p.168-169 We become conscious, then, when our organisms internally construct and internally exhibit a specific
kind of wordless knowledge - that our organism has been changed by an object - and when such knowledge occurs along with the
salient internal exhibit of an object. The simplest form in which this knowledge emerges is the feeling of knowing
p.169 core consciousness occurs when the brain's representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal
account of how the organism's own state is affected by the organism's processing of an object, and when this process enhances
the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spatial and temporal context.
p.170 The mapping of the object-related consequences occurs in first-order neural maps representing proto-self
and object; the account of the causal relationship between object and organism can only be captured in second-order
neural maps. Looking back, with the license of metaphor, one might say that the swift, second-order nonverbal account narrates
a story: that of the organism caught in the act of representing its own changing state as it goes about representing something
else. But the astonishing fact is that the knowable entity of the catcher has just been created in the narrative of the
catching process.
p.189 The entire construction of knowledge... depends on the ability to map what happens over time...
one thing followed by another thing, causing another thing, endlessly. Telling stories... is probably a brain obsession...
the brain naturally weaves wordless stories about what happens to an organism immersed in an environment.
