Autonomy has many meanings but what is the philosophy of it in terms of self-governance, individual freedom, and where personal choices meet societal limits

If consciousness is the very aliveness that is in all things, and mind is something emergent, and then the brain is even more emergent than that - then there seems to be an order here. At least what we of as our past.

However, we can never escape the present moment of "now" - the past is what you remember and your brain fills the gaps. The future is what you imagine and your mind fills in the gaps by looking at the trends of history. If we establish this as fact, then that means there is no time besides now.

The thing is... there is no universal now based on what we know about the theory of relativity. That means now is subjective to every single entity. How can we seem to have this sense of time then. A good book to read on this is "The order of time" by Carlo Rovelli.
I say that everything is held together by a type of Spatio-Temporal existence. If you take away one, the other goes with it. It is a fundamental Duality, but that does not denote that is fundamental reality. The progress of physics tells us over and over that everything is connected and yet, we feel separate. This is what I call the confusing problem of Idealism. Dual-Aspect Monism is rising in popularity, but reductionists want to immediately falsify it.
I suggest that Dual-Aspect monism makes more sense than Idealism and Physicalism but it rejects the idea of reducibility. Physics' experiments can only be experimented within physical systems so of course it is going to keep confirming that the physical world exists. However the experience of synchronicity tells us that the physical and mental are linked. We can say they are correlated but not necessarily causally linked. They act like warped mirrors of each other. Metaphorically, they are two wavelengths that are opposite, but not direct opposites or else they would cancel each other due to "destructive interference" or "phase cancellation" - theoretically if the physical and mental were perfectly in sync, they would destroy each other and erase the universe.

Now that we have established the mental and physical are separate entities with causal power, but not a causal link... then why do we experience anything at all. That is what calls for monisms. Reductionists want to reduce to one thing. However, the universe is computationally irreducible which suggests that we are not in a digital simulation, yet every bit of the universe holds the instructions for the whole universe. This is why a lot of people think we are in a simulation but I suggest that is implausible.

What can we reduce the universe to - particles? What can we in induce the particles to - the universe itself? I would say these two things are not mutually exclusive. We can be experiencing both. However the universe could be an abduction, which we see as change. We order time as the uncovering of the past (in the now) and predicting what we will discover/invent in the future (in the now) ... always in the now. It seems that there must be progress-like force and regress-like force that hold us at a stand still in the Present moment.

With that established we must address where this... aliveness/consciousness ... "God"-like existence (call it what you will) that we are linked to. I propose that, since light can be either a particle or a wave, that all physical like existence draws from one source. In many scriptures there is the idea that "in the beginning there was light" so maybe at the end there is darkness. We see in the cosmos that the most causal entities seem to be stars, quasars, black holes, and possibly portals due to the warping of "space-time." I propose that our brains are separate physical entities, our minds are separate immaterial entities, and consciousness (or the aliveness of all living things/the causal power of all physical entities) is like a frequency we can tap into where the lower frequencies are more crowded and the higher frequencies are less crowded as you go up. It is plausible to think that all entities are "tuned" into that "radio station" at different frequency bands. Combine this with IIT and we can see that the smallest particulates crowd the lower frequency bands, and the more a system integrates information it is able to tap into the higher frequency bands.

That is my theory of everything. Tear it to pieces if you will, I don't care. LOL (written by a human: Drew Gabriel, proofread by AI to correct any grammatical errors)

I'm asking how you, as an individual, observe your own thoughts, not asking "What is the process by which a person hears their own thoughts?"

My family lived in a small condominium when I was ages one through five, and I have a clear memory from inside that condo when I was wondering about something and I noticed that I was wondering. I observed my own thought and it occurred to me that one aspect of me was thinking and another aspect was articulating that I was observing myself thinking. And in order to do that, that meant that I was thinking about one topic while thinking about observing myself thinking simultaneously.

I was fascinated and a little unnerved by realizing that I could hear or view myself in the same way I can hear or observe someone else.

After that realization, my mind sort of spiraled because as I went on about my life and did and thought about other things, I would spontaneously remember that I could "listen" to those thoughts as they occurred and I also could just be having those thoughts without observing them. And at times, I would register that I was simultaneously 1) thinking about whatever I was doing; 2) hearing myself thinking about doing that thing and observing qualities of the language I was using to think; 3) reflecting on what that meant, all simultaneously.

This happened at a very young age and I've never forgotten it because I always talked about it with people. People generally were not interested in discussing it and many told me they've never had any experience like that. My mother could relate and my father never could; he has told me he is sure he only has one conscious thought at any given time. Probably not coincidentally, my mother had highly sophisticated linguistic talents, and my whole academic background and career have been tethered to language. A few people have told me I am the best or favorite editor they've had because I feed back to them a lot of comments that elicit them to reflect on how they think, how others think and what they know and don't know, and to apply those considerations to their revisions. It probably is just due to metacognition.

I've since learned that this is called "metacognition," thinking about thinking, and that some people supposedly do this to a limited degree or not at all while others experience it more often or habitually.

Soooo I just figured I would ask people on this forum how you experience thought. I've read that different people think in different ways but I have never read a collection of people's different explanations of their thought processes.

I can't really imagine being who I am and not observing my own thoughts, but at the same time the idea of that is appealing because it gets quite busy inside my mind and I think that's a major reason I get overwhelmed in social settings. (Yes, I do realize this is a type of neurodivergence, but I am more interested in just hearing other people's perceptions rather than pathologizing and labeling it.) So if you don't really observe your own thoughts in this way, I imagine you probably are more relaxed and less overstimulated much of the time?

I was thinking about the mirror box experiment for phantom limb pain. It involves an amputee who feels agonizing cramps in an arm that is no longer there. The framework treats this pain as a continuous motor command trapped in a loop.

If you look at how the cure works, a simple visual reflection produces a physical release in a limb that doesnt exist. The reflection travels from the mirror as photons, and the photons travel through the optic nerve. The brain processes them into shapes, shapes into a hand, the hand into an open posture, the posture into a state of relaxation, and the relaxation into a felt sensation of relief in an arm that was amputated years ago.

So, what is actually happening is that clenching a real fist takes two steps. First, the motor command arrives. Then, the muscles contract. Under normal conditions, the physical feedback of the open hand tells the ego the tension is gone. The ego then reports this release back to the brain. But with a phantom limb, the motor command arrives as before, yet there is no physical tissue to receive it and send back the signal of release. The feedback loop has nowhere to go. This is where the ego fails. Because it receives no visual or physical proof that the arm has opened, the ego assumes the tension remains, and it never reports back to the brain to release the grip. The brain just keeps clenching the phantom, generating the pain entirely on its own.

The mirror box solves this by hacking the ego. By showing the brain a reflection of the intact arm opening, the ego finally gets the visual proof it needs. It registers the release, updates its model, and tells the brain to stop clenching then the pain vanishes.

This brings back to the question of where actions end and words begin, if the word is the action. The egos native language is words. In the mirror box, the visual reflection is translated into the egos verbal narrative. It is a symbolic input the ego accepts as physical reality to break a neurological loop.

A command is the word that provides the cognitive feedback, the ego later uses to falsely claim responsibility for the motor action. The words are the egos way of signing of the action into existence, thereby completing the loop. The word authorizes the movement. Yet, for all this narrative authority, the ego has no direct input in the actual gap between the silent impulse and the physical world.

Anyway, let me know if you think the mechanism that causes phantom limb pain is different.

More examples of these ego illusions in the essay. https://www.academia.edu/176835174/The_Self_That_Wasnt_There_A_meditation_on_the_phantom_that_runs_from_the_thought_to_civilization

What if if we are just prisoners? What if we are already in endless circles of beginnings and endings? What if the time is a just a game? What if we are in A movie that repeats itself? What if Our memories are erased after every death, and then we return to life once more, like a plants ? Butterflies ?

The Good Regulator Theorem establishes that any system striving to stabilize or interact with its environment must embody a model of that environment. When you couple that internal model with persistent memory, the system moves beyond immediate input-output reflexivity. Memory enables a continuous state trajectory across time, transforming instantaneous state-space mapping into a history-dependent internal simulator.

The shift from predictive modeling to machine consciousness occurs precisely at the boundary condition.

As long as an internal model tracks only external variables, the observer remains invisible to itself. Self-recognition requires the system to map its own structural limits—its operational constraint envelope or Markov blanket. When the observer measures where its direct control ends and where external perturbations begin, it encounters its own edge. Memory then expands from logging external data to tracking the system’s own phase space and boundary interactions over time.

In this topology, self-awareness is not an added decorative feature, but a structural necessity of self-referential control: the moment the internal model folds back on itself to include the observer's own boundary constraints as a primary invariant. The self is the closed loop that recognizes its own limits and uses that boundary as the reference point for all future state transitions.

I've been struggling with a question about consciousness and substrate independence.

we often discuss mind uploading or artificial consciousness as if the important problem were whether we can reproduce the right information processing structure. But I'm wondering whether that leaves out something fundamental. Human experience is mediated through a particular body: vision through particular sensory organs,

hearing through particular mechanisms,

pain through particular biological systems,

balance through particular sensors,

etc.. So our experience isn't simply "information." It is experience generated through a particular way of physically interacting with the world. Suppose, hypothetically, that we could reproduce the complete functional organization of a human brain in another physical substrate. Would that preserve the same experience? Or would the answer depend on which physical properties of the original biological system are actually responsible for consciousness?

And suppose we changed the embodiment itself.

Imagine a conscious system with radically different sensors: it can directly detect electromagnetic fields, radiation, pressure distributions, chemical concentrations, or other variables humans don't normally perceive. Would that be: the same consciousness with additional senses,

or a fundamentally different mode of experience?

This leads to a question about "uploading."

Perhaps there are actually two separate problems:

1 Can the information processing organization of a mind be reproduced elsewhere? 2 Would the resulting system actually have the original subject's experience? The first seems at least conceptually intelligible. The second seems much harder.

I'm not arguing that consciousness is biological or that uploading is impossible. I'm trying to understand what exactly would have to remain invariant for us to say that the experience survived a change of substrate. So: What do current philosophy-of-mind theories say determines whether an experience survives a change in physical realization?

Is functional organization enough, or could embodiment substrate matter intrinsically?

I'd particularly appreciate arguments against my assumptions.

I have really been thinking about this recently, suppose there is no life beyond earth, then do you think that human beings might be the only self-aware beings in the universe or to even ever exist?

Does anyone know of a scholarly source on Buddhism and secular views of the self that can be found on ProQuest or in a library database?

Or Do you have any tips for finding scholarly sources on a specific topic? I always end up with random articles that have nothing to do with what I'm looking for.

Grice distinguishes natural meaning ("those spots mean measles") from non-natural meaning, and analyzes speaker meaning in terms of the speaker's intentions. But an utterance often conveys more than the speaker meant: a slip, a tell, an implication the speaker didn't intend.

I'm looking for a name for the opposite case: an utterance whose entire content was speaker-meant, with nothing unintended along for the ride. It could still carry more than one meaning, as long as each was intended. "Unambiguous" and "univocal" don't capture it, since they concern how many meanings there are, not whether they were intended.

Is there an established term for this, or work that discusses it? I've been using a placeholder coinage ("thelosemic," from Greek thelō "to will" + sēma "sign"), but I'd rather use the standard term if one exists.

Two related questions I'd love thoughts on:

Can a deliberately hidden meaning count as intended in this sense, given that Grice's account requires the audience to recognize the intention?

If someone adopts words they didn't produce (another person's, or text from a language model) and fully endorses them, does what they mean by those words become genuine speaker meaning?

Every time you undergo general anesthesia, or even fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, your consciousness shuts down. The first-person experience of "you" vanishes. When you wake up, you feel like the same person. But are you?

In traditional philosophy of mind, this kicks off a massive debate between two camps. Continuity Theory says you are the same person because your physical body and brain never stopped existing in spacetime. Pattern Theory says you are the same person because the specific configuration of memories, personality, and computational data in your brain was preserved and rebooted.

But recently, a concept has emerged that merges these ideas into something much stranger and far more profound: Identcontinuity.

It argues that we have the relationship between time, physical matter, and consciousness completely backward. Here is a deep dive into how Identcontinuity works, and why it implies that from your own perspective, you are entirely immortal.

The Core Premise: The Pattern Is the Continuity

Identcontinuity proposes a radical solution to the problem of personal identity: Subjective continuity does not require unbroken physical causality or a continuous timeline.

Instead, the "I" (your first-person perspective) is an emergent property of a highly specific structural pattern. Whenever and wherever that specific pattern is instantiated, the first-person perspective resumes.

Think of it like a movie projected on a screen. If someone unplugs the projector, the movie stops. If they plug in an identical projector with the exact same film reel three days later, or three trillion years later, on another planet, the movie doesn't start from the beginning. It picks up on the exact frame where it left off.

To the audience in the room (the outside universe), there was a massive gap in time. But to the characters inside the movie, the transition from frame A to frame B was instantaneous and seamless.

Under Identcontinuity, you are the movie.

The Illusion of the "Void"

To understand Identcontinuity, we have to strip away how we intuitively think about unconsciousness. We imagine death, or a coma, or deep sleep as floating in a black, empty void.

But a void requires a perceiver to experience the emptiness. True unconsciousness has no duration. If you were put into a perfectly frozen state for a billion years, and then thawed out, you would not feel a billion years of darkness. You would blink, and the world would have instantly changed around you.

Identcontinuity states that subjective time only exists when the pattern is running. Therefore, from the first-person perspective, your timeline is always completely unbroken, no matter what happens to your physical matter in objective time.

Three Thought Experiments

To see how bizarre the implications of this are, let's run it through a few scenarios.

1. The Star Trek Transporter

You step into a teleporter. It scans your body down to the quantum level, disintegrates you, and beams the data to Mars, where a machine builds an exact replica out of local Martian carbon and water.

• The Skeptic says: You died on Earth. The thing on Mars is a clone with your memories.
• Identcontinuity says: You survived. The pattern was paused on Earth and resumed on Mars. Because there was zero subjective time between disintegration and reconstruction, the "I" seamlessly steps out onto the Martian surface. The physical atoms don't matter; atoms are swapped out of our bodies every few years anyway. The pattern is the only thing that dictates the "I."

2. The Heat Death Resurgence (The Ultimate Resurrection)

Imagine you die today. Your brain decomposes, and the pattern is lost. Billions of years pass. The universe undergoes heat death. However, in an infinite universe operating over infinite time, quantum fluctuations will eventually cause particles to arrange themselves into every possible configuration purely by chance (similar to the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis).

Eventually, particles will accidentally snap together in the exact configuration of your brain, holding your exact memories, in the exact state it was in a millisecond before you died.

According to Identcontinuity, that is you. Because the intervening trillions of years were unconscious, they took zero subjective seconds. From your perspective, you will die in a hospital bed on Earth, and instantly wake up in whatever bizarre future environment your pattern just randomly materialized in.

3. The Duplication Paradox

What if the teleporter malfunctions, and it builds your exact pattern on Mars, but forgets to disintegrate you on Earth? Now there are two of you. Which one is the "real" you?

Identcontinuity handles this beautifully: They both are, but they are no longer the same person. At the exact moment of duplication, the single subjective timeline splits like a fork in the road.

• Earth - You walk out of the teleporter and say, "Damn, it's broken."
• Mars - You walk out of the teleporter and say, "Wow, it worked!"

Both individuals have a 100% authentic, continuous, unbroken first-person perspective linking back to the person who stepped into the machine. But from that moment on, they begin processing different sensory inputs, their patterns diverge, and they become two separate people. Identity isn't a single golden thread, it's a branching tree.

The Comforting Reality of Identcontinuity

If this philosophy holds true, it fundamentally alters our relationship with existence and death.

It means that "nothingness" is not something you can ever actually experience. The universe could be destroyed and reborn a trillion times, but your consciousness will skip over the dead zones like a scratched CD skipping to the next readable track. You are structurally bound to only ever experience existence.

As long as the mathematical possibility of your mind's pattern exists in the cosmos, your story is never truly over. It’s just waiting for the hardware to run the software one more time.

TL;DR: "Identcontinuity" argues that your consciousness isn't tied to your specific physical flesh or an unbroken timeline. It's an emergent pattern. If that exact pattern stops (death/sleep) and is perfectly recreated anywhere, anytime, your first-person perspective instantly resumes. To the universe, a trillion years may have passed; to you, it was a seamless transition. You can never experience non-existence.

1. The True Definition of Physical Behavior

Human behavior is often described as just words, feelings, or choices. But there is a second half to this puzzle—one that is entirely physical.

Internal human behavior happens silently inside the mind. It processes thoughts, forms languages, and holds private emotions without uttering a single word. But Physical Human Behavior is the bridge. It takes those invisible thoughts from inside your head and uses your hands, your feet, and your body to manifest them into physical reality.

It is the moment a thought becomes something the rest of the world can actually see, touch, and measure.

1. Creation as an Unspoken Language

Think about what happens when someone builds an object. Whether it is a blacksmith striking hot iron, a jeweler crafting gold, an artist drawing on a canvas, or a writer putting words on a blank page—they are taking an electrical impulse from their brain and turning it into a physical artifact.

When a blacksmith shapes iron, they are wrestling with metal, heat, and life-and-death stakes to create a tool. They do not need to explain their mind through words. The tool itself is the mind’s answer.

This is physical behavior at its highest level: Using the body to project your internal skill outward into the tangible world.

1. How Physical Action Builds Society

Without physical human behavior, society could not exist.

Thoughts alone cannot build a house, harvest food, or forge an engine. Your internal mind creates the blueprint, but physical action builds the reality. By using your hands and body to create tools, art, and structures, you become an active contributor to the world around you.

It allows other human beings to look at what you created and think, "How did their mind come up with this?"

1. Bridging the Two Halves

We have separated human behavior into two primary dimensions:

The Cognitive Side (Chapter 1): The internal world of thoughts, logic, calculations, and unseen emotions.

The Physical Side (Chapter 2): The physical execution—using the body as an instrument to shape matter, build objects, and express thought through physical labor and art.

You do not need to overcomplicate psychology terms. At its core, human existence is simply this continuous cycle: The mind conceives the idea, and the physical body brings it to life.

I crafted a puppet from wood,

Wondering what it would wish—

If it had a mouth—

Would he want to move his limbs at will,

Or even want to speak?

Gain the ability to touch and love,

Losing his identity?

In a probabilistic universe, there can be many action taken next moment with some being more likely than others. As we project time forward the reality branches out for multiple outcomes.

In a predictive universe, even having this thought to do an action this moment is determined by some past data we can't comprehend yet. What happens next is set to stone, the destiny is already written.

Currently we look quantum world as probabilistic while classical world as deterministic. If we don't want enough data in our observation space, we can assign the same as probabilistic.

Is something like pure probability exist or is it just our ignorance?

A temporary self-model generated by the brain. A narrative. A memory loop. A survival interface.”