BODY WORK REPORT 2024
Written 10/27/24
Published 10/27/24
A Comprehensive Body Work Write-Up: How I Overcame Tourette’s, Suicidal Ideation, and Chronic Pain through Self-Taught Somatic Techniques
Table of Contents
Philosophical Conceptualization
For you, the reader. Love yourself.
Intro
The following is an account of my experience dealing with a long list of symptoms and pain for which I have no clear diagnosis. I can cite several potential sources for the pain, including but not limited to bad posture, improper technique with musical instruments (drum kit specifically), wisdom teeth removal leading to significant numbness/after-effects from anesthesia, etc. The following assumes no particular basis or condition to attribute the pain to, but rather focuses on the body as a system of energy, unknowable in its infinite intricacies, yet predictable by means of intuitively understanding energy flow and balance in the body.
The goal of this is to shed light on a systematic view of the nervous system’s behaviors such that we may continue to diagnose and treat conditions properly. I avoided seeking diagnosis of my own condition as I feared the symptoms suggested a complicated mix of several potentially related conditions, and recommended treatment for each of these generally falls into the category of “self-maintenance and rest”. While this is helpful and correct, this is not actionable at the level of reducing active pain in real-time. No diet or stretch is going to address the real-world problems associated with chronic pain, like being temporarily unable to think, move, care, or breathe.
For what it’s worth I did visit a doctor last year, who then ordered blood tests and x-rays (that I did not ask for), after which they promptly suggested physical therapy and improving my diet. This was a weeks-long process that resulted in them telling me to do the things that I was already actively doing in my own time, on my own schedule, for free, in a way that applies directly to my body rather than the abstract concept of a human body. I also “learned” from the x-rays that the source of my pain was not from any fractures or broken bones, though I never believed this to be the case, and I can’t say why they did. I understand the idea of being thorough, yet these tests truly seemed to be their only coherent tactic for diagnosis, rather than a competent decision that was made as a result of critical thinking about my specific situation.
I visited another doctor who was able to refer me to a neuropsychology lab, which seemed helpful at first. The problem was that the referral was for TALK THERAPY. I asked for a brain scan (EEG, MRI, anything in this vein) because there were clear and obvious signs of neuropathy affecting my physical/mental health (including daily episodes of Tourette’s and synesthesia); I told them repeatedly and even showed them directly where the nerve on my spine was pinched. This was apparently insufficient evidence to justify a referral for any kinds of tests or scans that I actually specifically asked for.
I told these medical professionals about my history of severe physical and mental stress, directed them to the primary physical source of the issue, asked politely for testing, and they responded by giving me tests I did not ask for, and sending me off to talk about my feelings. The therapy was beneficial for other aspects of my personal life; this is entirely beside the point. My overall qualm was with their severe inability to engage with or integrate my own perspective as a valid system of information. This is entirely counterintuitive to how pain works, but go off.
I strongly resist the urge to label Western medicine doctors as anything other than “competent”. This experience, however, was eye-opening to the sheer complexity of the human body and the ineffable impossibility of trained experts in any domain to recognize and address situations that do not generalize nicely from their training.
I have attempted to turn to researching alternative practices such as reiki energy healing, jhāna practices, massage and chiropractic care, etc. and I have found wisdom and benefits that I am able to integrate from all these things I’ve learned about along the way. I do want to focus this report in a generally scientific/academic direction that aims to resonate indirectly with concepts from these various alternative practices.
In an effort to take my own perspective seriously, I offer this write-up as a counterpoint to the notion that my condition is one that might be easily understood and treated by current medical professionals. The appropriate scientific rigor simply has not yet been applied to understand these behaviors of the human body, though it should be applied as such. The academic study of somatic work must be taken seriously in the name of reducing suffering for all beings.
Pain/Symptom History
I started to notice symptoms when I was around 18 (2020) that would continue to get worse over the next couple years. A non-exhaustive list of the grief I’ve experienced:
severe neck/lower back pain (up to 10/10, e.g. screaming “kill me”)
prone to daily spasms/cramps/dizziness/mental fogginess
cluster headaches on/off (shoutout to QRI for providing a name with which to identify this)
pinched nerves/misalignment in neck/spine/brain stem/tailbone
erectile dysfunction
tension in rib cage/hips
difficulty breathing
completely broken voice at 3hr singing gigs :(
instances of multiple consecutive days of sleep (12+ hrs per day) with noticeable improvements
wrist/shoulder pain with drums, limited range of motion
Tourette’s/verbal tics, hundreds of times daily (near-zero now)
synesthetic component (see Philosophical Conceptualization)
It’s been an exciting journey exploring the state space of qualia; however, I understandably felt compelled to try to reduce these symptoms. This has taken me on a journey I could not have predicted: a strange combination of meditation, philosophy, stretching, fasting, synesthesia, and theorizing which has collectively led to definitive, demonstrable improvement of my physical and mental well-being.
3 years ago, I said the pain would go away in 2 weeks. I said that a few weeks later too. Pretty soon I stopped saying that, as it felt entirely pointless (and it was) to try and put a timeline on this healing process that I was still developing and discovering and experiencing on my own.
I am happy to report that over the course of these few years, my pain has reduced from “aggressively invoking intrusive thoughts daily” to a more manageable “slight twitches/cramps”.
Philosophical Conceptualization
The details of these explorations should be addressed with proper scientific research and mathematical modelling. Nevertheless, we may observe regularities in the known nature of the body’s motor/sensory functions and hypothesize on potential insights.
Consider the body’s state as one focuses awareness on a single concentrated point. As one becomes aware of the point, energetic sensations may arise near the point. Now, as one releases the focus from this singular point to a less localized region, one may notice that the ability to feel sensations at the original point of focus diminishes. Let us observe a potential correspondence that we may initially understand as an assumption, yet we may persist and address its consequences.
There exists a correspondence between focused localized awareness and potential magnitude of sensation near the local region. An experienced meditator may be able to shift this awareness to a global holistic perception of the mind-body; this state decidedly exhibits some global valence, but perhaps at a lesser magnitude than that of the localized awareness. When one increases focus on a localized sensation, the perceived magnitude generally increases.
Tanhā as Sampling Mechanism
We may understand this correspondence as a distributed effort of tanhā to model the body’s states. Tanhā is a Buddhist concept that describes the “grabbing” sensation of your mind clinging onto sensations in the initial stages of experiencing qualitative content. We will look no further than citing Principles of Vasocomputation by Michael Johnson as a primary model with which to make sense of tanhā; only a rudimentary understanding is required for the purposes of these ideas. [2] When one focuses on a localized point, one must sustain effort to converge the tanhā to that location; likewise as the focus becomes less local, the mechanism which generates tanhā becomes a distributed wave of awareness that may sample many distinct points on the body simultaneously.
When one may focus tanhā on two distinct localized regions simultaneously, this achieves a certain correspondence between the two regions. Consider for example you have both a tense shoulder and knee. Focus on both of these regions and you may notice a region of tension that exists between and around the two points. Talking about the energy “between” points is quite fallible as the motion of energy in the body is all but linear. Between any two points in the body there exists some circuit which may activate both of those points, as well as several other connected regions that may not necessarily physically exist between the two points.
One method which may reduce global tension is to use points of resistance, like your fingers, or some external object, and apply the resistance directly to the point of tension. The reasoning for this lies in the idea that the body stores electrical energy and uses it to exert force; exerting some equal and opposite force on an existing force should negate the work being put into the system, thereby dissipating the energy from the hyperactive region. This is a fallible model as the energy required to maintain this effort against the resistance is decidedly not independent from the energy stored in the hyperactive region, they are of the same body.
Regardless, I find in my own experience that I may feel a strong signal coming from somewhere like my back, and I can apply firm pressure to a specific node along the signal’s path which should reliably impede/reduce the magnitude of the signal. The nature of the relationship between the behavior of the signal and the optimal location of applied resistance is case-by-case, historically guided largely by my own continually improving intuitions. It should be noted that a sharp signal at point A may be reduced in magnitude by applying pressure at point A, however there generally exists some point B which may provide further reduction of magnitude if pressure is applied here instead (or simultaneously with A).
Let’s say your body spasms at times, and you can feel a spasm coming in your shoulder. It wants to move your right arm from a loose dangling position into a raised position. If you resist this signal, the result is painful. If you allow this signal to flow and allow your arm to move involuntarily, the signal will pass such that the energy does not converge at the shoulder, but rather passes through and around on to the next connected muscular system. This action allows the involuntary signal to flow freely as intended, rather than exposing itself to some arbitrary point of resistance/tension in your body and manifesting as pain.
I find myself spinning my shoulder in circles as there seems to be a persistent behavior where a signal wraps around my shoulder several times. I may spin my shoulder around, and this reduces the perceived tension and twist at that point. I do it again, it reduces the pain further. I can continue to do this with any node of tension, until the node is no longer there.
This is not to say that reducing a node of tension temporarily leads to any permanent reduction of energy potential at that point. In regions where there is no observable node of tension, there still exists potential for a node to form; this is precisely how your body is able to send motor signals to perform certain actions, by activating/tensing specific groups of muscles in specific patterns. The “tension as nodes” model is a model that works only when tension is convergent to a discretized region of hyperactivity. How might a region become discretized?
The left demonstrates an inner region that is independent from the outside such that no energy may escape, while the right demonstrates a more realistic scenario where multiple regions of impedance (resistance, tension) in a given local topology might prevent energy from escaping. The impedance reduces the rate of energy dissipation, thereby increasing the duration of viability to model a given node of tension as such, before it may dissipate its energy into nearby muscles and the active node becomes a passive region of potential energy again.
Consider that at any given moment there exists energy, i.e. tension somewhere in your body, trivially by nature of the fact that the force of gravity presses you against the object underneath you, creating a dense region of high pressure in the body through which energy flow might experience a bottleneck relative to its default mode, which should exhibit some effect on the nervous system’s dynamics at large.
In order to take actions in the world, the body tenses this muscle to move that one, tenses that muscle to move this one, etc. by channeling existing energy into existing circuits that should perform the intended actions. Any perceived deviation from the body’s ideal self model with regards to these motor functions may be corrected by addressing the body as a hyperactive electrical system with undesirable tension nodes, and eliminating only nodes that impede one’s full range of motion.
Let’s say you are standing, and there is tension in your shoulder. What is crucial to note here is that there is decidedly tension elsewhere in your body (your feet/legs), and there is perceived tension in your shoulder. If the tension in your shoulder goes away, great. If the tension in your legs goes away, try not to hit your head on the way down.
Some tension is ok, often necessary. Perceived tension generally is not.
At this point it should also be noted that in order to successfully execute some healing process such as this, one must necessarily become more sensitive to subtle changes in the body’s balance and self-model. As one reduces perceived tension, they necessarily become more aware of pre-existing tension. This may feel like a vicious feedback loop, as reducing pain actually leads to more pain in a certain roundabout way, but this process only demonstrates existing undesirable tension that was not previously perceived as pain.
One may gradually approach a state of minimal perceived tension by continually reducing tension in undesirable locations where it should not be present (e.g. everywhere but the feet when you stand). These regions of tension may exist for years without being perceived; this explains the continual discovery and awareness of newfound tension. However, as one approaches the limit of minimal undesirable activity, the previously imperceptible regions may be addressed properly rather than ignored by the nervous system. Any instance of the body failing to identify undesirable tension inevitably results in inhibited range of motion, i.e. deviation from the ideal self-model. To reduce any local tension is to dissipate energy that may have been generating some unwanted connection between regions which would inhibit range of motion.
Synesthesia
A considerable factor of my own self-model involves a type of synesthesia where any number of stimuli may be interpreted as colors, patterns, somatic responses, heavily encoded emotional bursts, etc. I consider these symptoms as well as the aspect previously described as Tourette’s to be correspondent to some vague kind of subconscious information processing, where the outputs are not necessarily encoded meaningfully so much as temporally correspondent to arousing stimuli in some undefined way.
I could argue that particular stimuli correspond to particular phenomenal experiences, which in turn correspond to distinguishable signals and states within the body. These signals are interpretable, much like a language, but I currently have no translation/articulation process that could represent meaningful information about the mappings between stimuli and observable effects.
It’s important to note that these mappings are subjective, case by case, and often times beyond interpretation. It would be nonsensical and overly ambitious to try to assert some generalized model of synesthetic mappings as it relates to my experience. An example of one such demonstrable mapping is that chocolate predictably loosens up my spine in a particular way. Don’t ask, I don’t know why. Chocolate is a particularly high valence stimulus that has many observable positive physical effects (beyond tasting good).
I can physically feel my back unclench when I even so much as hover a piece of chocolate over my tongue, then I touch it to my tongue and feel new sensations associated with the increased magnitude of stimulation. I can move the chocolate from the left side of my mouth to the right, and middle, and these have noticeable effects on the particular electrical signals and the locations they may manifest in my body. I have no mapping table between stimuli and effects to assert currently, I view this kind of endeavor to be equivalent to PrincipiaQualia’s Translation Problem. [1]
There are recurring synesthetic visual patterns that I can make use of in my self-healing practices. None of these forms have intrinsic meaning per se; these are simply to be understood as observations of coincidences. One example would be bursts of blue and white sparkly dots that occur consistently when a particularly gnarly piece of tension releases itself naturally. If I am to trust that this correspondence is meaningful in some sense, I may simply observe the perceived location of the blue dots in my awareness, and focus on the dots until they multiply and expand. This is a real thing that I’ve experienced and it demonstrably leads to reduction of suffering. This shouldn’t be a thing that’s true, it doesn’t feel correct to talk about in any way, but nevertheless I assert it as my lived experience. Follow the dots, trust the synesthesia, and sometimes it works unreasonably well.
Another instance of utilizing synesthetic modes to my advantage would be a technique that I refer to as a “wireframe” representation of hyperactivity. I may close my eyes and visualize a part of my body, my shoulder for example. In my awareness I may visualize the nodes and connections of tension as intricate patterns of color/light. The best description I can give of this perspective resembles that of a wireframe outline of a 3d object, where the contents of the object are invisible and only thin polygonal edges remain.
In this sense I may model any part of my body as a series of nodes and connections, and simply observe the dynamics. I want to reiterate that the mapping between electrical activity and perceived stimulus is entirely theoretical, in that I have no justification saying that the visual representation I experience necessarily maps onto the given body part in a meaningful way.
What I will argue is that I may act as though the model is proper, rather than some purported illusion of my own imagination, and my actions have observable consequences. If for example, I observe my shoulder as a “wireframe” model, I might observe the model shift. This could be due to a) some coherent behavior of the electrical activity that the model is actively responding to, or b) unexpected noise between the model and observed activity.
Regardless, if I act as though the model is proper, and I observe some change in the model’s representation, I might take action according to this model and observe some meaningful consequences of my actions.
My shoulder wanted to go here according to the model, so I pushed it there. Does this have any meaningful effect? Sometimes. Not all of the time. The effects of noise on this model system are profound and nontrivial. It is incredibly difficult to maintain persistent focus on the wireframe model in such a way that the observable data is independent from the action of observing; the observed representation of energy is rarely independent from the required energy associated with conducting the observation itself.
Despite inherent sources of noise, I may act as though the model represents meaningful information, and act accordingly. Often times the wireframe model will begin to twist, in a way where the nodes, which were previously “lined up” along the abstract mental concept of my shoulder, are now floating and stretching, taking random walks around the mental space while maintaining relative connections between nodes. This sounds almost entirely meaningless until I mention that I may, in my mind’s eye, try to untwist the twisted connections.
I cannot relay what this means in any way that does justice to the experience. I must emphasize once again, I don’t know why this works. I’m pleading and begging you to believe me when I say things like “I mentally untwist the wireframe knot that represents my shoulder, and then my physical shoulder unclenches in the real world immediately.” This should not be the case; it just doesn’t feel scientific, fundamentally. I am simply relaying empirical observations to the best of my ability.
It doesn’t work all of the time. Sometimes the wireframe goes haywire and spins out of control, or blinks out of existence. It’s an incredibly fragile indirect proxy of a temporary convergence of electrical activity. It’s a model, but sometimes it spits out the right answer. I don’t know how to relay the notion that there exist any correspondences between observed states of the representation and optimal actions to generate with my body given those states, but some correspondences do manifest sometimes, and I try my best to take those actions as opposed to suboptimal actions.
The ability to “trust the synesthesia” and have it actually pay off was not immediately accessible wisdom. This ability was developed over several years of intense isolation and meditation. To put it bluntly, the COVID-19 pandemic had little to no effect on my social life. I was locked in.
Over a year or two of experiencing these synesthetic modes, I went from “confused observer” to “confident agent” by learning to influence and focus on the representations, as well as act on the representations in a way that optimally reduces tension. I follow the blue sparkles, I untwist the wireframes, and it works sometimes, in ways that I cannot possibly explain more simply. I will also note that any nodes of tension as described naturally generate synesthetic content at a greater magnitude than other areas that are less tense; this is to say that the wireframe visualization mode also acts as a heatmap, generating forms and blobs that loosely map to the magnitude of electrical activity within a particular region.
Related Concepts
I had the pleasure of sharing a conversation with Twitter user @Way_opener earlier this year about our individual experiences of dealing with chronic pain via meditative practices.
In our discussion, we bonded over several shared experiences that allowed us both to make sense of some of the ideas in our heads. One of which I found particularly fascinating and resonant with my own experience was the idea of doing some kind of “Fourier analysis” on the body’s electrical signals; this is precisely what it feels like to attend to specific frequencies of signals that might correspond to specific connections between groups of muscles.
While the rigorous terminology and mathematical frameworks involved could use some proper development, we may nevertheless attempt to make sense of these given intuitions. While it might be imprecise to call it Fourier analysis, the fact stands that wave-like electrical signals are moving all throughout your body at any moment, and to attend to a specific signal is to attend to a specific subsystem of the overall system, i.e. particular frequency components of the global signal. The human body does not submit nicely to being modelled by any Euclidean topology, however one might hypothetically apply some non-Euclidean topology as a model of the body within which some reframed version of Fourier analysis may be meaningful.
Another topic I suggested during this convo was the idea of a Shephard’s tone as a model of the arousal levels generated by particular meditative practices. For a quick explanation, a Shepard’s tone is a series of summed frequencies that are separated by octaves (2x frequency).
You can then modulate the fundamental frequency value, shifting it up at a constant rate. The intended outcome is that this wave pattern as a sound wave gives the illusion of an infinitely rising tone. The equivalent visual illusion, commonly known as the barbershop pole illusion, works by rotating a helically-striped pole, giving the impression that the stripe is always “moving up”.
The analogy refers to the perceived states of arousal that occur when attempting to do somatic work, or body work that involves conscious flow states and physically embodied perception. As one attempts to localize awareness to some specific point, the increase in perceived magnitude may cause a spike in activity at that region or some other location on the body. One may enter a recursive flow state of focusing awareness until hyperactivity induces overwhelm, then releasing awareness and prioritizing globalized balance of muscular systems. This back and forth between focus and release creates a profound effect of being able to pinpoint certain modes of tension, then reconfiguring the body so as to attend to the identified tension in a more healthy way.
This process generates an internal state of arousal that resembles a Shepard’s tone: the arousal moves up as focus increases, then as one releases focus, the tension moves in a direction that I can only describe as the “top”, as in “top-down processing”. Though words fail me, I will note that this does feel quite a bit like forming a boundary around the thing I call my ego, and squeezing it like it’s got juice. It feels like 30 emotions in half a second, all as articulate and profound as any emotion I’ve experienced before, and then gone in an instant. I can’t fathom how surreal this sounds written out as lines of text, unless you’ve directly experienced similar things in your own practices.
The tension arises from the ground up, converging from various energy sources in the body towards some key piece of resistance that is inhibiting the flow of energy, and then the resistance breaks or slips, causing the energy to flow out the “top” and out of the system. Again, I read these sentences and feel a bit underwhelmed by my own inability to describe the experience. I must admit that the idea of the signal going “towards the top” is vague at best, informed only by my applied model of thinking about it as a frequency spectrum with a relative dimension of “low” vs. “high” frequencies.
This feeling of the signal going to the top, feels like the signal moves up through the frequency spectrum: from the low rumble up through the midrange, and out past the high frequency buzzing range into infinitesimal dissipation. I hesitate to articulate much on the measurable frequency spectra of stimuli, however certain stimuli have some noticeable “low frequency” qualities about them relative to some “high frequency” stimuli; THC and nicotine are good examples of stimuli that seem to have relatively lower/higher perceived frequency distributions, respectively. But the notion of parsing frequency content as such is still highly oversimplified in this context and requires further articulation moving forward.
Other miscellaneous aspects of my practice include the following techniques:
Shouting, grunting, singing, etc. as a means to trigger particular frequencies. For example, I might sing a particular pitch, and my body resonates with the frequency of the note. I can then modulate the pitch as needed until my body resonates at some frequency that causes a dramatic shift in energy and balance. I attribute this behavior to the notion of structural resonance, e.g. an opera singer shattering glass by singing at a certain pitch, or a poorly designed bridge that begins wobbling uncontrollably.
Various stimuli/arousing activities: drums, exercise, deep stretching/yoga/meditation, breath work, tasting strong flavors (candy, chocolate, spices), pornography (not recommended), sex (recommended), massage (craniosacral technique among others was beneficial), writing, speaking with people, generally engaging fully in tasks.
Sauna, hot (and cold) showers, and hot tub as a form of annealing. I should note that I distinctly observed 2 parallel processes of annealing which worked in tandem for boosting my physical and mental health: that of physical and neural annealing. [3]
Heat application lends itself to physically restructuring the muscular system, while meditation and psychedelics catalyze the neurogenesis (neurological rewiring) necessary to reorient the body’s nervous system towards a more optimal and efficient sensory/motor control system.
Future Research
While this is still an exploratory process of discovery, we may be able to articulate first steps to scientifically understanding the mechanisms that underlie somatic work. I’ve made a particular effort to frame my insights in ways that should lend themselves to inspiring proper experiments.
For example, consider the notion of moving a piece of chocolate on the tongue from point A to point B to point C, etc. and measuring the body’s electrical responses to these kinds of stimuli. With enough structured data, one might begin to parse the relationships between stimuli and the frequency content of the body’s response to them. This could in turn allow us to generate structural models of stimuli based on evidential mappings to their expected response.
There is considerable work to be done with regards to rigorously articulating the wave mechanical properties of body tension. The most pressing and obvious impedance to progress in this domain is the idea that 3-dimensional physical objects generally do not fit neatly into Euclidean models. While the notion of Fourier analysis is well-defined for Euclidean spaces, it might be more fitting to consider a wide range of related wave-processing techniques as none of the techniques individually capture the holistic scope of somatic work.
Consider an electrical signal that passes through your arm. You could try to model the signal with your own subconscious processes and attempt to parse the information. Within seconds, the signal is gone and there is nothing to measure except noise. Suddenly a sharp pain shoots through your temple, and your knee locks up.
At this point it would be wise to consider other models of action, like lightly tapping the tension in the temples, or pressing inwards on both sides of your knee to release the stored up tension. These other techniques have nothing to do with Fourier analysis at face value, and yet they are valuable. These techniques all understand the system as a wave-mechanical electromagnetic system with measurable magnitude, frequency, etc. yet they take different approaches based on context, rigor, duration of information sampling, and a whole host of other factors.
At this stage of research, it is best to consider many approaches simultaneously under the unified goal of treating the physical system as a medium which carries signals that may be processed/manipulated. The claims I’ve made so far specifically intend to suggest wave-mechanical approaches to understanding the mind-body relationship and the state-space of consciousness.
As a final offering, I will reference my own work on metacognition and phenomenology. The following is an excerpt which intends to demonstrate a wave-mechanical interpretation of constructing nested representational models, and subsequently associate this demonstration with a well understood theorem regarding signal processing and sampling (Nyquist’s theorem).
From Phenomenology and Religion (2024): [4]
Given any initial set of phenomena modelled by some A, there exists some set of symbols posited by A which each purport some contextual relationship to the particular phenomenon to which it is mapped.
This set of symbols intends to correspond to a model of phenomenal models in some meaningful way. These symbols act as observable articulations of the phenomenal models themselves, however any attempt to articulate observations inevitably results in a model.
The “counting” framework demonstrates a structure which intends to indirectly model itself by asserting perspectives which correspond directly to a least reducible meaningful construction, the integers.
Note that the constructs [A, B, C, D] may correspond to either the nodes of the signal (representing a convergence of abstract activity; an emergent model), or the complementary dual process of experiencing observations and generating models of the experience. In theory, some construct which maps to the top wave diagram might serve as a model of some construct which maps to the bottom diagram, via an extrapolation from the foundations of the Nyquist-Shannon theorem: the purported models occur twice as frequently on the top wave relative to the bottom wave, which may justify some intent to sample semantic content that directly corresponds to to the connections between the given nodes on the bottom wave.
–
While this might not serve as a rigorous justification of wave-mechanical analogies, consider one’s ability to observe the relationships between multiple points on the body as it relates to the top wave model, which represents an oscillation between constructing and observing representations of information. Non-local experience of somatic information may be loosely represented by B and D on the top wave diagram, as well as the tanhā circuits described earlier.
I invite any honest feedback and criticism on this work. I do plan to reach out to people directly via Twitter and gather more perspectives; perhaps I will eventually combine these ideas into an updated essay with new insights in the future.
Works Cited
[1] Johnson, Michael (2016, Nov.). PrincipiaQualia: Blueprint for a new science. OpenTheory. https://opentheory.net/principia-qualia/
[2] Johnson, Michael (2023, July 12). Principles of Vasocomputation: A Unification of Buddhist Phenomenology, Active Inference, and Physical Reflex (Part I). OpenTheory.
[3] Johnson, Michael (2019, Nov. 27). Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything. OpenTheory. https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/
[4] Bailey, Justin (2024, Aug. 27). Phenomenology and Religion: How to Count to 4 and Do It Again. Mind Math & Music. https://www.mindmathmusic.com/philosophy/count-to-4
