This is a response to a post by Rufus Pollock:

On Awareness
It is important to understand awareness neurologically and in terms of our sensory motor system, not just spiritually or abstractly. We can redefine awareness. To do so, we must oppose mentalism at every step. Awareness is physical, neurological, anatomical and existential. Our interoceptive sensory motor system provides inner awareness. This is what we are exploring at Prosocial Embodiment.
One of the most exciting discoveries at the heart of the paradigm shift is the bodywide fascial matrix. The implications for anatomy and biomechanics are very profound. However the implications for awareness are even more far reaching.
Fascia is our organ of interoception. Exteroception refers to the conventional five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Our exteroceptive perceptual faculty is superficial. It is about the outer world, our extremities, and our outer skin. This is how we know ourselves and the world—through our skin and our external five senses.
These senses provide the evidence for all scientific truth claims and underpin our sense of reason and common sense. However, in this polycrisis, this second renaissance, we can question whether these are all the sensory organs we possess.
Our interoceptive sensory organs are very diverse. Position, momentum, weight, pressure, pain, temperature, balance, muscular tone or density, stretch, and hunger are interoceptive senses, each with their own neuroceptors and physiological function.
Our inner sense, of course, is not merely physical or mechanical. We have to include intuition, possibly induction, and of course even emotional states are visceral. Instinctive responses and reflex actions are located in the body, often in the pattern generators within the spinal cord.
The integration of these systems is total and profound. But we can focus on the sensory motor system because that is the most practical and historically the most studied system.
Fascia is our organ of interoception. Where our skin is a major organ of exteroceptive self awareness, fascia is like a complex layered system of inner skin, with major swathes playing very familiar roles. The brain knows the body through movements and muscle synergies, not individual parts; this means through our connective tissue.
This is how we know ourselves and the interoceptive sensory motor system is always active in our body, working behind the scenes.
The fascia revolution is the beginning of anatomically specific and embodied inner awareness. It is theorized that this system functions as a kind of animal intelligence; it is preverbal and self directed. This form of awareness is also right hemispheric, with all that implies, but we now have the science to describe it clearly, explicitly, and pragmatically.
Awareness is anatomical.
If it all starts from within, then the interoceptive sensory motor system is where to start.
Awareness of the earth and of each other starts inside our own bodies, in the simple and familiar anatomy of the interoceptive sensory motor system.

Rufus’ post:
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