Mathematically modeling mental imagery: The handling of somatosensory-driven mental imagery and intentionality by Feedback Phenomenology for the model of purgation:

1. How somatosensory mental imagery or metaphor appears in the mind:
   
   • The following quote from Sherrington (1906) gives the key physiological basis for the somatosensory mental image associated with purgation:

     " ...the contractions of particular sets of muscles in the heart must entail the suppression of activity of other muscles for coordinated movements of the heart to emerge."

   • The inhibiting or suppressing sensation - possibly associated with neural stretch receptors located at one or more locations or regions of the heart, such as atria, ventricles, carotid sinus, aortic arch, and left coronary arteries - was represented by my imagination simply as a knot in my heart. The flow diagram in Figure 2 converts that sensation to the stock or state variable, KnotsInHeart. The contracting sensation was represented by my imagination as an opening of the heart. I converted that to the stock, HeartOpenness. This somatosensory mental image was the intentional object of my subjective experience of purgation.
   • This somatosensory mental image was both dynamic and orderly, because what Damasio (1999) calls the proto-self is constantly monitoring the body's inner states. In this case the proto-self is monitoring the movements of these heart muscles. The imagination then generates an image that has its biological correlates in heart muscles. This physical basis for the mental image gives orderliness to the dynamic functioning of the somatosensory mental imagery, allowing it to be modeled using system dynamics. It is analogous to Helmhotz's (1971) ideas on the orderliness of dynamic visual mental imagery produced by moving external objects.
   • Thought and imagination then add more detail to the somatosensory mental image: My mostly nonconscious understanding had spent some period of time on the airplane from LA to Boston [see Section II] feeling and exploring the beginning of this novel somatosensory mental image. Eventually, enough feeling-type data was collected in memory to allow my imagination to plan or create the following scenario: The dynamics of the entire mental image that appears in the mind is an opening heart that is restrained by a sequence of knots that need to be untied one by one as the heart opens. These knots are represented by the imagination as a collection of sins, guilts, hatreds, or grievious errors. The untying is to be accomplished through prayer and forgiveness. Husserl (Follesdal 1998) called this additional feeling-type data, hyle or evidence.
   • Here are a few additional items related to the appearance of the mental image:
     1. The core of the mental image, KnotsInHeart and HeartOpenness, is the basic building block of consciousness (Ellis 1995) during purgation.
     2. In creating the mental image and its associated scenario my imagination possibly drew on a childhood memory of pumping up a bicycle inner tube in early spring. Over the winter the tire had lost air and had become flattened, so when pumping it up I noticed the inner tube had become lightly stuck together at various points along its inner surface because of constant downward pressure from the rim. I realized that if the tube was to be salvaged, the air pressure had to be able to force the release of the sticking points.
2. Purgation's critical fork in the road to mystical union: The relationship of mental imagery and problem solving to the stabilization of the anxious and overstressed mind.
   By creating the above scenario and its associated changing mental image in such a way that it could be intimately correlated with the movements of my heart muscles, my imagination had provided me with the solid structure that I needed. With that structure in hand, my mind was no longer overwhelmed by the moment to moment dynamics. The reason was that a large percentage of the huge amounts of novel information I was dealing with during purgation could be 'compressed and stored' in the mental image. Therafter, my mind was freed up from the condition of being overwhelmed with information. This overwhelming by information may also be partly responsible for the overshoot in PsychicStress at the 180 minute mark in Figure 1. Thus, after I had formed the somatosensory mental image I could focus on the essential content of purgation or the dark night of the soul. The essential content included the following iterative sequence:
   • The anxiety, dread, and terror associated with the knots in the heart and the possibility of my approaching death at any moment.
   • My sin, guilt, grievious errors, or hatreds associated with the knots, that lay deep within my conscience.
   • My prayers to the Lord, like the prayers of a drowning man going down for the last time.
   • My awareness that I was in the presence of an image or archetype (Jung 1967) of Death: The archetype of Death that appeared was a silent, watchful, divine, dark, austere, male Judge. This Judge, who was felt to be a close and intimate agent of the Lord, could grant me forgiveness and pardon me from death, if He saw fit to do so. But He was a firm taskmaster: He required that my prayers to the Lord be both true and backed up by all my heart and soul. [This is the image or archetype missing from Figure 2 that will be included in the refined version of the model {see Section VII.k below}]
   • My thankfulness and peace after forgiveness.
   These mental images with their ability to compress and store information for the scenario, together with the grace of being granted forgiveness, led me to the way toward mystical union rather than the way toward a psychotic episode. [See also (Deikman 1971)]
3. Feedback Phenomenology, intentionality, and the mathematical modeling of mental imagery or metaphor:
   A key idea in Feedback Phenomenology is that the changing state of the core of the mental imagery can be represented mathematically by state variables. The intentionality of subjective consciousness during purgation was about this mental imagery or metaphor. That is, the stocks HeartOpenness and KnotsInHeart together represent the intentional object. Therefore when using Feedback Phenomenology to model subjective experience, one should look to the object of the intentionality when selecting the state variables or stocks.
4. The relationship of problem solving to the arousal of subjective consciousness:
   Further reflections on the experience of purgation reveal that subjective consciousness and its associated thought, emotion, feeling, and somatosensory mental imagery or metaphor arose in my mind in response to a problem (Ellis 1995). The problem was not pain, just a hard-to-describe intense opening pressure. The pressing initial problem I presented to myself was: What has caused this arousal in my heart? In great anxiety I asked myself: How long will it last? Will it ever end? Am I going to die? Without these problems the stress, fear, and anxiety components of my consciousness would not have arisen. My state of mind would have remained relatively unconscious and problem free. Thus problem solving is what causes the cognitive mechanism and the phenomenal mind to work together to produce dynamic consciousness.
5. Intentional inexistence:
   The somatosensory mental image for purgation brings out the subtlety of the mind and imagination, which we will explore briefly in the paragraph. The image is the intentional object of purgation. That is, it is what consciousness during purgation is about. This object is a mental object, but not a physical object. When this particular characteristic of intentionality is present, in which an object can exist as an intentional object but not as a physical object, Brentano (1925) called 'intentional inexistence.' However, one must be careful here: Eventually, when the physical reduction of purgation was performed, it revealed that the mental image for purgation (i.e. the heart opening against restricting knots) does ultimately have physical or neural correlates or reification in antagonistic heart muscles and that this reification is located predominately in the limbic brainstem and neurocirculatory system. All of consciousness must have neural correlates. Nevertheless, the mental image itself does not physically exist as such. It only exists intentionally. Hence, it has intentional inexistence.

Arlen Wolpert
October 19,2004
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
http://world.std.com/~awolpert/gtr349.html

Return to homepage.