The most effective way to build a bridge would be stressing the point that “early modern mechanical philosophy’s idea of dead, external matter” isn’t a neutral starting point, it’s the substance of their metaphysical commitments.
I was skimming a video today with David Bentley Hart and this same point caught my attention when he interrupted the interviewer to stress it - I would not have you think that I believe that there is ever any level at which matter is mechanistic alone.
The physicalist slide from method to metaphysics is so ingrained people assume we start with that mechanistic matter and they cant seem to drop that idea long enough to understand alternatives.
Thanks for another great article with plenty of food for thought.
Your Fichte quote is very appropiate here. Any conversation about consciousness not including what Dieter Henrich called Fichte’s original insight, that self-consciousness cannot be explained by a reflective "turning back" of consciousness upon itself (reflection theory), as this creates an infinite regress, is ill-informed.
We can appreciate his insight without accepting his attempts on deriving a one-dimensional theory from the fact.
What Henrich wrote in 1966 is still true today: “Even when he did not succeed in reaching a solution, he did advance the question; indeed, he advanced it to such an extent that even today to follow his route is still to learn something from him. Anyone seeking a suitable concept of "self-consciousness" must go back to Fichte and to the knowledge he achieved.”
Famously Fichte never succeeded in deriving intersubjectivity and nature as realities independent from self-consciousness, but that shouldn’t mislead us to reject his original insight, but rather inspire us to more multi-dimensional approaches integrating the insight.
I have recently looked up a quote from John Stuart Mill about conflicting conversations. I read it way back in high school about sixty years ago. It has stuck in my mind ever since. It is on page 67-68 of his “On Liberty”
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute
them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real
contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form ; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of ; else he will never really possess himself of the
portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition ; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions.
Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental pesition of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say ; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. They do not know those parts of it which
explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the
truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in
the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which
Charles, Thanks for this quote. This is why I think the most valuable part of my children’s public highschool experience was the Lincoln Douglas debate team.
"Consciousness does not exist independently of objects; objects do not exist independently of consciousness. Neither has any existence of its own — this is emptiness. "
is a quote from Nagarjuna, taken from the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (chapter 18, verse 6), which illustrates his position on consciousness .
This quote summarises the Madhyamaka approach: consciousness, like all phenomena, is neither real in itself nor absolutely illusory — it is dependent, conditioned, and therefore empty of essence.
Yes. Nāgārjuna is denying intrinsic existence, not experiential reality. Consciousness and objects are empty because they arise dependently; neither stands on its own. But emptiness is not nihilism, and it is not symmetry that erases agency. It dissolves static essences while preserving lived appearance and relational causation. The middle way is not “nothing exists,” but “nothing exists independently.”
What resonated strongly for me is your critique of effective theories being quietly ontologized — where explanatory success gets mistaken for metaphysical closure.
In a different context, I’ve been arguing that something similar is happening around agency in algorithmic systems: behavioral adequacy is increasingly treated as sufficient for attribution, even as the structural conditions for authorship quietly dissolve.
In that sense, the persistence of the “hard problem” is not about gaps in neuroscience or metaphysics, but about preserving the boundary conditions under which responsibility, evidence, and attribution remain intelligible at all.
Dennett used to regularly attend the Toward a Science of Consciousness conferences in Tucson, where he could be expected to be among the first to challenge every other speaker, in his jovial manner. I never spoke with anyone there who was convinced Dennett's approach achieved anything; but he at least presented a respectable, friendly foil.
On the current question of how panpsychism explains our individual points of view (and Fichte's "formal freedom"?) -- doesn't the panprotopsychist variant cover that? That is, if there is something "elemental" that is already a form of awareness within all that exists, then perhaps this is formed, in biological organisms, into what we know as our conscious theater, including as it does both the senses and the entwined projections in our senses forward ("prehensive"?) in time -- in which we see ourselves reflected insofar as our biological selves are facts of our prospects, such as our biological selves are naturally concerned with them?
Crudely, electrical charge exists at the level of electrons, yet we don't expect of other objects what we do of electrical devices (a rock is not a computer); if psychic "charge" exists at an equivalently basic level, we may still only expect to find consciousness in biological entities, even while far simpler entities, unincorporated into biological systems, have the inherent interiority panprotopsychism posits.
Might consciousness require interiority, while interiority does not require consciousness? (Bonus question: Is interiority sufficient witness for existence in and of a young universe in which conscious biology has yet to emerge?)
This is more or less Whitehead's position: that consciousness presupposes a more basal form of experience or prehensive feeling. The vast majority of experience in the cosmos is not conscious experience.
I had to write out some of your observations here Matt at they help me wrestle with this fascinating to and fro (and I thank the cosmos I don’t have to learn how to properly cite a Substack post for an academic paper 🙃). Also, nice opening graphic.😉
“In all spheres, thought, the prerogative of the individual, is subordinated to the vast mechanisms which crystallize collective life, and that is so to such an extent that we have almost lost the notion of what real thought is . . . signs, words, and algebraic formulae in the field of knowledge, money and credit symbols in economic life, play the part of realities of which the actual things themselves constitute only the shadows, exactly as in Hans Anderson’s tale in which the scientist and his shadow exchange roles. . .“
When symbols forget the consciousness that generated them, they begin to rule it.
Simone Weil is naming a civilizational inversion:
Thought (living, situated, risky)→ subordinated to mechanisms (symbolic systems that scale, harden, and detach).
Her examples are not incidental, signs, words, algebraic formulae, money, credit, abstractions. These are not neutral tools. They are compressed coordinations of collective life that gradually replace reality rather than serve it.
The Hans Christian Andersen reference is crucial: the shadow becomes sovereign, and the living person becomes derivative.
This is not merely epistemic error.
It is ontological displacement.
2. Why this matters for consciousness (and AI, and science)
Weil is pointing to the same danger you’ve been circling in different domains:
When symbols no longer refer back to lived interiority, they begin to govern it.
This applies directly to:
computational models of mind
information-first ontologies
economic abstractions
bureaucratic rationality
algorithmic governance
The problem is not abstraction per se.
The problem is abstraction without return.
In your language:
Action without memory of its experiential source.
3. Weil vs. materialism (the deeper cut)
Notice: Weil is not arguing against reason or structure.
She is arguing against reified structure — structure that has forgotten it was generated by thought.
This is the same mistake made when:
consciousness is reduced to symbols
intelligence is equated with computation
life is treated as an emergent epiphenomenon
The shadow (formal system) claims autonomy.
The source (living thought) is erased.
4. Inner Genesis alignment (cleanly stated)
Thought is not symbol manipulation.
Thought is experiential orientation, action that knows itself acting.
Symbols are useful prosthetics. They are not reality. When civilization forgets this, it begins to worship models, trust metrics over meaning, confuse prediction with understanding, mistake coordination for consciousness
Weil saw this before computers.
Weil is diagnosing a civilizational inversion, symbols meant to serve living thought come to replace it. Signs, formulas, and abstractions harden into mechanisms that govern us, while the experiential source of thought recedes into shadow. This is not anti-reason; it is a warning against reason forgetting its origin in lived interiority. When symbols no longer return to experience, the shadow takes the place of the person.
"Ontogenesis implies ontological pluralism. Thus one of the consequences of adopting such a stance is that philosophy becomes in large part a diplomatic method for coordinating the creative contrasts among various ontologies." Thank you Matt for this introduction to another way to speak of plural ontologies. Similar to the psychological understanding of intersectionality, this goes further to support the proposition that every moment can be an opportunity for a novel creation in a clients life - if the therapist particpates in the concrescence of the moment and doesn't crush the opportunity through diagnostic labels or disbelief in the ability of the client to walk in more freedom.
"Thus a subject cannot be understood to be a substance, if by substance is meant something requiring nothing but itself in order to exist. Subjects are relational processes." Do you mean the relational processes of your body's biological organs of consciousness? Like the surface-level impressions of reality "received" by the biological reality of your Eyes?
Which shouldn't be a surprise considering the fact that you are biologically conceived creature. Who thinks & speaks about reality, even while 99% of your own reality cannot cross the threshold of conscious awareness. And indicates the problem of simply acting-out our communication-biased consciousness, while pretending to be interested in the ontological nature of Reality.
Arguably because the psychological "judgements" of our symbolic-cognition, misconceive reality, through the "reified-reality" nature of the 'sounds & symbols' nature of language. And do so, so subconsciously & automatically we simply fail notice the our psychological "dissociation" is not reality discernment, but pure self-deception. As alluded to, with the "alluding" function of language, in this Ego shattering statement:
"For people to comprehend their conditioned self-deception scheme, they must try not to
impose a perceptual expectation of mind-sight on the perception capacity of eye-sight."
Daniel Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths, The Psychology of Self Deception
“Objectivity is not the absence of subjective perspective but the coordination of perspectives” — yes. That line lands because it explains why the “just give me the facts” posture can never be metaphysically clean: relevance is always already baked in.
This is very close to the axis of my own project (Absolute Relativity / The Shape of Now): a world of “facts” is the stabilized layer that emerges when multiple centers must agree well enough to coordinate. In that framing, measurement isn’t “mind makes reality,” it’s the public layer committing to one outcome so coordination can happen.
Question: do you think the deep disagreement between physicalists and their critics is ultimately an ontological fight (“what exists”), or a fight about what counts as an explanation (“what kind of story is legitimate”)? And how would you map that onto the measurement problem specifically?
Subjects are relational processes. This is correct, but still incomplete. The unresolved question is not whether subjects are relational, but how a relational process closes on itself as this subject rather than another.
Segall preserves first-person irreducibility, second-person reality, third-person coordination, but he does not yet explain why an “I” appears as indexical rather than generic.
This is exactly the difficulty you earlier named in relation to Philip Goff: panexperientialism can distribute experience everywhere, but it still struggles to account for why experience is always someone’s.
Where my Inner Genesis clarifies the “I / you” problem. My move is subtle but decisive.
The “I” is not a substance, not a role, not a projection, not a bundle, it is a recursive action that cannot proceed without referring to itself.
This does something Segall’s relational language alone cannot do. It explains closure without isolation. It explains singularity without substance. It explains otherness without projection.
“You” is not my predicate
“You” is not my construction
“You” is another recursively closed action-loop
That is why no one else can be me, but you are no less real than I am. This resolves the tension Segall is circling without collapsing into either,
absolutist idealism
functionalist deflation
This is one of the clearest articulations I’ve seen of the danger on both sides, cosmic Ego on the one hand, functional erasure of the subject on the other. I especially appreciate the insistence that the second person cannot be reduced to a predicate of my own self-activity. Where I would still press is on the genesis of the indexical “I” itself. Relational process is necessary, but not sufficient, something must close recursively for experience to appear as this someone rather than another. Without that, panexperientialism risks distributing experience everywhere while explaining no one in particular.
The universe may be relational all the way down, but relation alone does not explain why experience is always someone’s.
I agree that identity is layered and fractal, and that myth is often dismissed too quickly as “false” while scientific placeholders are treated as knowledge. Where I differ is in what grounds the fractal. Pattern alone cannot explain interiority. A rock and a brain may be computationally describable, but only one cannot act without remembering itself acting. Consciousness does not arise from being made in an image; it arises where action becomes self-referential over time. Fractality describes structure, but recursion generates experience.
What you’re describing is accurate for the math—but the lesson people often extract from it quietly overreaches the domain.
In the Mandelbrot/Julia relationship, memory is positional: the system “remembers” which Julia it belongs to because the mapping function is fixed. The morphology is set because the rule itself does not change. Iteration explores a pre-given space; it does not revise the space.
But that is precisely where the analogy breaks if we apply it to living consciousness.
Biological and experiential systems are not merely iterating a fixed function. The function itself is plastic. Action feeds back into constraint. History does not just locate the system—it reshapes the rule. That is the crucial difference between mapping and becoming.
So yes: within a closed morphology, to move against the flow is to iterate to extinction.
But life is not confined to a single morphology. It survives by opening new phase spaces, not by optimizing within one forever.
The lesson, then, is not “don’t move against the flow,” but rather:
extinction happens when iteration is mistaken for evolution.
Fractals teach us about limits of fixed rules.
Consciousness begins where rules can be renegotiated.
Agreed, within constraints, the search space is unbounded. But the crucial point is how that infinity is entered.
An infinite parameter space does not exist as a neutral field waiting to be mapped. It is selectively accessed through history, coupling, and value. A species is not merely “specific to infinity” in each parameter; it is actively narrowing infinity into habit, moment by moment, through what it can sustain.
Infinity here is not a destination or a property, it is a reservoir of unrealized trajectories. Morphology is not chosen from infinity like a lookup table; it is carved from it by repeated success at continuing.
So constraints do not oppose infinity, they shape which infinities can be lived.
And species are not endpoints in infinite space, but stabilized ways of touching it without dissolving.
Evolution, then, is not mapping to a fixed morphology, nor wandering freely in infinity, but learning how much infinity a form can hold before it breaks.
That balance, between openness and persistence, is where interiority enters.
A rock and a brain may be formally describable by similar computational rules, but only one of them cannot proceed without registering its own prior activity.
Kinds, likenesses, and images name how things appear once stabilized. They belong to the grammar of recognition. They tell us what a thing is like after it has cohered.
What they do not name is how a thing comes to be at all.
An image is not prior to the act that generates it. A likeness is not a cause, but a residue. A kind is a temporary success of repetition. Before any of these, there is an event: action folding back on itself until identity occurs.
So the deeper order is not
kinds → likenesses → images
but
action → memory → identity,
from which kinds, likenesses, and images later emerge.
Images explain resemblance.
Processes explain existence.
And consciousness, if it appears anywhere, appears on the process side, not in the catalog.
I think you’re pointing at something real, but I’d name it differently.
Fractals do describe structure, and you’re right that structure alone does not explain interiority. What fractals do show is how a mode of generation can repeat across scales. They tell us how something is made, not what it is like to be it.
So if we speak of an “image” that is everywhere, finite yet infinite, I don’t hear geometry so much as process. An image that has a beginning and an ending on the real line, yet unfolds without limit, sounds less like a static form and more like ongoing self-reference.
If I am “made in that image,” then what I am also describing is not my shape, but my way of becoming: action that loops back on itself, generating identity as it goes. Interiority does not arise from the fractal pattern—it arises when that generative process becomes self-involving, when action cannot proceed without memory of itself.
Fractals show us repetition. Interiority begins when repetition becomes experience.
The most effective way to build a bridge would be stressing the point that “early modern mechanical philosophy’s idea of dead, external matter” isn’t a neutral starting point, it’s the substance of their metaphysical commitments.
I was skimming a video today with David Bentley Hart and this same point caught my attention when he interrupted the interviewer to stress it - I would not have you think that I believe that there is ever any level at which matter is mechanistic alone.
The physicalist slide from method to metaphysics is so ingrained people assume we start with that mechanistic matter and they cant seem to drop that idea long enough to understand alternatives.
Thanks for another great article with plenty of food for thought.
Your Fichte quote is very appropiate here. Any conversation about consciousness not including what Dieter Henrich called Fichte’s original insight, that self-consciousness cannot be explained by a reflective "turning back" of consciousness upon itself (reflection theory), as this creates an infinite regress, is ill-informed.
We can appreciate his insight without accepting his attempts on deriving a one-dimensional theory from the fact.
What Henrich wrote in 1966 is still true today: “Even when he did not succeed in reaching a solution, he did advance the question; indeed, he advanced it to such an extent that even today to follow his route is still to learn something from him. Anyone seeking a suitable concept of "self-consciousness" must go back to Fichte and to the knowledge he achieved.”
Famously Fichte never succeeded in deriving intersubjectivity and nature as realities independent from self-consciousness, but that shouldn’t mislead us to reject his original insight, but rather inspire us to more multi-dimensional approaches integrating the insight.
Ignoring this is in my view a kind of illiteracy.
https://phil880.colinmclear.net/materials/readings/henrich-fichte.pdf
I have recently looked up a quote from John Stuart Mill about conflicting conversations. I read it way back in high school about sixty years ago. It has stuck in my mind ever since. It is on page 67-68 of his “On Liberty”
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute
them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real
contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form ; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of ; else he will never really possess himself of the
portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition ; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions.
Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental pesition of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say ; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. They do not know those parts of it which
explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the
truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in
the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which
the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up.
Charles, Thanks for this quote. This is why I think the most valuable part of my children’s public highschool experience was the Lincoln Douglas debate team.
"Consciousness does not exist independently of objects; objects do not exist independently of consciousness. Neither has any existence of its own — this is emptiness. "
is a quote from Nagarjuna, taken from the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (chapter 18, verse 6), which illustrates his position on consciousness .
This quote summarises the Madhyamaka approach: consciousness, like all phenomena, is neither real in itself nor absolutely illusory — it is dependent, conditioned, and therefore empty of essence.
Yes. Nāgārjuna is denying intrinsic existence, not experiential reality. Consciousness and objects are empty because they arise dependently; neither stands on its own. But emptiness is not nihilism, and it is not symmetry that erases agency. It dissolves static essences while preserving lived appearance and relational causation. The middle way is not “nothing exists,” but “nothing exists independently.”
That is in reference to chit not Rigpa (I know those are not his terms)
What resonated strongly for me is your critique of effective theories being quietly ontologized — where explanatory success gets mistaken for metaphysical closure.
In a different context, I’ve been arguing that something similar is happening around agency in algorithmic systems: behavioral adequacy is increasingly treated as sufficient for attribution, even as the structural conditions for authorship quietly dissolve.
In that sense, the persistence of the “hard problem” is not about gaps in neuroscience or metaphysics, but about preserving the boundary conditions under which responsibility, evidence, and attribution remain intelligible at all.
Dennett used to regularly attend the Toward a Science of Consciousness conferences in Tucson, where he could be expected to be among the first to challenge every other speaker, in his jovial manner. I never spoke with anyone there who was convinced Dennett's approach achieved anything; but he at least presented a respectable, friendly foil.
On the current question of how panpsychism explains our individual points of view (and Fichte's "formal freedom"?) -- doesn't the panprotopsychist variant cover that? That is, if there is something "elemental" that is already a form of awareness within all that exists, then perhaps this is formed, in biological organisms, into what we know as our conscious theater, including as it does both the senses and the entwined projections in our senses forward ("prehensive"?) in time -- in which we see ourselves reflected insofar as our biological selves are facts of our prospects, such as our biological selves are naturally concerned with them?
Crudely, electrical charge exists at the level of electrons, yet we don't expect of other objects what we do of electrical devices (a rock is not a computer); if psychic "charge" exists at an equivalently basic level, we may still only expect to find consciousness in biological entities, even while far simpler entities, unincorporated into biological systems, have the inherent interiority panprotopsychism posits.
Might consciousness require interiority, while interiority does not require consciousness? (Bonus question: Is interiority sufficient witness for existence in and of a young universe in which conscious biology has yet to emerge?)
This is more or less Whitehead's position: that consciousness presupposes a more basal form of experience or prehensive feeling. The vast majority of experience in the cosmos is not conscious experience.
I had to write out some of your observations here Matt at they help me wrestle with this fascinating to and fro (and I thank the cosmos I don’t have to learn how to properly cite a Substack post for an academic paper 🙃). Also, nice opening graphic.😉
“In all spheres, thought, the prerogative of the individual, is subordinated to the vast mechanisms which crystallize collective life, and that is so to such an extent that we have almost lost the notion of what real thought is . . . signs, words, and algebraic formulae in the field of knowledge, money and credit symbols in economic life, play the part of realities of which the actual things themselves constitute only the shadows, exactly as in Hans Anderson’s tale in which the scientist and his shadow exchange roles. . .“
Simone Weil, Oppresion and Liberty, pp. 93
When symbols forget the consciousness that generated them, they begin to rule it.
Simone Weil is naming a civilizational inversion:
Thought (living, situated, risky)→ subordinated to mechanisms (symbolic systems that scale, harden, and detach).
Her examples are not incidental, signs, words, algebraic formulae, money, credit, abstractions. These are not neutral tools. They are compressed coordinations of collective life that gradually replace reality rather than serve it.
The Hans Christian Andersen reference is crucial: the shadow becomes sovereign, and the living person becomes derivative.
This is not merely epistemic error.
It is ontological displacement.
2. Why this matters for consciousness (and AI, and science)
Weil is pointing to the same danger you’ve been circling in different domains:
When symbols no longer refer back to lived interiority, they begin to govern it.
This applies directly to:
computational models of mind
information-first ontologies
economic abstractions
bureaucratic rationality
algorithmic governance
The problem is not abstraction per se.
The problem is abstraction without return.
In your language:
Action without memory of its experiential source.
3. Weil vs. materialism (the deeper cut)
Notice: Weil is not arguing against reason or structure.
She is arguing against reified structure — structure that has forgotten it was generated by thought.
This is the same mistake made when:
consciousness is reduced to symbols
intelligence is equated with computation
life is treated as an emergent epiphenomenon
The shadow (formal system) claims autonomy.
The source (living thought) is erased.
4. Inner Genesis alignment (cleanly stated)
Thought is not symbol manipulation.
Thought is experiential orientation, action that knows itself acting.
Symbols are useful prosthetics. They are not reality. When civilization forgets this, it begins to worship models, trust metrics over meaning, confuse prediction with understanding, mistake coordination for consciousness
Weil saw this before computers.
Weil is diagnosing a civilizational inversion, symbols meant to serve living thought come to replace it. Signs, formulas, and abstractions harden into mechanisms that govern us, while the experiential source of thought recedes into shadow. This is not anti-reason; it is a warning against reason forgetting its origin in lived interiority. When symbols no longer return to experience, the shadow takes the place of the person.
"Ontogenesis implies ontological pluralism. Thus one of the consequences of adopting such a stance is that philosophy becomes in large part a diplomatic method for coordinating the creative contrasts among various ontologies." Thank you Matt for this introduction to another way to speak of plural ontologies. Similar to the psychological understanding of intersectionality, this goes further to support the proposition that every moment can be an opportunity for a novel creation in a clients life - if the therapist particpates in the concrescence of the moment and doesn't crush the opportunity through diagnostic labels or disbelief in the ability of the client to walk in more freedom.
When we inquire about consciousness, we use consciousness to investigate consciousness.
"Thus a subject cannot be understood to be a substance, if by substance is meant something requiring nothing but itself in order to exist. Subjects are relational processes." Do you mean the relational processes of your body's biological organs of consciousness? Like the surface-level impressions of reality "received" by the biological reality of your Eyes?
Which shouldn't be a surprise considering the fact that you are biologically conceived creature. Who thinks & speaks about reality, even while 99% of your own reality cannot cross the threshold of conscious awareness. And indicates the problem of simply acting-out our communication-biased consciousness, while pretending to be interested in the ontological nature of Reality.
Arguably because the psychological "judgements" of our symbolic-cognition, misconceive reality, through the "reified-reality" nature of the 'sounds & symbols' nature of language. And do so, so subconsciously & automatically we simply fail notice the our psychological "dissociation" is not reality discernment, but pure self-deception. As alluded to, with the "alluding" function of language, in this Ego shattering statement:
"For people to comprehend their conditioned self-deception scheme, they must try not to
impose a perceptual expectation of mind-sight on the perception capacity of eye-sight."
Daniel Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths, The Psychology of Self Deception
“Objectivity is not the absence of subjective perspective but the coordination of perspectives” — yes. That line lands because it explains why the “just give me the facts” posture can never be metaphysically clean: relevance is always already baked in.
This is very close to the axis of my own project (Absolute Relativity / The Shape of Now): a world of “facts” is the stabilized layer that emerges when multiple centers must agree well enough to coordinate. In that framing, measurement isn’t “mind makes reality,” it’s the public layer committing to one outcome so coordination can happen.
Question: do you think the deep disagreement between physicalists and their critics is ultimately an ontological fight (“what exists”), or a fight about what counts as an explanation (“what kind of story is legitimate”)? And how would you map that onto the measurement problem specifically?
Segall says:
Subjects are relational processes. This is correct, but still incomplete. The unresolved question is not whether subjects are relational, but how a relational process closes on itself as this subject rather than another.
Segall preserves first-person irreducibility, second-person reality, third-person coordination, but he does not yet explain why an “I” appears as indexical rather than generic.
This is exactly the difficulty you earlier named in relation to Philip Goff: panexperientialism can distribute experience everywhere, but it still struggles to account for why experience is always someone’s.
Where my Inner Genesis clarifies the “I / you” problem. My move is subtle but decisive.
The “I” is not a substance, not a role, not a projection, not a bundle, it is a recursive action that cannot proceed without referring to itself.
This does something Segall’s relational language alone cannot do. It explains closure without isolation. It explains singularity without substance. It explains otherness without projection.
“You” is not my predicate
“You” is not my construction
“You” is another recursively closed action-loop
That is why no one else can be me, but you are no less real than I am. This resolves the tension Segall is circling without collapsing into either,
absolutist idealism
functionalist deflation
This is one of the clearest articulations I’ve seen of the danger on both sides, cosmic Ego on the one hand, functional erasure of the subject on the other. I especially appreciate the insistence that the second person cannot be reduced to a predicate of my own self-activity. Where I would still press is on the genesis of the indexical “I” itself. Relational process is necessary, but not sufficient, something must close recursively for experience to appear as this someone rather than another. Without that, panexperientialism risks distributing experience everywhere while explaining no one in particular.
The universe may be relational all the way down, but relation alone does not explain why experience is always someone’s.
Keep on keeping on.
there may be but we can never know what they are. we can only assume. and I've seen what assumption looks like. it's not very reliable.
I agree that identity is layered and fractal, and that myth is often dismissed too quickly as “false” while scientific placeholders are treated as knowledge. Where I differ is in what grounds the fractal. Pattern alone cannot explain interiority. A rock and a brain may be computationally describable, but only one cannot act without remembering itself acting. Consciousness does not arise from being made in an image; it arises where action becomes self-referential over time. Fractality describes structure, but recursion generates experience.
What you’re describing is accurate for the math—but the lesson people often extract from it quietly overreaches the domain.
In the Mandelbrot/Julia relationship, memory is positional: the system “remembers” which Julia it belongs to because the mapping function is fixed. The morphology is set because the rule itself does not change. Iteration explores a pre-given space; it does not revise the space.
But that is precisely where the analogy breaks if we apply it to living consciousness.
Biological and experiential systems are not merely iterating a fixed function. The function itself is plastic. Action feeds back into constraint. History does not just locate the system—it reshapes the rule. That is the crucial difference between mapping and becoming.
So yes: within a closed morphology, to move against the flow is to iterate to extinction.
But life is not confined to a single morphology. It survives by opening new phase spaces, not by optimizing within one forever.
The lesson, then, is not “don’t move against the flow,” but rather:
extinction happens when iteration is mistaken for evolution.
Fractals teach us about limits of fixed rules.
Consciousness begins where rules can be renegotiated.
Agreed, within constraints, the search space is unbounded. But the crucial point is how that infinity is entered.
An infinite parameter space does not exist as a neutral field waiting to be mapped. It is selectively accessed through history, coupling, and value. A species is not merely “specific to infinity” in each parameter; it is actively narrowing infinity into habit, moment by moment, through what it can sustain.
Infinity here is not a destination or a property, it is a reservoir of unrealized trajectories. Morphology is not chosen from infinity like a lookup table; it is carved from it by repeated success at continuing.
So constraints do not oppose infinity, they shape which infinities can be lived.
And species are not endpoints in infinite space, but stabilized ways of touching it without dissolving.
Evolution, then, is not mapping to a fixed morphology, nor wandering freely in infinity, but learning how much infinity a form can hold before it breaks.
That balance, between openness and persistence, is where interiority enters.
The problem is not fractality itself.
The problem is where fractality is grounded.
Michael grounds fractality in a fixed penultimate pattern — an uncreated, complete structure that everything else “images.”
That move does real philosophical work, but it also freezes the generative process too early.
The key issue
He treats:
pattern → image → thing
as ontologically primary.
But this leaves unanswered:
How does pattern itself act, differentiate, or experience?
Fractals describe structure.
They do not explain interiority.
A rock and a brain may be formally describable by similar computational rules, but only one of them cannot proceed without registering its own prior activity.
That is not a difference of image or pattern.
It is a difference of recursive self-reference.
Yes, but only at the level of description.
Kinds, likenesses, and images name how things appear once stabilized. They belong to the grammar of recognition. They tell us what a thing is like after it has cohered.
What they do not name is how a thing comes to be at all.
An image is not prior to the act that generates it. A likeness is not a cause, but a residue. A kind is a temporary success of repetition. Before any of these, there is an event: action folding back on itself until identity occurs.
So the deeper order is not
kinds → likenesses → images
but
action → memory → identity,
from which kinds, likenesses, and images later emerge.
Images explain resemblance.
Processes explain existence.
And consciousness, if it appears anywhere, appears on the process side, not in the catalog.
I think you’re pointing at something real, but I’d name it differently.
Fractals do describe structure, and you’re right that structure alone does not explain interiority. What fractals do show is how a mode of generation can repeat across scales. They tell us how something is made, not what it is like to be it.
So if we speak of an “image” that is everywhere, finite yet infinite, I don’t hear geometry so much as process. An image that has a beginning and an ending on the real line, yet unfolds without limit, sounds less like a static form and more like ongoing self-reference.
If I am “made in that image,” then what I am also describing is not my shape, but my way of becoming: action that loops back on itself, generating identity as it goes. Interiority does not arise from the fractal pattern—it arises when that generative process becomes self-involving, when action cannot proceed without memory of itself.
Fractals show us repetition. Interiority begins when repetition becomes experience.