This conceptual article isolates an unresolved transition in the cognitive and philosophical study of mortality and afterlife belief. It distinguishes three propositions that are frequently conflated: the desire for more embodied life, the representation of the experiential subject as continuing after biological death, and the assignment of that continuation to a consciousness or agency of...
This theoretical manuscript develops an energetic formalization of Antonio Damasio’s architecture of selfhood. Damasio’s distinctions among the proto-self, core self, and autobiographical self are converted from a descriptive taxonomy into a conditional and falsifiable model of functional endurance. For each functional layer, usable free-energy delivery is compared with time-dependent...
Continuous inter-regional functional coupling in the brain carries a minimum energetic cost, and the clinical sequence of functional loss under sustained energetic restriction follows the gradient of that cost rather than the gradient of structural damage alone. This paper develops that claim as a functional model of neural remodeling, grounded in a single thermodynamic primitive and tested...
This paper proposes that the Damasian hierarchy tracks a structural property of the underlying neural architecture — the degree to which a layer’s function depends on integration across distributed networks, as opposed to localized or reflexive processing. Stated explicitly, this converts a descriptive clinical taxonomy into a framework yielding specific, falsifiable predictions. The paper...