Naming as the origin of overwriting prediction — an experience-anchored framework linking non-linguistic awareness, memory, and the predictive brain

Mart Wijn Independent Consciousness Researcher

ORCID 0009-0005-4894-972x

I Preprint · Extends “Natural Human Consciousness” (Landscape of Consciousness, Closer to Truth)

Abstract

This paper sets out a framework, not a proof. It proposes that the usual order of explanation between consciousness and predictive processing may be reversed: that phenomenal consciousness — bare, non-linguistic awareness — precedes language, and that the specifically overwriting, anticipatory mode of prediction that colors adult experience is, in large part, a consequence of language rather than its foundation. The argument is built on a distinction between recognition (knowing without naming) and naming (labeling that lays prediction over perception). Around this core, the paper assembles what is established in the literature — predictive coding and the free-energy principle, default-mode-network dynamics in rumination and meditation, odour-evoked and non-declarative memory, cross-linguistic work on the name-ability of the senses, and epidemiology of cognitive decline — and separates it carefully from first-person report and from hypothesis. Each claim is tagged by evidential status. The aim is to show that a coherent, testable position can be stated without overclaiming, and to indicate where it could be confirmed or refuted.

Zenodo link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23325538