Yes. Many of our usages presuppose archaic understandings. The recognition of subconscious motivations (and therefore consciousness of which we are not aware) is only a century old, after all. By working to comprehend these issues within the PCT model, with an understanding of brain anatomy and functioning, we can domesticate our terminology. We may hope to improve our understanding and devise testable proposals.
Are you saying we are aware of all of these perceptions at once, all of these several kinds of perceptions? I can be aware of any of them at any given time, those that I attend to, but not all at once.
Let’s reframe “metacognitive process” in the PCT model. Here’s a definition:
Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one’s thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one’s understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one’s thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner.
— Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching
This involves control systems above the Sequence level, what we conventionally call the Program level and (questioning that labeling) what I think of as the planning level, imaginatively trying different sequences and sequence combinations until a way is found to bring a desired perception under control. The reference to ‘understanding’ is vague. It could implicate ‘monitoring’ and ‘assessing’ from the (proposed) Principle and Systems Concept levels.
Some aspects of brain anatomy and function are important here.
You mention the reticular activation system. The ascending reticular activation system (ARAS) is a primitive part of the brain, at the top of the brainstem but with ramifications into every area of the brain, which readies the neurochemical environments of neurons for their more efficient processing. Broadly speaking, its functioning seems to range from “something’s happening, process sensory input” to “nothing much is going on, relax and let autonomic functions be fully in charge”.
You invoke the fight-flight-freeze-fawn categorization which the limbic systems in the brain impose very quickly on perceptual input. (Less often noted, this survival-value categorization includes recognition of opportunities as well as threats, sukha as well as dukha.) Via the somatic branch of the hierarchy, they immediately prepare the body to control perceptions through the behavioral branch. It seems to me likely that high gain is a function of these preparations. Desired perceptions and reference values are determined above the level at which these two branches diverge.
Limbic systems construct perceptions more quickly than cortical systems do (higher levels in the hierarchy being slower), but both kinds of brain function are conscious. Limbic consciousness is subliminal: the somatic consequences are accessible to awareness, sensations and intensities in the somatic hiararchy, but at least in my experience (and in what I see reported) the very rapid threat/opportunity assessment process is inherently subliminal. In ordinary living most humans do not attend to those somatic consequences. (Systematic attention to them is foundational to Hinayana vipassana meditation practices.)
In B:CP (1965) and LCS II we see Bill’s proposal about emotions as perceptions constructed at higher (cortical) levels. Emotions are the brain’s opinions about the somatic preparations controlled by those primitive survival mechanisms. The ‘emotional tone’ thus attributed to an environmental situation or process apparently influences which memories and therefore reference values are more strongly evoked than others.
It might help to look at Rick’s ‘downward arrow’ in terms of its origin. As Bill says, nothing is ‘flowing’ down. It just says that whatever perception you are ‘looking’ at, your point of view is from a level above it. This sets up an obvious infinite regress paradox. Language affords a standpoint beside rather than above the observed perception. (When subjects view emotionally disturbing images, traffic between the amygdala and cortex proliferates, but when they begin talking about what they are feeling this feedback diminishes.) I suspect that some of the “going up a level” in MoL is actually stepping sideways into another point of view; and that it doesn’t matter which, so long as you reach a point of view which encompasses both (or all) of the motivations that are giving rise to conflict.
(Digression: There are also proposals that category perceptions are not constructed by a level of the hierarchy but rather by functions which are in some way ‘beside’ the entirety of the hierarchy and able to categorize at any level. Bill introduced the category level consistent with prevalent conceptions about the relationship of language to the symbolic calculi of algebra, logic, etc. which I have discussed elsewhere as misconceptions.)
These words attention, awareness, awake, consciousness, conscious, unconscious, etc. are slippery with ambiguity and vagueness. A common usage of ‘conscious’ is synonymous with ‘awake’, vs. ‘unconscious’. Another usage of ‘conscious’ implies volition, and is sometimes even synonymous with ‘intentional’. ‘Awareness’ as I have used and will use the term includes subliminal awareness, which is sometimes referred to as ‘subconscious’ or even oxymoronically as ‘unconscious awareness’. I hope we can avoid such entanglements.
Please unpack that objection a bit.