The biological man, the animal even, have beingness. But man can turn around beingness using his mind full of knowledge and then he gives new resonances to awareness. His state of awareness, filled up with knowledge, becomes a state of essence. This return assumes the use of reason and of his intellect, i.e. the scientific knowledge exercised upon the surrounding existence (a process with obviously social character) but also upon his inner world, upon his internal processes, and upon the possible connections between these processes and the material world. But regarding the investigation of these latter aspects science is still only at the beginning.

In order to explain the meaning of beingness one possible solution is to assign to it the character of a certain form of material movement on a certain level of complex organization. In a first model beingness and hence awareness will appear as a superimposed signal generated by a neuronic movement in the brain (the central nervous system). Beingness is not given by a point on the cortex, by a neuron or several neurons, just as the sensation of a light spot is not given by the point on the cortex where the information from the eyes arrives, but by a larger involvement of brain's neurons, in a circuit, in a system. This neuronic movement (a real neuron vortex) could determine a new quality of material movement; we should remember that it also involves the rinecephalon3 (the language system, connected with affectivity) the reticular system4 (connected with the state of awakeness), etc. Then we could imagine the neuron vortex as a new type of wave carrying beingness, as a phenomenon new to everything already known about the living substance. This neuron vortex, and its associated wave, embrace the sensorial, affectional, and command parts of brain's anatomy, less the intellectual parts, i.e. the frontal lobes. For this reason it is expected that the process also exists in brains having reduced frontal lobes or cortex, as for example at animals with the "old"5 brain type.
Beingness is in fact so much different from all the hardware and software of the human machine that we should consider it as a new manifestation of material movement. A possible model is that of a special wave propagating in brain's material support (and somehow attached to it) and containing beingness. The generation of this wave is neither an intellectual process, nor a will process, but a natural phenomenon. Beingness is partially in our organism, and partially in this wave. The degree in which such a model can be scientifically justified is a matter of future research.
Within a philosophical framework, the notion of wave must be considered in a wide sense. Instead of brain generated wave it is just as possible that a new form of matter is used, e.g. a field. And is possible that what it appears as a field is in fact one of the deep substances of matter, i.e. informatter.

We conducted the awareness experiment in a rather biological framework. It is true that for its description we used the natural language, and that this is not only a biological but mainly a social product; nevertheless the experiment in itself has a purely "animal" nature. Beingness is a state disjunct not only from reason and intellect (via a process which in man is not easy) but also from the social inside the man. This aspect begins to be felt in scientific works of various domains. W. Buckley6 considers the process of knowledge as a system for processing information in which the social factor plays an essential role. For him, knowledge is an extremely complex process consisting of multiple perspectives interacting and of continuous interpersonal validation, epistemology having thus a rather group reference level and not a purely individualone.
Beingness as an act does not mean knowledge but a process, a phenomenon. It begins to become knowledge when we constitute in our mind its meaning and its symbol via "to be" and "to know". As an act of knowledge, it is individual up to the use of the words for marking the state-symbols recognized through the awareness experiment. But the moment we use the natural language we also produce a socialization of the awareness act, since it becomes an act that can be compared with that of other individuals via verbal communication. But can an other communication exist ? "To be" + "to know" represent a primary, individual act of knowledge, naturally generated by the human machine. In relation to beingness, "to be" and "to know" determine a relationship that has an informational aspect. This elementary act of knowledge proves that knowledge is indeed a construction and not a mere photocopying process. During knowledge, the human reason builds up various models of the external reality (and "internal" as well, since in a wide sense of the word internal can represent an other type of externality).

The construction of knowledge is based on human reason, the only one which can filter the data provided by external and internal experiences, fed into the central nervous system by the sensory organs, or obtained by its direct contact with the moving forms of known, or yet unknown, matter. Reason is naturally, instinctively, nucleated in humans but it is then enriched and historically developed. The way logics is spontaneously utilized by children has been already shown. A four year old child "knows", without learning from anybody, that if A > B and B > C, then A > C (obviously not in symbolic form but within some simple minded experiments)7.

If beingness can be separated from reason and socialness, this only happens in a first stage; later, when the state of living is to be recorded as resulting from the confrontation between the giving state and the recorded state, then the intellect will be invoked and the reason will experience a state of "know". These are not yet language, but only state and state-symbols and, if one could say so, they are the most primitive language, the biologic language. This language is probably contained in an extremely complex manner in our being; it is a language of states and must be the biological support of any more evolved language such as the language of images, the language of animals, the natural (human) language, and the mathematical and scientifical languages. Is it not that such a vague primitive language is called upon by the scientist when he feels something in his intuitive mind, something that he cannot express in words nor in mathematical symbols ? The natural language has a higher precision than this primitive language, whereas the mathematical language is even more precise, more rigorous than the natural language; but both, while gaining in formal rigorousness, lose more and more of the intuitive powers of the primitive language. The natural language was born on a certain biologic and genetic background, during the practical common activity of humans, to the purpose of mutual communication. Without this specific human property, without the need for action to the purpose of assuring and reproducing life, without work activity leading to economic and social activities, the appearance of natural language could not have been possible. And without the natural language, neither mathematics, nor scientific languages, could have appeared. Work, reproduction, language, economics and society form an unitary whole.
But there are two animal, biologic thingsthat stay behind these:

  1. the biological human machine with its genetically inscribed programs, with the open possibilities of its nervous system to structure and restructure itself according to external stimuli, essentially of social nature;

  2. beingness, man's property, but of a different order, that lights on the first authentic signs of reason and knowledge, either directly, or indirectly (as in the near human) but always with a direct origin. Beingness leaves its direct or indirect trail, not only in reason, but also in affectivity, determining the higher spheres of spiritual life.
Man, as a biological machine, is open through his actions towards society and intro-open through himself towards beingness.


The Awareness Experiment 54