Sep 30, 2026 · @Mart Wijn

Mart Wijn Independent Researcher — Natural Human Consciousness

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between reality, consciousness, truth, and free will from the perspective of Natural Human Consciousness (NHC). The central thesis is that reality is fully and immutably present, and that consciousness — defined as the capacity for nomen-free observation — is the sole precondition for receiving that reality undistorted. The paper takes the newborn child as its point of departure: an observer without linguistic mediation, without predictive processing, without conditioning. From this starting point, it argues that truth coincides with raw, holistic experience prior to naming; that free will is only possible through uninfluenced perception; and that the mind — specifically the act of naming during rather than after experience — constitutes the primary source of interference. Quantum mechanics is invoked as confirmation: the observer determines what manifests. Finally, consciousness is positioned as a fifth dimension — beyond space and time — from which reality can be perceived in its totality. The paper builds on seven years of first-person research into Default Mode Network deactivation with preserved cognitive and social functioning (Wijn, 2026a, 2026c).

Keywords: Natural Human Consciousness, nomen-vrije observatie, bewustzijn, realiteit, vrije wil, predictive processing, kwantummechanica, rechter hemisfeer, Default Mode Network

1. The Child — The Human Default Position

Imagine a newborn child. It opens its eyes for the first time. There is light, warmth, sound, touch. But the child does not think: “this is light.” It names nothing. It expects nothing. It does not compare with yesterday, because there is no yesterday. There is only this — this raw, unfiltered, total experience.

In the terminology of Natural Human Consciousness (NHC), this child inhabits the human default state: a condition of nomen-free observation in which experience occurs without linguistic mediation or predictive-processing interference (Wijn, 2026c). This is not a special state. It is the starting position of human consciousness — systematically suppressed through socialization, education, and language acquisition, not by biological necessity but through cultural practice (Wijn, 2026b, 2026c).

The child aged 0 to 4/5, before linguistic socialization, is the purest starting point for understanding what reality truly is, what consciousness does, and why truth need not be as complicated as we have made it. Because in that moment, the child receives reality exactly as it presents itself. Nothing more. Nothing less.

2. What is Reality

Reality is not what you make of it. Reality is what is — fully present, immutable, independent of who is looking at it or how it is being perceived. It does not need to be created. It does not need to be understood in order to exist. It is always there, as a total field that excludes nothing and adds nothing.

The common assumption is that reality is something we discover, interpret, or even construct. But this conflates two things: reality itself and our experience of it. Reality does not change. What changes is the way in which it is received — and with it, the degree to which what we experience still coincides with what actually is. NHC makes this distinction explicit: reality is the immutable substrate; what we ordinarily call “reality” is the influenced or uninfluenced reception of it (Wijn, 2026b).

3. Consciousness as Receiver

Consciousness is not thinking. It is not analyzing, naming, or interpreting. Consciousness is the capacity to receive what is, without adding anything to it or taking anything away. It is the silence in which reality can show itself as it is.

The child embodies this. Not because it does something special, but because nothing stands in the way yet. No language breaking up experience. No memory creating expectations. No fear coloring perception. The child receives — purely, holistically, completely. In NHC terminology: the right hemisphere functions as the primary receiver of unfiltered sensory and intuitive data, while the left hemisphere activates solely upon functional request, precluding retroactive narrative overlay (Wijn, 2026a). Consciousness is open, and reality flows through it unhindered.

Consciousness is therefore not merely a human attribute. It is the only gateway to reality. Without consciousness, no reception. Without reception, no experience of reality. Consciousness gives you the position to perceive everything as it presents itself — what NHC identifies as direct access to unbounded relational logic, the substrate of consciousness itself (Wijn, 2026c).

4. The Source of Interference — The Mind and the Timing of Naming

If consciousness is the receiver, then the mind is the source of interference. Not the brain as an organ, but the ceaseless process of naming, comparing, judging, expecting, and remembering. The mind takes over consciousness and replaces reception with interpretation. You no longer see what is — you see what you think is. NHC describes this as the usurpation of the real: the culturally acquired dominance of the left hemisphere and the Default Mode Network that systematically overwrite direct perception (Wijn, 2026a, 2026b).

What makes this insidious is that the mind presents itself as you. You identify with it. You believe you are your thoughts. At that moment, consciousness does not disappear, but it is pushed into the background, drowned out by noise.

But here lies a crucial distinction — and this is a core point of the NHC framework. The mind is not inherently a problem. Naming itself is not the enemy. The enemy is timing. When you name at the moment of perception, you effectively break into the experience. The left hemisphere intervenes before the right hemisphere has completed its reception. What remains is no longer experience — it is a label, a fragment, an interpretation that takes the place of the whole.

But when you allow the experience to land fully first — holistically, undivided, as a total experience via the right hemisphere — then it stands. Complete and untouched. Only then can you step beside it as an observer and name it. From the outside, as observer of the observation. The word no longer alters the experience, because the experience has already been fully received. The raw perception stays raw. This is what distinguishes NHC from theories that treat all conceptualization as distorting: naming after the experience is a conscious instrument, not interference (Wijn, 2026c, 2026d).

That is the difference between conscious thinking and being unconsciously lived by thought.

5. Truth and Free Will — Uninfluenced versus Influenced

The same mechanism that determines whether you receive reality purely also determines whether you have access to truth and free will. The structure is identical.

Truth is the raw experience itself, prior to naming. It is what presents itself when consciousness receives unhindered. As soon as experience is influenced — by conditioning, by expectation, by naming at the wrong moment — what remains is no longer truth. It feels like truth, it presents itself as truth, but it is a construction. A distorted image posing as the real thing.

Free will follows the same line. With consciousness — with that unmediated reception of what truly is — you can act from direct experience. Your choice is based on what is, not on what you have been taught, ingrained, or led to believe. That is free will: acting from clarity.

Without consciousness, your choices are driven by conditioning, habit, fear, expectation. You think you are choosing, but in reality you are being lived by everything that unconsciously steers you. That is not free will — that is reaction.

Reality, truth, and free will are indisputable — as long as they are uninfluenced. The moment they are influenced, they cease to be what they are. Then your reality is not reality, your truth is not truth, and your free will is not free will. NHC positions clarity of perception and logical precision as intrinsic to consciousness itself, not as emergent properties of neural architecture (Wijn, 2026c). This carries a direct implication: where established frameworks treat free will as a neural or metaphysical question, NHC holds that free will is simply the consequence of uninfluenced perception — and therefore accessible to any human whose consciousness has not been overtaken by the mind.

6. Quantum Mechanics as Confirmation

What philosophy describes finds a striking parallel in quantum mechanics. At the subatomic level, a particle exists in all possible states simultaneously — a superposition. It is only at the moment of observation that the particle manifests in one concrete state. The observation itself determines what appears.

This is precisely the structure described here. Reality is fully present — all possibilities coexist simultaneously, immutable, as a total field. But it is consciousness — the observer — that allows reality to appear. Not creates, because it was already there, but makes visible.

The position of the observer therefore does not determine reality itself, but which aspect of it manifests. Not because reality is limited, but because observation always takes place from a position. And the purity of that observation — the degree to which consciousness is uninfluenced — determines how faithfully that manifestation reflects the underlying reality.

Pure observation allows reality to appear as it is. Contaminated observation — influenced by the mind, by expectation, by conditioning — yields a contaminated result. Quantum physics confirms what the child shows us: the observer cannot be separated from what is observed. This aligns with the NHC thesis that consciousness is not a by-product of neural processes, but the substrate within which reality manifests — a position that distinguishes NHC from both materialist and panpsychist frameworks by identifying consciousness as direct perceptual capacity, not as an emergent or fundamental property of matter (Wijn, 2026a, 2026d).

7. Beyond Space and Time — Consciousness as the Fifth Dimension

Up to this point, the discussion has focused on the mind as the source of interference — naming, conditioning, interpretation. But there are even more fundamental influencers: time and space.

Time forces you into a sequence. Past, present, future. And with it, into memory and expectation — two of the most powerful sources of influence. Space forces you into a location. You are here and not there. And with it, into perspective, into limitation, into distance.

Quantum mechanics shows that at the subatomic level, time and space are not the fixed frameworks we take them to be. Particles can be entangled across distance. States exist outside our linear experience of time. The constraints of time and space are constraints of the observer, not of reality.

Consciousness itself is not bound by time or space. The child experiences no past and no future. It has no “here” as opposed to “there.” It is present — fully, unboundedly, now.

When you let time and space fall away as influencers — just as you let the mind fall away — you arrive at pure consciousness. The position from which everything can be perceived without any limitation. The helicopter view.

One might call this the fifth dimension. The first three dimensions are space. The fourth is time. The fifth is consciousness — the position that can observe the other four without being constrained by them. Not a part of the game, but the field on which the game is played. This is what NHC terms unbounded logic: the capacity for real-time perception and problem-solving unconstrained by stored patterns or predictive priors, manifesting when consciousness is free from the limitations of both the mind and of time and space as influencers (Wijn, 2026c, 2026e). It is a third mode of reasoning beyond Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 — a mode that operates outside inherited frameworks and assumptions (Wijn, 2026e).

8. Conclusion — Back to the Core

Reality is always there, fully and immutably. Consciousness is the capacity to receive it as it presents itself. Truth is the raw experience itself — before naming, before interpretation, before time and space impress their stamp upon it.

Free will is acting from that direct experience, not from a constructed image of reality.

The child knows this. Not by thinking about it, but by having nothing in the way yet. It receives, it experiences, it is free. Not as an achievement, but as a starting position.

The question is not whether reality, truth, and free will exist. They exist. Indisputably. The question is whether we can still receive them uninfluenced — or whether we have become entangled in a web of concepts, expectations, and conditioning that passes itself off as reality.

Consciousness is the way back. Not as something to achieve, but as something to set free. It was always there — just like reality itself. Seven years of first-person research into DMN deactivation with preserved full cognitive and social functioning support this thesis empirically: the human default state is not theoretical but lived, not singular but sustained, and not limited to one domain but reproducible in real-time cross-disciplinary problem-solving (Wijn, 2026a, 2026c, 2026d).

References

Wijn, Mart. (2026a). Brain Hemispheres, the DMN, and Consciousness. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19651892

Wijn, Mart. (2026b). The Usurpation of the Real. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19887388

Wijn, Mart. (2026c). Human Default State. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20692032

Wijn, Mart. (2026d). Natural Human Consciousness: The Heritage for the Next Generation. https://payhip.com/b/C31BV

Wijn, Mart. (2026e). Beyond System 1 and System 2: Unbounded Logic as the Cognitive Architecture of Paradigm Shifts. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22982353