John Swygert
November 12, 2026
DOI: To be assigned

Abstract

This paper proposes a conceptual research framework for consciousness using the distinction between clarity, noise, and an intermediate region of partial organization. The central hypothesis is that conscious contemplation may involve dynamic selection and stabilization of patterns from ongoing mental activity: not simply a binary separation between expressed and non-expressed content, but a boundary-mediated process in which initially ambiguous material becomes sufficiently organized to visualize, interpret, or articulate. The proposal connects this phenomenological account to the mathematical language of reciprocal expression and non-expression, while explicitly distinguishing analogy, formal modeling, and empirical evidence. It also argues that carefully collected first-person testimony—including unusual or near-death experiences—can provide analyzable observations without being treated as automatic proof of their interpretation.

1. The Observation: Clarity, Noise, and the In-Between

Ordinary experience suggests that people often distinguish a clear thought from mental noise. Between these extremes lies a less definite region: an impression, intuition, image, or fragment of understanding that is not yet fully formed but can become coherent enough to contemplate. This intermediate region is the focus of the present proposal.

The term “equilibrium” is used provisionally here. The in-between is not necessarily a fixed midpoint, nor has it been shown to be a mathematically stable equilibrium. Rather, it may be a dynamically maintained condition in which competing influences—salience, attention, memory, inhibition, and context—allow some patterns to become available for conscious consideration while others remain indistinct.

2. Consciousness as a Process of Emergence

A useful image is that consciousness “bubbles to the surface.” Beneath an articulated thought there may be many interacting processes, not all accessible to introspection. A particular pattern may become prominent enough to enter awareness as an image, sentence, felt significance, or recognizable idea. Once consciously accessible, it can be rehearsed, questioned, described, and revised; those conscious acts may in turn affect subsequent processing.

This account does not assume that every unspoken thought is unconscious, that all conscious experience takes the form of inner speech, or that awareness itself has been explained by a metaphor. Inner dialogue is one accessible example of expression within consciousness, not its full definition.

3. Connection to Reciprocal Expression and Non-Expression

The prior mathematical framework describes a fraction p(t) occupying an expressed state, a complementary fraction 1 − p(t) occupying a non-expressed state, and a conditioning variable b(t) that influences transitions. In its abstract form, the model does not specify thoughts, neural energy, words, or consciousness. Its numerical simulations demonstrated that a chosen parameterization could settle into stable proportions while transitions continued in both directions.

A consciousness-oriented interpretation could tentatively define “expressed” as content available for report or deliberate contemplation and “non-expressed” as processing not presently accessible in that way. A boundary variable might operationalize attention, task context, sensory evidence, or a measured threshold of reportability. These interpretations are hypotheses to be operationalized and tested; they are not results of the earlier simulations.

The bathtub analogy is useful but limited: a constant water level despite simultaneous inflow and outflow illustrates dynamic equilibrium. It does not establish that awareness works like a reservoir or that consciousness is produced by equilibrium.

4. The Role of Language

Language provides both an example of structured expression and a means of communicating experience. A thought may be felt before it is verbally formulated; speaking or writing can sharpen its distinctions, reveal contradictions, and make it available for shared examination. Conversely, some conscious experiences are visual, bodily, emotional, or otherwise nonverbal. Language can clarify and constrain an experience without exhausting it.

This creates a methodological challenge: when studying consciousness, researchers must often use language to report phenomena for which ordinary language is incomplete. The solution is not to reject testimony, but to develop clearer descriptive categories and measurement procedures while remaining alert to the ways words shape what is reported.

5. Experience as Data, Not Automatic Proof

Personal experience is an important source of candidate observations. First-person reports can reveal recurring structures—such as degrees of clarity, transitions in awareness, temporal order, vividness, and perceived agency—that may be overlooked by purely external measurements. The author’s reflections on unusual states, including a reported near-death experience, motivate the insistence that testimony should not be dismissed merely because its mechanisms remain uncertain.

However, the existence and sincerity of an experience must be distinguished from claims about its cause. Memory can change, language can influence recall, and subjective reports may admit multiple explanations. A scientifically useful approach preserves the testimony while comparing interpretations with independent observations wherever possible.

6. Toward a Measurable Framework

One possible research program would ask participants to describe brief episodes of inner speech, mental imagery, or emerging insight, and to rate their clarity, accessibility, stability, and confidence at repeated intervals. Researchers could examine whether changes in reportability show reproducible transition patterns, and whether attention or contextual manipulations systematically alter those patterns.

A provisional formalization could define p(t) as the measured proportion of reportable content within a specified sampling procedure, rather than an assumed fraction of all consciousness. The boundary b(t) would require an independently specified observable, such as task demand or attentional cue strength. Transition rates would then be estimated from data, not chosen to fit a preferred philosophical conclusion.

Crucially, the hypothesis must compete against simpler alternatives: threshold models, evidence-accumulation models, ordinary stochastic switching, and established accounts of attention or perceptual access. Evidence for stable turnover alone would not distinguish this proposal from conventional feedback systems.

7. Falsifiability and Limits

The model would gain scientific traction only if it generated advance predictions about measurable changes in clarity, accessibility, or transition dynamics that rival models could not match as well under equivalent conditions. It would be weakened if its variables could not be defined independently, if results depended entirely on retrospective interpretation, or if competing models explained the observations more simply.

There is no claim here that a computational equilibrium proves consciousness, that near-death testimony establishes a particular metaphysical account, or that shared terminology across language, mathematics, and cognition establishes a universal law. The present contribution is a structured proposal for inquiry.

8. A Cumulative Perspective

The broader research program may be organized provisionally as follows: The Fabric of Reality considers the possible structure and boundaries of distinguishable phenomena; TSTOEAO considers relationships of expression and non-expression; Reciprocal Expression and Non-Expression provides an abstract model of transition and balance; and the present consciousness proposal asks whether analogous relationships can be identified in first-person experience and measured cognition.

This is a conceptual synthesis rather than an experimentally demonstrated hierarchy. Its value is in generating questions that can be made precise. An idea initially felt but difficult to articulate may acquire shape through testimony, comparison, diagrams, operational definitions, and mathematical modeling. The process of describing consciousness thus becomes part of the inquiry into how clarity emerges from uncertainty.

Conclusion

The central proposal is simple: between mental noise and clear awareness there may be a dynamic region in which partially organized experience becomes sufficiently stable to contemplate and express. Whether this region is accurately described as equilibrium remains an open empirical question. First-person testimony offers meaningful starting observations; mathematics offers a way to make their proposed relationships explicit; and controlled comparison offers a way to determine whether the proposal explains more than an evocative metaphor. The objective is not to assume that the unseen has been solved, but to give an initially hard-to-describe phenomenon a form that can be questioned, measured, and refined.