The Morphodynamic Theory of Consciousness Part1

The Morphodynamic Theory
of Consciousness

Philippe Ingels
(45 minute read)

A theatre performer was once asked to explain the orbital mechanics of Mercury using only his facial expressions. It was a spectacular show, but he failed—not for want of trying, but because facial expressions simply aren’t the right medium for conveying spacetime curvature, gravitational equations, or relativistic corrections.

How odd it is that, after millennia of philosophical effort, we have made so little progress in solving the enigma of consciousness. It’s complex, we declare with a semblance of gravitas, before resuming our aimless circling. Yet the reason may be that, like the hapless performer, we are using the wrong language. Our natural, formal, and even mystical languages, though insightful in their own domains, seem utterly inadequate for describing the subjective and the objective within a single framework. And we need to do this because without a language capable of bridging the subjective and the objective, we cannot truly understand either in isolation, since each is always already entangled with the other in the very act of being conscious of anything at all. However, we don’t even have a language for each of them. Every language we possess—mathematical, natural, symbolic, or embodied—has evolved or been devised to chart the objective world. Trying to press these languages into service to explain consciousness is like attempting to measure the softness of a pillow with a thermometer. The tool simply isn’t designed for that purpose. At best, such languages can evoke the subjective, but they cannot formally describe it from within.

The Morphodynamic Theory of Consciousness holds that consciousness emerges from the dynamic organisation of fundamental, information-like elements. The evolving forms and patterns—the morphodynamics—are generated by an underlying generative language.

In this essay, I shall examine several key questions that arise from this theory. These include: what exactly constitutes these fundamental information-like elements; how their interactions produce emergent morphodynamic patterns; in what sense a generative language underlies this process; and how such a framework might allow us to address the intractable questions surrounding the nature of conscious awareness and intelligence, as well as the evolution of the mind and its interface with matter. Indeed, the theory suggests a resolution to the enduring mind–body problem by revealing the generative language and its fundamental elements as the unifying process that spans both mental and physical domains. Finally, I shall consider its broader philosophical implications for our understanding of the world and our place within it, particularly regarding the reformulation of entrenched dualities such as mind and matter, subject and object, and inner experience and external reality.

It is not really surprising that consciousness itself has offered us the key to uncovering this generative language. It is, after all, the primary it-ness of our existence—the most immediate and self-evident phenomenon we can encounter. It is the ground of all experience and knowledge, without which no inquiry or observation would be possible. In this most basic sense, it is almost inevitable that consciousness would eventually reveal the generative language that underlies its own emergence.

The big question, however, is why it has taken us so long to recognise and formalise it.

You can’t know what you can’t describe

The need for a new language

Different systems of language impose distinct frameworks of understanding. They shape the way we interpret problems, the assumptions we make, and the boundaries of what is thinkable. It is like sitting inside a box with holes punched through the sides. Each hole offers a unique perspective, but you cannot discover anything about the roof by looking through the hole near your foot. The wrong language will forever keep us circling the periphery of the solution we hope to find. In the case of consciousness, this has been our situation for centuries.

What we need is a new kind of formal language—one capable of describing both the objective and the subjective, not merely in metaphorical terms but in a constructive, explanatory way. It must reveal how mind, especially consciousness, and matter arise as different yet related forms of organisation from the most fundamental level of reality. Only such a language can demonstrate how consciousness is part of the universe, rather than standing apart as some ethereal anomaly.

Yet here we face a Kuhnian paradox. Thomas Kuhn observed that scientific revolutions require a shift in the entire paradigm through which we apprehend the world. Crucially, such a shift cannot be fully articulated using the vocabulary and assumptions of the old paradigm. It’s like an ice cube trying to understand what it’s like to be a liquid. To do so, it must first become a liquid, but until it does, it cannot comprehend the nature of liquidity from within the fixed and frozen logic of its own condition. However, the very act of melting requires it to grasp something of liquidity in advance—something it cannot yet know as an ice cube.

In this case, the language we need must already transcend the conceptual constraints that keep us in ignorance. Without it, we cannot even formulate the problem properly, let alone resolve it. We find ourselves in a bind: compelled to develop a new paradigm from within the very one that renders the task impossible.

Developing such a language may seem as daunting as solving the mystery of consciousness itself. In a very real sense, it is the same problem. And yet we have no choice but to attempt it. The stakes are unnervingly high. If we fail to make this transition, our progress will slow to a dispirited crawl. We will drag ourselves across an increasingly desolate intellectual landscape until the fevered heat of frustration bakes us into dust. The old paradigm has given us only half a world, half an understanding, and half an identity. One foot planted in the empirical, the other still mired in the discredited realm of the mystical. That “woo-woo” half contributes virtually nothing to scientific or technological progress—yet we cannot quite pull our foot free of the sticky mud.

How much are we missing in physics and technology because we have failed to account for half of reality? How much worse will mental health and social fragmentation become if psychology continues to rely solely on behavioural inference, while the main star of the play—consciousness itself—remains unmeasured and formally inaccessible? And at what point will our dazzling progress in AI grind to a halt because of economic, energy and computational constraints simply because we still have no idea how to make machines think, feel, or understand as we do?

If we continue building our brick tower without mortar, it will inevitably collapse.

Something has to be authoring reality

The language of creation

The good news is that we do have a way to resolve our Kuhnian paradox. The descriptive language we need to illuminate the mysteries of consciousness is already available to us. Indeed, it is the most familiar of all: the foundational mode of expression from which every other language—natural, formal, and symbolic—ultimately emerges.

This proto-language, embedded in the architecture of sentient life and expressed in the functioning of any organism with a central nervous system, has simply never been formalised. Yet it is there, active and shaping the very fabric of cognition well before any of it is passed on to the mind’s conscious awareness. The challenge, then, is not to invent a new language but to recognise the one that familiarity has rendered invisible—and to give it formal structure.

The artist uses this pre-verbal proto-language. It is underpinned by the sense of things: the sense of form, flow, proportion, and presence. Creativity for the artist is the art of sensing how forms relate in space; of feeling rhythm, pacing, tension, and release; of grasping wholes and patterns before any conceptual articulation; of a rightness that is sensed long before it is reasoned.

For the artist, it is not a formal language. It is a felt grammar of being. You do not learn it by definition—as I have experienced first-hand—but know it by doing, by noticing, by waiting for it to reveal itself. It is a pre-conceptual feel for how things hold together, move, and carry meaning—beneath both words and numbers.

We have long regarded this “sense of things” as either discrete feelings—an aha moment or a gut intuition that erupts like a lightning bolt—or as a continuous undercurrent that quietly guides our reasoning. As such, we have categorised it as a feeling to be filed in the same cabinet as bodily feelings and emotional experiences. This is a significant mistake, because the question we never asked was: what if our experience of “the sense of things” is, in fact, the echo of a far more sophisticated language—the language of cognition itself? That, as it turned out, was the right question to ask.

This idea is hardly far-fetched when we consider that the mind—or more precisely, consciousness—possesses a surprisingly rich and multifaceted array of “senses,” or internal dimensions of awareness. These are not merely sensory in the ordinary, perceptual sense, but forms of mental orientation and subjective attunement to various aspects of reality, both within and without. We have a sense of distance, direction, location, magnitude, belonging, scale, curvature, time, change, and much more besides—in fact, our entire experience of reality is the sense of something.

The question is whether these senses of things can be broken down into more fundamental elements—and, if so, whether we might then uncover a formal language capable of finally explaining the phenomenon of consciousness itself.

At the very bottom, there will be something strange

The strangely familiar

Let’s turn to the physical, for a moment. We must accept that, at the most fundamental level, physical reality cannot rest on nothingness; it must consist of something whose very existence is secured by its determinate nature. To be at all is to be some particular kind of thing. Every existent is inseparable from—and defined by—what it is.

Yet this nature is not the familiar manifold of spacetime, matter, or forces. Contemporary fundamental physics acknowledges as much, proposing that the substrate underlying matter and forces might take the form of quantum fields, strings, spin networks, or some as-yet-unknown entity. Nevertheless, for methodological reasons, physicists must bracket this uncomfortable somethingness: such claims are neither falsifiable nor testable within the current empirical framework.

Still, whatever its form, the most fundamental stratum of reality can be characterised as non-physical, from which the physical emerges, and whose own nature remains tantalisingly opaque.
That means, whether in physics or consciousness, any existent must be determinate and defined by what it is, and that some, potentially shared substrate, grounds both the physical and experiential domains. If this is so, then at some point our inquiry into consciousness will be compelled to cross a threshold: from the familiar (how we experience consciousness, and by extension the world) to the somewhat strange.

This strangeness is compounded by the fact that consciousness presents itself as a flow of structurally complete thoughts and experiences. Whether these arrive coherent, fragmentary, or ambiguous is secondary to the more arresting fact that they come already assembled, composed of elements and patterns that remain invisible within experience itself.

It is therefore likely that consciousness emerges from more fundamental constituents whose nature, structure, or interactions are not immediately evident from the vantage point of our awareness. It is much like how fields are not apparent when observing particles, or how code is hidden when looking at a character in a game. These elements may, at first glance, appear strange or even alien relative to what consciousness feels like.

If these fundamental constituents are information-like, as the Morphodynamic Theory proposes, then what, precisely, is information? We possess theories describing how information behaves—how it can be measured, transformed, or propagated—but not what it is in any ontologically definitive sense. And yet, since our very capacity for awareness relies upon the elements that compose it, they must, in some way, be accessible or intelligible to us. Otherwise, we would have no grounds whatsoever for relating them to experience.

We should therefore expect the generative substrate of consciousness—the foundational elements and the syntax of whatever new descriptive language we devise or uncover—to appear at once eerily familiar and utterly strange. I will show that this is the case.

What if language creates more than just mental pictures?

Morphodynamic Theory

To recap: The Morphodynamic Theory proposes a new generative language from which mind and matter emerge. If confirmed, it would mark the first step in lifting the constraints on understanding imposed by our established languages. It claims that the most fundamental layer is information-like, whose nature resembles the sense-ness we experience at the emergent level of consciousness. It then identifies the elements involved and shows that they function as a formal language with a distinctive lexicon, syntax, and grammar.

I will show that:

There is a deeper, common layer beneath mind and matter. This is the underlying unity that a philosophy called Neutral Monism has long sought as the true basis of both mental and physical phenomena.
This layer has identifiable basic forms—fundamental elements.
These elements behave according to a formal structure—a kind of proto-grammar or syntax—that gives rise to all known phenomena.
This structure constitutes a generative language of reality.

In this theory, the most fundamental stratum of reality can be characterised as non-physical information (no surprise there), whose nature is revealed by what it expresses at higher levels in the hierarchy of emergence. In other words, the nature of these elements bubbles up into conscious awareness. And what bubbles up—in fact, the only things that bubble up—are the senses of things: the sense of somethingness, the sense of distance, direction, movement, time, space, relationship, rhythm, colour, touch, sound, smell, taste, feelings, and so on.

So, the nature of information is sense-ness. There is nothing deeper. It is tempting to ask what constitutes the blue-ness of blue. Regrettably, the answer must be that it is not composed of anything else. Blue is the tag we assign to a fundamental informational element whose nature is blue-ness. It simply is what it is. Blue-ness is just blue-ness. Anything deeper, if it exists at all, lies beyond our reality. I call these fundamental elements Sensicles.

So if you insist that everything must be made of something else, spiralling down in an infinite regress, you will have to look outside our reality for your answer. Good luck with that. However, if this still feels somewhat unsatisfactory (it does to me), Morphodynamic Theory at least pushes our conceptual understanding a step closer to an intuitively satisfying one. It takes us right up to the edge of our reality—and then hints at what lies beyond.

The stuff of minds

Sensicles

To make any sense of the nature of Sensicles, you must be attuned to the pre-verbal language in which your mind primarily operates. Put differently, you must learn to think in that proto-language if you wish to grasp it at all. This often requires effort. Our rational mind relies heavily on natural language, which tends to obscure the Sensicle language by operating at a higher plane of emergence. It is like trying to see fine details painted on a canvas through a layer of frosted glass—our natural language blurs direct perception of the proto-language from which it emerges. Yet that is precisely what is required: without this attunement, it becomes far more difficult to appreciate the true nature of the elements, syntax, and grammar that compose this language.

Sensicles are as fundamental as anything can be imagined. Each is its singular property: it is nothing but its own nature. For example, blue-ness embodies only the essence of blue-ness. It has no other features or properties—not even the property of mixing with another colour or spreading over a surface to become visible to the mind. It is just blue-ness. That is the essence of being fundamental: a single property defined entirely by its singular nature. Whenever one encounters a Sensicle, recognition itself is already the first step of emergence, not an additional property layered upon the Sensicle.

Some readers might wonder why I do not simply refer to these Sensicles as qualia. Qualia refer to the raw felt qualities of sensations, emotions, thoughts, or anything else. Although Sensicles may appear equivalent to qualia, I avoid that term, as it is too entangled with subjective consciousness to serve as an objective, foundational element in an account of how things fundamentally come into being, including consciousness itself. Qualia are what we experience in consciousness after it has been assembled by Sensicles.

The question naturally arises: if a Sensicle possesses only its singular nature—so that something like blue-ness lacks even the property of spreadability—how is it possible for us to see it extended across a surface or mixed with another colour? The answer lies in the first Sensicle we will examine.

[ ]

The Set (or Set-ness) Sensicle is the sense of something-ness.

Imagine standing alone in a dark forest. You think you have heard a twig snap. You feel that there is something there, though you do not know what. That feeling of something-ness is as close as we can get to experiencing the Set Sensicle.
In such moments, your mind instinctively tries to fill that set with a further set that will define the cause of the noise. For us, as conscious agents, everything is a “something.” Indeed, there is not a single thing in this universe—whether physical or mental—that is not a “something,” and that something-ness is made possible by the nature of the Set Sensicle.

It allows collections of Sensicles to cohere into a unified presence without altering or blending their individual natures. For example, if we place a red and yellow Sensicle in a Set, they don’t mix together. The orange we experience is what emerges from the Set Sensicle. Without the Set Sensicle, other Sensicles remain uninstantiated in our reality: they are a no-thing. In this sense, if you have ever wondered whether the universe emerged from nothing, it did—though only in the sense that these elements are real in potential but have not yet become anything from the perspective of our universe or awareness. Without the Set Sensicle, these fragments remain in a “not-of-our-reality” state: they do not register as part of our world. They have no thing-ness, no presence, no felt “there is something.”

A straightforward way to visualise this process in action is to imagine a green clown. Before the act of imagining, your blue clown did not exist. Its component parts—for instance, the quality of blue-ness—did exist. Your mind gathered all the requisite elements and assembled them into a Set Sensicle. In this act of putting it all together, the blue clown emerged.

Conversely, without elements for the Set Sensicle to instantiate, the Set Sensicle itself is meaningless. Simply entertaining the concept of the Set Sensicle already instantiates it in thought—a reflexive “double nesting” [ [ ] ] that brings the very idea into being. We have no conception of what reality is like beneath the emergence of our universe, but as mentioned earlier, there is a hint in what bubbles up into our awareness.

The Set Sensicle is the singular entity whose nature enables structure and emergence to arise from arrangement alone. It constrains elements into sets, allows them to form relationships, and introduces the persistence of identity. From these sets, novelty arises through the relational interactions of the elements they contain.

Unlike a mathematical set, which is defined by explicit membership rules, the Set Sensicle—by its very nature and in combination with other Sensicles—brings forth the rules underpinning pattern formation. We begin with a collection of elements that are, in themselves, utterly meaningless no-things. The Set Sensicle coheres them into various sets, giving rise to first-order emergence. Those sets then cohere into higher-level sets, resulting in second-order emergence, and so on. It’s like atoms forming molecules, molecules forming macromolecules, those forming cells and all the way up to us.

The Set Sensicle does not merely organise patterns—it is what makes the very notion of pattern and structure possible. Without it, there is no coherence, no form, no rule—only undifferentiated potential. With it, “something” emerges from nothing (as in not-a-thing) through the instantiation of presence.

It is like having dozens of actors representing various characters in a stage production. These characters do not exist until the actors step onto the stage, at which point the characters come to life. The stage acts like a Set, bringing everything together as ‘a-thing’—a show.

◿

The next Sensicle we will examine is the Magnitude (or Magnitude-ness) Sensicle.

Taken in isolation, this Sensicle is again entirely incomprehensible to our conscious awareness. In such a solitary state, what exists is not magnitude as we ordinarily feel it, but only the potential for magnitude—a kind of undifferentiated sense intensity. This is a qualitative presence that has not yet been placed within any relational frame. It is neither “large” nor “small,” for there is no scale and no contrast. It simply is: a raw, non-relative intensity of presence. Don’t worry about not ‘getting’ it on an intuitive level. You can’t.

In its emergent form (when it’s ‘in’ a Set Sencile with other elements and where our understanding kicks in), the Magnitude Sensicle contributes the sense of relation—the intuition of “more-ness” or “less-ness,” a pre-linguistic, pre-mathematical awareness of quantity or intensity within Set structures. The Magnitude Sensicle exerts a profound influence on reality and our conscious experience of it. While the Set Sensicle creates structure, Magnitude introduces variability and the potential for change. It is crucial to the emergence of space, time, movement, and the very basis of causation. If the Set Sensicle is the creator, Magnitude is its power.

Another distinctive quality that Magnitude contributes to emergent phenomena is its additive nature. A hundred instantiated Magnitude-ness sets create a sense of “more-ness” in relation to, let us say, ten references. It is the Magnitude Sensicle that enables the Set Sensicle to form multiple references of a set [ [◿] [◿] [◿] ]. How did it all start? The simplest way to understand this is that the sense of more-than-nothing opens the possibility of more-than-that-more. So, a unit of Magnitude in a Set with no Magnitude gave us the sense of one more than zero, and that sense of more-ness gave us one more than one and so on. Remember, Sensicles make sense in the vocabulary of their nature—sense-ness. Our natural languages are not suited for it. They are the wrong language to use, and that’s why we’ve made no progress.

To make the notation of Magnitude more straightforward, we write it as [ ◿3 ], acknowledging that each Magnitude Sensicle reference is “wrapped” in its own Set and then brought together in a parent Set.

In summary, Magnitude is the sense of a primitive relation or felt distinction: this is greater than, smaller than, or equal to that. It makes comparison possible without requiring counting or measurement. Like all Sensicles, Magnitude must be instantiated to become “a thing” [◿]. Then, for it to have value in reality—and by extension to our minds—it must cohere with some other thing in that Set [ ◇◿ ]. In other words, the Magnitude of something. Next, it requires variability through its additive nature [ ◇◿3 ]. Finally, it requires a structure to make it relational [ [ ◇◿3 ] [ ◇◿6 ] ].
I have, of course, just introduced another Sensicle, so let me present it now.

◇
The Position (or Position-ness) Sensicle represents the sense of something being somewhere. Yet in its isolated state, it is, like all Sensicles, entirely unknowable. On its own, locality loses all definitional content. There is no “where,” because there is no elsewhere. It is presence without spatial relation: a pure hereness that has no contrast, no boundary, no direction, no extent. Space, in any meaningful form, does not yet exist. The solitary element does not occupy or define a real position—it is position-ness, or perhaps more precisely, presence without placement.

The only reason the Sensicles make any sense at all is that your mind always experiences them at higher levels of emergence. You cannot think of Magnitude-ness without thinking of the magnitude of something, nor of Position-ness without thinking of something somewhere, even if you do not know where. For example, you cannot envision this element as existing in a universe that contains only a single Position Sensicle, because your mind will inevitably imagine it within an entirely black space (spatial dimensions plus colour added). Try removing the space and the colour. Even if you manage that, you will still sense the Position Sensicle in a relational context to your own position.

What I am trying to do here is create an understanding of how the Sensicles cohere to create the emergent sense experience that we are so familiar with in our conscious awareness. So, let us imagine we bring a Position Sensicle together with a selection of Magnitude sets [◇◿100]. This creates the emergent sense of position-ness combined with 100 magnitude-ness—a Position of 100 Magnitudes. At this low level of emergence, it does not make much practical sense to the mind, which is primarily concerned with relational entities. If we then place it together with another set containing a different magnitude reference amount, an emergent sense we know as distance—in its most basic form—arises: one Position/Magnitude relative to another.

[ [◇◿1] [◇◿100] ]

Of course, in consciousness, we usually experience such Sets within higher levels of emergence, where we also know what the Position refers to—the Position of what?

[ [ [object1] [◇◿1] ] [ [object2] [◇◿100] ] ]

These structures quickly become increasingly complex. A sense of distance, for example, typically comes with at least two spatial dimensions, built-in orientations, and all of this unfolds across time. Still, these lower-level Sets are experienced as brief moments of the sense they represent, which quickly blend into the larger context of emergence.

The artist, in a sense, learns to isolate these more basic Sets and focus on them during the creative process. For example, they might isolate the Set of a curve’s tension, the weight of a shadow, or the distance between two forms—not merely as visual data, but as momentary intensities of presence and relation. It is like a dancer sensing the tension in a pause, rather than experiencing it as merely a mechanical duration between two steps. These can be shaped, emphasised, or distorted so that they resonate with the larger set of felt relations, thereby creating a unified quality that guides the creative process.

There are many other equally fascinating Sensicles—such as Spin-ness and Then-ness—alongside the more familiar colours and those that combine to give rise to our emotions and our experiences of sound, smell, touch, and taste. By delving into the language of Sensicles—by coming to terms with the grammar of reality itself—we can begin to uncover insights into questions such as why we experience only three spatial dimensions, how we perceive the passage of time, what the self truly is, the nature of free will, and much more besides.

Why? Because these phenomena emerge from the language of Sensicles, understanding its syntax and grammar allows us to gain insight into their structure and function. Together, they form the foundation of our conscious experience of the world.

CONTINUE WITH PART 2