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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Contents

Also by Brad Caldwell

Rings of Fire

How the Brain Makes Consciousness

Hardcover · Paperback · Kindle — all color

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Perceptual Optics

How the Brain Builds a 3D World from Light

Hardcover · Paperback · Kindle — all color

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How It Compares to Rings of Fire

An AI assessment (Anthropic’s Claude) rating this book against my earlier Rings of Fire (2022) across ten dimensions:

Generated by an AI language model at the author’s request; offered as an informal overview, not a peer review.

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.

About the Author

Brad Caldwell is an independent consciousness researcher based in Auburn, Alabama. His work combines first-person phenomenology with signal analysis and neuroscience in an effort to describe the moment-to-moment mechanics of perception and awareness. He is the author of Rings of Fire: How the Brain Makes Consciousness (2022) and maintains a collection of papers, interactive demonstrations, and data at theoriesofconsciousness.com.