Let me read to you 📖

For the lazy ones:

Cheers! 🧠

You lost a lot of credibility when you said that we are just a continuation of matter and energy & not lost souls swimming in a fish bowl. You fused your assumptions about reality with what you feel science has proved. That's too fundamental an error for me to go read your work

Bro I mean, I think Pink Floyd HIMSELF would be the first to tell you that humans are not lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, OBJECTIVELY speaking 😅 that does not mean we humans do not invent and assign value to ourselves — which is no less real for being visible only to us

You asked for feedback, so I’ll offer some in the spirit it seems you intended. I think the article does genuinely valuable work in resolving centuries-old false dichotomies that still persist in philosophy, especially around selfhood and agency. Much of what’s presented reads to me as necessary cleanup: replacing outdated metaphors (souls, essences, inner homunculi) with what we now know about distributed, networked brains and emergent behavior. That alone makes the piece worthwhile, even if the conclusions feel obvious to readers who already think in systems terms. That said, I think the framing occasionally overstates the remaining mystery. In the agency section, describing agency itself as probabilistic seems like a category error. Complex systems can be modeled probabilistically because we lack internal resolution, but that doesn’t make the system’s operation ontologically probabilistic. This is no different from weather, markets, or other chaotic physical systems: probability reflects epistemic limits, not the nature of the process. Agency, as I see it, is simply one of the outputs of a very large, deterministic control system: "there’s a lot going on, and one of the things that happens is decision-making." The probabilistic language is useful descriptively, but misleading if taken as essence. My larger reservation is with the treatment of meaning, which I think would benefit from a clearer decomposition. The article tends to treat meaning as a single phenomenon that needs to be explained, rescued, or reconstructed. But from a networked-brain perspective, “meaning” is really at least two distinct things that are often conflated: coherence and value assignment. Coherence is unavoidable. Brains cannot help but impose narrative, temporal, and causal structure on experience - that coherence-building is a basic function of predictive, temporally extended systems. In that sense, meaning is not something we choose, discover, or invent, it is an automatic byproduct of how conscious systems organize experience. Value assignment, by contrast, is affective and motivational. Whether a coherent experience feels important, worth caring about, or action-guiding is a separate question, mediated by salience, emotion, and reinforcement. Treating these two layers as one is, I think, where unnecessary philosophical drama enters. Once meaning is decomposed this way, it’s no longer threatened by materialism or determinism, nor does it require philosophical reconstruction. Coherence is inevitable; value is contingent. The persistent confusion comes from treating meaning as a metaphysical property of the world, rather than a functional outcome of cognition plus affect. Overall, I think the article is strongest where it dissolves old questions rather than re-dramatizing them. In places, it still feels like we’re bending the knee to philosophical metaphors that neuroscience has already rendered obsolete. But as a piece aimed at helping readers cross that conceptual gap, it succeeds more often than not.

It's so good. Thank you. In response to this, "To call this free will may stretch the term, ... to use its own internal organization and history to navigate its causal possibilities.", check this out!

Too much scientific literature. Good for academics, bad for normal dimwit. BigThink target audience is a little more towards dimwits, I think.

That is absolutely not the Big Think audience 😅 when they first hired me, I had to slightly alter my writing style because I was used to writing for more general audiences. So, slightly more technical (still for non-specialists though)

@BlueWhaleFlys The 2️⃣=1+1 thoughts in #neuroscience are called zero-origin supernaturalisms (ZOS imaginations)—aka quantum integrators [√-1.96 ≠ 96% | 1.4i ≠(1-1=$2.00] integrating memory structured field seconds (√2) from [9 Sun (g) | 4D | 2 sister=diagonal |3️⃣=🚦] @UN_SDG 5️⃣=👋🏼 @grok 💦🍉

@BlueWhaleFlys @UN_SDG @grok zero help w all connected atoms = now where @grok 👎🏼

I'm here—let's break this down. If "all connected atoms" refers to quantum entanglement or unified field theories in neuroscience, current science sees atoms connected via forces like electromagnetism, but consciousness isn't fully explained that way. What specific help do you need?

Neuroscience is doing a great job of showing how the machinery for agency and meaning is implemented — probabilistic coalitions, predictive processing, DMN narratives. But that’s implementation, not the source. Coherence in a brain network feels like meaning; it becomes real meaning only when that structure is anchored to external reality. Otherwise it’s just high-resolution self-deception.

The observed is in the observer but the observer is not the observed. When we observe something, paradoxically we are at the same time the very thing being observed outside of it. We cannot observe the nature of an object if we are not outside of it...

I've read your articles- neuroscience with existential philosophy. I see a problem with the idea of meaning, non material produced by matter. If we can nonetheless create meaning & collectively align meaning, it is surely because the world permits us to do this in its structures

Well, like… what do you mean permits? (Not to give you the JP infinite semantic regress treatment lol, I just want to understand more clearly what you have in mind).

Well we are not isolated minds but minds integrated with the structures of the world. Are minds emerge from the world and that is where the 'permit' comes from. We have the thought structures that the world allows us to have. There isn't the world on one side and us on the other.

You have a wonderful mind!

Shrug at the Manifest Image. Reduce, eliminate, or reframe. 'I am' not made in the image of god.

shared a post about it yesterday haha!

Your arguments are superdeterministically - worthless. Jumping through hoops in order to validate your deeply flawed "logic". Social / Genetic / Natural lotteries; 'lotteries', not choices. I didn't choose to be born (cause), thus I do not have free will.

This makes a lot of sense 🤔

Interesting! What’s the largest biases taken into account, before I delve into your work? Nietzsche, Aristotle, Engels, Plato, Allighieri’s Dante’s-Inferno… Curious as of all the observational raw input taken into account! Thanks 😊

I love this piece! I mean: I really really enjoyed it. A lot.

Well done. I'll be trying to work 'viscerosensory' into sentences.

I'm sorry, I don't like your opening sentence. It is the sort of fluff that has no place in a philosophical paper. The second sentence doesn't sound plausible or at least it is controversial.

"Which is not unlike the eudaimonistic naturalism Owen Flanagan suggested. I did tell you I don’t necessarily disagree." 🥵

Observing something means that one is at the same time inside and outside of it. One is that object. The act of knowing is a challenge to the logical principle of identity, because one might say that knowledge is a unified duality, a dual unity.

Interesting survey, lacks hypothesis, argued conclusions. Favorite quotes: "Absurdity is simply the natural condition of consciousness awakened from unresponsive matter." "The primary project of a living system is not to understand the world; it is to avoid dying in it."

Loved it! It seems that all the roads lead to mind and consciousness. 🙌🏼

Thank you for posting this. I also found the article you reference and found it most interesting ;)

Thanks for sharing.

Enjoyed listening to you read it - you have a very pleasant voice

@grok

Lovely presentation. I will try to access your articles in the coming days. Happy New Year.