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 what it's all about. If it's important, why not just come out and say it? That will be my aim in this foreword. 

 The framework shows how the human brain works to create subjective experience. What is that? It's precisely everything that you have ever experienced, and will ever experience. It's all the sounds you have heard, every color, shape and scene you have seen, every sensation, every feeling, every thought. It's not things outside of you – it's not the vibrations in the air that result in the sounds you hear. It's not the light waves that enter your eyes and which eventually result in those conscious perceptions that you see. In a sense, it could just be called “experience,” except that two people can have an experience together, but each one of them has their own subjective experience while part of that group experience. That is to say, each person is a “subject” with a specific experience unique to them. Your subjective experience, therefore, is something that you have directly and only you know about, unless you talk about it to someone else.

 And subjective experience is more than the inward experience arising from your five senses. It also includes every mental sensation arising from thought, imagination, recollection, emotion, bodily sensation, or a number of other senses, like interoception, proprioception, and so on. These types of things that can possibly come into awareness are called the “modes” of subjective experience. This word mode is similar to a wash mode, a rinse mode, a spin-dry mode, etc, on a washing machine, and is used simply to call attention to the fact that the subjective experience one has while reading a book is intrinsically different in type from the experience of looking at a real flower.

 The BAL-looping framework explains how all the modes of subjective experience are created from the same functional operation used for different purposes. This shared operation is not so surprising when you think about it. How often do people say that while reading a book it is like watching a movie or even witnessing events as an observer? And isn’t recollection very similar to observation? And when you listen to someone describe something, isn’t the ultimate gist of the meaning similar as well?

 Why is it important to know how the brain creates this? Socrates once said, “Know thyself.” We live in a material universe. Our environment, body, and brain are made of material things and the interactions among them. One aspect of knowing ourselves, therefore, is to understand how our subjective experience is created by our material brains. So this is why all the terms used in the BAL-looping framework refer only to things that exist materially and to their interrelationships. 

 It's important that all the terms refer only to material things, because otherwise there would be a gap in the explanation spanning from the material to subjective experience. For example, if you use the word “thought” or you begin by assuming that the brain somehow talks to itself inside, without stating how, you will never have an explanation that spans from the material to subjective experience. All the basic terms of the BAL-looping framework are material things and their interrelationships. These are the terms it uses to explain how subjective experience is created.

 Do you need to read the papers to understand how it works? Maybe. It's quite impossible for me to express in a few sentences how it works, since you're still unfamiliar with the terms. The terms are not technical, but they are precise, and no one has ever talked about subjective experience and brain function in precisely the same way. So in this foreword I cannot use the actual terms, but I can still give a pretty good idea of how it works 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's what our brains help us to do. The basic units are the same whether or not we are behaving automatically or using consciousness and language somehow. When we talk to other people, we are communicating about these basic units of meaning. The 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 these basic units that makes language useful to us in life. 

When we speak, we are using our language output channel (message going out). When someone else hears what we say, this comes in their input channel (message coming in). Language works because it activates equivalent basic units of meaning in the other person, the same as are activated in direct experience. It is well established among researchers that the language output channel and the input channel work in tandem with one another, constantly influencing one another, in a sort of paired resonance.

 The BAL-looping framework adds one hypothesis: that the brain can learn to repurpose the resonance in the input channel, attending to it, allowing it to activate those same basic units of meaning that are the common currency of experience and language. And it can do this even if the activity in the output channel is merely incipient – a signal that begins but is never outwardly expressed. Even an incipient signal is enough to cause the resonance, which then loops back through the input channel, activating those basic units of meaning. This is subjective experience.

 That’s it in a nutshell. Now, of course, if you are interested in learning more and want to understand in detail how it works, you can go ahead and read the papers. I've tried to write them clearly, but if there are some places that are difficult, I hope you will shoulder through and keep going. I believe in the end you will be able to piece the framework together. It's quite satisfying to know how your subjective experience arises from material things and their interrelationships. And this is not just intellectual knowledge – it really does change the way you see yourself. Your relationship to subjective experience changes once you understand the BAL-looping framework. 

John Mark Norman

November 28, 2025