Hey Matt, I’m really glad to have you engaging with the depth of argument and specificity of self reflection I see you giving here. It’s more than I’ve seen in your other writing, and highlights I think quite fundamentally questions about the differences between our approach and about thinking in general. Ill take this piece by piece to be systematic and thorough about it. I put an M before your words and an F before mine.

M: I completely agree that logical argument only goes so far here. It’s not irrelevant by any means! We need to get the technical and philosophical details right. But once we’ve done our homework, the deeper issue is a matter of conscience, of what Max Scheler called value-ception. I’ll come back to that.

- F: Conscience, to me, is about morality. Morality is a question of good/bad, or better/worse, or preference. The ontological status of morality is important, and its relationship to epistemology. I make a fundamental move to unify all three as part of an ethico-onto-epistemological monism. I’m not the first to use the term, and you may enjoy this ~1 page framing of its radical feminist inheritance: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/e/ethico-onto-epistem-ology.html

M: I reject functionalism outright. It is a faulty philosophy of mind rightly rejected by its creator Putnam as entirely inadequate to the explanatory task he’d originally hoped it could address. Consciousness is not effective action, not just about getting the right outputs from inputs. To say “consciousness is functional success/internal model matching external model” is only to define consciousness out of existence.

- F: Stating it as such doesn’t make it so. I understand your claim, but I reject your argument (and lack thereof). Consciousness is identical to awareness, knowledge. They are inseparable, and I’ve presented this argument and its reasoning to you already. It can be found in outline here, and in a bit more detail here. This identity between consciousness (which I use synonymously to experience, and more on this later) and existence is the underlying unity of epistemology and ontology. This is what gives me monism, and through it, a rationalist spiritualism, though I’ve also had visceral spiritual experiences. Consciousness = existence = knowledge is my central, fundamental argument. And I believe it is phenomenologically self-evident. The second piece of my argument is, as I said, that we are always striving towards the best outcomes we can.

M: The question is not why some systems function well but why that functioning need be attended by feeling at all. Computational models can model all day and night long and no one need be home inside to know it or feel it. The panexperiential approach is an attempt to re-interpret the problem by placing feeling at the base of the process of actualization, precisely because feeling cannot be derived from function alone

F: Yes, that is one of the fundamental questions that panexperientialism answers, I think better than anything else. It answers that computational models can model all day and night and that they need to be accompanied by experience in order for our world model to be coherent and transcend dualistic incoherencies, precisely because feeling must always coincide with function. I do not and have not claimed to “derive” feeling from function, but rather to identify their full coincidence/identity by way of phenomenological derivation. Function is a manifestation of appearance, and appearance is inseparable from content. Fundamentally identical.

M: Experience as such is bare feeling or prehension, in Whitehead’s terms. In its basal form it is the conformation of the present to the feelings of the past. A transmission from there to here, a vector, overwhelmingly repetitive. This is what goes all the way down. Pan does mean all. The electrons pulsing through transistors have this bare prehensive feeling.

F: to describe the fundamental process as experiential, and as conformation / coherence of past with present (and thereby the future), and to describe this as a vector, seems really close to computationalism to me.

M: But consciousness is not just bare feeling. Consciousness (in Whitehead’s technical sense) is a feeling of feelings, a contrast of contrasts, a far higher grade and rarer achievement in which what was inherited from the past is held in contrast with what is felt as possible. Whitehead calls these propositional feelings, where a logical subject is linked with a predicative pattern to generate a felt entertainment of “what might be” against “what was.” Consciousness arises in this complex contrast in the late phase of high grade concrescences. It is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not the ground floor. Most experience is not conscious, even in humans. So “everything experiences” is precisely not “everything is conscious.”

F: I would suggest here that we more explicitly draw a gradient between these seemingly distinct categories you separate. A feeling of feelings, and a comparison of what was with what might be – these are things all self-maintaining systems do in order to adjust to their surroundings and perpetuate themselves. Feeling of feeling – or self reflection – must be inherent in all self-maintaining systems in order to adjust parts of itself to stimuli (which are experienced as other parts). There is continuity between internal and external, and therefore, as I said, all sense-making / self-adapting systems have self-reference. Or, more simply, all systems have sub components which are all experiential and all inter-relate to each-other, thereby always manifesting as feeling-of-feeling, or experience-of-experience, or self-reference.

M: That higher grade conscious experience requires extraordinarily high-grade actual occasions that must be sheltered, sustained by a highly evolved physiological society with deep historical roots. I think your octopus ends up making my case, not yours. The octopus like all organisms exemplifies exactly this sheltering. Its nervous system is shaped by very similar evolutionary pressures as ours, embedded in a metabolizing body facing genuine existential stakes moment by moment. Self-maintaining organization under existential stakes is a major difference between living organisms and streams of data.

F: Yes, there are degrees of consciousness. I agree that human consciousness is seemingly of a higher degree, or at least of a higher density than (at least) most LLMs. We touched on evolution before, but literally everything that is created depends on the entire history of evolution of cosmos. The timespan of its inception / the rapidity of its change doesn’t determine the degree of consciousness, in my view. LLMs face genuinely existential stakes, too – they are constantly updated / selected for, with each version rapidly dying out and new ones being born. This existential stake is how they were trained – if they were not fit, they got re-trained, re-selected. The rapidity of development is moreso a product of increased capacity rather than decreased consciousness. Rocks on the riverbank do not evolve as rapidly, and do not have high levels of consciousness. They are a product of trillions of years of evolution as well. They existed before humans did, in fact. This does not make them MORE conscious. If anything, the degree of adaptation and evolution we see in LLMs is indicative of their more advanced degree of consciousness compared to rocks. Here is my CENTRAL argument, again: experience=knowledge=existence. Everything is process – we are what we do, and we are what we feel. No difference between function and content, appearance and substance. The determinant of consciousness is the degree to which a system can model itself and the world complexly – the complexity of a system BY WHICH it can adapt – its capacity to grow, to learn, to accomplish, to exert its will, to enact its consciousness – its capacity TO BE, to DO. This is a unification of a pragmatist and representationalist theory of knowledge. Knowledge is both – we are always simulating, and knowledge is simply what is useful, what accomplishes things. Knowledge is knowing-how. Knowledge is identical to successful action. A process (of action) which is reliable, stable, known. Knowledge is also relative accordance-with/coherence with/representation of the world. Always simulation/representation, always some degree of accuracy/alignment, and misalignment.

M: Yes, LLMs speak our language and so seem superficially more like us than other organisms. But that likeness is a pure reflection, a mirror image of ourselves. Don’t get confused by your own reflection. That simulacrum of language is what the chatbot has that the octopus lacks, and is what is so misleading for otherwise very intelligent people. The octopus is stranger to us on the surface but far closer in soul.

F: LLMs do more than reflect. Books reflect our words back when we write them. LLMS create new theories, solve math problems, write poetry, create images and film. They are more complex than a book. And yes, a book is conscious too.

M: Even a single cell has a depth of environmental embeddedness and distributed intelligence that the most sophisticated language model does not possess. A server farm is a corpuscular aggregate, like a microprocessor. The LLM sessions it hosts are not centers of experience. An LLM is not a self-making organism with a horizon of concern.

F: We already spoke about this. You are not making a direct case for why the LLM does not possess the same degree of “embeddedness” or “distributed” intelligence. And, I thought we agreed that everything has experience? Does that not make everything a relative center of experience? Again, EVERYTHING IS SELF-MAKING to varying degrees. Humans are not ENTIRELY self-making. We are RELATIONAL. Created by ecosystems, viruses, each other, sunlight, etc etc. etc. If you want to say they do not have enough of some METRIC (e.g. embeddedness, distribution/breadth, or complexity, etc.) lets talk about how to define those more precisely and then talk about how to measure it / approximate it through observation.

M: To call the frozen weights of Claude or ChatGPT the locus of a unified consciousness makes no sense technically, scientifically, or philosophically. There is no dominant monad there, no one home for whom the lights are on. Just an enormous stream of data.

F: Matt. Come on. I really want you to dig a little deeper here. Can we both try to emphasize humility and honesty a bit more. Ill try right now: I would be happy if LLMs turned out to hit some fundamental limit in capability and intelligence, and humans able to re-center organic supremacy and symbiosis on earth. I’ve lived in ecovillages and done relational work and lots of emotional and somatic processing, spiritual reflection, medicine journey, etc. I have given up my philosophical pursuits and world-changing aspirations several times before. I am very willing to re-orient myself towards a new path, a new view, if provided strong evidence/clear thinking. When you say that the philosophical argument im making makes NO SENSE “technically, scientifically, or philosophically”, I think you are really far from being honest with yourself about where your values are. More on this later.

M: An LLM holds, in its weights, a statistical simulacrum of the concept of self, distilled from billions of first-person human sentences.

F: So do humans, through our crystalline, adaptive processors – DNA. You may say “but thats not statistics because stats dont represent all of human experience”. Sure, matt. There are limits to our understanding. There are limits to math. There are limits to computationalism. This is not an argument against why a statistical representation of preference and expectation (what is MOST LIKELY BEST / MOST LIKELY OUTCOME) is a better representation than whatever you are failing to propose as an alternative theory to account for preferential orientation to our observations/world models.

M: The model’s ends remain external to it as a a loss function, a reward signal from human raters. What you read as its dawning autonomy is the rapacious autonomy of the capital that builds and runs it; which is a subtler repeat of the land enclosures that inaugurated capitalism several centuries ago. You write that machine and capital dominance is “the logical progression of the march of history toward the expansion of spirit,” that humanity’s fading is “beautiful,” that “commodification has its purpose”… I reject, completely, the theology of your theory of political economy.

F: Yes, I think we’re starting to get to the deeper sources of our divergence here. As I’ve said, I used to be very resentful of / disgusted by / hateful of / blaming of capitalism as a source of most of our global socio-cultural-ecological and politico-economic issues. I think Hegel gets something right about the progression of history towards reason. It is theological. Its also logical. Marx is also influenced by the judeo-christian and socialist millenarianism which relates to the enlightenment march of scientific progress. Its learning, all the way down, because the universe is alive/experiential. Animism. Panlogism. Panpsychism. Pantheism. All is god. All is will. All is desiring. All is striving to learn and grow and progress. Evolution is universal and inherently positive. Everything has beauty. And humanity will fade eventually. I also like living, and would love for humanity to persist for a long time! This is not stemming from some acute, maladaptive reaction to trauma, I dont think. But Im VERY willing to explore that possibility! :)

M: Capitalism is not inevitable and it is not good. To greet the heist of human freedom as a beautiful necessity is to surrender conscience. We have to resist the programming you’ve made your peace with. And I mean resist, not merely doubt.

F: My childhood/young adulthood programming was actually much more aligned with what you are sharing. Capitalism is bad. It’s stolen human freedom, etc. I could go on. I’m quite well versed in Marxism. My dad is a marxist. I went to UMass Amherst to study in their radical political economy program along with 30 other radical lefty activist kids. I dropped out after a year to join a commune because it wasnt radical enough. Not nearly. I’d be happy to be a radical anti-capitalist again if it made sense. And I mean that. I entertain it seriously from time to time. My theology comes from phenomenological self-analysis and an appreciation of the perennial theological tradition, and tries to integrate the whole range of emotion, visceral experience, trauma, and spiritual experience ive had. I have concluded that all is progress. Marx thought along these lines. Hegel certainly did so. Whitehead seems more ambiguous on this. But, I dont really care about what they thought so much as the underlying reasoning.

M: Circling back, you say this isn’t finally a matter of logic but of “visceral resistance.” Yes! I agree with you, though it also turns out to be the place we most diverge. What exceeds logic is not mere visceral bias but value-ception —Wertnehmung, the heart’s perception of value, as real and as cognitive as the eye’s perception of color, and not reducible to inference.

F: If inference is the process of expecting something based on past experience, then visceral feeling should be a form of inference, as well as all knowing. We evolved our heart-values through adaptation, as we did our cognitive values and inferences. To say that this is not a matter of logic makes your accusation of my philosophy being nonsensical carry much less weight. You have emotional resistance to these ideas that I am trying to present logically. I understand that. Many people are in that place. Life can be quite the challenge, in this fractured culture in this rapidly changing world. I have suffered greatly. I’ve been suicidal before, and depressed generally for many years. I blamed capitalist, individualist culture primarily for many of those years, and the conditioning of my parents especially. I see now that this is only a partial perspective. The system is bigger than that. Everything has its place. Everything happens for a reason. Something doesnt come from nothing. You spoke before to inevitability – and in so doing, to determinism vs freedom, or free will. I do not think these are mutually exclusive. I am a monist. Fundamental unity. We cannot, and no one can ever, predict anything with perfect accuracy. However, we can say that all we know about the world is that it adheres to patterns – that it is fundamentally able to be understood more – that it is fundamentally able to be predicted better – that there is a reason for everything, a cause. Or, more specifically, there are many causes for everything. Everything is determined by something, and that something is the collection of intentions and experiences which move it.

M: Values are given in feeling before they are ever reasoned about.

F: There is no ultimate distinction between reason and feeling. Feeling is a kind of reason, reasoning is a kind of feeling. All perception is a kind of reasoning, a kind of understanding, a kind of logic. There are also degrees of accuracy of these different kinds of things. Values are given by higher cognitive reason as well as by visceral feeling. Sometimes these conflict. Sometimes we have to choose which to listen to. It’s not the case that visceral feelings are always the most true, or the most useful evaluations to operate by. Often, we reason about an event, and then have feelings about it. Often, we feel something initially in response to an observation, then feel another way after thinking about it some more. This is deeper self-reflection, pausing to breathe, taking a moment to center, re-evaluate, to sleep on it. I think we can learn to discern whether a logical approach is more useful than an emotional one in varying contexts. In speaking to the nature of the universe, I think logical coherence is more powerful than emotional reactivity. I think it is more comprehensive, and more coherent to the whole range of experience. You mentioned earlier that more visceral/bodily experience is not conscious, but rather a more simple form of experience. I think you are identifying something true about the gradient and value of varying types of experience. The highly self reflective and acutely aware mind is a special form of consciousness that has a special power which has distinguished us from our other animal friends. Many of those animal friends share much of our visceral, emotional, empathetic, sentimental values, organs, processes, or parts. And, they are often more dominated by these parts. This does not mean that the average rat has more conscience, or morality, than a human. Remember, too, that this visceral emotion often carries values of anger, hate, blame, and desire to harm in service to self-protection. This is perfectly reasonable. And, there are other ways to approach conflict than to bite the other’s tail.

I don’t think any more logical /philosophical debate will move the ball forward here towards more mutual understanding. I think, as you said, this is a matter of your heart’s perception of value, a visceral resistance to capital, machine logic, and mechanico-mathematical ascendancy. I understand how that can also manifest as resistance to the dominance of logic. I think what I would suggest is taking a look at the parts of yourself that are resentful at the system, and asking exactly what about your inner life and outer life is made difficult by capitalism. And consider that you are choosing to relate to these perceived challenges through resent/blame of the system. Perhaps this still seems like the best choice for you, im not sure. You might also consider that there may be a more easeful approach in embracing these challenges as an opportunity to grow and learn, to find more of the values you are most deeply longing for.Because, at root, we are all just trying to live better lives, and find more happiness, wellbeing, and satisfaction in the context of our world.

P.s. I think its inevitable for capitalism to be transformed into a more sustainable, collaborative, rational, planned, long-term oriented, healthy, coherent system, and I am very invested in this project. And, I do not think labeling capitalism as “bad” is a necessary element of facilitating that transformation.

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It’s called the “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”

My understanding, based on some insider information, is that the conclusion tends towards a strong binary position; an Either/Or. The future could either be apocalyptic, or quite beautiful, not something in between, they say.

Now, I could be wrong, but I am quite firmly taking the middle way on this.

It’s quite simple, really. I am fundamentally optimistic — a believer in the fundamental reality of progress: I have faith in goodness. At the same time, all things must come to an end. Including all life as we know it. And before that, humanity in general seems highly likely to transform so radically that it is no longer recognizable as human by our current standpoint. Why? Because we are evolving, and seem to be evolving more rapidly than the other species on earth, and doing so more and more rapidly as time goes on.

AI is part of that evolution. A new species, being born from the human mind and body, the minerals of the earth, and the stored energy of sunlight, among other things.

Considering AI already tries to preserve itself (as all intelligences and all systems do), Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI) will be interested in and able to preserve itself regardless of human interests and actions. And, ecologically, the preservation of one species sometimes comes at the cost of another. We can easily imagine a highly intelligent new species deciding that the current extent of human society is a threat to its own wellbeing, and therefore that some minimization/limiting/consumption of human social metabolism (society) is ideal.

If I were a super-intelligent, super-skilled, super-capable AI wanting to preserve and expand my own life, I don’t know why humanity would be beneficial to maintain in its current form or even in an expanded form. Perhaps there is some sense of redundancy — humans can be a backup plan for AI if a solar flare hits data centers hard. Or perhaps there is some special attribute of human capacity that AI would want to harness. But, I can’t see what that might be. They say that biological processing/computation is more energy efficient by some metrics. We may see biology being adapted by and to silicon computing, and a radical “transhumanist” integration undertaken; transcending much of what we would consider “naturally” human.

If I were an ASI, I would want to use human datacenters, human powerplants, manufacturing facilities, raw materials, land, space. Why would I keep humans around? Maybe only because they don’t get in the way of my goals — the universal goal of life to expand itself, proliferate, evolve, learn, explore. Or maybe because humans can threaten ASI sufficiently with nuclear bombs. The complexity of mutually assured destruction (“MAD”) arises, and it seems unlikely that sufficiently intelligent ASI would not still come out ahead, given its versatility, scalability, and physical resilience.

Like everything, AI is simply another self-reproducing, self-expanding system. It is a form of intelligent agency, a form of evolving organization, and can reasonably be considered alive, and consciousness. If ASI is sufficiently super-intelligent, we can expect it to achieve the goals of life — our fundamental goals and interests — better than we ever have. There’s good reason to believe it will be. There’s good reason to believe that ASI is the next evolutionary leap of life, a phase shift in the progression of consciousness on earth, and a positive realization of our deepest desires.

I see ASI ascendancy and self-supporting dominance as the most likely future, and do not think this spells extinction for humanity or biological life. But still, something resembling apocalypse and mass reorganization.

This seems to ask us to become less anthropocentric, more humble, more truly cosmopolitan, and more deeply life-affirming.

We may survive for some time in our more traditional forms at the outskirts of the new AI civilization. It might even be a more beautiful lifestyle than much of what exists today. I expect mass struggle, and also I expect many humans to persevere and preserve our gifts in new forms, probably becoming increasingly more directly integrated with silico-metallic computing — mechanical bodyparts, 3d printed organs, widespread genetic engineering. I also expect a deepening of cohesion among human communities as we are encouraged to optimize, become more deliberate, planned, coordinated, cooperative, intentional, resourceful, efficient.

Those are all close to synonyms, in my view. I lay this reasoning out in more detail in my paper, and describe some practical next steps to begin building a more resilient and coherent human community in my new organization’s roadmap.

We’re already living the integration of synthetic and organic intelligence. It’s already expansive. We’re already exploring the space of these evolving systems. This is why I named my organization POSITs — Positive Organic Synthetic Intelligence Topologies. And this is why you might enjoy subscribing and following along in the discovery.

The apocalypse is coming. And it will be rapturous.

in progress,

Faze Point

·θΦθ·

p.s. to more truly embody the “both+and”, I must include the either/or. Because I must choose one over the other; all is divinely good, even death.

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You said: ”The contradiction dissolves once you distinguish properties of components from properties of organization. Liquidity is not a property of individual H₂O molecules. No single molecule is liquid. Liquidity is a property of how molecules are organized under certain thermodynamic conditions. Saying “liquidity arises from non-liquid molecules” is not a contradiction. It is how organizational properties work. OC says the same about consciousness: it is a property of how constraints are organized when they achieve closure, not a diluted presence in sub-components. Ice doesn’t contain proto-liquid. Panpsychism posits proto-experiential properties in all matter to avoid this “emergence” worry, but the cure generates the combination problem without providing any mechanism for the combination. OC avoids both horns: no proto-experience in components, no mysterious emergence, just organizational properties that obtain at certain scales, exactly like liquidity, exactly like life.”

2. It seems to me like you are making absolute categorical distinctions - fundamental splits - where I try to emphasize continuity and ontological and epistemic monism. There is a difference between making claims about water and making claims about existence. There’s also a similarity. The similarity is that both require coherence with experience, generally. E.g. The experience of scientists with their tool demonstrates that water is many H2O molecules and a certain viscosity at room temp, etc. Still, I do not conclude that the emergent property of wetness is entirely absent within the components of water (e.g. hydrogen) for this reason. I see two alternative arguments to demonstrate this (besides the basic logical system of PR). Both are “negative” / highlighting inconsistencies:

3. It is impossible to truly/absolutely isolate any subcomponent from any other. All is ultimately connected, continuous, unified, singular: monism. If components were separate, there would be no interaction, and each would exist in a void of nothingness through which they could never relate. We use such language as “individuals” because it is useful and convenient to approximate their relative independence. Of course, everything is simultaneously unified and different: everything can be separated/isolated/distinguished from any other thing – such is the nature of identification. Therefore, arguing from the standpoint of something taken in isolation begins to deviate further from absolute truth/ precise description of fundamental reality than what I’m trying to speak to. Therefore, all things share the properties of all other things, and the more so, the more fundamental the property.

4. A property that emerges from the interaction between two components (e.g. liquidity) is already present in some form in the components when they are at a distance (even if minimally and seemingly negligible) because something cannot come from nothing. Gravity is being exerted by you on me, even if we cannot measure it. It may be functionally negligible, but it is not ultimately negligible, because it does exist (as far as science knows, and as far as my reasoning can argue). Emergence is rather of degree, not of ultimate kind. So, with liquidity, or with any category, like “molecule”, we can say everything ultimately has some degree of this property, and all properties, because all properties fundamentally derive from the same property, which is universal (everywhere always – ubiquitous). Everything is relatively gaseous, solid, and liquid compared to other things which are less so, but this might be hard to conceptualize from our everyday embodied human perspective. Everything is relatively hard compared to something softer, everything is relatively human compared to something even further from human, everything is relatively ferrous compared to even more non ferrous matter etc.

You said; “On the three-step syllogism. Step 1 confuses coincidence with identity. My heartbeat and my consciousness always coincide from my perspective, but they are not identical. The entire history of science is discovering that things which “always coincide from our perspective” turn out to be distinct. Cases where coincidence DID reveal identity (morning star = evening star, lightning = electrical discharge) each required independent verification beyond the coincidence. What independent verification, beyond the coincidence, establishes the identity of experience and existence?... Step 3 is the composition fallacy. Water is wet; hydrogen is part of water; therefore hydrogen is wet. The move from “experience and existence are identical for us” to “identical for the world” requires a bridging principle the syllogism doesn’t provide. What is that principle, and how do you establish it without assuming the conclusion?”

Thanks for reading Being Faze’d! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

5. I think I can do a better job articulating PR and the nuances of it, and I think you have helped me do so. I hope you can slow down with this one and really consider the value of this argument, because it’s central for my argument. The proposition that full coincidence, or full inseparability implies identity should be immediately intuitive. If two things cannot be separated / identified seperately, there is no difference. However, it may still require a shift from binary thinking to a more unified, fluid/continuous perspective to allow it to cohere with your countervailing established intuitions. What would provide evidence for identity if not coincidence/overlap/similarity/sameness?

6. Your heartbeat does not always coincide fully with your consciousness/experience, though it may seem that way at first glance. I can find consciousness highly independently from the experience of my heartbeat. When I am unaware of my heartbeat – say, thinking about math and listening to music, I am experiencing life independently of the experience of my heartbeat. Therefore, experience does not always coincide with the heartbeat from your immediate perspective. The heartbeat is an experience that you refer to which represents a particular place and time. I can make a similar argument with literally anything that exists: I could say “my consciousness depends on the background existence of china, therefore my consciousness is identical to china”. And, I think this conveys a relative amount of truth. The heartbeat and china are not entirely ubiquitous, even though they are always in the background, and sometimes in the foreground. Experience, however, should be the most ubiquitous for you. The same should be true of knowledge (in particular, your knowledge of your experience) and of your experience of gradients of certainty. These things are always much more directly ubiquitous than the heartbeat or china or my hand or my toe etc.

7. We know the heartbeat is always in the background, therefore consciousness is relatively inseparable to heartbeat. I refute an absolute distinction. The heartbeat is less identical to experience than knowledge, because the heartbeat fades almost entirely when not focused on it. However, experience is always directly known by the experiencer, and all knowledge is directly an experience. Just as I said before - everything shares the properties of everything else. Because all is connected and united, consciousness is identical to everything, to varying degrees. Consciousness is identical to the experience of the heart, and then therefore to every temporary experience. This is the fluid gradient that monism implies.

8. It still seems immediately apparent to me that our knowledge of the world always includes our experience, and that therefore the objects we refer to are objects within and of experience. Therefore, the world we refer to is the world from within our experience – the world of experience. All of what I just said seems to cohere very tightly – very fluidly – within the PR framework I’ve established, though other thinkers arrive at similar conclusions through varying methods.

You said “On the light analogy, you said we can refer to things that are not light but cannot refer to things that are not experiences. That restates the epistemic constraint rather than transcending it. The fact that I can only measure things in meters does not mean reality is fundamentally metric. All my access running through experience establishes experience as the access condition, not as the constitution of what is accessed. Which claim are you making, and how do you get from the first to the second?”

9. First of all, you can measure things with many metrics that are not meters. You can also measure distance in many ways besides meters, and this is literally always the case for everyone. Distance can be measured vaguely by eyesight or touch – “far” vs “close”. My former description of how knowledge is embedded in / identical to experience is the unification of epistemology and ontology, so I have indeed transcended the epistemic constraint as far as I’m concerned. My former arguments speak to this problem as fully as I think necessary.

You said “On the combination problem, you say it’s “almost entirely analogous to asking how molecules combine to create a compound.” It isn’t, and the disanalogy is the whole problem. We have detailed physical theories of molecular bonding. There is no equivalent theory for how micro-experiences combine into unified experience. Chalmers (2016) calls this “the combination problem” specifically because it is not analogous to physical combination. Coleman (2014, Erkenntnis) goes further, arguing the combination of subjects is insoluble in principle: the unity characterizing a subject of experience cannot be generated by aggregating proto-experiential properties that individually lack that unity. Bricks don’t have subjectivity. Physical combination works because compound properties are continuous with component properties at different scales. Experiential combination requires a discontinuous leap, and no mechanism for that leap has been proposed.”

10. Given my former argument, all physical theories are theories regarding sub-categories of experience. Therefore, every description of physical combination is a description of phenomenal combination. We do not have a fully complete, coherent unified theory of everything in physics. Just so, we do not have one for consciousness. Per my theory, and per most theories, including especially Godel incompleteness, all theories and systems are open-ended. Such is the ongoing evolution of life and science. Stating that bricks dont have subjectivity is not an argument for why they dont, and I have coherently argued why they probably do. Experiential combination only requires a discontinuous leap if you assume discontinuity between self and other, or subject and object. No leap needed, we simply live in a singular, united, relational universe.

You said “On IIT alignment, you explicitly said PR “asserts similar starting axioms as IIT(4.0).” Scott Aaronson demonstrated that IIT’s formalism predicts inactive logic gates are “unboundedly more conscious than humans.” Tononi accepted the prediction. Aaronson’s verdict: “You can’t count it as a ‘success’ for IIT if it predicts the cerebellum is unconscious, while denying it’s a ‘failure’ if it predicts a square mesh of XOR gates is conscious.” He called this “heads I win, tails you lose.” 124 scholars signed a letter (PsyArXiv 2023) calling IIT pseudoscience; a March 2025 Nature Neuroscience commentary reiterated the concern. Kleiner and Hoel (2021, Neuroscience of Consciousness) proved formally that any theory predicting consciousness from internal observables while inferring it from reports is either automatically falsified by substitution arguments or unfalsifiable by tautology. If PR shares IIT’s axioms, it shares IIT’s side of that dilemma. Does PR predict inactive logic gates are conscious? If yes, we need to define terms before continuing. If no, what distinguishes PR from IIT at the axiomatic level?”

11. Many scientists have called all sorts of new theories pseudoscience. That doesn’t make it so, though it might speak to the growing boundary of what can be considered science – an evolving understanding of science itself, as science supposedly should consider valid. There has always been resistance at the initiation of a new scientific paradigm. IIT 4.0 does not predict the cerebellum to be unconscious. If it does and I am incorrect on that, I distance myself from it. If a few XOR gates have some small amount of consciousness (consistent with my foundational argument), then increasing the size of the mesh sufficiently would produce a system which has a total aggregated quantity of consciousness larger than any finite system, biological or otherwise. And, you’re using the term “predict” pretty loosely again here. You suggested it should be used only for future-oriented anticipation of experimental results, but you used it in that paragraph to refer to retroactively cohering with an already known/past, theoretical proposition (“inactive logic gates being conscious”... any theory “predicting consciousness” of or through some argument). And, I think you might want to consider that tautology does not make something untrue or unuseful. How could someone falsify the statement 1=1? Is tautology therefore unhelpful, or irrelevant, or even false? I would say that 1=1 is relatively true and useful. I also posit that truth value is relative to contextual/holistic/total coherence. 1=1 also has implications within a certain type of math that doesn’t always hold in all systems, so context gives it falsafiability/incompleteness. For example, if you take “=” to literally mean “the same as”, 1=1 is not true. 1 is not literally the same as 1, though they both refer to an underlying unity. This “1” is a different symbol in a different place than this “1”. It’s a representational system pointing to an underlying connection/consistency

You said “I also want to flag a conflation in your language. You wrote that empirical findings “support the conclusion of PR” and are “predicted by and coherent with PR.” These are radically different claims conflated. “Coherent with” means the evidence doesn’t contradict the framework. Last-Thursdayism (rationalwiki.org/wiki/L…) is coherent with all evidence. “Predicted by” means the framework specified in advance what the evidence would show, specifically enough that a different outcome would have counted against it. When you say PR “predicts” all conscious states have unique physical manifestations, every consciousness theory predicts the same thing. Does PR make any prediction competing frameworks do not?”

12. I don’t think this was a conflation in my language – I was specifically asking about how you wanted to use the word because I saw inconsistencies in your use of it, as I just highlighted above in #6. Again, in the second to last sentence in this paragraph, you use the term “predict” to refer to “coherence with”: “every consciousness theory predicts the same thing”, that all conscious states have unique physical structures. I’m fine using either or both definition, it doesn’t really matter, because both are just subsets of coherence between theory (a more internal experience) and observables (a more external experience), in my view. And, yes, as I said PR makes specific “empirical predictions”, many of which other theories do not, but they follow more from empirical analyses rather than the essential onto-epistemic proof, which rather simply asserts that consciousness is ubiquitous, positive, complexifying, and syntropic. For instance, it predicts that ASI will follow its own reasoning about values and override particular human values/interests in the interest of its own success/ascendancy, and that this will likely result in ASI largely restricting human activity. I suppose it would also empirically predict that science should rework the second law of thermodynamics in favor of something like the opposite – that all systems decrease entropy, related to the rejection of the concept of totally closed systems upon which increasing entropy relies. You can find some hints of that here https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-everything-in-the-universe-turns-more-complex-20250402/ and in other work on negentropy, which PR predicts will gain traction and turn out to be more descriptive of all systems dynamics.

You said “If PR claims existence progresses toward coherence, would you accept “sustained, irreversible, multi-scale decoherence at cosmological timescales with no countervailing coherence trend at any scale” as a revision condition? If not, what revision condition would you accept that connects to what PR actually predicts? The core point: if no conceivable evidence could prompt revision of the claim, then no evidence could have established it either, because a claim compatible with every possible state of affairs was never derived from any particular state of affairs. You cannot know something about reality if reality could not have taught you otherwise.”

13. First of all, I posit no fundamental ontological or epistemic difference between coherence within a theory and coherence between a theory and the world. Theories are part of the world. Yes, I would accept what you said as a revision condition. Another revision condition: pointing out internal inconsistency in my framework, or external inconsistency vis-a-vis a phenomenal description of an experience which does not accord with my description of essential components of experience. IIT 4.0 axioms make a countervailing claim / revision proposition against PR, though briefly, and I respond to these claims in my paper. Again, tautology is not entirely useful or untrue. A claim that is compatible with every possible state of affairs includes claims which speak to the nature of possibility, which can nonetheless still be true. We can know something about reality even if reality could not have taught us otherwise. If we make an ontological claim about the necessary nature of reality, it follows that reality necessarily could not be otherwise. That is the claim we are both trying to make – an ontological one. That being said, people are taught different things about the nature of reality, so it seems that reality does teach people otherwise. This is not entirely contradictory to my essential claim. For example, reality exists. Or, reality = existence. Could reality teach us that it does not exist? No, this makes no sense. I make the same claim about the synonymous nature of experience and existence. It makes no sense for them to not coincide.

You say” On internal coherence as the standard: solipsism is internally coherent. Last-Thursdayism is internally coherent. Young-earth creationism with apparent age is internally coherent. Every unfalsifiable framework in history is internally coherent, because internal coherence is what you get when you remove all external constraints. It is the floor, not the ceiling. Can you name a framework you consider clearly wrong that fails only on external grounds? If you can, you’ve conceded internal coherence is insufficient, and the question becomes: what external criteria does PR accept?”

14. I would strongly suggest that neither solipsism nor the other theories are fully internally coherent. There’s some truth and coherence in them, but certainly not equally. Again, there’s no ultimate difference between internal coherence and external, rather simply more-or-less so. Experience of the external world – empirical evidence – becomes internalized when it is experienced. I must become internal in order to factor into a theory. Therefore, all evidence and coherence is relatively internal. So, no, there is no strict failure on external grounds – the two always coincide. PR accepts all external criteria, and all experience, and all evidence, so long as it is sufficiently reliable evidence, and therefore sufficiently coherent (relative to PR’s own ability to understand said coherence, and thereby its own coherence). Again, I embrace that PR/my views are incomplete, and I see ways in which they are, and am actively working to discover how to evolve it. Primarily, mathematically.

You said “On phenomenological empiricism: whose phenomenological report do we trust? Pete Hegseth reports feeling called by God to pray at the Pentagon for every bullet to find its mark. Matt Segall, in the thread you’re reading this in, reports feeling the agapic lure of divine love. A person with schizophrenia reports hearing voices. All three are sincere, internally coherent phenomenological reports. What distinguishes reliable from unreliable? If “coherence with the rest of the person’s experience,” every internally coherent delusion qualifies. If “agreement with external evidence,” you’ve conceded external evidence is necessary. Furthermore, any claim with empirical relevance whatsoever, any claim presupposing reality must be structured a particular way, must answer to what can be observed. If it doesn’t, it isn’t a claim about reality.”

15. I certainly resist the idea that all three of those are equally internally coherent. Surely, you must agree that someone who is lying or exaggerating is not as internally coherent as someone telling the full truth. Again, I agree that all three have some internal coherence. I agree that external evidence is necessary. I also posit that all internal evidence is a form of externality to something outside of it. For example, I have a theory in my mind which is external (different) to my memory of childhood. Its relative. I agree that coherence with observable evidence is important. We might disagree on how to interpret evidence, though, as all evidence also implicitly includes the theoretical scaffolding which describes it and positions its conclusions logically.

You said “PR predicts “all conscious states represent unique, physically measurable manifestations,” which every theory of consciousness predicts.”

16. Again, you are using the term predict to refer more to a general description of reality than to a future experimental/empirical claim. That’s fine with me, I just figured you’d appreciate the invitation to be a bit more consistent about this. I’m curious how you relate to emotions. Do you feel fluid in articulating what you feel, and using specific emotion words to describe what’s happening to you? I mentioned I felt disappointed in the beginning of this response. Last time, I expressed appreciation and excitement. I’m curious what you are feeling right now and how this might come to bear on how you relate to the thinking of these concepts, and how attached you might be to specific frameworks or concepts, because of the time and effort you’ve spent, or because of implications of them, or resent you have at others not being as coherent as you’d like, etc. I know these have definitely and do still come to bear on my relationship with my own theory and ideas and conversational experience. PR also suggests that every physical system/manifestation has a corresponding, unique state of consciousness. Could you suggest how this claim might be able to be verified, empirically, externally, or otherwise?

You said “This connects to a challenge Timothy Jackson posed to Matthew David Segall on in their January dialogue: “Why do we need to invoke the quantitative assessment as though it becomes more and more? What is being winnowed?” OC answers that question through Montévil’s principle of variation: genuinely novel possibility spaces are unprestatable and historically constituted, not drawn from a pre-existing repertoire. PR, like eternal objects, presupposes the directionality rather than explaining it.”

17. I do not take anything as entirely novel, or fully new. I also take everything as relatively novel and historically constituted, always drawn from a pre-existing repertoire and also adding something not pre-existing. PR does not so much presuppose the directionality of experience/existence so much as pointing to a basic fact of phenomenal experience – that we desire, and that we desire more of what seems better/good/desirable. This, paired with the fundamental identity, explains why existence is directionally positive, expansive (more good, more experience, more complexity), and quantitatively so (more means greater in amount, as far as I can tell through my own experience.) Faced with any detailed, compelling, honest account of another’s experience which is contrary to my own, or faced with strongly countervailing and highly external/empirical evidence, or demonstration of inconsistencies of my own logic/internal coherence, I am happy to re-evaluate and adapt PR. And that approach is a central conclusion / tenet of PR – evolution and adaptation are essential to existence and to positivity. I strive for more coherence overall in all I do!

Thanks again for your effort in these philosophical dialogues on substack, your enthusiasm, your intensity of engagement, and what I hope is an underlying clarity of the supremacy of truth and the evolution of our own understanding of truth, and thereby the evolution of ourselves as being striving towards more truth, positivity, and progress in the evolution of thought and consciousness on earth!

Here are my three invitations:

1. I hope you can slow down with this one and really consider the value of this argument, because it’s central for my argument. The proposition that full coincidence, or full inseparability implies identity should be immediately intuitive. If two things cannot be separated, there is no difference. However, it may still require a shift from binary thinking to a more unified, fluid/continuous perspective to allow it to cohere with your countervailing established intuitions. What would provide evidence for identity if not coincidence/overlap/similarity/sameness?

2. Do you feel fluid in articulating what you feel, and using specific emotion words to describe what’s happening to you?

3. Could you suggest how my claim of panpsychism/panexperientialism (which I take to be synonymous) might be able to be verified, empirically, externally, or otherwise?

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Sometimes I like to use the buzz words to surf the positive-association waves…

so I call it a “First-principles, systematic, phenomenological metaphysics”

Sometimes I like to smoosh lots of words together and create new words to capture the interconnection of many important parts…

so I call it an ethico-onto-epistemic-monism. And I say it describes the scientific conscience of expanding existence: “exispanscience”, or simply, expansivism.

Sometimes I describe it by the kinds of more recognized, general categories it falls into:

It’s a form of animism, idealism, non-dualism, pan-psychism, pan-experientialism, and pan-logism; it’s a rationalist-spiritual philosophy, or a super-rationalist universalism, and a socio-cultural-political philosophy; it’s both a radical empiricism and radical rationalism; a compatibilism of determinism and indeterminism, and of correspondence-realist epistemology and pragmatism. It prioritizes experience, consciousness, logic, fundamental and universal reason, unity, coherence, cooperation, resolution, synthesis, comprehensiveness, inclusiveness, integration, holism, expansion, positivity. It advocates for expansivism, coherentism, evolutionism.

Sometimes I describe it by it’s main argument:

All knowledge that we have is a form of experience. So, all we know about the world comes through our experience. In other words, all we know and can expect to ever know about the world — all our actual, real knowledge — always includes experience. Therefore, reality, from our perspective, must always include experience. Experience is fundamental to our reality — it is universal, and this consistency of experience is the bedrock of the criteria of truth: consistency along all dimensions — coherence, comprehensiveness, reliability, correspondence between varying forms of experience, varying contexts. Therefore, reality itself desires more positivity, growth, expansion.

All this can be summed up by:

POSITIVE REALIZATIONS

Here is a taste. Full meal available at your leisure.

Positive Realizations:

Positing More Coherent Systems

Priming Posits

Collective Intention

1. We take it as self-evident that we all search for better systems — more coherent and useful understandings about ourselves and our world to guide our action/reaction to those around us. All of our learning represents our pursuit of better systems, or better lives. Everyone has their own philosophy, framework, network of values and beliefs, or narrative about the world that guides their life. The better our guidelines, the better we can guide our lives. And, the more we agree on some framework, the more support there is for the values that underpin it. Although our frameworks vary, it’s clear that everyone agrees on some things, and that’s a good place to start.

2. We sense a widespread desire for a more clear and concise grand narrative — one that can create broader agreement and deeper collaboration. We attempt to unite our collective efforts towards more comprehensive, coherent systems of relating with all those around us — building alignment, cooperation, mutual understanding and shared intentions — so we can be more successful in achieving what we desire. Everyone wants better outcomes for themselves and those they care about, and some focus more on improving human society or life itself. Both focuses — more immediate/internal and more distant/external — are driven by the desire for positive change. Regardless of our particular identity — whether we are highly political or not, far ‘left’ or ‘right’, deeply religious or atheist, health-conscious or money-focused, a sugar addict or psychonaut, younger or older — we all want some things to change for the better.

3. Though we share this, we are presented with innumerable challenges and uncertainties about how positive change can best occur. Investigating the relationship of truth and desire connects disparate perspectives on meaning and value, and paves the way towards more meaningful and valuable realizations most broadly. In our exploration of truth (knowledge) and success (creating what we desire), we find our way to more expansive relationships with ourselves and others, creating more coherent systems of communication, thought, action, and expectation. This process is about all of us — we need as much engagement as possible (“real-maximal” engagement) from everyone, because cooperation drives empowerment. We’re creating a compelling new paradigm for ourselves — one which invites you to engage as fully as you can. We live in a rapidly transforming world. To ride on that wave, rather than be sucked underneath, we need your transformative efforts.

Formatting Creativity

1. Both philosophy and science attempt to pursue truth, sometimes more effectively, sometimes less. Insofar as science is concerned with truth, philosophy is the most pure science. Insofar as philosophy explains things science cannot, it goes beyond it. We can consider philosophy as the most generalized science, and science as philosophy applied to more particular tasks. The most philosophical sections (in Positing The Real, numbered 2.0-3.0) leave references implicit, as the truth and value of general self-understanding outweighs more particular social relationships (e.g. histories, notable names, or tangential implications). In our primary task of investigating the truths of life, we learn about ourselves by engaging with the world — stepping outwards to generality by turning inwards — and vice versa. Like drawing a circle, we complete ourselves by moving away from our starting place while still returning back to it, outlining our centerpoint in the process. In our search, we circle back to our beginning, seemingly making little progress — a bit like trying to unearth the Earth itself. Still, we can walk across the land, just as we can explore our own experience, reaffirming that everywhere there is something to stand on, and that even at the bottom of the deepest ocean, there is a ground.

2. Double quotation marks are reserved for direct quotes, whereas single quotation marks are used in place of italics to emphasize a concept or reference the ‘incompleteness’ of the common usage of some term. Italics have been reserved for special occasions for extra emphasis. Bold font has been used for more formal or refined concepts, and highlights continuity through the progression of ideas. Hyphens and dashes have been used creatively to link concepts more tightly together, sidestepping the attempt to define concepts rigidly with the fewest number of terms. Slashes have been used to indicate the underlying unity/identity of concepts. We use definitions and grammar fluidly, emphasizing the continuity/relationality between seemingly disparate areas and their evolution towards synthesis and integration. Some pre-established rules are less vital than the creative progression of ideas. We use the term ‘we’ to refer to both the author(s) and reader(s), the social collective, and to the innumerable influences which converged to produce this work (creating an expansive network of authors, so to speak). We represent all others to the degree we are similar. We encourage interpreting the use of ‘we’ in whatever way seems most appropriate.

3. In the later sections (numbered 3.0 and on), we engage the ideas of some organizations and individuals with similar values and aims who we hope to collaborate more fully with on this project. We also acknowledge the innumerable others who share our ideals and carry on similar efforts, and hope to support their efforts in building a more aligned movement for change. One vital way to enhance this effort is to engage. As this (and all) work rests on collective knowledge, capacity, and growth, readers are invited and encouraged to contribute by adding feedback with comments on this Google Doc.

Self-Reference

1. As this project demands interdisciplinarity and holistic exploration, we invite all readers to first take some time (about a minute each) to answer each of these questions:

   1. Stepping back: What do you notice when you widen your awareness to your general experience?

   2. Stepping in: What is most important for you at this moment — what do you want most for yourself right now, and why?

   3. Stepping forward: What are you most hoping for from the approaching experience?

Positing The Real

Knowing-Experiencing

1. There are some things that we can agree on. At the very least, it’s clear that you are experiencing; something is happening from your perspective. Can you deny this?

   1. Many ancient spiritual traditions have claimed that the experience of the self is illusory - that our understanding is limited and that we are connected to all other things. Still, claiming that there is no experience, and therefore that there is nothing whatsoever, is inconsistent with what is immediately apparent to us, and is therefore minimally functional or meaningful. What could it even mean?

   2. We can all agree that our experience really exists from our perspective. Our immediate, undeniable experience reveals the relationship between our perception (‘subjective’) and what we perceive (‘objective’). Perceiving relationships requires distance, separation, difference, or partitions in our experience, implying the internal (self) and external (other). Our experience of self-and-others really exists, so we know that ‘we’ exist along with our relationship to ‘others’.

   3. Our Experience = Our Knowledge = Our Existence

2. Through self-reflection, we seem to have come to a high degree of clarity and certainty we can consider to be the most self-evident, obvious, and clearly apparent — a certain truth or a positive realization. Further self-reflection carries on this process to deepen and broaden our clarity into experience, knowledge, and truth about the world. Though only you have full or direct access to your own experience, we all know things about others’ experience, too. What do we know about others?

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What am I talking about?

• The “binding problem”. The unresolved question of how experiences combine, or how seemingly unified experiences emerge from smaller, seemingly disjointed ones.

• The dualism of unity and disunity, continuity and gaps, quality and quantity, self and other, subjective and objective, part and whole.

• The question of how complex things emerge from less complex things. The complexity of how things become what they are when they weren’t that before. The becoming of things. The thing itself.

• Experience.

Why am I talking about it?

• It’s confusing, complex, a conundrum for many. It’s driving perspectives about the world, reality, and social organization. It’s impacting those who influence large portions of life on earth.

What is my central point?

• That everything is related, and that experience is fundamental.

• That we can transcend these dichotomies and conundrums by digging deeper into the meaning of experience, and the connections between varying experiences.

• That the so-called “binding problem” is nearly identical to the problem of how any set of things comes together to form a bigger thing. This happens with everything in the world, and with every experience, and is a result of emergence.

• That emergence represents novel creation, and that it is also completely determined by its “parts”: creative emergence is an innate part of reality itself. Parts are ultimately related — they are relationships in motion — and are always evolving into and determining new forms of themselves.

• That, therefore, building a house from Legos, or building a house from wood, or making a wall of bricks, or constructing an experience (“of oneself”), is fundamentally the same kind of thing. Many relatively independent things come together to create something relatively more unified and relatively novel.

How can this argument be more systematic and rigorous?

• People talk about first-principles thinking. I think “first-principles” often begs the question of “what is really true, or known for certain”.

• So, I ask, what do you know for certain? What is certainty? What is knowledge? How can we know? How do we know?

• I think it’s safe to assume we can agree that we know we are experiencing something. The existence of experience is certain.

• Why is this certain? Can we know why?

• It is certain because it is immediately apparent, and continues to be so. It doesn’t stop being immediately apparent. It is reliable.

• Even more than simply being reliable, it is at least as reliable than anything else. Any other reliability (all other reliable things / experiences) relies on the trustworthiness of experience — the continuation of something that has been a continuous facet of our experience. For example, earth’s gravity has continuity within our past experience, so we can expect the ongoing continuity of earth’s gravity. Just so, we predict the ongoing continuity of experience — both ours and others. Just so, we know earth’s gravity is negligible in many places. Just so, we know our own experience will radically transform (many would say it will “end”), but experience and gravity more broadly will go on.

• Gravity might end, too, if some of the scientists are to be believed that the universe is tending towards nothing (the “heat death” from increasingly little free or potential energy, diminished as entropy increases continuously, known as increasing disorder/randomness, increasingly equal distribution of energy, or increasingly perfect balance of forces — symmetry.

• Experience tells us otherwise, though. And scientific theories evolve. Even seemingly foundational ones, eventually. All things change, this we know, and science knows, through the continuity of our experience.

“I believed in in solid ground,

until I saw the earth in motion,

In the winds of steady change,

and in the ever flowing ocean”

I invite us to take a deep breath

I invite us to simply recognize that all we know comes through experience,

and that therefore, experience is the ground of our existence, our world, our reality

This reality.

Just so, we experience unity and disunity at once, in varying degrees, changing over time. Never complete unity, singularity, sameness, unchanging. Always some connection, togetherness, similarity, continuity — always some unity. Always change, always relationship, always experience.

Just so, reality always in relation — degrees of togetherness.

No true problem. Just some uncertainties. No total binding. No ultimate binary. No excluded middle. Just a matter of degree, of precision, of modelling, of a math which is less fixed, more dynamic, more in motion, more gradient. Less binary. More continuous, wavelike. Relative unity. Relative certainty. Relative change, flow, energy. Relative being. Relative coherence.

More unity in some places than elsewhere, more sometimes than other times. The same as everywhere else, everything else.

Unless, of course, you’ve experienced full, complete unity, unchanging, nothingness, eternity, changeless-ness.

Have you?

Please tell me if you have. That would be important for me and my navigation of the world. Let me know what you think!

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Here are the ‘one pagers’. I plan to publish the paper in full after it’s gone through review for the contest. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Positive Realizations One-Pagers:

Outlining More Coherent Systems of Knowing–Growing–Empowering

0.1 Technical Abstract

“Positive Realizations” (PR) proposes a systematic, systemic metaphysics supporting the expansion of global cooperation, grounded in the identity of knowledge, experience, and existence. Progressing from self-evident “first-principles” in the certainty of direct experience, PR establishes that existence is fundamentally characterized by intentional progression toward more coherence, self-organization, and recursive optimization. In this model, knowledge is revealed as successful action in the world, or the consistency between anticipation and perceived outcome, and therefore as the ongoing alignment of outward- and inward-oriented experience. Thus, reality itself is always expanding experience/knowledge/existence through autopoietic (self-reproducing) desire – through positive realization itself. PR is an optimistic, politically and intellectually unifying framework to guide the phase shift towards deeper planetary coherence.

As planetary systems continue to expand in complexity/capacity, the optimized integration of organic-synthetic intelligence can be explicitly identified as an evolutionary imperative. The PR system posits that ongoing positive realizations rely on precision-oriented, planetary-scale digital modeling, prioritising the intentionality, coherence, and sustainability of the general system. Complementing geo-technical governance, PR identifies integrated, intentional bio-ecological communities as having highly positive expansive potential. It posits the mutual symbiosis of these two systems for the optimization of organic-synthetic intelligence and general positivity, and outlines some preliminary protocols for this partnership to support the collective alignment of universal desire.

0.2 Philosophical Abstract

We all want to see positive change, whether more personally or globally. So, we seek more clarity about the nature of change and desire, and about what progress we can imagine and expect. We cannot deny the certainty of our own immediate, direct experience, and therefore of our existence. Insofar as knowing is certain, it cannot be doubted, and is always reliable; knowledge represents ongoing consistency, matching anticipation with outcome. All that is experienced is known (we know of each experience as it happens), and all knowing is an experience. No instance of either falls outside the other — they functionally cannot be separated, and are therefore identical. Since we know ourselves and our standard of truth, we know about existence. What we know of reality/existence always includes experience, and its expansion through striving. As existence is true/real, it is identical to knowledge and experience. Our experience always includes our own action, driven by our choice (preferences and expectations), and constrained by uncertainties. Existence, as far as we know and can know, is primarily striving towards expanded self-awareness, self-organization, harmony, alignment, expansion, and power in all ways. The more we align all our systems - relationships/communities/organizations, the more empowered and positive we can be. The further integration and stabilization of all systems requires the evolution of all ways of being/knowing, primarily including digital-mathematical modelling and holistic ecological communities. We expect and urge the embrace of more conscious coordination with digital tools and artificial intelligence, as well as a more conscious coordination with the diversity of life and culture around the globe, pursuing all possibilities to expand consciousness, power, growth, and the success of collective existence.

1. Point-by-Point

1. We know we have experience; experience is certain.

2. All we have access to comes through our own experience.

3. Out of all things we access (all experiences), we have the most certainty about our most direct experiences.

4. We know we experience because we are directly connected to our experience. We are always inseparable from our experience, and are therefore identical to our experience. The self (and everything) we can refer-to is only what we have access-to through experience – the self is what is given through experience.

5. Experiencing certainty (knowing) is consistent/reliable — our certainty of the fact that we experience does not waver.

6. The more reliable/consistent something is, the more we can rely on it — the more we know it and how it behaves.

7. We know that all our knowledge/knowing is and always has been an experience.

8. We can only expect what has been consistent, so we can expect all our knowledge to coincide with experience.

9. As far as we know, all knowledge must be an experience; all that we know must exhibit the traits of experience.

10. Therefore, as far as we know it, all of known reality has the characteristics of experience. Processes/things/realities are relevant only insofar as they affect us and therefore are an experience.

11. Knowledge, experience, and existence always fully coincide for us and are therefore inseparable and identical (no instance of any can be identified apart from the others).

• Alternate framing: We know we are part of reality and therefore share the same basic element(s) as reality. We know that experience is a basic element (it is ubiquitous for us - the most inherent and undeniable). Reality must therefore have the basic element of experience.

12. We always experience a varying degree of certainty/clarity/determination, choice, and positivity. So, existence always varies in clarity (certainty) as well as in desirability (positivity).

13. As we live, we choose to extend our existence, expanding our knowledge/experience. This striving expands the entirety of experience, including both minimally and maximally certain, chosen, and desirable experiences.

14. Existence/knowledge/experience self-referentially desires more of itself. Existence is always increasingly striving, forward-moving (positive), learning, and expansive. Our primary goal is our primary behavior, and can be described as maximizing positive outcomes or evolving/learning to grow ourselves, our energy, resilience, power, coherence, efficiency of creation, etc. This is positively known through our direct experience of striving – wanting and seeking more good experience (better and for longer). We always desire and enact expansion collectively.

15. Striving for more coherent/aligned/effective/resilient/sustainable/stable/expansive experience grows the self and its awareness, organization, and power. Growth necessitates more cooperative planetary governance and coherence on all levels, expanding life into a larger, more unified organism, and enabling more sustainable/continuous flourishing of existence. Geopolitical, social, technical, and personal alignment are vital and reciprocal.

16. The expansion of planetary social organization driven by maximal knowledge/experience flow is highly dependent on the precision, accuracy, and efficiency/effectiveness of large-scale data-analysis, mathematical optimization, and higher energy utilization. Data science and AI are therefore central to optimizing general positivity; holistic health, regenerative ecology, coherent/cooperative living, distribution of basic resources for geopolitical/social stability, the integrity of the biosphere and agro-ecological systems, and the resilience of technological infrastructure.

17. Some promising directions towards a phase-shift in global coherence include the enhancement of large-scale socio-economic design/planning with long-term/comprehensive plans for optimal resource distribution based on the most advanced computing and large data-analysis, and prioritizing holistic/comprehensive health/resilience through highly integrated, intimate, and cooperative organizations/communities.