How Consciousness is Made 1: The Mindwhirl

Autism disrupts the natural design of human consciousness. Let's learn how in this friendly series of articles explaining the flow of consciousness in the brain.

After a little while I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see. These, no doubt, were singular fancies to occupy a man's mind in such extremity—and I have often thought since, that the revolutions of the boat around the pool might have rendered me a little light-headed. 
   .Edgar Allen Poe, A Descent into the Maelstrom

.1

Inside every mind in the cosmos—inside every bacterium, bumblebee, and bonobo, inside every bandit, bigot, and biologist—swirls a whirlwind. An ever-looping mental coil we’ll call the mindwhirl.

Round and round your mindwhirl twirls, driving the flow of thought. The mindwhirl functions like the heartbeat of a mind. A ceaseless rhythmic activity whose steady cycling paces your experience of reality. When your mindwhirl commenced its embryonic revolutions in the womb you came into existence as a thinking being. When your mindwhirl spirals away for the final time like a thinning tornado unspooling into empty air, you will cease to be.

The mindwhirl is your mind’s engine. A mental turbine housed in your skull whose revolutions drive your thoughts to flow and resonate. Whirling beneath and through your consciousness. Your mindwhirl spins and spins and spins and twists purpose out of dumb atoms like spinning straw into gold.

.2 Sensors, Doers, and the Environment

Every mindwhirl, whether as rudimentary as an amoeba’s or as sophisticated as a human’s, is formed of a busy loop of sensation, action, and environment.

The environment is everything outside the mind. A sensor senses the environment. Some familiar examples of sensors in your own mind include the photon-sensing rods and cones in your retina, the vibration-sensing hair cells in your ears, and the sourness-sensing taste buds on your tongue.

A sensor interacts with a doer, which does something. A doer performs some action that alters the environment. Common examples of doers include the twitchy muscle cells in your finger, the sweat-producing apocrine cells in your sweat glands, and the liquid-leaking serous cells in your tear ducts.

Here is the single most important thing to understand about the mindwhirl. In fact, it’s the most important thing to understand about thoughts and minds. The mindwhirl is not a thing. The mindwhirl is activity.

The mindwhirl is a carousel of thinking. The interactions of sensor, doer, environment. The sensor senses the environment and responds to what it senses by signaling the doer. The doer responds to the signal from the sensor by acting upon the environment—thereby launching a new revolution of the mindwhirl.

The doer’s action alters the environment in some way. For example, if the doer is a physical lash that whips a microscopic single-celled organism forward through the water, then the doer will move the creature into a new part of the environment. As a result, what the sensor senses in the environment changes. Accordingly, the sensor sends a new signal to the doer reflecting the new status of the environment. In response to this new signal, the doer alters its propulsion and the neverending mindwhirl loops on.

Round and round it goes, sensation→action→environment→sensation, clocking the rhythms of your mind.

.3

The mindwhirl is very special. When the first mindwhirl was birthed on primordial Earth it fractured the universe in two. Physicists like to say the Big Bang was the origin of the universe. I disagree. The universe began with the languorous circling of the first mindwhirl in some warm pond or subaquatic vent. That was the moment purpose arose from chaos. That was the moment time began.

Mind is something different than matter. Will is something different than energy. They are all dynamics. All forms of physical activity. Matter and energy are purposeless activity. They care not for time. Mind and will are purposeful activity. They adore time and demand it flow in one direction.

When the first Earthly mindwhirl began to pirouette, its revolutions lifted it free of cosmic burden. The burden of aimlessness. Regardless of its precise material substance, the first mindwhirl pursued a goal in the face of obstacles. Perhaps it sought a microscopic jot of sustenance drifting in the wet sand. Or invigorating rays of sunshine sporadically penetrating a murky lagoon. In its pursuit of objective, Earth’s first mindwhirl resurrected Mind anew from out of the thoughtless void.

A billion and a half years ago, something unique in the universe manifested out of the mud and magma. Something shivered free of what human science calls physics. The first mindwhirl on Earth began to stalk its own self-determined intentions.

Whatever its exact composition, the first Earthly mindwhirl was not conscious. Far from it! This fragile pioneer exhibited no hint of the mental glories to come. First Mind was a molecular pinwheel in the clay or the slime, little different on its face from countless other cycling chemical cauldrons. But this molecular loop of sensation→action→environment→sensation boasted a wholly unprecedented nature.

A mindwhirl can adapt. A mindwhirl can learn. A mindwhirl can create dazzling new merchandise out of dull, boring physics that never existed anywhere before.

The first mindwhirl was a song whistling out of the quiet of the deep, utterly new yet old as time. A song that would sing itself to consciousness.

And further yet.

Previous Consciousness: How Consciousness is Made: Intro: The Song of the Self

Next Consciousness: 2: A Proclivity for Activity