Just another substack 'debate' about Pan-Experientialism
A Big Reply to Sweet Rationalism (Nathan) about my framework, Positive Realizations Theory (PRT)
Hi Nathan. I want to start again by being emotionally honest. I really appreciate the time and thought you put into engaging with my approach, and how I see you approaching inconsistencies and incoherencies in other similar arguments/standpoints to mine lately (especially in your consistent and expansive responses to some popular substack philosophers…). I’ve also been disappointed with what seem like obvious gaps in rigor and effort to employ consistent logic. I also want to express that I haven’t responded until now to our discussion because I have been disappointed in what seemed to be your effort to understand what I’m putting forth, and to dive a bit more deeply into some of the more fundamental questions of ontology and its relationship with epistemology. I do want to engage in depth with you because the effort I see you putting forth on these topics shows me that reason and truth are important to you, and you’ve seemed very sincere in our engagements so far, and in others I’ve seen you in. What you’re standing for is important to me too. I also want to emphasize my strong desire that both of us come to this convo with curiosity, willingness to learn and evolve our own perspective, and careful and deliberate thought rather than rushing to blast back a rebuttal to defend ourselves or attack the other’s argument. I am open to being wrong. In fact, I know I am wrong/my theory is incomplete because ideas evolve, science continues to refine itself, and my understanding of the world continues to expand before my eyes. I will take your response piece by piece, quote your words, and touch on what I see as the underlying misunderstandings that have us landing on different conclusions. I will number each of my responses. I will reiterate the more foundational and ‘positive’ arguments that are compelling to me, which I hope and believe stand on their own. I highlighted three things in bold which are my main invitations/questions for you.
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.”
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:
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.
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?”
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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?
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.
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.
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?”
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.”
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?”
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?”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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:
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?
Do you feel fluid in articulating what you feel, and using specific emotion words to describe what’s happening to you?
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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