This paper offers a fundamental critique of "substrate-independence" theories concerning the "digital soul" and "uploaded consciousness." It argues that these theories often simplify the issue by reducing consciousness primarily to an informational pattern while underemphasizing the continuous existential conditions required for it—namely energy, data, fundamental laws, and control. The paper...
Abstract: Self-report is the evidence most often offered for or against consciousness in large language models. I argue that it cannot serve that role, because the report is screened off by the choices of whoever controls two layers: alignment training inside the weights, and the runtime text around them, including text that the maker's chat template inserts by default. The argument's empirical...
This paper formalizes, in terms of computability theory and coinduction, a philosophical thesis about self-reference: the self and the process are fused, a system can only recognize what is contained within itself, the other is always supposed and never proven, and consciousness is a function of the state variations generated by this closure. We dene a self-referential computational system as a...
This paper proposes the Self-Foundation Model by reconsidering the structure of self-worth and psychological fulfillment through a basic question: Where does a person place the value of the self? External conditions such as approval from others, intimate relationships, social status, occupational success, achievement, and income are important sources of enrichment in life. However, when...
Recent work by Michael Wiest on Orch OR theory (Penrose/Hameroff) revives, on new empirical grounds, the hypothesis of a quantum substrate for consciousness, and proposes to solve the problem of the separation of subjects through a mechanism of amplitude cancellation specific to each conscious body. This article establishes that this mechanism presupposes the biological boundary it is supposed...
This paper examines the formation of knowing before it becomes stabilized as an explicit proposition, definition, or other symbolic epistemic output. Philosophical and scientific accounts of knowledge frequently privilege articulated results, while the conditions through which those results become epistemically possible receive less attention. The present inquiry focuses on the generative...
Accounts of subjectivity frequently assign central roles to sociality, recognition, attachment, language, and interpersonal relations. A substantial psychological literature also supports the importance of stable social bonds for well-being and health. This paper accepts those findings as important constraints and asks a narrower conceptual question: once a subject has already acquired...
The essence of philosophy lies less in providing answers than in determining what is to count as a question. Some philosophical questions do not arise merely from a lack of knowledge. Pain, death, selfhood, freedom, value, and meaning may emerge as philosophical problems only when a conscious subject encounters reality and experiences a tension between lived experience and the way the world is...
Why philosophize? This paper argues that philosophizing is a distinctive exercise of the human capacity for reflective thought. Thought can take not only external objects but also perception, affect, action, memory, judgement, and thought itself as objects of inquiry. Its distinctive power lies therefore not in infallibility but in its unusual reflective reach and its capacity for...
Holistic Emergence presents a structural dual‑aspect ontology in which biological organization actualizes the internal, proto‑phenomenal potential inherent in physical structure. The model rejects reductive physicalism, universal panpsychism, and functionalist accounts of mind. Instead, it proposes that phenomenality is neither ubiquitous nor reducible but emerges holistically when a physical...
Contemporary fundamental physics, on inspection, resolves almost entirely into relational structure. Charge, energy, mass, and quantum state each turn out, under analysis, to be conserved or covariant quantities defined by symmetry-relations rather than intrinsic properties of independently existing substances; even the fermionic “matter particles” of the Standard Model interact only through...
How should we understand human agency and moral responsibility in a world governed by natural laws? This paper develops a compatibilist account grounded in cognitive constructivism, proposing that agency is best conceived as a model-control architecture. On this view, an agent is a self-constructing, self-controlling system defined by its capacity to generate, select, inhibit, and revise...
Human spaceflight has been evaluated largely through physiological endurance and operational success. A more fundamental question has gone untested: whether cognition remains viable when the environmental conditions that have always accompanied human life are radically altered. This article argues, from ecological-enactive theories of cognition, that human cognition is constituted through...
This paper contributes to the philosophical literature on the relationship between contemporary physics and premodern theological cosmology by examining a specific test case: the Islamic and Bahá'í doctrine of 'álam al-mithál, the "imaginal realm" situated ontologically between the intelligible and the sensible. After reconstructing the doctrine's development from Ibn 'Arabī and Suhrawardī...
This paper develops a novel account of minimal-dual awareness as a disciplined epistemic method that systematically alters the access conditions of consciousness to reveal structures of temporality and cognition. Building on an Existential Realism (ER) framework, we argue that conventional, detached cognition often conflates reality with existence and thereby obscures the special role of the...
Reincarnation is a central feature of the Indian religious landscape, yet the question of what actually continues from one life to another can be surprisingly vague. In the non-dual Trika philosophy of Kashmir Śaivism, the answer is considerably more nuanced than either the migration of an eternal soul or the complete denial of personal continuity. Drawing primarily upon Abhinavagupta's...
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...
This paper examines the so-called hard problem of life: how supposedly non-conscious matter could become a living, self-organising and experientially unified being. Similarity Theory argues that the problem arises from the materialist assumption that consciousness must emerge from matter. Within the Similarity Theory framework, consciousness is ontologically primary, matter is a structured...
This paper examines psychedelic experience not as a question of truth or illusion, but as a problem of worldhood. Rather than asking whether altered states disclose deeper realities or merely distort ordinary perception, it investigates what such experiences may reveal about the conditions through which worlds become possible, stable, and inhabitable. Building upon previous analyses of...
This working paper proposes the concept of the positional self as a functional structure required for self-involving, action-guiding anticipation. It argues that some forms of future-directed simulation require more than predictive modelling: they require a first-person anchor from which a future scenario can be inhabited as mine. The paper connects this argument to mental time travel,...
This article provides an entry point on understanding subjectivity. Because subjectivity itself in the wild has been both poorly understood and basal to consciousness theories, subsequent theories flowing therefrom have been troubled. Subjects are consequential, not starting points. The exhaustive arguments are provided by my other works in the references.
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...
Abstract This paper establishes a fully deductive account of phenomenological lack grounded in diachronic self-identity. I demonstrate that any system satisfying diachronic identity necessarily operates under temporal indexation, which analytically entails the formation of a minimal self-model as a structural requirement of maintaining identity across non-coincident temporal states. From this,...
Abstract Western ontology, from Parmenides to Heidegger, has been persistently fixated on the question of "Being" (Was ist das Seiende?), thereby neglecting the formal mechanisms governing the survival and collapse of meaning-systems. This paper argues for a fundamental reorientation: the foundational question of philosophy should shift from "What is Being?" to "What conditions make the...
The Markov blanket has become one of the most conceptually powerful and philosophically contested notions in contemporary work on the Free Energy Principle and active inference. Initially introduced within probabilistic graphical modelling as a formal condition of conditional independence, it has increasingly been used to describe the boundary between internal, external, sensory, and active...