transfer device (PTD), a lateralized expressive mechanism whose activity is reused internally (a process called looping) to enable reportable awareness. This functional distinction between the PTD and the broader brain at large proves critical for resolving long-standing puzzles in split-brain research and clarifying the architecture of conscious experience. Beyond reinterpreting past data, the framework points toward a new line of research: identifying the difference between looped and unlooped responses. It proposes that what we call “consciousness” corresponds, functionally, to internal looping – a learned reuse of the expressive pathway that gives the brain a new internal resource that is highly effective for many purposes. On this view, split-brain phenomena are no longer peripheral puzzles or strange edge cases; rather, through the lens of the framework, they shed light on central facets of the brain’s operation. (Working Paper – updated February 2, 2026 – the only changes being the inclusion of the last three paragraphs of Section 4, explaining how recent findings also fit within the BAL-looping account.)