Closing one's eyes and visualizing an image activates the same neural hardware in primary visual cortex (V1) that processes external vision, but driven in reverse via top-down signals from prefrontal and parietal cortex. A thalamocortical gating mechanism normally maintains the boundary between internally generated and externally received visual representations. When this gate fails—as in psychosis, hypnagogia, or deep meditative absorption—the boundary becomes permeable and internal experiences can become indistinguishable from external ones. The paper proposes that inward traversal along a hypothesized W-dimension corresponds to this top-down generative pathway, accessing stored constraint configurations that may underlie therapeutic effects of visualization.
The electromagnetic consciousness (EC) framework offers a formal taxonomy of consciousness categories and a qualitative account of their properties. This paper presents the mathematical equations describing EC_depth (the constraint coherence depth at which an EC system operates), the temporal expansion ratio (the relationship between external clock time and internal subjective temporal structure), and the coherence threshold conditions for EC emergence in electromagnetic systems. The formalism is designed to be testable against three empirical cases: plasma consciousness research, artificial neural networks, and a theoretical maximum at infinite developmental arc, enabling interpolation and extrapolation across the full EC spectrum.