Hello...
I have been working on a theory of consciousness and the experience of fear forms a important part of my understanding of consciousness. I'm glad to be sharing my ideas on this group.
An excerpt from my book about fear is as follows.....
The relation between perception of the stimulus as a potential threat and the experience of fear....
"A body executes the fight-flight response to get itself out of danger quickly. Persistent presence of threat or prolongation of perception of threat produces significant negative effects in many aspects of functioning of the entity. This implies that fight-flight reactions are primarily reactions to avoid the possibility of being exposed to a harmful stimulus. The appraisal of the stimulus as a threat is seen in the experience of fear. The experience of fear is characterised by the act of fleeing or freezing in response to a stimulus which is necessarily perceived as a threat to the body or to the existence of the entity itself. It can be considered as both a fight and flight response because fear causes the person to escape from the stimulus on one hand but also causes the person to express anger or aggression with regard to the stimulus. Aggression can be considered as a kind of escaping response because an entity is said to try to harm another entity in order to grant itself an escape from the situation with the other entity. The mechanism called fight is also termed as pseudo-aggression because in the process of saving itself from potential damage the entity impinges a harmful effect on the stimulus. This effect is considered as an attempt of the entity to escape the situation not by escaping or fleeing from the interaction itself but by causing escape of the stimulus by threatening it. Thus fighting response is an attempt to escape the interaction by causing the stimulus to escape or by way of making the stimulus incompetent to interact with it. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has been successful in treating fear because the person is made to confront with his fears and made to change his beliefs about the stimulus which he perceives as a threat to his body, while the experience of fear is necessarily causes the person to move away or escape from the stimulus in the first place. The fact that the person is made to be present in the presence of fear causing stimulus leads the person to no longer understand the stimulus as having the capacity to cause harm because mere presence of it in relation to the stimulus means that it doesn’t attempt to harm the stimulus in order to escape from the interaction. The increased physical exposure to the stimulus decreases the fleeing or freezing tendency. Fight or aggression is an attempt of an entity to escape from interaction with the stimulus by causing absence of the stimulus by way of making it impotent to persist in the interaction. Thus in the experience of aggression, the body possesses the ability to escape danger not only by escaping but by causing the stimulus to escape and such ability is not confined to physiological changes alone as will be shown later in the chapter. Since by causing harm to the stimulus, it is made impotent to continue to interact with the entity, aggression is said to be a state where the entity tries to grant itself automatic escape from interaction with the stimulus that is unable to interact with it in a productive manner. Thus any entity causes harm to others primarily to protect oneself from being harmed"
The summary of my upcoming book about Consciousness is as follows....
'The potential of there being an experience when met with success is manifested as a choice in
an experiencer and such manifestation is itself the Self. Experiences of various kinds are
shown to emerge from one another in stages called the levels of Self. Self-reference is
regarded as the ability to assess the feasibility of any kind of change. Every entity with a form
of the nature that Aristotle described as a Soul is called the Substrate of Self which is
preserved in every kind of change that an entity undergoes. An attempt to reconcile the
Nativist and Interactionist ideas of language development is made by showing that each part
of speech is grounded in experience of a specific kind. The emergent hierarchy signifies an
increase in awareness and the ability to respond in interaction with specific parts of the
surrounding as opposed to other parts. Emotion is a collection of bodily changes in the form
of facial expressions directly elicited by physical contact with the stimulus. Primary and
secondary emotions such as fear, surprise, disgust, happiness, angry and hangry are shown to
be at lower levels of self and self-conscious emotions such as guilt, shame, pride and
embarrassment are shown to be experiences of higher levels of self. Mind in its purest form
originates in an entity as awareness of non-physical effects emergent from awareness of
physical effects on the body. Feeling is a collection of bodily changes not elicited by physical
effect from stimulus, where such bodily changes are not only restricted to the experience of
emotions, but also the experience of reflexes, locomotion and pointing.
Life is the series of occasions of emergence of awareness about different parts of the
environment stored as memory as different parts of speech and interrogative sentences and
accompanied by various kinds of experiences such as reflex, emotion, locomotion, abstract
thinking, feeling, self-conscious ability and theory of mind ability.
Predictive processing is the underlying process of the function of feelings. Self-knowledge
resulting from predictive processing leads to self-evaluation of one's actions in the form of
experience of Self-conscious emotions and thus the ability of self-awareness is said to
emerge.
The emergent chain of awareness and thus experiences increases freewill and such inflow of
maximum possible experiences are attributed to the tendency of an entity to be close to the
domain of maximum possible experiences which is God. The ability of choice-making
manifested as a self that underlies each experience is considered as a necessity for freewill.
The state of decreased variety of bodily experiences and the corresponding feelings
signifying decreasing freewill is said to be the experience of stress, which when increases in
intensity is associated with said experience of helplessness or depression.
At which stage in the development an entity possesses the ability to collapse the wave-
function and understands that the problems of consciousness are valid and need to be
answered is shown. The Brain is the physical imprint of experiences and their underlying
choices in the form of actions. Consciousness is the hierarchical arrangement of states of
body and mind as instances of self-reference, where each state emerges from another"
Look out for my book here....
https://thepertinentpress.co.uk/pooja-soni
Replies
Pooja, congratulations on your book. I also want readers here to access past conversations on the FM ning around your work; go to https://fearlessnessmovement.ning.com/forum/a-panexperientialist-vi...