IN LIGHT OF SCIENCE

My study of unconscious response began with internal observations. I was journaling at the time and found that, looking back on my notes, I saw shifts in attitude. I realized that I could not deny the hopeful and positive days, even though I might have been in a negative attitude when I read them. This prepared me for observing my feelings and self-observations regarding the phases.

My curiosity prompted a switch to using what I knew about the scientific method. As I applied the method, I became more objective about what I saw. The steps are simple, but not easy:

1.         Make observations

2.         Ask questions, such as what kind of pattern is it and when does it occur?

3.         Form a hypothesis: What do I think is happening?

a.         A repeating three-step pattern rose above the circumstantial details: an unexpected impact, recovery and evaluation, and then internal positioning toward the situation.

4.         Test

a.         Identify singular characteristics of each phase and how they differed from each other.

b.         In new circumstances, in retrospect, separate the external details from the internal movements.

c.         See if the three-step pattern stayed the same in different situations.

i.          The Impact of the Unexpected: When something unexpected occurs—whether meeting someone new or experiencing a radical change in a familiar relationship—it often triggers a visceral gut reaction. Because these events fall outside of my expectations, a survival mode engages where my responses, such as freezing or showing sudden emotion, are instinctive reflexes rather than deliberate choices.

ii.         Recovery and Evaluation: Following that initial impulse, I move into a stage of intellectual calm to restore internal order. I sort through these experiences by asking myself what happened, why I reacted as I did, and whether my behavior aligned with my personal values. This evaluation helps me isolate the dynamics of new situations and reveals personal priorities and an internal compass that naturally draws me toward stability.

iii.        Internal Positioning: Once I processed the situation, was I able to establish a perspective of my own that is separate from the external impact. This allows me to make internal determinations about where I can safely and authentically reside.

By making these intentional yet unconscious choices, I saw how I found a way to move beyond mechanical living toward a life of greater fullness and meaning.

5.         Develop testable predictions

a.         In retrospect, can the three-step pattern be recognized as separate from the circumstances?

b.         Are there internal prejudices affecting the quality of observations?

6.         Gather data: Continue to test over a long period of time, at least several months.

7.         Refine, alter, expand, or reject. Separating the three-pattern internal movements from the external factors raised some questions about my bias. Observations of this internal reflex must be tested with an intention to exclude personal and cultural bias. I established specific criteria in these areas:

a.         Gender. This was a study of the innate spark of human motivation, not based in anatomy, physiology, or any lifestyle that could be identified as springing from anatomy, physiology, or lifestyle.

b.         Nationality. I had been separated from the homeland for over a year and lived off the tourist track on one that skimmed over the top of the Thai culture. This broke the continuity I had in Colorado and I returned with a kind of objectivity about American culture as a whole. The nature of people in common is being human.

c.         Age. I found a basis of common identity and simple human affinity, regardless of age. As a parent and grandparent, I found it impossible to connect with a child’s broken heart and maintain discipline using an authoritarian manner. Necessity demanded deeper communication to understand a child’s unique form of grief. I found the same emotional and physical reflexes in children as I have as an adult: the aching in the gut while crying, for example. Children do not yet have words for grief. While the study went forward, it became extraordinarily important to encourage love and each one’s desire to be part of a family unit. In a highly emotional and unhappy circumstance, we had to find the highest and best natural motivation for each of us.

d.         Spirituality versus religious doctrine. Aside from the personal faith I retained, the search for spontaneous positive motivation was quasi-science so I learned to separate natural spirituality from my own self-serving doctrines. My search was increasingly focused on the natural human phenomenon. Even if a spiritual principle is understood in various forms of mysticism, I wanted to express what I found about the heart and spirit in my native Western logic and language. In other words, if this is an observable natural phenomenon of human nature, it was not necessary to use labels adopted from Eastern or Western cultures and language.

8.         Gather more data: Continue to test with these criteria so results are more objective.

9.         Again, refine, alter, expand, or reject biases.

Several years of continued observing and testing led to a discovery of the complete phenomenon that I call "12 Phases of the Cycle of Unconscious Response™.” This experience is in my book, The Heart's Mind: How Unconscious Responses in Life and Work Naturally Improve Our Lives While We Make Other Plans (2018).

Making a “Footprint”

In 2019, a client introduced me to Debra J. Dean, PhD, a dissertation coach. She was the first person to recognize the scientific discipline in my book. Debra agreed to work with me to publish an academic paper about the phases. In 2020, with Debra’s excellent coaching, we published the paper “Qualitative Study of the Theory of Unconscious Response™.”

This was a huge accomplishment for me, stepping boldly into the realm of peer review. It set me on an exciting new path: finding more work among scientists that might validate my discovery.

Science Works

In the “Qualitative Study of the Theory of Unconscious Response™,” I leaned on two major principles:

1.         Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity:

Relativity changed all research and reaches into our everyday lives. According to special relativity, no two people have the same perspective on events, even if the events are experiences at the same time. This special position is in the physical space a person occupies, which no other person shares.

Einstein’s work was simple and profound. Over a century later, scientists are still working through how general relativity changes the classic understanding of physics. In this study, special relativity and general relativity, with respect to quantum space, give clear definition to the singular space of one human.

The Theory of Unconscious Response™ explores the nonconscious activity within humans that sustains autonomous motivation. Autonomy is implied in special relativity: one person, one perspective. The study of unconscious responses is connected to the epigenetic processes at work in the organism, from the physical to the mental. 

Autonomous motivation is a mind-and-body process that originates in the unseen power behind movement. In unconscious responses are the clues to the particular way autonomy is maintained in life. For each person, meaning is contained in their internal response to the interaction in an experience. New experiences – new decisions – are connected to a person’s history in a unique way.

In the Theory of Unconscious Response™, meaning is hidden beneath external circumstances. By mapping a person’s life history, changes in direction are revealed in the spontaneous, unplanned movements. The history of these unplanned movements shows an unconsciously held priority in autonomous motivation.

2.         Psychologist Erik H. Erikson’s Epigenetic Model of Human Development:

Erik H. Erikson was trained by Sigmund Freud and turned psychology toward positive alternatives in development. Erikson applied the “organismic principle of epigenesis” to the whole life span. This study rests upon this key principle and the “wholeness” in Erikson’s way of looking at the life cycle. (Erikson, 1997, p. 26-27) Erikson states that this important model, taken from the discoveries in embryology at that time, was critical to his understanding of organic unity of the whole life cycle.

New Connections in Science

In talking about my research into unconscious behavior, the Lex Fridman podcast was recommended to me as a resource. During the two years I followed Fridman closely, he interviewed many scientists and philosophers in his search to understand what is essentially human. As a robotics developer, he aimed to make robots more humanlike.

Those fascinating talks, unscripted and lengthy, exposed the lives, culture, and work ethic of scientists in different fields of study. As I recognized a similarity between my way of living and working in theirs, my credibility got an unexpected boost.

A.         Theoretical physicist Fay Dowker, in her address to the philosophy department in Geneva (https://youtu.be/LAFymPdAg5I). In demonstrating the effect of general relativity on scientific thought, Professor Dowker gave me four major points that encompassed my work:

a.         Time can only be measured in the experience of each entity in spacetime, whether a star, a planet, or a person.

b.         The historic events comprise the “worldline” of each entity; these events are only fixed in the history of the entity. I was showing people how the life cycle phases worked in each individual life, based on their life history.

c.         The only way to know the timeline of an entity is for those events to be plotted on the worldline.

d.         “Becoming” versus “being” as her chosen perspective on her work. This pertains to the epigenetic unfolding of an individual, as I have used as a foundation of the Theory of Unconscious Response™.

Professor Dowker’s ending statement encouraged me in continuing my work:

“We shouldn’t limit ourselves to any particular tradition of thought but look most widely at all of human thought to give ourselves the best chance of making progress in the future.”

My work fell into the way she, as an authority, embraced “all of human thought” as applicable to her scientific research.

B.         Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: Feelings are representations of the state of your body. In this book The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018), esteemed neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains much of the internal, physiological, and mental processes as a whole-body process. Damasio makes extensive intricate descriptions of the body-and-mind organism and how the process delivers images to the human mind.

Thanks to Damasio’s life of research and advancements in neuroscience, we now know how the body and mind work as a fluid system. His understanding has mapped this complex system as the way your organism works smoothly, giving you the ability to create solutions to your problems as a way to improve your life. (The Strange Order of Things, 2018). Using homeostasis as the core principle, Damasio states:

Homeostasis refers to the fundamental set of operations at the core of life… Homeostasis is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative…nothing less than enduring and prevailing…ensures that life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, a projection of life into the future of an organism or a species. (Damasio, 2018, p. 25)

The term “flourishing” aligns with what humans perceive as “good.” As organisms operating with the physical imperative of homeostasis, Damasio shows clearly how the nervous system and the body system work with the brain to deliver messages to the mind. In images sent to the mind, the whole body reports what your condition is.

The collection of coordinated processes required to execute life’s unthought and unwilling desire to persist and advance into the future, through thick and thin, is known as homeostasis. (p.34)

Damasio’s book successfully depicts the body-and-mind organism to show the living, fluid system we enjoy. Where Damasio’s conclusions jump forward to the advances in society, the Theory of Unconscious Response™ may fill the gap by showing how individuals advance, maintain personal authority, and contribute to societal growth by creating, thereby increasing good for everyone.

This natural tendency to move in a positive direction is true for the complex human organism just as it is for single-celled bacteria. The individual perception of a positive direction highlights the singular perspective in self-regulation. Every cycle of 12 moved me forward – my organism looked after its own (my) good.

Damasio’s specific descriptions give weight to what I have observed in the twelve phases phenomenon. As an inherent process in our organism, the integration between body and mind is in what matters to you:

…When feelings, which describe the inner state of life now, are “placed” or even “located” within the current perspective of the whole organism, subjectivity emerges. And from there on, the events that surround us, the events in which we participate, and the memories we recall are given a novel possibility: they can actually matter to us; they can affect the course of our lives…  (p. 158)

Damasio’s neurobiological model shows that the mind and body are not separate systems but one organism, constantly working to preserve itself. So autonomically constant is this activity that your awareness is transferred to the external experience. Unconscious behavior aligns with inner meaning before we’re aware it’s happening. The internal system that has its own lifelong agenda: making you, you! Every cycle of 12 moves you forward – “upregulates” you, a term Damasio uses for the nature of organisms to seek their own good.

C.         Assembly Theory: Chemist Lee Cronin and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker rose to prominence in the Lex Fridman podcast conversations about the search for life on other planets. Their “assembly theory” came about in a search for the origin of life as a way to recognize unfamiliar life forms on other planets. Assembly Theory came out of the hunt for ways to detect extraterrestrial life forms. The question is, how can we recognize life that may be in a form we don't recognize?

Assembly Theory (AT) proposes that the first steps of life systems can be identified before they produce a product. The theory has a system that finds the first, most simple chemical bonds that begin a life-forming process. The theory asserts that complexity and memory are evidence that life forms by assembling components through time, retaining what works, and discarding what doesn’t.

a.         Assembly theory focuses on the specific signs of life systems, regardless of the form of the object. These are traits of the assembly space in AT:

i.          Intrinsic: a characteristic defined by its formation history.

ii.         Recursive: “retains the memory of past formations of objects”

iii.        The object’s building blocks are measurable.

iv.         New objects are available for subsequent steps.

v.         Organisms and environment are “co-constructed and co-selected.”

vi.        The precise assembly path leads to the object.

vii.       “an explicit arrow of time intrinsic to the structure of assembly spaces”

viii.      “objects can only be built from parts that already exist…therefore historically contingent.”

(That same principle appears in human development as our organism selects from disruption what works for the individual in the epigenesis of a unique person. The 12 Phases™ show how our internal responses select, refine, and reintegrate experiences into new structures of the self. The evidence of life is in its beginnings, how an individual exists according to their DNA. The “product” of the process is shown in the evidence of unconscious response but the process is the life-giving structure.)

b.         In her book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence, Sara Walker suggests that new laws of physics are needed "...that include us as part of the system we are studying..." She says further:

“…We cannot see ourselves clearly because we have not built a theory of physics that treats observers as inside the universe they are describing…explanatory power for how we think about and interact with the reality in which we alive…”

and

“…Life exists in biology and technology as far as we know, but we do not understand the transition or continuation of life from biology to technology, any more than we understand the continuation of life when chemistry transitions to biology…”

c.         Sara Walker aims to find out what makes matter alive. This is where she and Lee Cronin come together in assembly theory. Sara considers the assembly index an intrinsic property of a molecule, essential to using the theory for solving the origin of life, as well as time being fundamental in making bonds in a series of steps, something like an algorithm. In that way, she says, information is also an object.

The twelve phases phenomenon of human development meets many of AT criteria. It is:

a.         An intrinsic, self-organizing system.

b.         Recursive: the same twelve phases repeat cyclically to build. At Phase 12, the new growth is available to reproduce growth in the next cycle.

c.         12 is the “minimal number of recursive steps necessary to build the object.”

d.         Each phase is separable as a principle and is interdependent in the system.

e.         The human organism responds to activity around it in rebuilding autonomy, and through autonomy the individual affects its environment, the surrounding community.

f.          The system of 12 interdependent and sequential elements that leads to the formation of new growth in the individual. The end of the “assembly path” is perceived as a new good in human experience.

g.         Time is distinct; its factors historic in unchangeable events plotted along the individual’s worldline (Dowker).

h.         Natural epigenesis occurs in the womb, it carries forward at birth, and continues and regenerates throughout the life cycle until the person dies.

The twelve phases phenomenon is a sign of life, literally the origin of development in each individual. The direct connection between humans and the steps of advancements can be shown through the twelve phases phenomenon. It addresses the need for more information about ourselves as life on this planet, not yet fully understood. In the mandate of homeostasis, the twelve phases phenomenon constantly makes progress on the worldline of an individual. (Damasio; Dowker)

This new information in the twelve phases phenomenon can define the origin of life on Earth as residing in each individual person. The proof of life is in the autonomous movement within the body-and-mind organism. The twelve phases phenomenon is an intrinsic trait of humans that precedes what we create – societies, technology, the arts, and all the visible evidence of advancements in our history.

From quantum physics to individual worldlines, from chemistry and epigenetic biology to Damasio's extensively described body-and-mind organism – from the images the body sends to the mind, to the person who addresses that information by creating custom solutions – this is the most complete understanding of human experience. The twelve phases phenomenon is key in connecting the physical human to how a person functions in life. It is the minimal number of steps, the place where new constructions originate, that identify humans as the highest order of life on Earth. Each person is one cell in the whole of humanity. Every organism sustains itself and affects its environment.

The principle of epigenesis in the human organism is shown in the twelve phases phenomenon. The distinctly inimitable individual revealed at birth develops according to inborn abilities and disposition. Birth demands a response to the impact of an environment completely different from the one the baby left. Epigenesis – the continuous unfolding from the beginning – happens in the baby and through the years of learning the conditions of their life. The automatic responses of the baby and as a young child come from those inborn traits; they are the inherent resources available to the child as a distinct person.

The twelve phases phenomenon is observable as an intrinsically built system that preserves and protects the autonomous nature of each person. By following the twelve phases from birth through the whole life cycle over the human lifespan, the 12 Phases™ structure is a tool for gauging the progress of an individual in their personal development. What makes the information meaningful is the personal history of life events.