BEING–SITUATED–PERCEIVING - The Symbiosis of the Body-Territory

From the Damasian Mind to 5D Consciousness: how do metabolism, feelings, predictions, and movement participate in the experience of existing within a Biome?

Damasian Mind · António Damasio · 5D Consciousness · Anil Seth · APUS–Tekoha · Priming · EEG Microstates · Decolonial Neuroscience

Imagine entering an unfamiliar room. Your feet search for support, your eyes assess distances, and your posture adjusts. Perhaps your breathing changes before you can explain why.

Now imagine dreaming about that same room. You walk, recognize people, and experience feelings, even though the perceived objects are not physically in front of you.

What connects these experiences?

We are organisms that feel, position themselves, and perceive. Yet not everything that changes our organism reaches consciousness.

At BrainLatam, we propose investigating this relationship through the symbiosis of BEING–SITUATED–PERCEIVING, expanding the study of the brain toward the Body-Territory situated within a Biome.

1. BEING: an organism carrying its history

We do not enter an environment without previous experiences.

We carry memories, motor repertoires, metabolic conditions, expectations, and learned relationships.

Experimental psychology investigates part of this influence through priming: a previous experience modifies the subsequent processing of information.

After encountering a particular word, we may recognize a related word more quickly.

However, priming does not necessarily imply consciousness or lasting learning.

BrainLatam's question is broader: how does our embodied history participate in the possibilities of the next encounter?

BEING is not an immutable identity. It describes an organism whose history continuously participates in its functioning.

2. The Damasian Mind: feeling is part of existing

António Damasio and Hanna Damasio offer a fundamental contribution to this discussion.

In Homeostatic Feelings and the Emergence of Consciousness (2024), they propose three interrelated components of conscious mind: continuous interoceptive feelings, images organized from the organism's perspective, and the integration of these processes in the construction of subjectivity.

Homeostatic feelings contribute to our experience of the internal conditions that sustain life.

Hunger, thirst, discomfort, and well-being are not merely peripheral information: they can influence attention, priorities, and decisions.

BrainLatam develops this dialogue in Sentimento como Foco da Consciência (Feeling as the Focus of Consciousness).

The Damasian Mind allows us to investigate the organism that feels while perceiving, remembering, deciding, and acting.

3. Metabolism does not wait for consciousness

In The physiology of interoception and its adaptive role in consciousness (2025), Damasio and colleagues discuss the physiological characteristics of interoception, distinguishing it from faster forms of exteroceptive processing.

Interoception monitors the organism's internal conditions. Proprioception provides information about bodily position and movement.

These processes do not need to become entirely conscious to participate in physiological regulation.

Breathing, circulation, ionic gradients, and metabolism continue even when we are not paying attention to them.

This helps us distinguish the material movement that sustains life from the conscious experience of certain aspects of that movement.

Investigating consciousness requires considering both without treating them as equivalent.

4. SITUATED: positioning ourselves transforms what we can perceive

By changing posture, we modify our visual field, balance, reach, and possibilities for movement.

We do not simply receive environmental information: our actions change what we will be able to receive.

In Active inference, sensory attenuation and illusions, Harriet Brown, Rick Adams, Isabel Parees, Mark Edwards, and Karl Friston discuss models in which perception and action participate in the relationship between predictions and sensory signals.

We can revise our interpretations in response to the world or act upon it, changing the available information.

BEING SITUATED is not merely occupying a place. It means participating in the conditions of the next encounter.

This relationship is particularly important when investigating posture, attention, and learning.

5. PERCEIVING: the present is constructed

Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in Presence, objecthood, and the phenomenology of predictive perception, investigates how predictive models contribute to perceptual experience.

Sensory signals take time to arrive and be processed.

Therefore, what we experience as the present involves information from the immediate past and continuously updated expectations.

This does not mean that we literally live in the future.

It means that the organism integrates available signals with predictions about the world.

However, the Damasian Mind adds another question: how does this perception relate to the feelings and bodily conditions of the organism that perceives?

Presence is investigated not only as a representation of the environment but also as a situated experience.

6. Dreams show that perception does not require a present external object

During dreams, we may experience images, sounds, movements, and feelings even when the corresponding objects are not present before our sensory organs.

Perceptual experience can be constructed predominantly through internal processes.

This does not mean that the organism is completely disconnected from its environment.

External signals may still influence dream content.

From the perspective of the Damasian Mind, we can ask how homeostatic feelings, images, and subjective perspective participate in these experiences.

Dreaming demonstrates that conscious perception is not equivalent to simply detecting an external stimulus.

We must also distinguish conscious perception from sensory processes occurring without reportable experience.

7. Sensitivity, perception, and scientific knowledge

A physical stimulus can modify the organism's matter without producing a conscious sensation.

Exposure to X-rays provides an example: ionizing radiation can interact with tissues without generating a corresponding sensory perception.

This does not demonstrate that every exposure changes conscious experience.

Nevertheless, scientific instruments allow us to understand phenomena that we cannot directly perceive.

Radiation protection relies on evidence, risk models, and specific regulatory limits, not merely bodily sensations.

Thus, we can acquire conscious knowledge about events that our senses cannot directly detect.

The Body-Territory participates in material processes that extend beyond its immediate perceptual field.

8. 5D Consciousness: the movement that perceives itself as BEING

BrainLatam proposes:

“Consciousness is a movement that perceives itself as BEING within the metabolism produced.”

This formulation, developed in A consciência é um movimento que se percebe ser (Consciousness Is a Movement That Perceives Itself as Being), brings together movement, metabolism, experience, and the Body-Territory.

Not every physical movement becomes consciously perceived.

Yet conscious experience, as currently understood in living organisms, depends on material processes that sustain existence.

In Triple-aspect monism, Brazilian researcher Alfredo Pereira Jr. distinguishes physiological, unconscious mental, and conscious aspects.

5D Consciousness engages with this approach without reproducing it.

Our hypothesis is to investigate how an organism can perceive itself as BEING within the metabolic conditions that make its existence possible.

9. APUS–Tekoha: the relationship unfolds within a Biome

In BrainLatam's proposal APUS e Tekoha — como o mundo entra no corpo e o corpo retorna ao mundo (APUS and Tekoha — How the World Enters the Body and the Body Returns to the World), we use two conceptual perspectives.

Tekoha helps investigate internal conditions, interoception, and bodily history.

APUS guides questions about posture, movement, reach, and possibilities for action.

Previous Tekoha conditions influence our positioning. APUS changes the stimuli encountered. New experiences reorganize both.

These interpretations do not replace the original cultural meanings of these Indigenous concepts.

The Body-Territory also depends on water, food, oxygen, temperature, and ecological relationships.

The Biome is not merely the setting of experience: it participates in the material conditions that sustain the conscious organism.

10. EEG Microstates: how can we investigate this dynamic?

In Modality-specific predictive templates in pre-stimulus EEG activity (2026), Isabelle Hoxha and colleagues investigated pre-stimulus brain patterns related to the expected sensory modality.

EEG Microstates offer another window: relatively stable topographic configurations and their temporal transitions.

We can investigate whether particular sequences accompany anticipation, repositioning, and perceptual responses.

However, microstates do not directly identify conscious contents, feelings, or glial activity.

The proposal would be to combine EEG, respiration, ECG, postural sensors, and subjective reports.

This would allow researchers to investigate relationships between brain dynamics, physiological conditions, and experience without reducing one dimension to another.

11. BEING–SITUATED–PERCEIVING: an experimental hypothesis

We can propose an A→B→A experimental design.

First, we would record perceptual and physiological responses in a particular environment.

Next, we would modify posture, movement possibilities, or expectations.

Finally, we would investigate how participants respond when encountering conditions resembling the initial ones.

The comparison would include behavior, microstates, respiration, and reported experience.

A later assessment would help distinguish momentary effects from persistent transformations.

Metanoia of the Metastable Brain would enter as a hypothesis concerning lasting changes in repertoires and possibilities for transitioning between states.

BEING conditions how we are SITUATED. BEING SITUATED transforms PERCEIVING. PERCEIVING reorganizes our situated condition and may transform BEING.

These are not three independent mechanisms, but dimensions of a living Body-Territory.

Consciousness, in BrainLatam's proposal, is the movement that perceives itself as BEING within the metabolism produced — in an organism that feels, predicts, dreams, and transforms within a Biome.

In Blog 09, we will investigate how physical and cellular processes participate in these transformations: from Ca²⁺ and glial cells to TMS–EEG and neuroplasticity.

Meta description: How do feelings, metabolism, dreams, and predictions shape our experience of the present? António Damasio, Anil Seth, and BrainLatam's 5D Consciousness.

Scientific framing: The Damasian Mind, predictive perception, active inference, and EEG research provide complementary scientific perspectives. BrainLatam's BEING–SITUATED–PERCEIVING framework, 5D Consciousness, and Metanoia of the Metastable Brain remain integrative hypotheses to be investigated experimentally.

BRAINLATAM | W47/2026 | BLOG 08/12 — ENGLISH VERSION