BAL-Looping Framework Glossary

Part 1: The Foundational Engine (The Basic Animal Brain)

Brain at Large (BAL)

The brain at large (BAL) is the entire control system – brain and body working as one. It regulates all activity of the organism, using sensory input and internal feedback to guide actions toward achieving and maintaining its goals.

The BAL includes every process that supports the organism’s operation. It isn’t confined to the brain – many functions run through constant exchange with the body, which is why the boundary between them isn’t very useful in practice.

Another way to think of this is to imagine a Venn diagram where the BAL represents the entire frame – the complete operating system of the organism. Later, we will examine one particular area within this larger space: the language faculty, which in functional terms is called the proxy transfer device (PTD).

See also: Goal-Seeking System, Internal Model

Goal-Seeking System

The BAL is constantly working to bring the organism from its current state to a goal state – a configuration that satisfies internal or environmental demands (e.g., satiety, warmth, safety, social inclusion). These are not goals in the psychological sense, but functional targets shaped by the organism’s evolutionary and developmental history.

The BAL is not a passive responder to input. It is an active, cybernetic operator that adjusts the organism’s behavior to bring the sensed world into alignment with its internal needs. But it cannot do this by simply reorganizing itself. A goal state is not something the system can declare or imagine – it must be achieved in the world.

As an imperative imposed by evolutionary constraints, the BAL must close the gap through action, not mere internal rearrangement. Any achievement of any goal state must be matched with information streaming in through the sensory system, confirming it.

See also: Brain at Large, Internal Model, Thermostat Analogy

Internal Model

To guide the organism’s actions consistent with its needs, the BAL embodies information about the environment. According to cybernetic theory, it does this by building and maintaining an internal model – a continuously updated set of learned configurations that reflect patterns the BAL either possesses innately or has built through interaction with the environment.

This model is not a symbolic map or abstract representation. It is a functional counterpart to the environment: a real-time structure that behaves in ways that match the relevant parts of the world. The model embodies the cause-and-effect relationships and temporal dynamics of the environment – how things connect, influence each other, and unfold over time. Like an interlocking logical machine, it captures not just where things are positioned in space, but how they are situated in time and in terms of causation.

The internal model changes as the BAL interacts with the environment. Its value is measured by how well it supports the organism’s continued operation, not by how closely it matches an idea or description.

See also: Neuronal Proxy, Proxy Configuration, Goal-Seeking System

Status Quo Ante

The brain at large carries forward an expected state of its surroundings rather than rebuilding its internal model from scratch each moment. This status quo ante is a baseline sense of “how things normally are,” and it works because it is efficient: by holding on to what is already familiar, the BAL avoids the constant effort of full re-analysis.

Instead of continuously reconstructing the whole internal model in a Sisyphean effort, the BAL makes quick checks to see whether the present still matches what it knows. Very often, everything lines up and the system can move forward, using its operational resources for other purposes.

But when it discovers something different from that expected state – a new object in a familiar room, an unexpected sound, a change in someone’s manner – it immediately narrows its attention. The difference is examined until it is understood and absorbed into the model, which then becomes the new “normal.”

This habit of mind explains many everyday moments: when one notices that furniture has been moved; when one sees a cat pause at something unfamiliar in its territory; or when one drives along a customary route while thinking of other things until some unexpected situation pulls the focus sharply into the present.

The status quo ante shapes all BAL activity, not just sensory perception. Social exchanges, bodily states, even abstract reasoning lean on the same strategy: hold on to the familiar, and turn full attention to what changes.

This way of working has been in place for hundreds of millions of years and runs constantly, with or without looping. It is one of the BAL’s most basic ways of keeping its inner picture of the world in step with both the outer environment and its own internal state.

See also: Internal Model, Overview and Focus, Search Templates

Neuronal Proxy

This phrase is used in its most straightforward sense. “Neuronal” because it involves neurons, and “proxy” because it’s a stand-in – an element that takes the place of something, at a different location. A neuronal proxy is something within the brain’s internal model that stands in for a discrete element in the external environment.

A neuronal proxy is not a single neuron or even a localized cluster of neurons. It is defined functionally, not anatomically. A proxy may be a widely distributed pattern spanning multiple brain regions, a dynamic network that shifts over time, or a complex configuration involving millions of neural connections. What makes it a “proxy” is not its physical location but its functional role: it reliably corresponds to a specific, discrete element in the organism’s world.

Any given proxy is a stable, innate or functionally learned configuration that arises through interaction with the environment and becomes part of the internal model. Each proxy corresponds to a distinct entity, quality, or relationship – for example: red, dog, behind, rough, above, or warm. These function as atomic building blocks (components) that maintain their discrete identity while combining with other proxies into larger configurations.

Proxies are not ideas or symbols. They are operational structures – patterns of activation that consistently emerge in relevant contexts and influence behavior. A proxy for “red” remains functionally identical whether applied to an apple, a car, or a sunset. A proxy for “behind” works the same way whether describing spatial relationships between trees, people, or buildings. Their usefulness lies in this stability and reusability: when a particular element is encountered again in the external environment, the BAL can use the same neuronal proxy, treating it as a familiar, discrete component.

A helpful analogy is the Micronesian stick chart – a navigational tool that is not a graphic map, but rather made of sticks, pieces of rope, and shells, with each part corresponding to a real feature such as an ocean swell, current, or island. In the same way, a proxy is a stand-in for something specific in the environment, serving as a discrete functional element the BAL can use whenever that same condition is encountered.

See also: Proxy Configuration, Proxy Activation, Internal Model

Proxy Configuration

This phrase refers to an interrelated grouping of proxies. The largest possible proxy configuration is the brain’s internal model, while any connected grouping of it can be referred to as a proxy configuration.

A proxy configuration is simply a group of stand-ins that are active at the same time and connected in ways that match their real-world relationships. Together, they form a small model of some part of the organism’s environment. These groupings change constantly as the BAL responds to new situations.

Configurations are not language or pictures. They are functional structures in the brain – interrelated stand-ins (internal proxies) that together give the BAL something it can work with when guiding the organism’s behavior.

See also: Neuronal Proxy, Proxy Activation, Interfunctional Complementation

Proxy Activation

Activation refers to the event by which a proxy from the BAL’s total repertoire becomes active – brought into the working model the BAL is running at that moment. Any event that brings a proxy from potential into active use constitutes activation.

Proxies never work alone. Once one is activated, it always joins others in a configuration that models some part of the organism’s environment. The BAL can then work from that model to guide behavior in real time.

Proxies can be activated in three main ways:

1. Direct environmental input – This is universal in animals. Something in the world triggers the stand-in directly through the senses.

2. Interindividual communication – Humans can use structured signals (speech, symbolic gestures) to activate matching stand-ins (proxies and proxy configurations) in another person’s BAL. Many animals do signal to one another, but their signals don’t transmit a detailed scene. A bark might mean “danger” or “come,” but not “three birds on the branch” versus “two birds on the rock.” So, while many species communicate, only humans can transfer well-formed proxy configurations.

3. Internal reuse of incipient activity in the outgoing speech channel – This is also uniquely human. The BAL can activate its own stand-ins (proxies) through a process called looping: the activation of neuronal proxies triggered by incipient activity in the brain’s own outgoing communication channel. Think of it as the BAL eavesdropping on what it could potentially say, thus activating the same internal structures as if that message were received from someone else.

See also: Neuronal Proxy, Proxy Configuration, Looping

Part 2: The Gateway to Expression and Shared Meaning

Proxy Transfer Device (PTD)

The PTD is the functional system that allows one BAL to transfer its internal proxy configurations to another BAL. When people speak to one another and truly understand each other, they are using their PTDs to activate matching proxy configurations across two different brains.

In nonfunctional terms, it is called the language faculty. But the word “language” carries a lot of luggage, which is not needed in the framework, since many aspects of language –  like syntax, grammar, etc. – all collapse within the transfer, being irrelevant to the framework.

The PTD operates through two coordinated channels. The outgoing channel takes an active proxy configuration within one person’s BAL and converts it into an external signal – whether spoken words, written symbols, gestures, or other structured expressions. The incoming channel receives such signals from another person and converts them back into proxy configurations within the receiver’s BAL.

This transfer process is what makes genuine communication possible. When you say “red cup” and someone understands you, their PTD has successfully activated proxies for “red” and “cup” that functionally match the ones that were active in your BAL when you spoke. The match between proxy configurations is what constitutes shared meaning.

Functionally, the PTD has two channels. The outgoing channel formats and sends messages, when you speak, gesture, or write. The incoming channel receives messages and converts them into internal proxy configurations, when you listen to speech or read.

The PTD is not limited to spoken language – it includes any structured system that can reliably transfer specific proxy configurations from one BAL to another.

See also: PTD Channels, Looping, Coterminous Principle

PTD Channels (o-series and i-series)

The PTD has two channels: an outgoing channel (o-series) for sending messages and an incoming channel (i-series) for receiving them.

The outgoing channel begins with a configuration of neuronal proxies active in the BAL and converts them into a linear series of signs that can be sent out as a message. In humans, this message might be speech, writing, or a gesture. The process ends in muscle movements that produce the signal.

The incoming channel starts with the raw signal: sound waves when hearing speech, or visual symbols when reading. These arrive as a linear stream of discrete elements, which are then combined back into a proxy configuration in the BAL. The message is always coded in linear form for transmission, but the result is always a multidimensional structure the BAL can work with directly. Once this structure is formed, meaning has been transferred.

What makes this process work is that both channels handle the same basic currency: neuronal proxy configurations. The outgoing channel breaks them down into a linear sequence for transmission; the incoming channel rebuilds them into the original multidimensional form.

See also: Proxy Transfer Device, Message Conversion, PTD Resonance

Realm of Effation

The Realm of Effation is everything humans have ever put into language or language-like form – spoken, written, recorded, remembered, or taught. It is made up of messages that can be converted to proxy configurations within a BAL, when received through the input channel of a PTD.

This is not an abstract “cloud” of ideas. It is a functional space: all the messages that exist in a form that could activate proxy configurations in someone else’s internal model. In a sense, many fields such as, law, literature, mathematics, history, and science all live here in the form of tangible material traces, which have been expressed by a PTD, and can be potentially received by another.

The realm of effation includes all proxy configurations that have ever been “effated,” that is, which have been expressed by the outgoing channel of a PTD. So this realm also includes incipient activity in the PTD – the activity which is detected and converted into meaning during looping.

The notion of the realm of effation is not new. Shakespeare knew of it, for example, when he wrote in his Sonnet 18, “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” The “this” is the message embodied in the sonnet – a thought that began internally, passed through the PTD, and became eternal in the Realm of Effation. Written down, it can reactivate proxy configurations in any reader’s BAL. The realm is functional, not metaphysical: it consists of all expressions that can be reliably converted into proxy configurations through the incoming channel of a PTD.

See also: Proxy Transfer Device

Message Conversion

When a message comes in through the PTD’s input channel, it travels as a linear stream – spoken words, written symbols, or gestures in sequence. The final step is when this stream is converted into stand-ins (a configuration of neuronal proxies) inside the BAL. At this point the linearity is lost; the message is converted into a multidimensional configuration of interrelated neuronal proxies within the BAL.

This is the moment when the meaning of the message is grasped. The outside signal stops being an external code (or incipient code in the case of looping) and becomes part of your internal model.

See also: PTD Channels, Proxy Activation

PTD Resonance

Within the PTD, the expressive and receptive channels are interconnected in an ongoing correspondence. The activities within the two channels are used functionally during speech and listening, giving rise to a sort of resonance, like two tuned strings that vibrate together. This is not a vague analogy but a well-documented property of speech activity, exemplified in McClelland and Elman’s TRACE model, which describes how multiple levels within the channels affect one another in a tightly interlinked way.

In the PTD, this bidirectional influence produces a kind of “handshake” between channels: each element in the outgoing stream is matched by a corresponding element in the incoming stream. Under normal circumstances, this resonance is used for the language communication system to work, ensuring coordination between production and comprehension.

This same resonance becomes the foundation for a remarkable discovery in the brain of infants: the BAL can learn to exploit this correspondence internally, using incipient activity in the outgoing channel to trigger the incoming channel directly. This internal reuse of the resonance is what makes looping possible.

See also: Neuronal Reuse, Looping, PTD Channels

Part 3: The Mechanism of Subjective Experience

Neural Reuse

Neural reuse is a well-established principle: existing neural activity, originally evolved for one function, can be repurposed for some other function, essentially leveraging it toward some use. As Michael L. Anderson noted in his seminal 2010 article, the emergence of such reuse is entirely plausible whenever potential benefits exist, as is evident from the title – “Neural reuse: A fundamental organizational principle of the brain.”

The PTD evolved to enable interindividual communication – converting proxy configurations into structured signals that can travel between BALs, and converting incoming signals back into proxy configurations. But neural circuits naturally explore new patterns when the opportunity arises.

During early development, as the child begins using the PTD, a reliable correlation emerges: expressive preparation in the outgoing channel consistently precedes meaning activation in the incoming channel. The brain, always sensitive to useful patterns, begins to detect this correspondence. Over time, it discovers it can trigger the incoming channel directly from its own expressive preparations, bypassing the external loop entirely.

This isn’t a planned development – it’s simply what neural circuits do when they encounter a stable, useful pattern. The same pathways designed for external communication get recruited for internal use, allowing the BAL to treat its own expressive preparations as if they were incoming messages.

See also: Looping, PTD Resonance, Proxy Transfer Device

Looping

Once the system for inter-individual communication had evolved, something remarkable became possible. When the brain at large (BAL) begins to express something, that incipient activity already points to the meaning that will be communicated. Could this incipient activity be leveraged somehow – accessed internally in lieu of being expressed?

This would be extraordinarily useful. The BAL normally can only activate proxies through actual interaction with the external world – which takes time, energy, and can be risky. Suddenly, through this internal reuse, the BAL would gain a “lazy” way to activate proxies: it can trigger them directly by “eavesdropping on its own expressive preparations. This would open up untold possibilities – internal experimentation, mental time travel, hypothetical reasoning, complex planning, and focused examination of experience itself – all without having to even move a muscle and engage with the external world.

Before the brain learns to loop, the mechanism for looping is already complete within the PTD during normal use, the only thing missing is the “neural reuse.” The BAL is equipped to work with messages that have passed through the incoming channel, where meaning is properly structured for comprehension. Resonance between the expressive and receptive pathways of the proxy transfer device (PTD) creates the bridge: because the two channels can align in one-to-one correspondence, activity in the outgoing channel produces a mirrored pattern in the incoming channel. The BAL can then work with this mirrored pattern just as it would any other incoming message.

This reuse does not involve hearing words or replaying sounds. Instead, it delivers the “gist” – the final integrated meaning that normally follows the decoding of another person’s message. In looping, that meaning comes from one’s own expressive signal, without it ever being externalized.

This single mechanism underlies all subjective experience – imagination, internal speech, voluntary recollection, conscious perception, and focused attention. There is no parallel system. There are no exceptions.

See also: Neuronal Reuse, PTD Resonance

Semantic Formatting

When the BAL prepares to express something through the PTD’s outgoing channel, the signal undergoes a transformation referred to in the framework as semantic formatting. The significance of this goes beyond its use in the communication process – it’s what gives conscious perception and subjective experience its distinctively meaningful, communicative quality.

The exact mechanism of this formatting remains unknown, but its effects are unmistakable: looped content arrives with the same semantic richness we experience when understanding another person’s words.

For a fuller exploration of this insight – that conscious perception has an inherently communicative, semantic structure – see “A Fourth Dialogue Between Hylas and Philonous” (available online at https://sites.google.com/view/7dialogs/epilogue-i and forthcoming on PhilPapers), where the dialogue format makes the nature of semantic formatting much clearer than can be achieved through dry prose alone.

Semantic formatting transforms neural activity into the language-like structure that becomes our subjective experience. It’s the bridge between the BAL’s purely functional operations and the meaningful, communicative quality of what we actually experience when we perceive, remember, or imagine.

See also: Looping, PTD Channels

Coterminous Principle

Within the BAL-looping framework, subjective experience and expression both operate through the same system – the PTD. When we express something, we use the PTD to send proxy configurations externally. When we subjectively experience something, we use the PTD internally through looping - the BAL processes its own expressive output. Since both processes run through the same PTD machinery, they naturally have identical boundaries.

This explains why the boundaries of subjective experience and the boundaries of potential expression perfectly match. Everything in our subjective experience is, in principle, expressible; and everything expressible comes through the same PTD system that creates subjective experience.

This perfect overlap is so universal that we hardly notice it. We take for granted that any element of experience could be put into words, and that even our most abstract ideas can be traced back to perceptual foundations. Yet this coterminous relationship would not necessarily be inevitable if our brain architecture were different. There is no apparent reason why, under a different architecture, beings could have thirty percent of their subjective experience completely inexpressible, or have pure abstractions with no perceptual foundation. But given our architecture, we never encounter these cases – because both use the same system.

What about experiences that feel “beyond words” – like a sudden feeling at sunset that seems inexpressible? These moments don't violate the principle. They occur when the BAL begins interacting with the PTD but the process doesn't complete cleanly. The feeling of presence is real contact with the PTD system, but the signal hasn't formed clearly enough to produce words.

See also: Proxy Transfer Device, PTD Channels, Looping, Semantic Formatting

Part 4: The Structure of Subjective Experience

Temporal Spanning

All of our subjective experience runs through the same looping mechanism. Only one mode can be active at a single time. This means that it is impossible for you to consciously perceive your surroundings, recall a memory, or imagine a future scene at the same time. The loop can only be running one proxy configuration at a given moment.

This may seem counterintuitive at first. In daily life we feel certain we can walk down the street thinking of childhood while also consciously perceiving trees, cars, and people. After a walk, we can recall all of these things, and we don’t notice any gaps between them.

But the truth is apparent on careful introspection, and it’s also a logical consequence of the looping framework. The system can switch seamlessly between modes, but they are never simultaneous. Just as that device of a bygone era – a radio – can only be tuned to a single station, likewise, the loop can only run one mode of experience at a given moment.

This impression of simultaneity comes from a principle in the framework called temporal spanning, which creates a false sense of continuity between separate episodes of looping. Because the brain has no way to register these switches, it seems as though one thought carries through other experiences without interruption.

See also: Overview and Focus, Looping Uncertainty Principle

Overview and Focus

The terms overview and focus describe two different ways the loop operates, but they follow the same fundamental constraint as set forth in the temporal spanning principle: only one at a time. It is impossible to have a broad, general awareness of your environment (overview) at the same moment that you engage in intense, detailed examination of a specific element (focus).

Overview mode occurs when the loop processes a wide-ranging proxy configuration –taking in the general sense of a room, the overall mood of a conversation, or the broad contours of a problem. Focus mode occurs when the loop narrows to a specific configuration – examining the texture of a fabric, parsing the meaning of a particular phrase, or working through a detailed logical step.

When we are focusing on the details, the overview is not immediately present, but remains as a potential. The same applies in reverse: when we are considering the overview, the details remain in potential.

Overview and focus are not different systems or competing processes. They are two ways the same looping mechanism can operate – like a camera that can zoom out for a wide shot or zoom in for a close-up, but cannot do both simultaneously.

See also: Temporal Spanning, Looping

Looping Uncertainty Principle

When we recall a past experience, we are not retrieving it as it was originally looped. The reactivation happens through our current expressive–perceptual apparatus, and if that apparatus was different at the time, the original experience could have been entirely different – in ways we can no longer access. The problem isn’t just fading memory, but the impossibility of stepping back into the prior system that first looped that moment.

Even if you anchor the experience with a marker – like a photograph, drawing, or journal – your perception of that marker is still filtered through your present apparatus. The colors, details, emotional tone – they are all being remapped by what you are now, not what you were then.

Joseph Conrad captures this impossibility in Heart of Darkness: “No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence… We live, as we dream – alone.”

In the BAL-looping framework, this becomes practical and unavoidable: each moment of subjective experience is inseparable from the system that generates it. When we recall, we are never re-looping the same moment – we are looping through a different, present system.

See also: False Stability Assumption, The Naïve Archaeologist

False Stability Assumption

We instinctively assume that the way we experience things now is how we have always experienced them. When we recall the past, the present apparatus delivers it in a way that feels continuous, hiding any changes that may have occurred in the machinery of perception and looping.

This quiet bias – the belief in stability – differs from the uncertainty principle, which concerns the impossibility of verifying what past experience was actually like. The false stability assumption is our tendency to assume no verification is needed because “things have always been this way.” We project our current experiential apparatus backward, assuming it was the same when we were younger, or even just yesterday.

This makes us confident that our recollections reflect how things actually felt at the time, when in fact they may have been very different, and only appear similar now because they are being reprocessed through the present looping system.

This is a corollary of the looping uncertainty principle.

See also: Looping Uncertainty Principle, Looping Misattribution Error (a close corollary)

Interfunctional Complementation

When the BAL reconstructs a memory, it doesn’t retrieve a single trace. It assembles a usable configuration from multiple proxy systems: visual proxies (what you saw), motor proxies (how you moved), proprioceptive proxies (where your body was), physiological proxies (heart rate, blood pressure, etc.), emotional proxies (how you felt), and auditory, linguistic, spatial, and social proxies.

This is interfunctional complementation – the reuse of proxy elements across different functional subsystems to form a coherent structure. The more systems engaged in the original experience, the more stable and versatile the configuration becomes.

In Jude the Obscure, when newly purchased pigs escape and head back to their original farm, Arabella explains: “This comes of driving ’em home… They always know the way back if you do that. They ought to have been carted over.”

Arabella intuitively recognized that walking the pigs home created a richly layered configuration – built from sight, motion, smell, effort, terrain, balance – which could later be reengaged. This redundancy isn’t just for memory; it can support any future task that draws on the same pattern – whether it’s pigs retracing their steps or a person recalling what they did at the restaurant.

See also: Proxy Configuration, The Naïve Archaeologist

Part 5: Correcting Widespread Mistaken Impressions

Conscious-Perception-as-a-Window Fallacy

The widespread “intuitive” impression is that conscious perception is a kind of window onto the world – that we experience reality as it is, in real time, through a transparent inner lens.

The BAL-looping framework reverses this entirely. What we experience as conscious perception is not a direct input stream, but a looped construction – an outgoing report the BAL would give about the current environment, built from proxies.

Looping is not triggered by incoming sensory data. It is triggered by the BAL preparing a PTD-formatted output about that data. We are not watching the world; we are watching ourselves prepare to describe the world.

Conscious perception is not a window. It is not on the input side but rather on the output side, as it is our potential expression.

See also: Looping, PTD Channels

Tape Illusion of Memory

We often imagine memory as a kind of recording – like a tape or video – that can be played back. This metaphor shapes everything from courtroom testimony to personal nostalgia.

But memory is not playback. It is present-moment reconstruction. As the BAL uses looping to create a recollection, it draws on proxy traces, patterns, and fragments from multiple functional systems (visual, motor, proprioceptive, physiological, emotional, auditory, spatial) – and loops it.

The vividness of this loop gives the impression that it comes directly from the past. But in functional terms, it is no different from imagining the future: both are built now from available components.

There is no stored tape. There is only the current loop, assembled in real time from elements within the current brain state that serve as evidence.

See also: The Naïve Archaeologist, Interfunctional Complementation, Looping Uncertainty Principle

Involuntary Thought Fallacy

Sometimes thoughts come suddenly – uninvited, disturbing, or painful. It can feel like they’re happening against our will.

But these thoughts are not intrusions. They arise when the BAL – the brain at large – uses the looping procedure to try to better understand something that remains unresolved.

If the original experience was too overwhelming, complex, or fragmented, the BAL may never have integrated it fully. So it keeps trying. Looping is the tool it uses to revisit and restructure meaning.

The repetition is not “intrusive.” It is the brain using its own machinery to seek resolution. Understanding this removes the fear of the thought. It is never an invader. It is always you.

See also: Brain at Large, Looping

PTD Activity vs. Looping Conflation

It’s easy to fall into the habit of assuming that PTD activity and looping are the same thing, or that one always requires the other. For some reason people often make this conflation. In reality, however, they are separate processes that can operate independently or concurrently.

The PTD can operate outside the context of looping. You can speak while you are not looping (talking, but behaving in “automatic” mode), or even when looping is engaged elsewhere – focused on something entirely different from what you're saying.

However, looping cannot operate without the PTD. Looping requires incipient activity in the outgoing speech channel, though it doesn't need the entire channel to complete its external output.

And yet the activity does not need to be only incipient. If an actual message is outputted, the BAL can still be looping the content. Or not, depending on its aims.

The key distinction: PTD activity is the brain's communication system; it can communicate outward to other individuals, or inward, when the brain eavesdrops on its own incipient PTD activity. We therefore see that externalized expression and internalized looping are separate capabilities that can work independently or in coordination, but they are not the same process.

See also: Proxy Transfer Device, Looping

Looping Misattribution Error

Sometimes we recall experiences we didn’t seem to notice at the time – a fragment of conversation, a visual detail from a routine drive, or an event that occurred while our attention was elsewhere.

This often leads to a misjudgment: that we must have looped it at the time, since we now recall it vividly.

But that vividness results from a looping procedure being carried out in the present. It could be working on evidence that was laid down through sensory input and reinforced by interfunctional complementation, even if the subjective experience at that time was different (fantasy, recollection, imagination, projective inner rehearsal, etc.)

Because the brain has no built in “gauge” to really know exactly what its subjective experience was at a prior time, the construction/reconstruction of the experience is readily accepted as an accurate version of the subjective experience that was taking place in the past.

See also: The Naïve Archaeologist, False Stability Assumption (a closely related corollary)

Part 6: Helpful Metaphors and Clarifications

Naïve Archaeologist

Recollection works much like the work of an archaeologist. An archaeologist doesn’t consult a library of films or photographs; they examine physical traces from the past – artifacts, fragments, and remains – and then piece together a plausible story.

As the BAL uses looping, it draws on traces left by real experience and assembles them into a coherent recollection. But in certain situations it can behave like a naïve archaeologist. Sometimes it encounters traces that are not from a lived experience at all – for example, after waking from sleep, when there was no subjective experience. In that case, it may be looking at maintenance activity, “placing oneself into the world” routines, physiological markers from current or recent bodily states, current or recent sensory input fragments from the previous day, and standard perceptual templates. It still constructs a convincing narrative, but mistakenly assumes that it corresponds to an actual past experience.

See also: Interfunctional Complementation, Looping Uncertainty Principle

Thermostat Analogy

The thermostat analogy illustrates how the BAL operates as a cybernetic system. In a classic thermostat – such as those using a mercury switch on a bimetallic coil – the mechanism doesn’t represent or interpret the external temperature. It embodies it. The coil expands or contracts with heat, tilting the mercury tube, which physically closes or separates an electrical contact. There is no symbolic comparison, no interpretation, and no reaction in the human sense. The system’s configuration itself is the action.

The BAL functions similarly: it forms internal structures – neuronal proxies – that embody aspects of the external world. These proxies, grounded in feedback, allow the system to move toward a goal state mechanically, not by planning or predicting, but by operating from a structure that physically reflects what matters in the environment. Action emerges from embodiment, not from abstraction.

See also: Goal-Seeking System, Neuronal Proxy, Internal Model

Placing Oneself into the World

This is one way to refer to the process by which the brain rebuilds and reactivates its internal model when transitioning from sleep back to active awareness. This can also be referred to, more objectively, as building the internal model, but the term “placing oneself into the world” is much more memorable and meaningful to anyone who has caught sight of its effect on dream recall. This is not simply “waking up” in the behavioral sense, but rather the brain’s reconstruction of its working relationship with the environment.

During sleep, the BAL operates in a fundamentally different mode, called the maintenance mode. The internal model that normally guides active behavior becomes dormant, loses its tone, or undergoes changes during maintenance. Upon returning to active awareness, the brain must rebuild this internal model, essentially “placing itself back into the world” – reestablishing the proxy configurations that orient it in space, time, and circumstance.

This process involves more than simply receiving new sensory input. The brain must rebuild its sense of where it is, when it is, what situation it’s in, and how it relates to its environment. This reconstruction draws on traces and patterns from the previous active state, but it is a process of rebuilding rather than a simple resumption.

The subjective effects of this process can often be felt during dream recall, especially when one wakes up into a situation that has changed (e.g., when one has traveled). One can deduce this underlying process when observing the recollections that occur after waking up. It is one aspect of the “mnemonic basis” (which was not laid down during any sort of subjective experience) that one encounters after a period of sleep. The other aspects are maintenance traces and previous events (mainly from the previous day), seen through the lens of the perceptual templates.

See also: The Naïve Archaeologist, Internal Model, Proxy Configuration, Search Templates

Search Templates

These are patterns or configurations that the BAL keeps active in its ongoing scan of the environment. They represent what is most relevant to the organism’s survival, goals, or current concerns. They act like internal filters, bringing certain types of information to immediate attention while leaving the rest in the background.

Templates explain why a person with a romantic interest will notice that “significant other” at once in a crowd, or why someone with a particular fear will quickly spot a possible threat that others overlook. The BAL adjusts these scanning patterns according to what matters most in the moment – whether that is survival (predators, food), social connection (mates, allies), or whatever is occupying the mind at the time.

In neuroscience, this is referred to as “attentional bias” and “perceptual set” – the tendency to favor stimuli that match current concerns, expectations, or emotional weight. Studies show that anxious people scan for threats without thinking about it, people in love notice their romantic interest more readily, and even a simple instruction can create a short-term template that shapes what is noticed.

These same templates influence dream construction. When the brain’s “naïve archaeologist” sorts through fragments left after sleep, it applies the active search templates to interpret them. Someone preoccupied with a loved one may “find” that person in the dream storyline – not because the person was part of sleep’s maintenance processes, but because the search template is active, and influences the reconstruction.

Search templates are one of the brain’s most basic survival tools – a constant, automatic way of picking out what matters most in a flood of sensory input. They work without conscious effort, running in the background to filter and prioritize things according to their relevance to the individual.

See also: The Naïve Archaeologist, Placing Oneself into the World, Proxy Configuration

One-Step-Back Strategy

As explained above, in the “inner witness trick” it is common, when trying to explain perception, to picture an inner observer – a self, a soul, or a “homunculus” – inside the head, looking out at the world. The image feels satisfying because it gives the appearance of an answer: we see because someone inside is watching. But this only moves the puzzle back a step. Like the old tale of the Earth resting on a turtle’s back, we are left to ask: What is the turtle standing on? If an inner observer is watching, what explains that observer’s own experience?

The BAL-looping framework does not rely on such an inner observer. It shows that the brain’s own working parts – its internal model of the world, its neuronal proxies, and its looping of expressive configurations – are enough to produce what we call subjective experience.

There are other one-step-back strategies as well. Whenever one sees an explanation, one should ask if it’s a one-step back strategy. Does this really explain anything, or just ratchet up the level of complexity one more level to the point where the average person is left wondering, perhaps it makes sense?

This does not settle the question of whether a soul exists. Kepler and Newton explained planetary motion in terms of natural laws without invoking God’s direct hand, yet this was in no wise taken as a denial of God’s existence. In a similar way, the BAL-looping framework explains perception, recollection, and imagination in terms of natural brain processes. If there is a soul, it is not needed for these explanations – and its existence would be a matter for a different kind of inquiry.

The claim is simple: we can account for subjective experience without invoking a soul. Whether or not a soul exists lies outside the scope of the framework.

See also: Conscious-Perception-as-a-Window Fallacy 

Closing Note

This glossary outlines the key structural elements of the BAL-looping-framework, emphasizing functional clarity over abstraction. While the framework is largely complete, the history of its development shows that certain definitions and sections sometimes give way to better ones as understanding deepens. This document may therefore be updated to reflect sharper distinctions, cleaner terminology, or more precise formulations. The aim is not to fix definitions in place, but to provide a stable reference point as the framework continues to clarify how expressive reuse – looping – gives rise to imagination, recollection, conscious perception, and every mode of subjective experience.