Re-evaluating the structure of consciousness through the symintentry hypothesis.
Front Psychol November 21, 2023 David Rail, Andrew Selby
Consciousness has five invariant structural features: experiencing space in three dimensions, integrating past, present, and future into a unified Now, combining information from different senses, relating to objects in the world with awareness, and a pre-reflective sense of a unique self. These features arise from a more fundamental process called symmetry-based modeling, rooted in Kant's idea that the mind imposes structure on experience and Cassirer's notion that a mathematical group underlies that structure. To account for intentionality and the five symmetries, a dual quaternion operator is needed. This operator unifies symmetry and intentionality into a new concept, symintentry, which is proposed as the original form of symmetry, offering fresh understanding of consciousness.