Mind, Brain, and Being-in-the-World: The Resonance-Inference Model as a Neuro-Phenomenological Answer to Dualism

Abstract

This paper presents the Resonance-Inference Model (RIM) as a meta-theoretical framework that overcomes the "explanatory gap" between the first-person perspective of experience and the third-person perspective of neuroscience. The central thesis is that the RIM resolves Cartesian dualism not through reduction but through a synergetic synthesis, modeling the mind as an emergent ordering parameter of the brain-body-environment loop. The model integrates the free energy principle (Friston), the phenomenology of the embodied self (Gallagher), and spatio-temporal brain dynamics (Northoff). A philosophical genealogy is drawn from Schopenhauer's anti-representationalist turn to modern enactivism (Thompson), and a mediating proposal between enactivism and predictive processing is offered. The paper also subjects the model to a stress test by addressing and integratively resolving key limit questions (e.g., on the nature of consciousness and the universality of the search for meaning). The implications for a non-reductionist, integrative science of the mind, as well as for the clinical practice of psychotherapy, are outlined.