Neither theory nor practice alone is sufficient for personal flourishing or scientific inquiry; the two are complementary skills that can be deliberately trained and oscillated. A latent preference for abstract concepts over direct experience—termed "latent Platonism"—contributes to personal suffering and intellectual dead ends. The paper illustrates this through Type I diabetes management, where constant negotiation between abstract formulas and embodied experience is required. Five practical principles are offered: regard concepts and experience as trainable skills; commit to oscillation between them; prioritize relations and processes over objects and states; embrace trial-and-error learning; and employ conditional historicism over linear causal thinking. The framework aims to reduce suffering, enhance inquiry, and provide a pragmatic methodology for evaluating philosophical positions.
Consciousness is modeled as a spatial field structured by projective geometry and controlled by active inference. The Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) combines sensory evidence with prior beliefs, selecting points of view and perspectives according to preferences. Violations of expectation are encoded as free energy, and minimizing free energy drives perspective taking, switching between perception, imagination, and action. Consciousness functions as an algorithm maximizing resilience by using projective perspective taking to escape local free energy minima. The model accounts for spatial phenomenology, distinctions between perception, imagination, and action, affective processes in intentionality, bistable figure dynamics, and body swap illusions. It relates phenomenology to function, suggesting computational advantages of consciousness and generating neurophenomenological hypotheses.