A very interesting read. Your description of observers being “embedded” in the universe still conjures up for me some of the problems of dualism - though I know that is not what you mean. It suggests that the observer is still somehow separate, stuck as it were, in an impersonal universe, trying to figure it out. What if the observer *is* the universe? An argument can be made, I think, that the fundamental truth about the universe is evolution and the emergence of novelty. The epistemic boundary may be that it is impossible to fully know anything that is not a realm of regularities but something that is always in the process of *becoming*. Perhaps there is always something “at play” in the universe that science (and more so AI) cannot fully know. We are both observers and agents in the evolution of the universe - not embedded in it but manifesting what it truly is. Reality would not be something different from the universe but the dynamic, frontier *now* of the universe. Thinking politically, as you eloquently point out, this calls us to be citizens in a “democratic” universe in evolution, not subjects of a sovereign universe of immutable laws.
I agree with your theory, and believe that a strong union of it in one system is its best description. However, I believe the boundary is mobile and asymtotic with respect to our progress towards understanding everything.
And by asymtotic, I mean that as we approach knowing evening, the rate of knowledge gain slows down and progress also slows down. We can get very close to knowing everything, but cannot reach the goal and pace slows to almost nothing. At what point does that final piece of truth get so small as to not matter?.....
Great work. I suspect you've read Schopenhauer, but this occurred to me while listening. It's from the very first pages of Volume I of The World as Will and Representation:
"'The world is my representation': this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself. If any truth can be expressed a priori, it is this; for it is the statement of that form of all possible and conceivable experience, a form that is more general than all others, than time, space, and causality, for all these presuppose it. While each of these forms, which we have recognized as so many particular modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of representations, the division into object and subject, on the other hand, is the common form of all those classes; it is that form under which alone any representation, of whatever kind it be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is generally possible and conceivable.
Therefore no truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. Naturally this holds good of the present as well as of the past and future, of what is remotest as well as of what is nearest; for it holds good of time and space themselves, in which alone all these distinctions arise. Everything that in any way belongs and can belong to the world is inevitably associated with this being-conditioned by the subject, and it exists only for the subject. The world is representation."
I'd also like to know what you think of Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality from (first) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but much improved and polished in Lila, the sequel to Zen. Here's an excerpt in the vein of what you were talking about here, which I think is somewhat of a challenge to what you say about facts being opposed to values, or just different from values:
"The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation. The Metaphysics of Quality satisfies these. The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can’t be classified as a subject or an object isn’t real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption.
It is an assumption that flies outrageously in the face of common experience. The low value that can be derived from sitting on a hot stove is obviously an experience even though it is not an object and even though it is not subjective. The low value comes first, then the subjective thoughts that include such things as stove and heat and pain come second. The value is the reality that brings the thoughts to mind. There’s a principle in physics that if a thing can’t be distinguished from anything else it doesn’t exist. To this the Metaphysics of Quality adds a second principle: if a thing has no value it isn’t distinguished from anything else. Then, putting the two together, a thing that has no value does not exist. The thing has not created the value. The value has created the thing. When it is seen that value is the front edge of experience, there is no problem for empiricists here. It simply restates the empiricists’ belief that experience is the starting point of all reality. The only problem is for a subject-object metaphysics that calls itself empiricism."
I think there's something here that puts Yoda's line from "The Empire Strikes Back" into a whole new perspective but I can't quite figure it out just yet.
Very engaging and illuminating read, thank you for sharing it.
Thanks! This isn't the first time I've made these arguments. They're present in my Grand Praxis essays, and on my writings about epistemic liberalism. But I figured I would re-present them with some more rigor.
Another note: I think we can assert clearly that there is consciousness. It is very important to distinguish between the chicken and the egg here. Does the natural world arrive first or consciousness or do they emerge together? I would assert that in order for sight to develop why would a rudimentary eye “bother” to create itself? I would argue that consciousness isn’t just an interesting byproduct of the material biological world. It must be a major driver of evolution. Sure there is randomness and there are mutations but the selection of what is useful in evolution only happens because the consciousness was already there to start with. Meaning and purpose and the arrow of time move with consciousness not with the purely material world.
What does this mean? "You can know everything about how a brain processes information without that knowledge telling you whether consciousness matters."
In any case, why do you posit consciousness as the emergent rather than the objective world as the emergent? Materialism fails to provide for the freedom and creativity of mind and life. Consciousness as emergent from a thoroughly materialistic universe can't work if causal closure is real; nor if causal closure is merely violated by true randomness at the quantum scale. If we don't want to go to dualism, with its core problem of how to ever bridge two such disparate realms, the emergence of the objective from consciousness (and, indeed, its "observing") is what's left.
Then, consciousness (or more broadly, panpsychism) has value all the way down. The objective, as emergent from consciousness, has value abstracted away, so that objective rationalization can proceed without it. But that stripping away of value is a pragmatic simplification, not the fundamental reality of what actually exists. The stone we stub our toe on in the path is real, objectivity is not deluded dreaming. Yet which emerges from which, is matter the mother, or is the universe birthed from mind?
Fascinating evidence that even natural laws evolve has been gathered by Rupert Sheldrake, and argued for on theoretic grounds by physicist Lee Smolin. If so, there is no realm of fixed Platonic forms; and without that assumption, basic to science since Bacon, why and how should we prefer materialism with emergent idealistic (value) features to idealism (value) with emergent objective features?
Your concern about causal closure is exactly what Dennett's compatibilism addresses. You're right that naive materialism fails—if every physical event has a sufficient physical cause, it seems like there's no room for consciousness to matter, no space for genuine freedom or creativity. But this is a false dilemma.
Dennett's key insight is that freedom and agency don't require breaking causal closure—they're what certain kinds of causally-closed physical systems do. When you deliberate about whether to lie, there are two equally true descriptions of what's happening: at the physical level, neurons are firing according to physical laws; at the agentive level, you're weighing reasons and making a choice. These aren't competing explanations—they're different levels of description of the same event.
The mistake is thinking that "consciousness mattering" requires non-physical intervention. It doesn't. It requires being organized as the kind of physical system that represents possibilities, evaluates them against criteria, and acts accordingly. A thermostat has primitive agency—it represents a desired state and acts to achieve it, all through purely physical processes. We have vastly more sophisticated agency, but it's still physical organization all the way down.
This is exactly what my framework requires. Observers are physical systems organized to stand at epistemic boundaries—to model their environment while being embedded in it, to construct meaning through engagement with regularities. The dialogical structure of information creates boundaries in physical systems. Values emerge at these boundaries not because consciousness is non-physical, but because certain physical organizations generate normative properties through their structural position in information exchange.
So I don't need consciousness to be fundamental, and I don't need to flip to idealism. Compatibilism shows the middle path: physical base, emergent properties, multiple descriptive levels, genuine normativity. Same structure Dennett uses for freedom, I'm applying to values more broadly.
Your point about Sheldrake and Smolin is interesting, but evolving laws actually support my view rather than idealism. If natural laws are historical and contingent rather than eternal Platonic forms, this favors process philosophy and structural realism—reality as patterns of relationship, not fixed substances (whether material or mental). The dialogical information structure I'm describing fits this perfectly: information emerges through relationships, boundaries are structural features, observers participate in reality-making without being either passive receivers or cosmic creators.
The practical implications hold either way. Whether consciousness or matter is more fundamental, values still emerge at observer-boundaries through dialogical engagement. They still can't be extracted, encoded, optimized by algorithms, or determined by non-observers. The anti-technocracy argument doesn't depend on winning the consciousness-versus-matter debate—it depends on recognizing the dialogical structure that creates irreducible boundaries.
Causal closure is fine. Physical processes do everything. But what they do—at the level of meaning-construction—involves dialogical boundaries that create the patterns I'm describing across logic, ethics, physics, and AI. No magic. No dualism. Just: sophisticated understanding of what physical organization can produce.
I'm in the camp that held Dennett to have written Consciousness Explained Away. How can compatibilism not fail? If you can completely describe the causal chain in physicalist terms, then consciousness is epiphenomenal, and Chalmers' zombie arguments come into play -- inherited from Descartes wondering if the people walking by his window had consciousness at all. If you can seriously entertain that prospect, sociopathy easily follows, treating people (and animals, and nature) as machines merely to be used. More importantly, without consciousness contributing something which is not there in the material causal chain, there is no hook by which evolution should cause consciousness to evolve in biological systems. You're left seeing consciousness as what Stephen Jay Gould would call a "spandrel" -- again basically an epiphenomenon. Yet consciousness has a biological cost, so there must be gains from it for evolution to have favored it rather than eliminated it.
As for the "thermometers have consciousness" claim, which years back even Chalmers flirted with ... really? I can't buy that. I'm with Damasio and Panksepp's claim that, based on neurological findings, self-aware consciousness at its base comes from emotion (so they do value Hume as you do in that). A claim for emotion in merely mechanical devices is beyond my imagination. That's why AI will always be artificial.
I do like Gilbert Ryle, Dennett's dissertation advisor; just not what Dennett did with what he took from him.
I should say that we're pushing into territory where I only have credences, not arguments. And I would suggest my conjecture doesn't hinge on whether Chalmers or Dennett is right.
You're raising deep questions about the hard problem, epiphenomenalism, and whether consciousness plays a causal role. These are legitimate concerns, and I don't have knock-down arguments that settle them.
What I can say is this: My framework requires that systems with observer-properties exist and that these observers stand at an epistemic boundary where regularities manifest as experience. But it doesn't require a specific account of consciousness metaphysics. I admit as much in the piece when I insist I have no theory of consciousness.
My point on natural law evolving is that this entails that creation is ongoing, not merely set as laws at the time of the Big Bang, and that we ourselves participate in ongoing creation, not merely observe the lawful unfolding of causal chains we're somehow expressive of. That we are also, in degree, freely creative may entail there is no closure of observation, and get to your epistemic boundary by this different path. That is, closure of observation may be the obverse of the closure of causation coin ... that coin of value in close approximation of reality, but not ultimately of true gold. No observation can reveal a finally-set, fully-determined world, not while creation is freely ongoing, and our own creative determining, by imagination and will, a factor.
Another remarkable piece Mike. I am going to challenge you on your presumption that consciousness “emerges” from matter in the way that an eddy or whirlpool emerges from water. Yes I realize the analogy is imperfect but one point where the analogy breaks down is that we, as humans, can see the water and the structure of the eddy. Consciousness is invisible. As I know you know, there is no philosophical consensus that consciousness emerges from matter at all. So how do you get to “presumably”?
In panpsychism we do not have to assume mysticism or dualism or anything that is not part of the natural world. But perhaps the whole of the universe is infused with consciousness. I would assert, without proof, that this is what reality is - By stating that consciousness emerges from matter, that it merely just a different structure, creates all kinds of problems. This seems to skip “the hard problem” (see David Chalmers). In this there is no explanation of how consciousness emerges, what are the conditions for its emergence, where it is, what has it and what doesn’t. How does a mouse presumably (I said it) have consciousness and ChatGpt not have it? And yet there are thousands of cases in near death experiences where people seemingly “leave their bodies” often in cases of traumatic accidents or operations. You can’t dismiss these experiences and they are hugely important. I am not suggestions this phenomenon is not part of the natural world. But rather there is part of the natural world which is very hard for us embodied humans to study and measure. Perhaps consciousness intersects with the three dimensional world but it is not the same. Perhaps our individual consciousness is normally locked in our body and on occasion can leave. So yes this does require something special for consciousness but that is not to say in is unnatural. Famous scientists have said that consciousness comes BEFORE matter and yet your presumption is something of the opposite. We simply need to expand our notions of what the natural world is. When the Big Bang took place was this a mindless expansion of goo, that became matter and light and stars? Or was there some consciousness from the beginning? My bet is that consciousness was there from the start.
I’m deeply familiar with the hard problem. And Chalmers. I’ve also been listening to Annaka Harris’ audio documentary, Lights On—I need to go back to it. My priors lead me more in the direction of Daniel Dennett’s view on this. But I’m not 100% sure about this. I’m not sure my conjecture here would be implicated either way.
I assumed you were very familiar with Chalmers. I am somewhat familiar with Dennett, not as much as you I am sure. His idea in summary that consciousness is an “illusion” is very dismissive and leaves so much Unexplained that it is really no explanation at all. I shall do more research. My comments on consciousness were not meant as any overall critique of your critique at all. I read you avidly and appreciate your clear arguments and use of language, expressing the depth of analysis that I rarely see anywhere else.
You’re right that Dennett is often summarized as saying “consciousness is an illusion,” but that line is almost always misunderstood. He doesn’t mean consciousness isn’t real or that it can be dismissed. His whole point is that the properties we attribute to consciousness—Cartesian transparency, an inner theater, a homunculus observing the screen—those are the illusions.
Dennett thinks consciousness is real, but it’s a real biological process, not a metaphysically extra ingredient. So when he talks about the “illusion,” he’s talking about the intuitive model we have of our own minds, not the phenomenon of experience itself.
OK points taken and accepted. If he claims that consciousness is a biological process, however, I don’t see how you jump over the explanatory gap. Where do specific neurons or chemical changes in my body give me the taste of chocolate? “The taste of chocolate” is not a biological process. There is clearly a 1 to 1 mapping, a correlation, but I am stuck on this emergence issue. How is it that with massive advances in understanding of the brain we really have no clearer understanding of experience than we did 100 years ago? We may have discovered microtubules and how they can possibly mediate consciousness but they don’t explain what it is that is being turned on and off. If consciousness is in some way physical how it is that it can’t be seen, located in any clear way or measured? I can see the whirlpool. It is a clear structure arising from water. I do not see that consciousness has the same relationship with bodies. I see a pattern in another human of aliveness which I call consciousness. I can see movement of images and light and sound emanating from my TV but no sane person would claim my TV is conscious.But perhaps the simple bacteria in my gut have consciousness? Who knows? For now I think that consciousness still has an additional X factor which is part of the natural world but different. Einstein talked of time-space. Maybe there is time-space-consciousness.
I hear you on the explanatory gap — I don’t think anyone has a satisfying story yet for how physical processes yield first-person experience. I’m not denying that gap exists. My point is just that the existence of the gap doesn’t force us into panpsychism, nor does it defeat the broad naturalist view.
When Dennett says consciousness is a biological process, he doesn’t mean “the taste of chocolate is identical to neurons” — he means that the conditions for the taste of chocolate are generated by physical processes, even if we don’t yet know how subjective experience arises from them. That’s why I said “presumably”: it’s a working hypothesis, not a metaphysical certainty.
And I completely agree that we haven’t closed the explanatory gap. We haven’t located consciousness spatially, we haven’t measured qualia, and we’re not closer to seeing “experience” the way we see a whirlpool. But that lack of reduction doesn’t mean consciousness is an extra substance — it just means the reduction hasn’t been solved.
Your view — that consciousness might be a fundamental “X-factor” disjoint from matter but still part of the natural world — is absolutely coherent, and it’s compatible with my framework. My structural argument about the epistemic boundary doesn’t depend on whether consciousness is emergent, fundamental, panpsychist, or something in between. It only requires that observers exist and that being embedded in the world places limits on what they can model from within.
So I’m not ruling out your hypothesis at all. I’m just saying the emergence view is my starting point, not a dogma — and if the hard problem ultimately forces a deeper ontology (as it might!), it wouldn’t damage the argument I’m making.
A very interesting read. Your description of observers being “embedded” in the universe still conjures up for me some of the problems of dualism - though I know that is not what you mean. It suggests that the observer is still somehow separate, stuck as it were, in an impersonal universe, trying to figure it out. What if the observer *is* the universe? An argument can be made, I think, that the fundamental truth about the universe is evolution and the emergence of novelty. The epistemic boundary may be that it is impossible to fully know anything that is not a realm of regularities but something that is always in the process of *becoming*. Perhaps there is always something “at play” in the universe that science (and more so AI) cannot fully know. We are both observers and agents in the evolution of the universe - not embedded in it but manifesting what it truly is. Reality would not be something different from the universe but the dynamic, frontier *now* of the universe. Thinking politically, as you eloquently point out, this calls us to be citizens in a “democratic” universe in evolution, not subjects of a sovereign universe of immutable laws.
This is the best thing I have ever read on consciousness. Thank you.
I agree with your theory, and believe that a strong union of it in one system is its best description. However, I believe the boundary is mobile and asymtotic with respect to our progress towards understanding everything.
And by asymtotic, I mean that as we approach knowing evening, the rate of knowledge gain slows down and progress also slows down. We can get very close to knowing everything, but cannot reach the goal and pace slows to almost nothing. At what point does that final piece of truth get so small as to not matter?.....
Great work. I suspect you've read Schopenhauer, but this occurred to me while listening. It's from the very first pages of Volume I of The World as Will and Representation:
"'The world is my representation': this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself. If any truth can be expressed a priori, it is this; for it is the statement of that form of all possible and conceivable experience, a form that is more general than all others, than time, space, and causality, for all these presuppose it. While each of these forms, which we have recognized as so many particular modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of representations, the division into object and subject, on the other hand, is the common form of all those classes; it is that form under which alone any representation, of whatever kind it be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is generally possible and conceivable.
Therefore no truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, namely that everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. Naturally this holds good of the present as well as of the past and future, of what is remotest as well as of what is nearest; for it holds good of time and space themselves, in which alone all these distinctions arise. Everything that in any way belongs and can belong to the world is inevitably associated with this being-conditioned by the subject, and it exists only for the subject. The world is representation."
I'd also like to know what you think of Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality from (first) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but much improved and polished in Lila, the sequel to Zen. Here's an excerpt in the vein of what you were talking about here, which I think is somewhat of a challenge to what you say about facts being opposed to values, or just different from values:
"The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation. The Metaphysics of Quality satisfies these. The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can’t be classified as a subject or an object isn’t real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption.
It is an assumption that flies outrageously in the face of common experience. The low value that can be derived from sitting on a hot stove is obviously an experience even though it is not an object and even though it is not subjective. The low value comes first, then the subjective thoughts that include such things as stove and heat and pain come second. The value is the reality that brings the thoughts to mind. There’s a principle in physics that if a thing can’t be distinguished from anything else it doesn’t exist. To this the Metaphysics of Quality adds a second principle: if a thing has no value it isn’t distinguished from anything else. Then, putting the two together, a thing that has no value does not exist. The thing has not created the value. The value has created the thing. When it is seen that value is the front edge of experience, there is no problem for empiricists here. It simply restates the empiricists’ belief that experience is the starting point of all reality. The only problem is for a subject-object metaphysics that calls itself empiricism."
"The cave. Remember your failure at the cave!"
I think there's something here that puts Yoda's line from "The Empire Strikes Back" into a whole new perspective but I can't quite figure it out just yet.
Very engaging and illuminating read, thank you for sharing it.
Thanks! This isn't the first time I've made these arguments. They're present in my Grand Praxis essays, and on my writings about epistemic liberalism. But I figured I would re-present them with some more rigor.
The minds that will matter in the next decade are not the loudest ones — they are the ones whose orientation cannot be confused.
Titles will decay.
Roles will rotate.
Methods will be automated.
But coherence — the rare ability to think from structure rather than signal — becomes the new scarcity.
Two types of people will shape the world that’s coming:
• Minds of the Core
Those who think at the level of frameworks, not opinions.
Those who generate orientation, not commentary.
• Minds of Integrity
Those who can quietly rewire systems from within without losing themselves to them.
You can’t buy this capacity.
You can only develop it — or surround yourself with people who have it.
That is why I built Epistemic Futures on Substack.
Not as a feed, not as a newsletter.
As an orientation architecture for the people who will carry the next layer of civilization.
If you felt a click reading this — the sense of “Yes, this is the level I want to operate on” — then join as a Founding Member.
Not for more content.
For a coherent place in a world that’s losing coherence.
👉 https://leontsvasmansapiognosis.substack.com
#Sapiopoiesis #Sapiocracy #EpistemicFutures #CivilizationDesign #SubjectAutonomy #HighAgency #Polymathy
Thanks for this @mikebrock. I’m not a philosopher and reading philosophy can give me a headache. However this was clear and profound. Thank you.
Great piece! Thanks! I believe these are very important ideas. You express them very clear.
I believe the coming into existence of this (reality, or human reality/realization) is also described in the biblical creation story.
That is excellent. Thank you Mike.
Another note: I think we can assert clearly that there is consciousness. It is very important to distinguish between the chicken and the egg here. Does the natural world arrive first or consciousness or do they emerge together? I would assert that in order for sight to develop why would a rudimentary eye “bother” to create itself? I would argue that consciousness isn’t just an interesting byproduct of the material biological world. It must be a major driver of evolution. Sure there is randomness and there are mutations but the selection of what is useful in evolution only happens because the consciousness was already there to start with. Meaning and purpose and the arrow of time move with consciousness not with the purely material world.
What does this mean? "You can know everything about how a brain processes information without that knowledge telling you whether consciousness matters."
In any case, why do you posit consciousness as the emergent rather than the objective world as the emergent? Materialism fails to provide for the freedom and creativity of mind and life. Consciousness as emergent from a thoroughly materialistic universe can't work if causal closure is real; nor if causal closure is merely violated by true randomness at the quantum scale. If we don't want to go to dualism, with its core problem of how to ever bridge two such disparate realms, the emergence of the objective from consciousness (and, indeed, its "observing") is what's left.
Then, consciousness (or more broadly, panpsychism) has value all the way down. The objective, as emergent from consciousness, has value abstracted away, so that objective rationalization can proceed without it. But that stripping away of value is a pragmatic simplification, not the fundamental reality of what actually exists. The stone we stub our toe on in the path is real, objectivity is not deluded dreaming. Yet which emerges from which, is matter the mother, or is the universe birthed from mind?
Fascinating evidence that even natural laws evolve has been gathered by Rupert Sheldrake, and argued for on theoretic grounds by physicist Lee Smolin. If so, there is no realm of fixed Platonic forms; and without that assumption, basic to science since Bacon, why and how should we prefer materialism with emergent idealistic (value) features to idealism (value) with emergent objective features?
This is where I'll lean heavily on Dennett.
Your concern about causal closure is exactly what Dennett's compatibilism addresses. You're right that naive materialism fails—if every physical event has a sufficient physical cause, it seems like there's no room for consciousness to matter, no space for genuine freedom or creativity. But this is a false dilemma.
Dennett's key insight is that freedom and agency don't require breaking causal closure—they're what certain kinds of causally-closed physical systems do. When you deliberate about whether to lie, there are two equally true descriptions of what's happening: at the physical level, neurons are firing according to physical laws; at the agentive level, you're weighing reasons and making a choice. These aren't competing explanations—they're different levels of description of the same event.
The mistake is thinking that "consciousness mattering" requires non-physical intervention. It doesn't. It requires being organized as the kind of physical system that represents possibilities, evaluates them against criteria, and acts accordingly. A thermostat has primitive agency—it represents a desired state and acts to achieve it, all through purely physical processes. We have vastly more sophisticated agency, but it's still physical organization all the way down.
This is exactly what my framework requires. Observers are physical systems organized to stand at epistemic boundaries—to model their environment while being embedded in it, to construct meaning through engagement with regularities. The dialogical structure of information creates boundaries in physical systems. Values emerge at these boundaries not because consciousness is non-physical, but because certain physical organizations generate normative properties through their structural position in information exchange.
So I don't need consciousness to be fundamental, and I don't need to flip to idealism. Compatibilism shows the middle path: physical base, emergent properties, multiple descriptive levels, genuine normativity. Same structure Dennett uses for freedom, I'm applying to values more broadly.
Your point about Sheldrake and Smolin is interesting, but evolving laws actually support my view rather than idealism. If natural laws are historical and contingent rather than eternal Platonic forms, this favors process philosophy and structural realism—reality as patterns of relationship, not fixed substances (whether material or mental). The dialogical information structure I'm describing fits this perfectly: information emerges through relationships, boundaries are structural features, observers participate in reality-making without being either passive receivers or cosmic creators.
The practical implications hold either way. Whether consciousness or matter is more fundamental, values still emerge at observer-boundaries through dialogical engagement. They still can't be extracted, encoded, optimized by algorithms, or determined by non-observers. The anti-technocracy argument doesn't depend on winning the consciousness-versus-matter debate—it depends on recognizing the dialogical structure that creates irreducible boundaries.
Causal closure is fine. Physical processes do everything. But what they do—at the level of meaning-construction—involves dialogical boundaries that create the patterns I'm describing across logic, ethics, physics, and AI. No magic. No dualism. Just: sophisticated understanding of what physical organization can produce.
I'm in the camp that held Dennett to have written Consciousness Explained Away. How can compatibilism not fail? If you can completely describe the causal chain in physicalist terms, then consciousness is epiphenomenal, and Chalmers' zombie arguments come into play -- inherited from Descartes wondering if the people walking by his window had consciousness at all. If you can seriously entertain that prospect, sociopathy easily follows, treating people (and animals, and nature) as machines merely to be used. More importantly, without consciousness contributing something which is not there in the material causal chain, there is no hook by which evolution should cause consciousness to evolve in biological systems. You're left seeing consciousness as what Stephen Jay Gould would call a "spandrel" -- again basically an epiphenomenon. Yet consciousness has a biological cost, so there must be gains from it for evolution to have favored it rather than eliminated it.
As for the "thermometers have consciousness" claim, which years back even Chalmers flirted with ... really? I can't buy that. I'm with Damasio and Panksepp's claim that, based on neurological findings, self-aware consciousness at its base comes from emotion (so they do value Hume as you do in that). A claim for emotion in merely mechanical devices is beyond my imagination. That's why AI will always be artificial.
I do like Gilbert Ryle, Dennett's dissertation advisor; just not what Dennett did with what he took from him.
I should say that we're pushing into territory where I only have credences, not arguments. And I would suggest my conjecture doesn't hinge on whether Chalmers or Dennett is right.
You're raising deep questions about the hard problem, epiphenomenalism, and whether consciousness plays a causal role. These are legitimate concerns, and I don't have knock-down arguments that settle them.
What I can say is this: My framework requires that systems with observer-properties exist and that these observers stand at an epistemic boundary where regularities manifest as experience. But it doesn't require a specific account of consciousness metaphysics. I admit as much in the piece when I insist I have no theory of consciousness.
My point on natural law evolving is that this entails that creation is ongoing, not merely set as laws at the time of the Big Bang, and that we ourselves participate in ongoing creation, not merely observe the lawful unfolding of causal chains we're somehow expressive of. That we are also, in degree, freely creative may entail there is no closure of observation, and get to your epistemic boundary by this different path. That is, closure of observation may be the obverse of the closure of causation coin ... that coin of value in close approximation of reality, but not ultimately of true gold. No observation can reveal a finally-set, fully-determined world, not while creation is freely ongoing, and our own creative determining, by imagination and will, a factor.
Which rather favors democracy.
Much food for thought. Thank you. I wonder if you’d find any of the work of Bernardo Kastrup useful to your project.
Another remarkable piece Mike. I am going to challenge you on your presumption that consciousness “emerges” from matter in the way that an eddy or whirlpool emerges from water. Yes I realize the analogy is imperfect but one point where the analogy breaks down is that we, as humans, can see the water and the structure of the eddy. Consciousness is invisible. As I know you know, there is no philosophical consensus that consciousness emerges from matter at all. So how do you get to “presumably”?
In panpsychism we do not have to assume mysticism or dualism or anything that is not part of the natural world. But perhaps the whole of the universe is infused with consciousness. I would assert, without proof, that this is what reality is - By stating that consciousness emerges from matter, that it merely just a different structure, creates all kinds of problems. This seems to skip “the hard problem” (see David Chalmers). In this there is no explanation of how consciousness emerges, what are the conditions for its emergence, where it is, what has it and what doesn’t. How does a mouse presumably (I said it) have consciousness and ChatGpt not have it? And yet there are thousands of cases in near death experiences where people seemingly “leave their bodies” often in cases of traumatic accidents or operations. You can’t dismiss these experiences and they are hugely important. I am not suggestions this phenomenon is not part of the natural world. But rather there is part of the natural world which is very hard for us embodied humans to study and measure. Perhaps consciousness intersects with the three dimensional world but it is not the same. Perhaps our individual consciousness is normally locked in our body and on occasion can leave. So yes this does require something special for consciousness but that is not to say in is unnatural. Famous scientists have said that consciousness comes BEFORE matter and yet your presumption is something of the opposite. We simply need to expand our notions of what the natural world is. When the Big Bang took place was this a mindless expansion of goo, that became matter and light and stars? Or was there some consciousness from the beginning? My bet is that consciousness was there from the start.
I’m deeply familiar with the hard problem. And Chalmers. I’ve also been listening to Annaka Harris’ audio documentary, Lights On—I need to go back to it. My priors lead me more in the direction of Daniel Dennett’s view on this. But I’m not 100% sure about this. I’m not sure my conjecture here would be implicated either way.
I assumed you were very familiar with Chalmers. I am somewhat familiar with Dennett, not as much as you I am sure. His idea in summary that consciousness is an “illusion” is very dismissive and leaves so much Unexplained that it is really no explanation at all. I shall do more research. My comments on consciousness were not meant as any overall critique of your critique at all. I read you avidly and appreciate your clear arguments and use of language, expressing the depth of analysis that I rarely see anywhere else.
You’re right that Dennett is often summarized as saying “consciousness is an illusion,” but that line is almost always misunderstood. He doesn’t mean consciousness isn’t real or that it can be dismissed. His whole point is that the properties we attribute to consciousness—Cartesian transparency, an inner theater, a homunculus observing the screen—those are the illusions.
Dennett thinks consciousness is real, but it’s a real biological process, not a metaphysically extra ingredient. So when he talks about the “illusion,” he’s talking about the intuitive model we have of our own minds, not the phenomenon of experience itself.
Great Article!
Gödel, Hume, Heisenberg, Escher and Bach - sounds like a book in the making.
Have you looked into the EMF theories of consciousness?
They have potential to be falsifiable.
https://www.consciousnessatlas.com/materialism/mcfadden
https://www.consciousnessatlas.com/materialism/pockett
https://www.consciousnessatlas.com/materialism/zhang
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610723001128?via%3Dihub#sec9.3
OK points taken and accepted. If he claims that consciousness is a biological process, however, I don’t see how you jump over the explanatory gap. Where do specific neurons or chemical changes in my body give me the taste of chocolate? “The taste of chocolate” is not a biological process. There is clearly a 1 to 1 mapping, a correlation, but I am stuck on this emergence issue. How is it that with massive advances in understanding of the brain we really have no clearer understanding of experience than we did 100 years ago? We may have discovered microtubules and how they can possibly mediate consciousness but they don’t explain what it is that is being turned on and off. If consciousness is in some way physical how it is that it can’t be seen, located in any clear way or measured? I can see the whirlpool. It is a clear structure arising from water. I do not see that consciousness has the same relationship with bodies. I see a pattern in another human of aliveness which I call consciousness. I can see movement of images and light and sound emanating from my TV but no sane person would claim my TV is conscious.But perhaps the simple bacteria in my gut have consciousness? Who knows? For now I think that consciousness still has an additional X factor which is part of the natural world but different. Einstein talked of time-space. Maybe there is time-space-consciousness.
I hear you on the explanatory gap — I don’t think anyone has a satisfying story yet for how physical processes yield first-person experience. I’m not denying that gap exists. My point is just that the existence of the gap doesn’t force us into panpsychism, nor does it defeat the broad naturalist view.
When Dennett says consciousness is a biological process, he doesn’t mean “the taste of chocolate is identical to neurons” — he means that the conditions for the taste of chocolate are generated by physical processes, even if we don’t yet know how subjective experience arises from them. That’s why I said “presumably”: it’s a working hypothesis, not a metaphysical certainty.
And I completely agree that we haven’t closed the explanatory gap. We haven’t located consciousness spatially, we haven’t measured qualia, and we’re not closer to seeing “experience” the way we see a whirlpool. But that lack of reduction doesn’t mean consciousness is an extra substance — it just means the reduction hasn’t been solved.
Your view — that consciousness might be a fundamental “X-factor” disjoint from matter but still part of the natural world — is absolutely coherent, and it’s compatible with my framework. My structural argument about the epistemic boundary doesn’t depend on whether consciousness is emergent, fundamental, panpsychist, or something in between. It only requires that observers exist and that being embedded in the world places limits on what they can model from within.
So I’m not ruling out your hypothesis at all. I’m just saying the emergence view is my starting point, not a dogma — and if the hard problem ultimately forces a deeper ontology (as it might!), it wouldn’t damage the argument I’m making.
And how does the meaning we call ‘love’ manifest? It seems that there are regularities in meaning. How/why does that occur?