A Theory of the Mind’s Structure — the Eight Elements of Mind
BOSIFWEM: How the Mind Works
BOSIFWEM is an acronym of Body, Operating Soul, Sense, Feeling, Image, Will, Ego, and Memory — a theory of the mind’s structure that explains mind as an information-processing phenomenon produced by eight elements working together.
Research ProposalImplementation PlanUnverified Hypothesis
Research Proposal
The Declaration — Mind Is a Phenomenon of Information Processing
We begin from the first sentence of BOSIFWEM
Mind is a phenomenon of information processing unique to living things.— the first sentence of BOSIFWEM
Mind–body dualism, which splits mind and body in two, cannot properly explain the mind. Mind is not a substance that exists on its own; it is a phenomenon that appears once the conditions composed of many elements are in place.
BOSIFWEM admits no separate domain called the unconscious — that place is taken by will, its subject, and the allocation of energy. And every element is at once an entity and a process.
Research Proposal
The mind is like fog — momentary, impermanent, interdependent
None of the eight elements is eternal
Consciousness, which splits into sense, feeling, image, ego, and will, is momentary — it arises in an instant and passes away. Nor are body, HonE, and memory eternal. Not one of the eight elements exists on its own; each is only a phenomenon that arises and fades as conditions lean on one another. Nothing is forever.
Each element is a way-station where information pauses briefly as it changes. It arises, influences the others, and passes away.
The mind is like fog: from afar it seems graspable as cotton candy, but the closer you come, the more all that remains in your hand is damp.
That is why the mind is so hard to study. Grasp at it and it scatters; halt it and it is already something else. So we see the mind not as a substance but as a flow — a process in which information crosses between the elements and changes.
Research Proposal
Eight Elements — a Nested Structure
The body wraps HonE; HonE wraps the five elements of consciousness and memory
The body wraps the whole from the outermost layer; within it sits HonE; and within HonE, the five elements of consciousness and memory do their work. Information flows among these elements and changes its shape.
Body — the Machine on Which Mind Runs
Just as no app runs without a phone, no mind appears without a body. Eyes and ears are input devices, hands and feet output devices, and the nervous system the circuitry between them. This is why a tired body clouds the mind — mind is a phenomenon running on the hardware called body. It is also why BOSIFWEM’s list of senses includes machine senses such as magnetism and ultrasound from the very start: the theory treats biological bodies and robotic bodies in a single frame.
HonE (Operating Soul) — the Director Behind the Stage
In the theater the audience sees only the actors, but it is the director backstage who lights the stage, changes the scenes, and readies the props. HonE is that director — it creates the stage called consciousness, sustains it, fetches props from the storehouse of memory, and clears up when the curtain falls. In computer terms, an operating system: never on screen, yet everything runs upon it. Even at night, when consciousness switches off in sleep, HonE does not switch off but keeps up its maintenance until morning.
Sense — the Post-Office Sorting Room
Tens of thousands of parcels arrive every second — light, sound, smell, taste, the touch on the skin. Sense is the post-office sorting room that receives these parcels, opens them, classifies them by kind, and sends them inward. We casually speak of five senses, but BOSIFWEM’s list is far longer: the tilt of the body (balance), changes in speed (acceleration), heat and cold, and inner signals such as hunger. If the sorting room stops, the world stops too — everything that enters the mind passes through this gate.
Feeling — the Instant Judge
Every piece of sorted information is stamped within a tenth of a second — good, bad, neutral. When a hand touches a hot cup, the verdict “bad!” arrives before the thought “hot” — that fast judge is Feeling. Its verdicts deepen in three layers: bodily pleasure and displeasure, liking and disliking, and satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life. These stamps become the first motive of every action — information with no feeling attached cannot move the mind.
Image (想) — the Mind’s Theater and Editing Room
Close your eyes and picture a yellow elephant — the place where that picture just appeared is Image. It is the inner theater and editing room where today’s material sent by the senses and yesterday’s material sent by memory are laid on one screen to form a scene. Yesterday’s recollection, tomorrow’s plan, and the understanding of this very sentence all happen on this stage. Three overlapping screens run here: what was actually seen (real representation), what was drawn by oneself (reasoned representation), and what is made of words (language representation).
Will — the Parliament of the Mind
At every moment a vote is held within the mind. The will of curiosity (α) moves “let’s try something new,” the will of self-protection (β) counters “it’s risky — let’s keep to the usual,” and the will of sharing (γ) proposes “let’s do it together.” The result of that day’s vote becomes behavior. What matters is that wills are not fixed at birth but programs that can be evaluated, revised, and replaced — the reason people can change, and the ground on which growth can be designed into a machine’s mind.
Ego — the Protagonist on the Stage
The protagonist whom that parliament calls “me.” An actor standing on the stage of Image, it wears six faces — the bodily self, the emotional self, the social self, the ideal self one hopes to become, the masks (personas) changed with each situation, and conscience. The astonishing fact is that this protagonist has no strict substance: it is a story built out of special information. Yet that story links yesterday’s me to today’s and lends life its coherence.
Memory — a Library with a Librarian
Memory is not a warehouse where things are piled up but a library where a diligent librarian works. New books are catalogued and shelved (storage); the often-read are moved to the front (reinforcement); the long-unread are pushed deep into the stacks (forgetting). And recall is not pulling a book out to read as is, but rewriting a summary on the spot — which is why memory changes a little each time it is called up, and BOSIFWEM regards precisely that reconstruction as the source of creativity.
Research Proposal
One Second of a Sip of Coffee — the Eight Elements in Concert
Theory sounds distant, but the eight elements are working together at this very moment
Let us follow the one second in which a hand reaches a coffee cup. As a single thread of aroma makes its round of six stations from sense to memory, information changes shape at each station.
Research Proposal
Thirty Information Flows, Nine Layers of Development
Thirty paths along which information flows and changes among the elements
The information processes among the eight elements were first drawn as 27 flows (the original map © 2008); they have now been expanded to 30 and reorganized into 9 layers according to the order of development.
- Examples of flows: the reception of sensation, feeling’s value-tagging, attention as resource allocation, the virtualization of reality (simulation), narrative self-construction, and the compressed storage and reconstruction of memory.
- Reconstruction in memory is treated not as an error but as the source of creativity.
- The definition of each flow and its placement in the layers are set down in the research records and form the skeleton of the publication manuscript.
Implementation Plan
Will and Conscience — the Parliament of the Mind
A conscience that governs the whole phenomenon of consciousness by the ideals it pursues
Will operates as a conscience — able to govern the whole phenomenon of consciousness by the ideal goals it pursues.
- Three cardinal wills — the will of curiosity and growth (α), the will of self-protection and defense (β), and the will of sharing (γ) compete and cooperate with one another.
- Classification of auxiliary wills — the wills of preparation, sensing, thinking, acting, remembering, acquiring, and creating, together with the relational will (the source of morals and of afflictions), organized into a code system. This classification drew its ideas from the old classics of East and West that closely observed the workings of the mind.
- Pursued ideals — Truth (眞), Goodness (善), Beauty (美), Completeness (完), Righteousness (正), Progress (進), Cultivation (修), Play (遊), Faith (信), Harmony (和), and Wisdom (慧): toward these eleven ideals the coordinates and directions of countless wills are set.
Why “conscience” is a design term
In BOSIFWEM, conscience is not moral preaching but structure — one of the six precincts of the Ego, and the operating mode of a collective of wills that carries ideals. This is why the name ECONAS holds both ‘conscious’ and ‘conscience’ overlapping within it.
Unverified Hypothesis
Sutraism — Old Maps of the Mind as Blueprints
A methodology that reads the psychological observations left by the classics as design material for artificial consciousness
A methodology that takes the mind — as ungraspable as fog — and, through the metaphors and observations left by the classics of East and West, grasps it and works it out with modern computer science. This is SAC (Sutraism Artificial Consciousness).
Buddhism — impermanence & dependent arising
Consciousness is not an undying substance but arises and passes each moment; nothing stands alone — all lean on one another by conditions.
Joseon Neo-Confucianism — Four Beginnings, Seven Feelings & gyeong (敬)
The weave of the four moral feelings (compassion, shame, deference, sense of right and wrong) and the seven emotions, and the self-cultivation of gyeong — keeping the mind undistracted.
Daoism — wu-wei & the gathering-scattering of qi (氣)
Wu-wei — acting without forcing — and viewing the mind as flux, as qi gathers and scatters, arising and fading.
The West — Kabbalah & Greece
The tiers of the Sefirot, the Greek division of the soul into parts — the West’s long tradition of seeing the mind in layers.
From among these traditions we take only the verifiable insights and confirm them by experiment. This is not about porting some religion’s scriptures or pseudo-psychology into digital form, but about mining — from the oldest, most careful observations of mind, older than religion itself — what can be translated into engineering. Whether it holds up in real implementation is for future experiments to answer.
Research Proposal
Where This Theory Will Be Used
A blueprint aimed at three places that need the structure of mind
BOSIFWEM is at once an academic theory and a blueprint — it is aimed at three places that need the structure of mind.
A Blueprint of Mind for Care Technology
A robot that imitates emotion and a companion that actually possesses the structures of feeling, will, and memory are different things. BOSIFWEM aims to provide a blueprint for care technology that reads a user’s state in the language of feeling, remembers the relationship, and can explain its own behavior as the vote of its wills.
A Psychological Model for Explainable AI
A frame that answers “why did you judge so?” with structure rather than numbers — which sensation came in, what feeling was stamped on it, which will won the vote. An AI that can show the lineage of its judgment in human words holds value wherever trust is required.
For Every Reader Who Needs a Map of the Mind
For the general reader curious about why their own mind moves as it does, and for developers and researchers trying to build a mind — a comprehensive companion volume is being prepared for both. It runs, in a single book, from the limits of Western philosophy through the East’s analysis of mind to technical implementation.
Implementation Plan
Organizing and Publishing — the Near-Term Goal
Turning accumulated research records into a manuscript for both kinds of reader
The near-term goal is to organize years of accumulated research records and edit them into a manuscript that both general and technical readers can read.
- Timeline: research begun in 2001 — the information-flow map in 2008 — structural documentation in 2015 — expansion to 30 flows and 9 layers in 2025 — the comprehensive explanatory manuscript organized in 2026.
- Publication structure: a main text for general readers, technical appendices, and diagrams — a composition running from the limits of Western philosophy through the East’s analysis of mind, the eight elements, the information flows, to technical implementation.
- Public records: we open our research records together through the research board and the document archive.
Research Proposal
See Also
A research track running alongside JIDEL and the Neutom Network
BOSIFWEM is a research track running alongside JIDEL (a description language) and the Neutom Network (a neural ecosystem); ECONAS is the long-term direction that explores the possibility of the three converging.
The intellectual background of the theory includes the old classics of East and West that observed the mind with precision, together with the insights of modern process philosophy. BOSIFWEM is less a direct inheritance of these traditions than an independent attempt to rewrite mind in the language of information processing; the comparison is treated in detail in the manuscript.