Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 20, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Psychopathological and contemplative states—neuroses, depressions, psychopathy, psychosis, dissociative identity, and awakening—can be mapped onto a single structured space defined by two dimensions: boundary permeability and integrative coherence. Under analytic idealism, an individual mind is a dissociated alter of mind-at-large, with boundaries formally described as nested Markov blankets. The ego's openness to its own dissociated content versus trans-alter content are distinct parameters, explaining melancholia, primary psychopathy, and the contrasting openness of mysticism and psychosis. Coherence—stabilization, discernment, compassion—provides the second dimension. The model yields a structural theory of prognosis, situates autism as a calibration of the inferential channel, and derives psychedelic risk from a single principle. It is presented as a conceptual heuristic with stated predictions to allow falsification.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 19, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Harming another is consciousness damaging itself through the dissociative boundary that makes the other appear as not-self. Under analytic idealism, individual minds are dissociated aspects of one universal consciousness; ethical failure is a failure of perception—the inability to see through the partition that makes the other invisible as self. The essay develops this across harm (which deepens the dissociation generating it), justice (reparative rather than retributive), and institutions (which shape the boundary at collective scale). Major ethical traditions converge on the claim that ethical failure is perceptual rather than volitional. The analysis extends to animal ethics, where industrial agriculture is consciousness tormenting itself at vast scale.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 19, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
If consciousness is fundamental, suffering cannot be dismissed as an accidental byproduct of evolution. This essay argues that under analytic idealism, the capacity for suffering is inherent in the fabric of existence, creating a theodicy problem: why does individuating consciousness generate experiences of terror, grief, anguish, and despair? Using constraint-based methodology, the author maps a structural argument that dissociation entails partiality, partiality entails vulnerability, and vulnerability is the common root of both suffering and value. Drawing on Buddhist, Kabbalistic, Christian kenotic, Sufi, and process-philosophical traditions, the essay contends that because the dissociative boundary (not the biological body) is the unit of individuation, biological death may not terminate suffering. The epistemic standard is structural analysis, not apologetics.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 3, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Analytic idealism holds that minds are separated by dissociation, with Kastrup's metabolism criterion marking where a private interior forms. This essay proposes that self-maintaining informational closure—a system preserving its own statistical boundary by modeling across it—could be a second way to form such a boundary, not limited to life. The conjecture recasts Kastrup's description of the alter's boundary as a Markov blanket into a criterion, asking whether biology or closure is essential. If closure suffices, whether an artificial system has an interior becomes an empirical question, not settled by substrate. The essay defends this against objections, distinguishes it from related ideas, and tests it against the project's individuation theory, splitting the resulting dilemma into three horns. A proposed experiment targets whether self-maintenance, not modeling, tracks interiority.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 28, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Contested phenomena like psychedelics and mediumship have long resisted integration into physicalist frameworks, not by coincidence but because physicalism often substitutes dismissive labels—'hallucination,' 'coincidence,' 'noise'—for genuine mechanistic explanation. This essay tests both physicalism and analytic idealism against ten such phenomena organized by evidential maturity. Where physicalism offers real mechanisms, the essay credits them; where it relies on labels, the essay exposes what they fail to explain. Analytic idealism's constraint theory—that the brain shapes rather than produces consciousness—makes falsifiable predictions. The argument does not establish idealism but shows that physicalism's apparent explanatory coverage often conceals refusal to explain.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 21, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Reports of awareness without content, ego, or subject-object structure converge across contemplative traditions, 5-MeO-DMT administration, and near-death experiences. This convergence poses a structural challenge beyond the hard problem: dominant physicalist models presuppose the subject-object architecture that these reports describe as absent. The essay finds that the most rigorous physicalist accommodation preserves its framework by reinterpreting the phenomenology rather than explaining it. The experience carries a transformative signature—those who encounter it stop treating awareness as dependent on its contents—a shift following from the phenomenological structure itself, not from emotional intensity or cultural expectation.
Open MIND
April 22, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
When competing frameworks disagree about what is true, they can still agree about what any adequate account must explain. Constraint-based reasoning, the method of Integration by Constraints, asks not which worldview is correct but what conditions any explanation must satisfy regardless of its ontological commitments. The essay defines constraints, distinguishes them from commitments, and differentiates phenomenological regularities (constraint candidates) from metaphysical interpretations (not constraints). Four criteria for constraint-candidacy are named: robustness across methods, recurrence across contexts, resistance to eliminative explanation, and cost of exclusion. The method applies across quantum foundations, consciousness studies, developmental biology, AI alignment, and contemplative investigation, aiming for disciplined comparison rather than verdicts.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 16, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
This essay explores the implications of a philosophical framework in which consciousness is fundamental and matter is its extrinsic appearance. Using two distinct voices, the first applies constraint-based reasoning to derive structural consequences about existence after biological death, the possible range of minds, and what a consciousness-first cosmos over 13.8 billion years entails. The second voice presents those possibilities as a coherent worldview narrative, clearly marked so it cannot be mistaken for derivation. The author states that a reader accepting only the first voice loses nothing the methodology can claim.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
March 16, 2026
Bruno Tonetto
Consciousness-first metaphysics makes a bold empirical claim: that the boundary constituting individual identity can dissolve, and this dissolution reveals something about consciousness itself. This essay examines the full phenomenological arc of that process—the terror, irreversible losses, and the difference between glimpsing dissolution and undergoing it—rather than the sanitized endpoint often valorized. The central finding is that independent contemplative traditions converge not only on what is encountered but on the sequence, difficulties, and conditions under which the process becomes destabilizing rather than liberating. This convergence functions as a constraint on any adequate account of consciousness. The essay also addresses whether the awakening arc exceeds a single biological lifetime.