How does Epistolution Explain Hallucination and the Placebo Effect?

The epistolution proposal presents the loop of cognition as an external and internal synchronization. Chain reactions of stimulation run from neuron to neuron, sometimes reaching the outer terminus of the nervous system in the muscular cells, which then interact with the outer world, the human niche. These are what I have called expect-actions. Through this interaction, the chain of stimulation then continues in a loop that enters the nervous system again through the perceptual cells…the optical nerves, the olfactory system, the senses of hearing, touch, vibration, temperature, and pressure. These connections into and out of the niche form a critical part of the cognitive loop; these are the connections that allow the nervous system to become a realistic anticipation of the world as encountered by a human. It is these connections into and out of the human niche that allow the nervous cells to create knowledge, as they synchronize to pathways of stimulation in the niche. The epistolution formula explains how the synchronization happens; the cells of the nervous system are time-delayed clocks that set one another off in sequential flows of stimulation, and the connections between them are mutated or reinforced based on whether they have matched the patterns of the niche. But there is no reason in principle why this type of system cannot run loops on its own without encountering the niche at all; it can be totally cut off from the world, and still be thinking. This would be the experience of the nervous system during hallucination and dreaming sleep. The contact we have with the world is a secondary contact; the loop can run without it. The nervous system can stimulate itself. There is no real boundary between hallucination and perception, rather dreams, like imagination, are recursive self-generated neural experiences. The point is that our only way to encounter the niche we live in is through expect-actions, which are hallucinatory preconceptions about it. Naturally these hallucinatory preconceptions shape the way we interpret reality…we only focus attention on the refutations of our preconceived illusions. We only really notice things when they do not turn out as expected, when our expect-actions are out of sync with our niche. This is where my example of the gloved hand is useful; we never notice the pinky finger of a gloved hand unless there is a hole in the glove. This concept may imply that all the physiological responses governed by our nervous system are in fact governed by expect-actions of one sort or another. In this light it would come as no surprise that having an attitude or a belief would influence the body’s response to medical interventions, since those beliefs are alterations of our patterns of expect-action. This also may mean that what we experience as “attention” is our nervous system somehow finding the location of the most acute disappointed expectations in our whole sensory field. This brings us some clarity about what consciousness may consist of, although I am not yet ready to advance any sort of empirical test for consciousness without seeing a lot more experimentation with the whole epistolution proposal first.