Theories of Consciousness

Dictionary
Cover of Journal of Ring Bank Phenomenology by Brad Caldwell

New Book · 2026

Journal of Ring Bank Phenomenology

What is a conscious moment, exactly—and what is it made of?

About the Book

Ring Bank Theory (RBT) proposes a precise and startling answer: each moment of experience is a brief geometric event staged over a rolling window of roughly the last and next half-second. At a thin “access manifold,” content is minted where converging structures are forced into agreement; a family of content-bearing “paint schemas”—the real world, the imaginal volume, the body’s peripersonal space, a library of stored shapes, and the empty canvas pulled through awareness during music—is sampled, posed, and printed into the felt present, then released to age into a receding wake.

The Journal of Ring Bank Phenomenology is the empirical heart of that theory: a catalogue of meticulous first-person case files—rings and three-dimensional spirographs, the dolly-zoom contraction of the surround, the imaginal head-turn, the slow drift of consciousness under sedation, the tearing and re-knitting of the self in dissociation, the flow of music through a moving canvas—each logged with the discipline of a lab notebook and read back, line by line, against the formalism.

What sets this book apart is its refusal to treat introspection as mere anecdote. Every observation is mapped onto a rigorous geometric model: poses living in the similarity group Sim(3); a “clamp identity” governing what must move when arrivals at the present disagree; wakes as path-ordered holonomies that remember their own history; attention, printing, and single-voice selection as well-defined operators. The result is a falsifiable architecture in which phenomenology and mathematics constrain each other at every step.

For researchers in consciousness science and the philosophy of mind, for phenomenologists, and for any serious reader willing to look closely at the texture of their own experience, this is an invitation to see the moment-to-moment construction of awareness as something with a definite shape—and to test that shape against the record.

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Hardcover

Black & white interior · 400 pages

ISBN 979-8-234-11441-9

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Full color · EPUB

ISBN 979-8-234-11442-6

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Contents

1The Attention/Paint Schemas, Variables, Concrescencep. 3
2Orientationsp. 43
3Per-Case Coupling Fingerprintsp. 49
4Three Flavors of Π: Πφ, Πψ, and Πωp. 71
5Observational Templatep. 75
6Case Filesp. 81
7Ring Bank Exploratory Correlate Atlasp. 315
8Glossaryp. 373
Works Referencedp. 385
Indexp. 389

The Theory Behind It

The journal is the companion phenomenology archive to the formal paper “Ring Bank Theory of Conscious Semiosis: Geometric Access, Baseline Dynamics, and Aboutness Modulation.” For the full body of work—papers, interactive demos, and data—visit the main Theories of Consciousness page.