The Force of Experience: A Biophysical Hypothesis of a Confined Interaction in Living Neural Systems

Standard physicalism often makes subjective experience seem epiphenomenal, while interactionist views struggle with mental causation and energy conservation. This paper proposes that experience itself acts as a real, physically efficacious force on neural architecture, confined to the brain's structured biological information, similar to how the strong nuclear force is confined. Within the brain's open thermodynamic system, experience biases activation barriers of neural logic gates, releasing stored metabolic energy in a direction determined by the meaning of the experience and prior history. The framework reconceives subjective experience as a confined physical force essential for biological agency, offering a biophysical mechanism for meaning-driven causation.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract Standard physicalism often renders subjective experience epiphenomenal, while interactionist accounts struggle to reconcile mental causation with energy conservation. We propose the force of experience : a real, physically efficacious force exerted by experience on neural architecture. To address the objection that a fundamental force should act universally, we introduce biological confinement, analogous to the confinement of the strong nuclear interaction. The force of experience acts exclusively on structured biological information—the coherent, meaning-bearing informational patterns sustained within the living brain. Within the brain’s open thermodynamic system, experience supplies the causal influence required to bias activation barriers of neural logic gates, releasing stored metabolic potential in a direction determined by the meaning of the experience and the organism’s prior experiential history. This framework reconceives subjective experience as a confined physical force essential for biological agency and clarifies how meaning-driven interactions can be both constructive and destructive. We situate this proposal within historical perspectives on mental causation, including agential realism, dispositional causation, and nonreductive materialist psychology, while offering a biophysical mechanism absent from prior accounts.