Accounts of consciousness routinely borrow vocabulary from physics — field, phase, coherence, superposition — and the borrowing carries an unpaid debt: a term imported from a discipline arrives with that discipline's warrant attached. This essay defends a compositional practice I call the seam, the requirement that a work mark, in its sentences, whether a given claim is formal, empirical, or...
This essay asks a deliberately narrow question inside the coherent-existence framework: what is light to the jays? Modeling a legible trace as a conserved intensity and a turning phase, the piece observes that light already divides itself the same way, into a conserved magnitude and a freely turning phase, and that the absolute phase of a single field is unobservable while the relative phase...
A philosophy-of-mind reflection on duality. It argues that science and religion, fractal and mandala, analysis and intuition are not opposites but two attentions turned upon one world — and that the felt task of "seeing whole" corresponds, at least by metaphor and at most by measurable correlation, to the integration of the brain's two hemispheres across the corpus callosum. Drawing on...
The opening essay of the Turning Toward series sets out the method and the stakes of a philosophy of psychology grounded in testimony and in the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung. Moving from the etymology of agnosticism to Jung's 1959 "I know" and the letters in which he qualified it, the essay places the meditative encounter with the boundary between ego and Self within a long...
On Witnessing takes Andrew Wiles's indirect proof of Fermat's Last Theorem as a method for approaching the combination problem in the philosophy of mind. Borrowing the structure of the Frey–Ribet–Wiles route — a reduction, a bridge, and a theorem proved in a far domain — the essay reframes the question of how micro-perspectives combine into a single unified subject as a question about redundant...
An essay on sleep as the separation of mind and body, written by someone who does not get much of it. It moves from a joke in a cartoon to the genetics of familial natural short sleep and the contemplative traditions that train the mind to stay awake while the body rests, and it is careful to say which of those the author is standing in — neither. The sleep genetics describes a rare inherited...
This document sets out a theoretical framework — not a finding — for a proposed approach in which a person's own deeply meaningful music serves as the substrate for an intervention intended to extend the positive affective state that music evokes beyond the listening session itself. The framework is pre-empirical: hypotheses are stated to be falsifiable, mechanisms are ranked by evidence, and...