Seven Dialogues between Haplous and Synergos: 

The BAL-Looping Framework for Consciousness

John Mark Norman

   Abstract

This book-length series of dialogues introduces a functional model of consciousness called the BAL-looping framework, designed to explain all forms of subjective experience, including recollection, imagination, and conscious perception – through a concrete set of mechanisms. 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: due to the scientifically validated process known as neuronal reuse, the brain 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 message from the outside. 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 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.