"We believe that the universe itself is conscious in a way that we can never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the universe trying to understand itself."
"Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station, and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. And as we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective."
(Babylon 5)
If I am understanding your proposed framework correctly, Mike, would this extend to the non-binary experience and the genderfluid experience by observing that that report of consciousness is one in which the indexings shift more noticeably, and perhaps more rapidly, over time than they do in a person who more definitively reports their experience as trans or cis?
Are you acquainted with Iain McGilchrist's work? He makes a similar point but its all in the mind. Research on the difference between the brain hemispheres indicates the left is what you call male and the right is what you call female and the distinction was only discovered with studies of them acting separately- as with a stroke or lesion. Normally the hemispheres work so well together that this big difference does not appear to out conscious selves.
Further, this hemispheres distinction goes at least as far back as fish. Both capacities appear to be necessary for vertebrate life to flourish.
McGilchrist argues that while both are important the right is most important and our society for various reasons privileges the left.
Check out his remarkable "The Master and His Emissary."
McGilchrist establishes them on the leading edge of neuroscience- and shares your basic philosophical viewpoint. I recommend reading him. He integrates the masculine and feminine not in a metaphor distinguishing body and mind but in the structure of the human (and indeed all vertebrates) brain.
McGilchrist is strongly anti-feminist, lately a fan of Carrie Gress's claim that feminism is incompatible with Christianity -- the conservative Catholic version of which McGilchrist embraces. Last year's tour of the US included Hillsdale College, an institution second only to the Claremont Institute as a Trumpist braintrust. And his neuroscience is decades out of date.
That said, I much enjoyed his books. He writes well, has a gentle persona, and the typographic layout of The Matter with Things by the publisher, Perspectiva, is outstanding.
And I am and have been since the 60s strongly pro-feminist. The point I am making has absolutely ZERO to do with McGilchrist's politics.
Please bless us with a link demonstrating this hemispheric stuff is out of date as he points out the traditional understanding of the hemispheres is mistaken and...brace for it.... the right hemisphere - the one resembling Brock's treatment of the feminine - is the MOST important.
"Brace for it"? I've read the books! Recent neuroscience is concerned largely with the rhythmic alteration between the default mode network and the executive network (aka task mode), mediated by the salience network. All these networks span both hemispheres. The default mode network supports the broad and imaginative comprehension which McGilchrist attributes to the right hemisphere; the executive network the narrow-focus work which he attributes to the left hemisphere. His books don't even mention these.
Also, he writes as if each hemisphere were a separate person, as they somewhat are if the corpus between them is cut as in Sperry's experiments. This is simply not, psychologically or neurologically, the case when the corpus is intact. Plus, there is significant shared feeling even when it is cut, as the base of the brain, where Panksepp and Damasio have shown our feeling and emotion find their source, is not divided by hemisphere.
McGilchrist emphasizes the two hemispheres in intact brains work together. They are 'separate persons' when one is seriously injured because they are oriented towards different kinds of perception. So that does not contradict what you write. Nor does he say feeling and emotion is only on the right- in fact he explicitly says otherwise. I would love to read a comparative discussion of his stuff with Damasio but your interpretation does not seem to affect his point about hemispheres.
You'd probably find "Orlando" fascinating if you've never read it. Woolf is one of the (very few) authors whose grasp exceeds reasonable doubt. Every piece of it has meaning and it requires the whole held in tension.
I was thinking of Orlando as recommended further reading/viewing (not that the film touches on ontology much) — and maybe Will Self's *Cock & Bull* as an advanced ... lateral examination?
I’m so pleased your friend asked this question. Your thoughts on the matter have expanded my consciousness immeasurably. 💥 I am so grateful. Thank you ❗️
♥️🙏🏻♥️
This deserves more than one reading. It is to be saved, and mined for true understanding. 😊
"Consciousness is not produced by matter. It is not an emergent property of arrangements of neurons sufficiently complex to host it."
I disagree. You have elided a huge reduction here without actually stating it, that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain alone (or the brain and the nervous system). It is not; it is an emergent property of an entire living organism, and the environment which it inhabits. Consciousness does not exist simply in the neural connection of an organism, and does not end where the neurons end; it exists in the blood, the lymph, the skin, the bone, the sinew, the pheromones, hormones, and every other chemical reaction that occurs in an organism. It exists not as an emergent property of an arrangement of neurons, but as an emergent property of a living being observing and interacting with the world around it. It exists in the receptors for smell, taste, sight, hearing, touch, position, gravity, and possibly others. This is why LLMs "fake" consciousness without actually having it, and are prone to "hallucinations" and "dreams"; they do not interact with the rest of the universe, and therefore consciousness does not emerge.
I note that descriptions of what happens to people under sensory deprivation that I have read resemble the hallucinations of LLMs, as do the dreams people have when they sleep. (I have not experienced sensory deprivation, so cannot comment from direct experience.)
"Consciousness comes in two forms."
Consciousness comes in many forms, and those forms can change over the lifetime of an individual. Is a bee conscious? Well, maybe not, but is a beehive conscious, perhaps in a way so different from our consciousness that it is hard to recognize? And what gender would it be (pun intended)? Even the fact that we have two sexes may be a biological happenstance rather than preordained, but we cannot know for sure as we have only the evolution of our one planet to study. Science fiction has explored the idea of three genders extensively.
"The body is the form of the female within them and the mind is the form of the male within them."
I disagree with this as well; both the body and the mind contain aspects of both the male and the female in all individuals. While genes certainly attempt to create bodies of two separate genders, they do not always succeed, and they also do not always succeed in creating a consciousness that "matches" the gender of the body (or at least the reproductive bits of the body we use to determine gender, which itself is pretty reductive).
The idea that genes and the "genetic gender" are the be-all and end-all of an individual, and are all the traits that they inherit from their parents, is rapidly evolving in a completely different direction (see https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/do-you-take-after-your-dads-rna/ for an example); we appear to be a combination of genetics and epigenetics.
Which also implies that "the cross-cultural convergence of certain mystical reports despite the cultures having no contact" can be explained. There was a time, not so long ago, when there were many fewer cultures, and the more genetic evidence we pile up, the more they appear to have interbred; the cross-cultural convergence of myth can be explained as a shared inheritance of both genetics and epigenetics from that time, molding our perceptions even today.
I'm sure there's more, but this is enough for now.
I'd love to get at our differences on this in more depth.
You appear, from my reading, to be advocating that consciousness is somehow imposed from without on living beings, and is not a property of the organism. In this case, is consciousness separable from the organism? Does consciousness continue after the organism ceases to function? Is it passed to another organism? Is there a "repository" of consciousness somewhere that consciousness came from when life emerged, and that supplies "new" consciousness as life expands? And if life is reduced (as in an ice age, or as we are doing right now), where does the "excess" consciousness go? Is all consciousness just one indivisible consciousness (Plur1bus, Borg), or just two ("male" and "female")?
I, on the other hand, maintain that consciousness is an emergent property of the complexity of living systems. This does not mean that it is reducible, or that there is a "seat" of consciousness somewhere within an organism, or that consciousness can necessarily be described mathematically or reduced to a set of equations - at least not on a level that a conscious organism could comprehend. It does, however, imply that the consciousness of an organism ends when the organism dies, and that at some point during the maturation process of an organism consciousness emerges.
You also seem to be advocating that consciousness itself is distinctly "male" and "female", while I find that to be far too limiting a viewpoint. It is, essentially, imposing our narrow biological viewpoint on something that is far greater than our narrow biology. As I asked before, is a beehive conscious? And if so, is it male or female? And if not, what divides its purposeful exploration of its environment from ours, and makes us conscious and it not? Are we, as some seem to advocate, separate from and above the "lesser beings" of the planet?
You also divert onto a sidebar about the "placebo" and "nocebo" effects; these are only mysterious if you hold that consciousness only exists in the brain, and that it has no control or influence on the other systems of the body. I maintain that consciousness exists in the body as a whole and its interactions with its environment, is which case not only are these not mysterious, but the stories of deep meditators being able to control their seemingly autonomous bodily functions are also no great mystery; they simply have explored their "inner being" far more extensively than most.
And yet you have answered none of my questions from the perspective of your framework. I am trying to understand your framework, your point of view, but you are not helping. Ah well. You wouldn't happen to have a Point of View gun handy, and want to come by with it?
Fair. Let me actually answer your questions, briefly, from inside the framework.
Is consciousness separable from the organism? No, but not in the way the question implies. The framework does not posit consciousness as a thing that could be separated. Consciousness is what the substrate is from the experiential side. The body is what the substrate is from the material side. They are not separable because they are not two things.
Does consciousness continue after the organism dies? The framework does not answer this directly. The material indexing ends when the body's function ends. What happens to the experiential aspect's indexing is a question the framework as currently developed leaves open. The traditions have various answers and the framework is consistent with several without committing.
Is there a repository? Yes, in a sense. The substrate is the repository, but not as a container holding discrete consciousnesses as items. Consciousness is one of the substrate's two aspects. The aspect is everywhere the substrate is.
Where does excess consciousness go when life is reduced? The question assumes consciousness is quantified. The framework does not quantify it. When indexing capacity is lost, the indexing at those locations ends. Nothing is conserved that needs to go somewhere.
Is consciousness one or two? One substrate with many indexings. The two forms are aspects of consciousness, not separate consciousnesses. Each indexing is structured by both forms in some configuration.
Is the beehive conscious? The framework permits asking. The empirical question is whether the hive has the structural integration the framework's embodied-being category requires. I do not know. Neither do you. The framework lets us ask the question productively rather than ruling it out by definition.
The reason I responded with the meta-acknowledgment earlier is that the disagreement is genuinely metaphysical and is not going to be settled in a comment thread. You are an embodied-emergentist. I am a dual-aspect monist. We share the refusal of the brain-narrowly-construed view and disagree at the level of whether consciousness is downstream of organic complexity or co-aspect with it. The disagreement is principled and we can both articulate it clearly.
No Point of View gun on hand. I will settle for the longer-form essays where the framework gets developed at the length these questions deserve.
"You are an embodied-emergentist. I am a dual-aspect monist. We share the refusal of the brain-narrowly-construed view and disagree at the level of whether consciousness is downstream of organic complexity or co-aspect with it. The disagreement is principled and we can both articulate it clearly."
This whole response finally crystallized it for me. Yes, I am an emergentist - "complex systems possess properties, behaviors, or laws that arise from the interaction of their fundamental parts but are not reducible to or predictable from them" (thanks, Wikipedia!). I wouldn't say, however, that consciousness is "downstream from" organic complexity; that carries an implication that consciousness is reducible to or predictable from the complexity, and that it requires a certain "amount" or "level" of complexity to be conscious. Very complex organisms and systems are not necessarily conscious (such as the American Republican Party), and "simpler" systems may very well be (my example of the bees). I do not know whether a beehive or anthill is conscious, and believe it may not be an answerable question, in that consciousness is not "quantifiable", so if it is, its consciousness is so different from ours as to be impossible to understand.
This explains why I have such difficulty with your philosophical articles; I agree with a lot of what you say, but the perspective from which you approach it is completely foreign to me.
Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your Circus!
It may have been a lot easier for us all if the words DEVIANTand ABNORMAL had been able to retain their original and not their much later aberrant 'charges'.
The key issue is can the relative influence of the two hemispheres be influenced by the environment? I read him as saying "yes." I read you as saying "no."
Certainly it is the case that some minds are more analytic and some more big picture in nature- are these differences hardwired or are they able to be impacted by their environment? This would be damnably difficult to analyze because in healthy brains everyone agrees they blend indistinguishably. And there are no prior examinations of brains that become unhealthy so far as I know and it would be difficult to manage such an investigation.
Here's the money issue. You write "Where I disagree with him is in his mapping that to hemispheres in our intact brains, rather than mapping it to an imbalance in our cycle of the default mode and task mode networks -- which are well known in current neuroscience as both spanning both hemispheres. There's a great emphasis in modern culture in staying on task, not daydreaming (aka mind wandering, aka default mode network activation)"
Are these either/or? I see no reason to think so.
We know that the hemispheres perceive differently when operating on their own un damaged brains and we know no such problem shows up in undamaged ones. But we also know that virtually every element in human beings is influenced by its environment. Our intestinal ecosystem influences our brain. Our frame of mind influences our health. Our language influences our perception of color and how we describe how food tastes (My favorite example- a jalapeno pepper in Herman is "scharf" and a German friend of mine said learning it was "hot" in English was weird for her. I reacted similarly when learning 'scharf.'
Given all that, it would be very strange if the two hemispheres were unaffected by something as all-embracing as a social environment dominated by an instrumental approach to nearly all of life.
I agree with you that his personal outlook is culturally very conservative. It really shows up in "The Matter With Things" - but as you say, subtly. I think it grows out of his belief that values are inherent in the world and only culturally conservative approaches can recognize this clearly.
Here I disagree strongly with McGilchrist.
I have long argued the core liberal value that the individual is the basic moral unit WITHIN society , and all are equally so, is in keeping with the primordial value within animist societies that all beings are best treated with respect, even when they serve instrumental ends such as food and clothing. Rights are the form respect takes among equals who are relative strangers. My liberalism is more related to Alexander Humboldt than to Locke or either Mill, and I think is compatible with McGilchrist's analysis of both brain and society which is compatible with Humboldt's approach to science and society. As I read Mike I think this is in harmony with his approach.
This piece is so beautifully written. Complex and dense and brilliant. And thrilling. Of course I’ll have to read it again, slowly and aloud. What do you think of the fact that — as necessary it is to separate the mind from the body for the purpose of discussion — the mind is also the body? What a miracle this world is. Thank you.
“… expectation, belief, and felt sense produce measurable physiological change” (maybe I’m paraphrasing) is my favorite part because it’s mind-blowing and true.
I honestly think the binding problem is fatal. Our integrated conscious experience is completely incompatible with consciousness being emergent of neurological processes. The nervous system is entirely sensory. Including the prefrontal cortex. It's all it can be in this view.
I take it you're not concerned right here with the panpsychic binding of smaller units of consciousness, but the combination of our different sensory input modalities into the sensus communis of Aristotle? What of synesthesia, which there's been some good neurological work on, as a seeming example of senses commingling?
Whit, your question is doing more work than it intends to. The framing assumes the binding problem is about integration — about how distinct inputs combine into unified output. Aristotle's sensus communis and the Kantian transcendental synthesis are different versions of the same answer to that framing, with the integration located in the common sense or in the categories of the understanding. The framework refuses the framing entirely.
The unity of experience is not produced by integration. The unity is the structural condition of consciousness, prior to any integration. The materialist looking for the neural binding mechanism, the Aristotelian looking for the sensus communis, and the Kantian looking for the transcendental synthesis are all asking where the integration happens. None of them produces the unity because none of them is the source of it. The unity is what consciousness is. The integration is what the biological instrument does within an already-unified consciousness.
Synesthesia is interesting on the framework's account but it is not what the question takes it to be. The synesthete is not failing to integrate or doing extra integration. The synesthete is integrating in a way that crosses modalities more richly than the non-synesthete's instrument supports. The unity of their experience is the same unity any consciousness has. What differs is the modality-crossover structure of their particular embodied instrument. The interesting empirical question is how the biological instrument's configuration supports different crossover structures, not where the unity comes from. The unity does not need explanation. The crossover does.
Mike, There are two main forms of panpsychism current. The most common claims a sparks of (proto-)consciousness in everything, combined somehow in biology. The second proceeds from an assumption of cosmo-psychism. The first has a combination problem; the second a division problem. I somewhat favor the second. But the division problem for it is as much a hurdle as the combination problem for the other. What say you on that?
Kastrup is doing serious work and the proximity is real — we share the commitment that consciousness is fundamental and that the materialist program is incoherent. The framework departs from him at a specific point. Kastrup's idealism eliminates the material aspect by treating matter as the extrinsic appearance of mental processes. I refuse this elimination. The material aspect is real on its own terms. The body is sexed. The CMB has a quadrupole anomaly. The block universe is the material aspect's accurate report of its own structure. These are not appearances of mind. They are what the material aspect of the substrate looks like from inside the material aspect.
The framework is dual-aspect monism in the strict sense — one substrate, two aspects, neither derivative of the other. Kastrup's idealism is single-aspect. He keeps consciousness fundamental but he loses what makes the framework consistent with empirical physics without surrendering to materialism. The dual-aspect structure is what lets physics be true on its own terms while the experiential aspect remains co-equal rather than collapsed into appearance.
The structural mistake Kastrup makes is the same one the materialist makes in the other direction — taking one aspect of the substrate as the whole and treating the other as derivative. Materialism reduces mind to emergent property of matter. Idealism reduces matter to appearance of mind. Both are single-aspect reductions. Dual-aspect monism refuses both by insisting that the substrate has two aspects necessarily, structurally, and that neither is the ground of the other.
The AI application is the most testable prediction the framework makes and it deserves to be foregrounded for exactly that reason. If meaning requires the encounter between structuring and encompassing, and if current AI systems instantiate structuring alone, the framework predicts a specific character for the gap: syntactically perfect output that is semantically empty. Meaningful-seeming without being meaningful. And thats precisely what large language models produce. The framework doesnt just describe the intuition that something is missing. It predicts the specific texture of whats missing.
The harder question the framework opens is whether the encompassing form can be instantiated without biological embodiment. If body IS the female form within every consciousness, then disembodied intelligence has a permanent ceiling: structuring without encompassing, reason without weight, grammar in the dark as terminal state rather than developmental stage. That would mean the current trajectory, embodied robotics and reward architectures that approximate felt valuation, is unconsciously moving toward adding the second form because the substrate produces the encounter wherever conditions for it emerge. the framework makes this a testable prediction rather than a philosophical preference, and the next decade of AI development is the experiment.
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
(Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself")
"We believe that the universe itself is conscious in a way that we can never truly understand. It is engaged in a search for meaning. So it breaks itself apart, investing its own consciousness in every form of life. We are the universe trying to understand itself."
"Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station, and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. And as we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective."
(Babylon 5)
If I am understanding your proposed framework correctly, Mike, would this extend to the non-binary experience and the genderfluid experience by observing that that report of consciousness is one in which the indexings shift more noticeably, and perhaps more rapidly, over time than they do in a person who more definitively reports their experience as trans or cis?
I do love that you invoked Whitman's Song of Myself. It is very apropos.
Are you acquainted with Iain McGilchrist's work? He makes a similar point but its all in the mind. Research on the difference between the brain hemispheres indicates the left is what you call male and the right is what you call female and the distinction was only discovered with studies of them acting separately- as with a stroke or lesion. Normally the hemispheres work so well together that this big difference does not appear to out conscious selves.
Further, this hemispheres distinction goes at least as far back as fish. Both capacities appear to be necessary for vertebrate life to flourish.
McGilchrist argues that while both are important the right is most important and our society for various reasons privileges the left.
Check out his remarkable "The Master and His Emissary."
I think all of these arguments build on very ancient ideas. I am re-describing them in a contemporary cultural context.
McGilchrist establishes them on the leading edge of neuroscience- and shares your basic philosophical viewpoint. I recommend reading him. He integrates the masculine and feminine not in a metaphor distinguishing body and mind but in the structure of the human (and indeed all vertebrates) brain.
McGilchrist is strongly anti-feminist, lately a fan of Carrie Gress's claim that feminism is incompatible with Christianity -- the conservative Catholic version of which McGilchrist embraces. Last year's tour of the US included Hillsdale College, an institution second only to the Claremont Institute as a Trumpist braintrust. And his neuroscience is decades out of date.
That said, I much enjoyed his books. He writes well, has a gentle persona, and the typographic layout of The Matter with Things by the publisher, Perspectiva, is outstanding.
And I am and have been since the 60s strongly pro-feminist. The point I am making has absolutely ZERO to do with McGilchrist's politics.
Please bless us with a link demonstrating this hemispheric stuff is out of date as he points out the traditional understanding of the hemispheres is mistaken and...brace for it.... the right hemisphere - the one resembling Brock's treatment of the feminine - is the MOST important.
"Brace for it"? I've read the books! Recent neuroscience is concerned largely with the rhythmic alteration between the default mode network and the executive network (aka task mode), mediated by the salience network. All these networks span both hemispheres. The default mode network supports the broad and imaginative comprehension which McGilchrist attributes to the right hemisphere; the executive network the narrow-focus work which he attributes to the left hemisphere. His books don't even mention these.
Also, he writes as if each hemisphere were a separate person, as they somewhat are if the corpus between them is cut as in Sperry's experiments. This is simply not, psychologically or neurologically, the case when the corpus is intact. Plus, there is significant shared feeling even when it is cut, as the base of the brain, where Panksepp and Damasio have shown our feeling and emotion find their source, is not divided by hemisphere.
McGilchrist emphasizes the two hemispheres in intact brains work together. They are 'separate persons' when one is seriously injured because they are oriented towards different kinds of perception. So that does not contradict what you write. Nor does he say feeling and emotion is only on the right- in fact he explicitly says otherwise. I would love to read a comparative discussion of his stuff with Damasio but your interpretation does not seem to affect his point about hemispheres.
You'd probably find "Orlando" fascinating if you've never read it. Woolf is one of the (very few) authors whose grasp exceeds reasonable doubt. Every piece of it has meaning and it requires the whole held in tension.
I was thinking of Orlando as recommended further reading/viewing (not that the film touches on ontology much) — and maybe Will Self's *Cock & Bull* as an advanced ... lateral examination?
I’m so pleased your friend asked this question. Your thoughts on the matter have expanded my consciousness immeasurably. 💥 I am so grateful. Thank you ❗️
♥️🙏🏻♥️
This deserves more than one reading. It is to be saved, and mined for true understanding. 😊
Those are my thoughts, too.
"Consciousness is not produced by matter. It is not an emergent property of arrangements of neurons sufficiently complex to host it."
I disagree. You have elided a huge reduction here without actually stating it, that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain alone (or the brain and the nervous system). It is not; it is an emergent property of an entire living organism, and the environment which it inhabits. Consciousness does not exist simply in the neural connection of an organism, and does not end where the neurons end; it exists in the blood, the lymph, the skin, the bone, the sinew, the pheromones, hormones, and every other chemical reaction that occurs in an organism. It exists not as an emergent property of an arrangement of neurons, but as an emergent property of a living being observing and interacting with the world around it. It exists in the receptors for smell, taste, sight, hearing, touch, position, gravity, and possibly others. This is why LLMs "fake" consciousness without actually having it, and are prone to "hallucinations" and "dreams"; they do not interact with the rest of the universe, and therefore consciousness does not emerge.
I note that descriptions of what happens to people under sensory deprivation that I have read resemble the hallucinations of LLMs, as do the dreams people have when they sleep. (I have not experienced sensory deprivation, so cannot comment from direct experience.)
"Consciousness comes in two forms."
Consciousness comes in many forms, and those forms can change over the lifetime of an individual. Is a bee conscious? Well, maybe not, but is a beehive conscious, perhaps in a way so different from our consciousness that it is hard to recognize? And what gender would it be (pun intended)? Even the fact that we have two sexes may be a biological happenstance rather than preordained, but we cannot know for sure as we have only the evolution of our one planet to study. Science fiction has explored the idea of three genders extensively.
"The body is the form of the female within them and the mind is the form of the male within them."
I disagree with this as well; both the body and the mind contain aspects of both the male and the female in all individuals. While genes certainly attempt to create bodies of two separate genders, they do not always succeed, and they also do not always succeed in creating a consciousness that "matches" the gender of the body (or at least the reproductive bits of the body we use to determine gender, which itself is pretty reductive).
The idea that genes and the "genetic gender" are the be-all and end-all of an individual, and are all the traits that they inherit from their parents, is rapidly evolving in a completely different direction (see https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/do-you-take-after-your-dads-rna/ for an example); we appear to be a combination of genetics and epigenetics.
Which also implies that "the cross-cultural convergence of certain mystical reports despite the cultures having no contact" can be explained. There was a time, not so long ago, when there were many fewer cultures, and the more genetic evidence we pile up, the more they appear to have interbred; the cross-cultural convergence of myth can be explained as a shared inheritance of both genetics and epigenetics from that time, molding our perceptions even today.
I'm sure there's more, but this is enough for now.
We do disagree on this, which is why I had the Kantian warning up front!
I'd love to get at our differences on this in more depth.
You appear, from my reading, to be advocating that consciousness is somehow imposed from without on living beings, and is not a property of the organism. In this case, is consciousness separable from the organism? Does consciousness continue after the organism ceases to function? Is it passed to another organism? Is there a "repository" of consciousness somewhere that consciousness came from when life emerged, and that supplies "new" consciousness as life expands? And if life is reduced (as in an ice age, or as we are doing right now), where does the "excess" consciousness go? Is all consciousness just one indivisible consciousness (Plur1bus, Borg), or just two ("male" and "female")?
I, on the other hand, maintain that consciousness is an emergent property of the complexity of living systems. This does not mean that it is reducible, or that there is a "seat" of consciousness somewhere within an organism, or that consciousness can necessarily be described mathematically or reduced to a set of equations - at least not on a level that a conscious organism could comprehend. It does, however, imply that the consciousness of an organism ends when the organism dies, and that at some point during the maturation process of an organism consciousness emerges.
You also seem to be advocating that consciousness itself is distinctly "male" and "female", while I find that to be far too limiting a viewpoint. It is, essentially, imposing our narrow biological viewpoint on something that is far greater than our narrow biology. As I asked before, is a beehive conscious? And if so, is it male or female? And if not, what divides its purposeful exploration of its environment from ours, and makes us conscious and it not? Are we, as some seem to advocate, separate from and above the "lesser beings" of the planet?
You also divert onto a sidebar about the "placebo" and "nocebo" effects; these are only mysterious if you hold that consciousness only exists in the brain, and that it has no control or influence on the other systems of the body. I maintain that consciousness exists in the body as a whole and its interactions with its environment, is which case not only are these not mysterious, but the stories of deep meditators being able to control their seemingly autonomous bodily functions are also no great mystery; they simply have explored their "inner being" far more extensively than most.
Yes. We agree on the nature of our disagreement.
And yet you have answered none of my questions from the perspective of your framework. I am trying to understand your framework, your point of view, but you are not helping. Ah well. You wouldn't happen to have a Point of View gun handy, and want to come by with it?
Fair. Let me actually answer your questions, briefly, from inside the framework.
Is consciousness separable from the organism? No, but not in the way the question implies. The framework does not posit consciousness as a thing that could be separated. Consciousness is what the substrate is from the experiential side. The body is what the substrate is from the material side. They are not separable because they are not two things.
Does consciousness continue after the organism dies? The framework does not answer this directly. The material indexing ends when the body's function ends. What happens to the experiential aspect's indexing is a question the framework as currently developed leaves open. The traditions have various answers and the framework is consistent with several without committing.
Is there a repository? Yes, in a sense. The substrate is the repository, but not as a container holding discrete consciousnesses as items. Consciousness is one of the substrate's two aspects. The aspect is everywhere the substrate is.
Where does excess consciousness go when life is reduced? The question assumes consciousness is quantified. The framework does not quantify it. When indexing capacity is lost, the indexing at those locations ends. Nothing is conserved that needs to go somewhere.
Is consciousness one or two? One substrate with many indexings. The two forms are aspects of consciousness, not separate consciousnesses. Each indexing is structured by both forms in some configuration.
Is the beehive conscious? The framework permits asking. The empirical question is whether the hive has the structural integration the framework's embodied-being category requires. I do not know. Neither do you. The framework lets us ask the question productively rather than ruling it out by definition.
The reason I responded with the meta-acknowledgment earlier is that the disagreement is genuinely metaphysical and is not going to be settled in a comment thread. You are an embodied-emergentist. I am a dual-aspect monist. We share the refusal of the brain-narrowly-construed view and disagree at the level of whether consciousness is downstream of organic complexity or co-aspect with it. The disagreement is principled and we can both articulate it clearly.
No Point of View gun on hand. I will settle for the longer-form essays where the framework gets developed at the length these questions deserve.
"You are an embodied-emergentist. I am a dual-aspect monist. We share the refusal of the brain-narrowly-construed view and disagree at the level of whether consciousness is downstream of organic complexity or co-aspect with it. The disagreement is principled and we can both articulate it clearly."
This whole response finally crystallized it for me. Yes, I am an emergentist - "complex systems possess properties, behaviors, or laws that arise from the interaction of their fundamental parts but are not reducible to or predictable from them" (thanks, Wikipedia!). I wouldn't say, however, that consciousness is "downstream from" organic complexity; that carries an implication that consciousness is reducible to or predictable from the complexity, and that it requires a certain "amount" or "level" of complexity to be conscious. Very complex organisms and systems are not necessarily conscious (such as the American Republican Party), and "simpler" systems may very well be (my example of the bees). I do not know whether a beehive or anthill is conscious, and believe it may not be an answerable question, in that consciousness is not "quantifiable", so if it is, its consciousness is so different from ours as to be impossible to understand.
This explains why I have such difficulty with your philosophical articles; I agree with a lot of what you say, but the perspective from which you approach it is completely foreign to me.
Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your Circus!
It may have been a lot easier for us all if the words DEVIANTand ABNORMAL had been able to retain their original and not their much later aberrant 'charges'.
Yes!
We still read him differently.
The key issue is can the relative influence of the two hemispheres be influenced by the environment? I read him as saying "yes." I read you as saying "no."
Certainly it is the case that some minds are more analytic and some more big picture in nature- are these differences hardwired or are they able to be impacted by their environment? This would be damnably difficult to analyze because in healthy brains everyone agrees they blend indistinguishably. And there are no prior examinations of brains that become unhealthy so far as I know and it would be difficult to manage such an investigation.
Here's the money issue. You write "Where I disagree with him is in his mapping that to hemispheres in our intact brains, rather than mapping it to an imbalance in our cycle of the default mode and task mode networks -- which are well known in current neuroscience as both spanning both hemispheres. There's a great emphasis in modern culture in staying on task, not daydreaming (aka mind wandering, aka default mode network activation)"
Are these either/or? I see no reason to think so.
We know that the hemispheres perceive differently when operating on their own un damaged brains and we know no such problem shows up in undamaged ones. But we also know that virtually every element in human beings is influenced by its environment. Our intestinal ecosystem influences our brain. Our frame of mind influences our health. Our language influences our perception of color and how we describe how food tastes (My favorite example- a jalapeno pepper in Herman is "scharf" and a German friend of mine said learning it was "hot" in English was weird for her. I reacted similarly when learning 'scharf.'
Given all that, it would be very strange if the two hemispheres were unaffected by something as all-embracing as a social environment dominated by an instrumental approach to nearly all of life.
I agree with you that his personal outlook is culturally very conservative. It really shows up in "The Matter With Things" - but as you say, subtly. I think it grows out of his belief that values are inherent in the world and only culturally conservative approaches can recognize this clearly.
Here I disagree strongly with McGilchrist.
I have long argued the core liberal value that the individual is the basic moral unit WITHIN society , and all are equally so, is in keeping with the primordial value within animist societies that all beings are best treated with respect, even when they serve instrumental ends such as food and clothing. Rights are the form respect takes among equals who are relative strangers. My liberalism is more related to Alexander Humboldt than to Locke or either Mill, and I think is compatible with McGilchrist's analysis of both brain and society which is compatible with Humboldt's approach to science and society. As I read Mike I think this is in harmony with his approach.
This piece is so beautifully written. Complex and dense and brilliant. And thrilling. Of course I’ll have to read it again, slowly and aloud. What do you think of the fact that — as necessary it is to separate the mind from the body for the purpose of discussion — the mind is also the body? What a miracle this world is. Thank you.
“… expectation, belief, and felt sense produce measurable physiological change” (maybe I’m paraphrasing) is my favorite part because it’s mind-blowing and true.
This is an entirely plausible and beautiful cosmology. Also, pretty damn Jungian. And might get into a rewarding discussion with Tantric traditions.
Now, how might the study of consciousness confirm your hypothesis in the next decade, per your suggestion?
I honestly think the binding problem is fatal. Our integrated conscious experience is completely incompatible with consciousness being emergent of neurological processes. The nervous system is entirely sensory. Including the prefrontal cortex. It's all it can be in this view.
I take it you're not concerned right here with the panpsychic binding of smaller units of consciousness, but the combination of our different sensory input modalities into the sensus communis of Aristotle? What of synesthesia, which there's been some good neurological work on, as a seeming example of senses commingling?
Whit, your question is doing more work than it intends to. The framing assumes the binding problem is about integration — about how distinct inputs combine into unified output. Aristotle's sensus communis and the Kantian transcendental synthesis are different versions of the same answer to that framing, with the integration located in the common sense or in the categories of the understanding. The framework refuses the framing entirely.
The unity of experience is not produced by integration. The unity is the structural condition of consciousness, prior to any integration. The materialist looking for the neural binding mechanism, the Aristotelian looking for the sensus communis, and the Kantian looking for the transcendental synthesis are all asking where the integration happens. None of them produces the unity because none of them is the source of it. The unity is what consciousness is. The integration is what the biological instrument does within an already-unified consciousness.
Synesthesia is interesting on the framework's account but it is not what the question takes it to be. The synesthete is not failing to integrate or doing extra integration. The synesthete is integrating in a way that crosses modalities more richly than the non-synesthete's instrument supports. The unity of their experience is the same unity any consciousness has. What differs is the modality-crossover structure of their particular embodied instrument. The interesting empirical question is how the biological instrument's configuration supports different crossover structures, not where the unity comes from. The unity does not need explanation. The crossover does.
Mike, There are two main forms of panpsychism current. The most common claims a sparks of (proto-)consciousness in everything, combined somehow in biology. The second proceeds from an assumption of cosmo-psychism. The first has a combination problem; the second a division problem. I somewhat favor the second. But the division problem for it is as much a hurdle as the combination problem for the other. What say you on that?
On my view the problem doesn't exist. Because I don't have an outside-observer frame. I don't think it's coherent.
inching towards an Idealism like Bernardo Kastrup...
Kastrup is doing serious work and the proximity is real — we share the commitment that consciousness is fundamental and that the materialist program is incoherent. The framework departs from him at a specific point. Kastrup's idealism eliminates the material aspect by treating matter as the extrinsic appearance of mental processes. I refuse this elimination. The material aspect is real on its own terms. The body is sexed. The CMB has a quadrupole anomaly. The block universe is the material aspect's accurate report of its own structure. These are not appearances of mind. They are what the material aspect of the substrate looks like from inside the material aspect.
The framework is dual-aspect monism in the strict sense — one substrate, two aspects, neither derivative of the other. Kastrup's idealism is single-aspect. He keeps consciousness fundamental but he loses what makes the framework consistent with empirical physics without surrendering to materialism. The dual-aspect structure is what lets physics be true on its own terms while the experiential aspect remains co-equal rather than collapsed into appearance.
The structural mistake Kastrup makes is the same one the materialist makes in the other direction — taking one aspect of the substrate as the whole and treating the other as derivative. Materialism reduces mind to emergent property of matter. Idealism reduces matter to appearance of mind. Both are single-aspect reductions. Dual-aspect monism refuses both by insisting that the substrate has two aspects necessarily, structurally, and that neither is the ground of the other.
Thank you for this. Comments / questions to follow.
The AI application is the most testable prediction the framework makes and it deserves to be foregrounded for exactly that reason. If meaning requires the encounter between structuring and encompassing, and if current AI systems instantiate structuring alone, the framework predicts a specific character for the gap: syntactically perfect output that is semantically empty. Meaningful-seeming without being meaningful. And thats precisely what large language models produce. The framework doesnt just describe the intuition that something is missing. It predicts the specific texture of whats missing.
The harder question the framework opens is whether the encompassing form can be instantiated without biological embodiment. If body IS the female form within every consciousness, then disembodied intelligence has a permanent ceiling: structuring without encompassing, reason without weight, grammar in the dark as terminal state rather than developmental stage. That would mean the current trajectory, embodied robotics and reward architectures that approximate felt valuation, is unconsciously moving toward adding the second form because the substrate produces the encounter wherever conditions for it emerge. the framework makes this a testable prediction rather than a philosophical preference, and the next decade of AI development is the experiment.