Stephen G. Perrin

The model of consciousness developed here is a cooperative venture between mind, brain, body, nature, culture, community, and family. The overall unity of consciousness is provided by the loop of engagement that conducts intentional action into the ambient. Each successive round of engagement between subject and world generates a gap of disparity between remembrance of purpose or intent and the effect achieved on the operative level of understanding within a larger taxonomic scheme in experience. That gap sends a delta signal that arouses various parameters of motivation to form a configuration that constitutes a felt situation within subjective experience. That delta signal and felt situation are nothing other than our subjective experience of consciousness. Situated intelligence is the first-person awareness stimulated by a particular complement of motivational parameters.

The problem toward which this study is directed the structure of experience--particularly the ongoing dynamics of that structure. Access to the world of phenomena is sought through the gate provided by metaphor which, in spite of its merely figurative reputation, leads directly to the sanctum of experience itself. Here the mutual interaction between tenor and vehicle is discovered to be the paragon of all coherent experience in which rude sensation is able to achieve a state of simultaneous resonance with some small residuum from the experiencer's heritage of remembrance. Thus follows a search for the neural substrate that might support such an ancient empirical notion, a search leading to an appreciation of the dialogical relation between sensory discrimination and intentional understanding, two processes locked together as complementary aspects of a single looping, self-regulating, effort after meaning. The thrust of the study then becomes directed toward an understanding of the balance between mutually opposing--yet compatible--factors by which genera and specimen become conjoined in a hermeneutical circle by the remarkable physiological calculus that gives us lived experience. The method employed has been to approach the experiential process deliberately from as many perspectives as possible, covering the gamut between metaphor and mythology. In every case evidence is gathered in support of a dynamic structural view of experience based on the resonant interaction of two separate factors which represent the abstract epistemological and concrete ontological aspects whose conjunction constitutes coherent episodes of lived experience. The implication of such a state of resonance is that all experience is perspectival and all knowledge partial and selective. Intersubjectivity is shown to be an achievement of a synchronous performance of expectancies by dialogical confederates. The conclusion is reached that every portion of this study is consistent with a phenomenological empiricism that holds experience to be determined by the coeval genesis of essence and existence at a level of discrimination determined by the experiencer's contextualized investment of motivation and interest. The appositeness of that synthesis is signaled by what can only be termed an aesthetic conviction