Foreword to the Group of Papers Concerning the
BAL-Looping Framework
As the discoverer of the BAL-looping framework and the author of the first five papers concerning it, I am often asked if I could briefly explain, in the simplest terms, “what it is about.” This two-page foreword provides this sort of brief overview.
The framework tells precisely how the human brain uses a combination of its already well-known functions to create subjective experience. What is subjective experience? It is everything that you have ever experienced and will ever experience. It is all the sounds you have heard, every color, shape, and scene you have seen, every sensation, every feeling, every thought. It is not things outside of you – it is not the vibrations in the air that become the sounds you hear. It is not the light waves that enter your eyes and eventually result in the conscious perceptions you see. In a sense it could simply be called “experience,” except that two people can have an experience together while each has their own subjective experience within that shared event. Each person is a “subject” with an experience unique to them. Your subjective experience, therefore, is something that happens in a specific way exclusively for you; it takes place only for you; only you witness it, and only you know about it unless you describe it to someone else.
Subjective experience is more than the conscious inward experience arising from your five senses. It also includes every mental sensation or process that you become aware of through thought, imagination, recollection, emotion, bodily sensation, or other senses like interoception and proprioception. It comes in various types, called the “modes” of subjective experience. To grasp the meaning of the word “mode,” think of it like the modes of a washing machine – different settings, same basic mechanism. We need to talk about different modes because they are each used for different purposes, and we name them differently. Reading a book is intrinsically different in type from looking directly at a real flower or recollecting some previous episode of your day or life. The modes can be roughly listed, not in any particular order, as conscious perception, imagination, recollection, thought, mental rehearsal or planning, active listening, and so on.
The BAL-looping framework explains how all the modes of subjective experience are created from the same functional operation. This shared operation is not so surprising when you think about it. How often do people say that their inner experience while reading a book is like watching a movie or witnessing events as an observer? And doesn’t recollection share a similar format with observation? And when you listen to someone describe an experience, isn’t the ultimate gist that you absorb similar in format to what you would experience while living it? Upon hearing someone describe something, many people say that through listening they experienced it vicariously.
The framework involves a small number of simply described operations, and the terms are not highly technical – but they fit together precisely, so, like the parts of a finely tuned motor, they must be carefully defined. This careful honing of meaning is done by the two interlocutors in The Seven Dialogues between Haplous and Philonous, which I assume the reader has not read, so those terms are not available to me now. And yet I can still give a clear sense of the framework in rough terms like this:
We all have in our brains very basic units of meaning. These basic units stand in for things in the environment, because we all need to interact with the environment, and that is what our brains help us do. The basic units are the same whether we are behaving automatically (with our conscious attention elsewhere) or using focused conscious attention on the task at hand. When we talk to other people, we are communicating about these basic units of meaning. Words activate them just as much as direct experience does. The word “cat” activates the basic unit for cat just as seeing a cat does. It is this common currency of basic units that makes language useful in life.
Language is an entirely other layer. It is a way to encode and transmit meaning, but always and inevitably it is these basic meaning units – which even nonspeaking animals have – that drive expression and form the end result of reception.
The operation of this transmission through language takes place in two essential channels: one for expression (speaking or writing, for example) and one for reception (listening and reading, for example). The “straight-through” language operation goes from one individual to another and results in the activation of similar basic meaning units in another individual. Researchers in linguistics and neuroscience know that there is natural resonance between these two channels; they work in tandem. What the BALlooping framework adds is:
1. that even incipient expression – activity begun but held back before being spoken – is enough to cause resonance in the input channel; and
2. that early in life the human brain learns to attend to this resonance in the input channel and thereby activate the same basic units of meaning that would be activated by an actual incoming message from the outside.
This process is called BAL-looping, and it is what accounts for all subjective experience, including conscious perception. It is important enough to repeat: 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.
The reader might wonder, then, why people have conventionally tended to overlook the possibility that every mode of subjective experience is generated by the same underlying functional operation. One reason could be that the shared format of recollection, imagination, reading, listening, and conscious perception is so familiar that we mistake it for a quality of the real world around us. But the format is not in the external world. Yes, there are real correspondences between our subjective experience and the outer world. To a significant degree, there is even what philosophers and mathematicians call isomorphism. To convey a sense of isomorphism to readers unfamiliar with this term: a bridge and a tunnel under the same river have a basic practical isomorphism: both connect the same two sides and permit passage between them. But despite that isomorphism they differ from one another in terms of their materials, structure, location, and appearance. Just as the bridge can differ significantly from the tunnel, subjective experience can correspond closely to the outer world while remaining altogether different in kind, with qualities and a format all its own.
This becomes clearer in a simple thought experiment, in which we imagine intelligent beings from another planet arriving on Earth. And let’s also suppose they have a form of inner experience. In this case, they might be adept at tracking many of the same objects, relations, dangers, and opportunities that we track. In that sense, there could be a certain degree of isomorphism between their behavior and ours, and perhaps even between their inner experience and ours, as they are in the same world as we are. But they would not experience the world in the human format. Stated simply, in the terms the reader will find in the BAL-looping papers, we can say that the aliens in this thought experiment would have an inner experience unlike our own, for the very reason that ours is generated by our human proxy transfer device (PTD), which they would lack.
Another reason could be this: conscious perception seems to be strikingly different, qualitatively, from the other modes, as it seems much more tangible and tied to the real world. In comparison, the gist of the meaning we experience in recollection, imagination, reading, and listening feels somewhat mental, partial, or sketch-like, so it is easier to recognize them as internally formed. Conscious perception, by contrast, feels immediate and world-bound, as if the mind were simply looking through a window onto reality. The BAL-looping framework explains this qualitative difference as follows: in the case of conscious perception, the subjective experience is being continuously corrected, enriched, and expanded through iterative return to the same ongoing sensory stream. The brain can move its attention from overview to focus, and from detail to detail, always anchored by the same ongoing stream of sensory input. It can bring its attention back repeatedly to the same spot, stay there, move away, and return. When seeing a rose, for example, it can attend to the overall form, then to one of the petals, then to the stem, then to another petal, in any order of its choosing.
In recollection and imagination, the raw sensory input is missing. There is an existing mnemonic basis for recalling the input, but that basis is preestablished and cannot be expanded or made more detailed. And in listening and reading, the degree of overview and detail is likewise fixed by the author or speaker. For example, the reader cannot generate new detail simply by attending more closely, as the observer of a real rose can. The author may describe one of the petals of the rose, but perhaps not the upper edge of that petal, or the shadowing as the eye moves deeper down into the flower. And the author does not describe the details in the order that the observer can control in actual observation. That continuous anchoring in a live sensory stream is what makes conscious perception seem more directly real and tangible, as compared to recollection, imagination, reading, and listening.
That is the framework in a nutshell. The papers provide a much fuller account, outlining the process in precise functional terms. Some passages might take some time to digest, as the ideas are new, but the reader can be assured that in the end it all becomes clear. With perseverance you will be able to piece the framework together in your mind and grasp how it works. It is illuminating to understand how your subjective experience arises from material processes and their interrelationships. And 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.
John Mark Norman
May 31, 2026