As without, so within: how the brain's temporo-spatial alignment to the environment shapes consciousness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Consciousness is constituted by a structure that includes contents as foreground and the environment as background. This structural relation between the experiential foreground and background presupposes a relationship between the brain and the environment, often neglected in theories of consciousness. The temporo-spatial theory of consciousness addresses the brain-environment relation by a concept labelled 'temporo-spatial alignment'. Briefly, temporo-spatial alignment refers to the brain's neuronal activity's interaction with and adaption to interoceptive bodily and exteroceptive environmental stimuli, including their symmetry as key for consciousness. Combining theory and empirical data, this article attempts to demonstrate the yet unclear neuro-phenomenal mechanisms of temporo-spatial alignment. First, we suggest three neuronal layers of the brain's temporo-spatial alignment to the environment. These neuronal layers span across a continuum from longer to shorter timescales. (i) The background layer comprises longer and more powerful timescales mediating topographic-dynamic similarities between different subjects' brains. (ii) The intermediate layer includes a mixture of medium-scaled timescales allowing for stochastic matching between environmental inputs and neuronal activity through the brain's intrinsic neuronal timescales and temporal receptive windows. (iii) The foreground layer comprises shorter and less powerful timescales for neuronal entrainment of stimuli temporal onset through neuronal phase shifting and resetting. Second, we elaborate on how the three neuronal layers of temporo-spatial alignment correspond to their respective phenomenal layers of consciousness. (i) The inter-subjectively shared contextual background of consciousness. (ii) An intermediate layer that mediates the relationship between different contents of consciousness. (iii) A foreground layer that includes specific fast-changing contents of consciousness. Overall, temporo-spatial alignment may provide a mechanism whose different neuronal layers modulate corresponding phenomenal layers of consciousness. Temporo-spatial alignment can provide a bridging principle for linking physical-energetic (free energy), dynamic (symmetry), neuronal (three layers of distinct time-space scales) and phenomenal (form featured by background-intermediate-foreground) mechanisms of consciousness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".