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The Morphodynamic Theory
of Consciousness - Part 2

The knitting machine of the mind

Consciousness
 

Consciousness is a high-level emergent phenomenon. The Sensicles and all the various Sensicle Sets—such as those that generate a sense of distance, locality, or time—are not themselves conscious. They are not experiences, because that requires the flow of time. A single movie frame cannot give you the experience of movement. The Senciles are static senses-ness.

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This is in no way equivalent to how we encounter them within consciousness. We should be careful not to conflate the sense of something with the phenomenon of consciousness itself. The sense of something is simply the nature of information; it bubbles up into the emergent event of conscious awareness. Consciousness arises only when these building blocks cohere with those that generate time and memory.

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In the context of consciousness, we can divide the mind into two broad categories: the primary mind, which undertakes the bulk of cognitive processing, and the conscious-awareness function, which is a specific process that the primary mind employs to enhance its ability to create positive outcomes.

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The primary mind organises the Sensicle Sets into networked structures that enable it to process information in real time, learn patterns, and generate adaptive responses. This happens in all creatures with a central nervous system, to varying degrees depending on the complexity of that system. We know it is an extraordinarily effective process: it allows jumping spiders to track their prey’s position even after losing sight of it, and enables a wildebeest calf to stand within minutes of birth.

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So, what does the conscious-awareness function do? It adds the capacity to weave sections of the networked data into contextual threads of meaning that can be further networked by the primary mind into abstract structures and recalled later. It is a higher-order process that binds sense impressions and experiences into cohesive, enduring conceptual threads.

Imagine a dense network of interconnected dots, with a highlighter tracing pathways, and then imagine linking those highlighted pathways together. These threads are not fleeting sensations or automatic reactions; they are stable, relational constructs that can be recalled, examined, and applied in new contexts.

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Put more simply, the purpose of consciousness is to take the raw, networked data and knit it into a tapestry of meaning that remains accessible across time. This enables the mind not merely to react to the present but to reason about the past and imagine the future. Through this integration, the mind can form abstract concepts, deliberate, and plan—capabilities far beyond what instinctual, unreflective cognition can achieve. This is how consciousness empowers us to reason, reflect, and ultimately transcend the here and now in our thinking.

The bridge between worlds

Neutral Monism solved


What happens if you stumble upon a solution to a problem—let us assume it is the right solution—but there remains one elusive piece you cannot yet figure out to make it fully work? The trouble is, you will not know it is the right solution until you have resolved that last fragment of the puzzle. If, at some point, you lose heart and veer off into other tangents, you are likely to encounter the same kind of seemingly unsolvable problems again. The bad news is that this time you will have no chance of success—none, zilch.
 

Neutral Monism is the idea that the fundamental substance of reality is neither purely mental nor purely physical, but a neutral “stuff” that underlies both. In other words, mind and matter are composed of these same basic, neutral elements, which can manifest as either mental experiences or physical phenomena, depending on the context. The one elusive piece that no one could figure out to make it fully work was what exactly this neutral stuff was.
 

Rather than working through that missing part, Materialists chose instead to declare that everything—including mind—is merely physical processes in the brain. Yet they then struggle to explain why subjective experience exists at all, rather than simply complex behaviour. It is that unsolvable problem again. Panpsychists suggest that consciousness is a fundamental feature of all matter, thereby attributing consciousness to everything, without clarifying how tiny proto-experiences can combine into full awareness. Still others, namely Idealists, insisted that reality itself is fundamentally mental or experiential, and that what we call the physical world is only a projection or construct of consciousness. However, this view risks dissolving the objective world into mere appearances, without offering a clear account of shared experience. Of course, all these positions provide solutions, but they tend to be either metaphysically heavy-handed or insufficiently precise.


Neutral Monism, in my view, is a more elegant and balanced solution because it avoids the extremes, offering a unifying description of reality that can, at least in principle, account for both consciousness and the physical world. But what about the elusive piece we need to make it work?
 

The Morphodynamic Theory of Consciousness, with its Sensicle-based formal language, provides a clear account of what these neutral elements are in themselves—information elements whose nature is the sense-ness of things: Sensicles. As I’ve shown, it demonstrates precisely how subjective experience emerges from arrangements of these neutral elements. It also illustrates how stable objects and causal interactions arise from neutral events, without collapsing into dualism or incoherence.
 

So, how exactly do Sensicles bring the physical into this picture, as required by Neutral Monism? If the most fundamental layers of reality are informational—in other words, if what underlies fields, quantum loops, or whatever substrate gives rise to particles and forces is ultimately informational—then there is no reason it should not be the same kind of information that gives rise to conscious experience. This unifying account aligns with Occam’s Razor, as it posits a single set of neutral informational elements rather than multiple entities to explain mind and matter separately.
 

It is the same informational elements, configured differently, employing the same lexical units, syntax, and generative grammar. It is the same underlying language that brings both mind and matter into existence. So, for example, the senses of locality, magnitude, motion, time, and so on that the mind utilises and experiences in consciousness are the very same Set constructs a particle incorporates. At the lower levels of emergence, those constructs, for the particle or force, are still informational. One set of neutral elements from which both mind and matter emerge.

The end of duality as we know it

The Mind-Body problem solved
 
With Neutral Monism finally resolved, we can now begin to explore how the mind evolved and how it interfaces with matter.
 
We surmise that somehow, attached to the neurons in our brain, there exists a seemingly non-material layer we call the mind. In the context of Neutral Monism, describing it as non-material simply means that the fundamental building blocks from which everything is made are configured in a way that is neither a particle nor a force. Since both the neurons and these non-material elements are composed of the same basic components, it becomes easier to see how they might interface—they share a common syntax. It is like constructing two different objects out of Lego bricks and then joining them together: the possibility of connection arises precisely because both forms emerge from the same underlying medium—Lego bricks.
 
Before asking how it all works, we should first consider why the mind exists at all. Why would evolution favour these additional, non-material attachments to neurons?
 
The first thing to realise is that the laws governing any configuration of building blocks are determined by the intrinsic natures of those elements and the way they are arranged. In other words, phenomena emerge, and so too do the laws that govern them. For example, the laws governing the behaviour of a tree do not reside in the cells of that tree. By their very nature, the non-material configurations will not be subject to the same laws that apply to physics. They might not be constrained by spacetime locality, conservation laws, the thermodynamic arrow, or any such familiar phenomena if they are not configured in a way that permits those phenomena to arise. Instead, they are bound by the laws corresponding to their configuration.
 
To illustrate, imagine building two neurons out of blue Lego bricks and attaching a yellow brick—representing the non-material construct—to each neuron. Those two yellow bricks could potentially interact regardless of how far apart you place the neurons themselves. You might object: Aren’t the two yellow bricks constrained by the neurons’ locations? After all, they are attached. The answer is no, they are not. The neurons’ spatial locality applies only at higher levels of the emergence stack. At lower levels, the constituent parts of neurons are also non-local; remember, the components are informational—they have not yet become particles. Moreover, what we call a connection is not some tangible link but rather a Set Sensicle. In other words, it is an informational connection.
 
Since the neurons and their non-material attachments can interact—because they share the same syntax—the clear advantage to the brain is that this informational layer can create connections between neurons that are not physically linked. This is possible because a neural spike does not traverse the neuron like a train moving along a track. Instead, it resembles a row of lights switching on and off in sequence: nothing actually travels from one end to the other; what propagates is the pattern itself. Therefore, all the non-material connection needs to do, since nothing physical is passed on, is pick up this pattern and relay it onwards. This vastly expands the brain’s functional connectivity, enabling swifter and more flexible integration of spike flows without incurring the spatial or metabolic costs of growing additional synapses. It is, in this sense, a significant evolutionary advantage for nervous systems to generate minds.
 
Unfortunately, there is currently no clear experimental evidence to support the occurrence of such events. This challenge is often referred to as the interaction problem of dualism. If these interactions were taking place, we would expect to see violations of energy conservation or causeless causes—such as neurons firing without any physical trigger—but we do not. However, rather than imagining a crude scenario where the mind pokes a neuron in some substantive way, it is more plausible to think of the mind’s influence as a subtle modulation rather than a direct trigger. The mind’s primary impact on the brain may be to select among available possibilities, modulate patterns of activity, sustain certain dynamics, or inhibit others.
 
If this is the case, our instruments may simply be too coarse to detect such extremely localised deviations. These micro-deviations might be effectively buried within what appears to us as noise and would need to be carefully isolated to be observed.
 
Another question to consider is how neurons construct these non-material modules. We already know that the dendrites of pyramidal neurons have many branches, each capable of accumulating voltage and generating its own spike, effectively functioning as miniature versions of the axon hillock. This is eloquently described in Mark Humphries’ brilliant book, The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds. So, imagine that these branches also host genetically encoded Sensicles—for example, Position ◇, Magnitude ◿, and Set [ ] Sensicles.

Neural binding

Each branch, able to send its own spike further along the dendritic tree, acts as a representation of the Sensicle interfaced at an information level of emergence. In this arrangement, when a neuron’s axon—situated at the base of all the branches—fires, it effectively confirms the presence of the upstream Sensicles. Although the axon itself does not directly receive Sensicle information from the dendrites, it only fires if a sufficient number of those upstream Sensicles have been verified by the dendrites’ activity. Therefore, when the axon does fire, that neuron stands as a representation of the entire Sensicle module. In the illustration above, this would be:
 

[ [ [ ↻◿1 ] [◇◿1 ] ] [ [ ↻◿1 ] [◇◿2 ] ] ]
 

This is how matter constructs the mind: through genetically encoded Sensicle references embedded in precise locations on the neuron’s architecture. The Sensicle modules, configured within the intricate branching of dendrites, constitute the first layer of cognition—our instincts. These instinctual patterns are pre-encoded templates: the inherited scaffold of orientation, reaction, and primitive sense-making upon which all further cognitive elaboration is built. They form a kind of primordial vocabulary of mind, out of which the brain’s richer semantic structures can emerge.


From this foundation, the information layer—unbound by the spatial and temporal constraints of physical synapses—begins to build an ever more complex network of connections. This network does not merely passively record sensory input; rather, it actively processes, integrates, and refines it, giving rise to abstract thought, conceptual blending, and imagination itself.

It assembles, therefore I think

The modules of consciousness

I have just outlined how the brain assembles Sensicle Sets. These Sets form the lexicon of the primary language of cognition. They constitute the basis of instincts and, ultimately, our advanced cognitive abilities. Each functions as a kind of lexical item that describes a basic event, relationship, form, identity, or substance type.

Event Modules, for example, encode fundamental sensed concepts such as “move-apart,” “pass-through,” and “block.” These capture how things move, transform, or interact with one another.

Relationship Modules describe sensed concepts such as “in front of,” “outside,” and “aligned with,” mapping how things relate to each other.

Form Modules describe the sense of basic shapes and configurations, such as “straightness,” “curveness,” and “angularness.” They represent how space feels when inhabited—how we immediately sense the way things move and take shape without needing to reflect or analyse.

Identity Modules encode concepts such as “sameness,” “part-of,” “wholeness,” and “thing,” allowing entities to be experienced as persisting, bounded, and unified across time and change.

Substance Modules describe qualities such as “softness,” “roughness,” “liquidness,” and “solidness,” capturing how things are materially constituted and sensorially encountered.

These modules provide the mind with a built-in set of basic ideas that help it understand the world. They form the groundwork that makes all later seeing, learning, and thinking possible. They provide the innate scaffolding required to make sense of the world, before, at least for us, natural language, culture, or explicit thought ever arises. In essence, they are the pre-reflective building blocks from which more elaborate representations are constructed. They construct the emergent experience of consciousness and form the building blocks of intelligence.

Each module is a structured collection of Sensicles. What allows these modules to be integrated into a network is that within each module, there is one or more empty Set Sensicles: [ ]. These empty sets act as an active mechanism that establishes connections between different modules. The mind abhors empty sets. The nature of the Set Sensicle is, in a sense, to ask: What something? In this way, the mind constructs complex structures within the information layer, enabling detailed descriptions of the world as events, relationships, forms, identities, and substances.

For example:
 

  • Consider a “move-closer” module (don’t worry about the specific structure).  [[◇◿1][◇◿100 ➤ [ [ ◿1 ] [ [ ◿2 ] ] ]]]
     

  • This module will have two empty Set Sensicles that can be linked to other concepts.
    [[ [ … ] ◇◿1][ [ … ] ◇◿100 ➤ [ [ ◿1 ] [ [ ◿2 ] ] ]]]
     

  • The mind can now insert a description (or sense) of a rock into one empty Set and a window to the other.
     

  • By establishing these connections, the mind generates an emergent sense of the rock moving closer to the window. Of course, there is a lot more to it than just this one Set, but this Set contributes the singular sense of move-closer to the more expansive experience of the event.
     

Additionally, these modules contain several sets of Magnitude Sensicles that provide information about aspects such as distance, velocity, or the timing of whatever they represent. By incorporating these magnitudes, the modules can represent not only that an event is happening but also how it unfolds—its scale, intensity, duration, and rhythm—as experienced within an embodied perceptual space.

Through the empty Set Sensicles, these modules are assembled into dense informational networks that help the mind make sense of events, predict outcomes, consider options, and take action.

This perspective reveals the profound interweaving of matter and mind. Neurons, with their elaborate dendritic trees and genetically encoded Sensicles, provide the material substrate. Meanwhile, the non-material informational layer supplies the medium for emergent properties that far surpass anything physics alone can account for. Far from existing as two realms in an obscure and uneasy collaboration, they form a single, fully integrated system—like a thermostat regulating a heater, which in turn alters the thermostat’s readings.

This synthesis not only helps to resolve the interaction problem but also provides an elegant framework for understanding how minds arise from—and then transcend—their material origins while remaining anchored in the substrate that brought them into being. It is a phenomenon of breathtaking beauty and wonder.

Before proof comes, sufficient proof

To think like we do

Are Sensicles real? Do they constitute a generative language, as I claim here, capable of bringing both mind and matter into existence?
 
To assess the validity of the Morphodynamic Theory, it must be empirically testable. It has to yield falsifiable predictions that existing frameworks do not already account for. For example, as noted earlier, do Sensicles entail measurable deviations in brain dynamics? At present, we simply do not know. The difficulty is that it could take decades of technological advancement merely to build tools precise enough to test the theory at that resolution.
 
Another promising avenue is to explore whether Sensicles can offer a clear and conceptually satisfying account of quantum phenomena that currently remain incomprehensible and counterintuitive. For instance, entangled particles might not be “linked at a distance” in the conventional sense. Instead, they could be governed by a Set Sensicle [ ]—a hidden informational structure deterministically determining their joint outcomes. While such an account would not amount to definitive proof, it would at least stand as a good indication that there is something foundational in the idea.
 
The approach I favour is to build an AI system that thinks in a way more genuinely akin to us—capable of generalisation, intentionality, understanding meaning, drawing upon emotions, maintaining internal needs, and sustaining an enduring sense of self and agency. This is a bold proposal. It suggests an entirely different architecture from our current approach. Yet there are compelling reasons to consider the Morphodynamic Theory, with its Sensicle-based language, as a serious philosophical and scientific candidate for transcending the limits of purely statistical models and moving towards genuine conceptual understanding.
 
Let me briefly explain: Sensicles enable us to define meaning formally, in a compositional and modular manner, providing a structured, meaning-oriented cognitive architecture. I have already outlined how these modular elements are arranged. They are the Sensicle Sets that make up the lexicon of the primary language of cognition—lexical items describing a basic event, relationship, form, identity, or substance type. The example I gave was the “move-closer” module:
 
[[ [ … ] ◇◿1 ][ [ … ] ◇◿100 ➤ [ [ ◿1 ] [ [ ◿2 ] ] ]]]
 
These modules comprise semantic primitives—for example, less-ness
[ [ ◿1 ] [ [ ◿2 ] ] ] — which makes the system all the more powerful. The key point is that each module embodies the functional meaning of the word it represents. The word itself is merely a tag we attach to the module for categorisation, association, and retrieval. These words—our natural language—are indeed powerful, but using them to derive meaning is like trying to uncover the subjective in the objective. We’ve tried and got nowhere.
 
Furthermore, each of these meaning modules carries adjustable variables—Magnitude Sets—that define their scope and nuance. For instance, the module representing move-closer could be tuned to specify precisely how much closer, and across what scale. This means that knowledge would not need to be relearned from scratch each time; instead, these meaning units could be plugged into any context and immediately function as integrated elements of the whole.
 
Unlike contemporary models, which sift through immense quantities of data to extract statistical correlations, this approach treats meaning as an intrinsic part of the architecture itself. In other words, rather than relying on a top-down process that uses language to approximate meaning and understanding, it adopts a bottom-up process in which meaning emerges in progressively sophisticated layers, with language ultimately functioning as a higher-order tool enabling advanced categorisation, association, and retrieval.
 
With such an architecture, when confronted by a hyper-novel concept, the system would not simply be adrift, forced to retrain from the ground up. Instead, it would attempt to integrate the new idea by drawing upon its existing network of meanings—or at the very least, know how to pose the right questions to make sense of it. In doing so, it could generate new Sensicle modules derived from existing semantic primitives. That is, after all, what the mind does. We will set the AI up with an instinct-level ability to understand the world, and from there, it will be able to learn through experience the way we do.
 
Developing a system that demonstrates true understanding would not, in itself, deliver fully human-like cognition—many more functions remain to be integrated, including the roles of emotion, needs, awareness, and identity. However, it would provide clear proof of principle that AI can move beyond surface imitation to something closer to conceptual comprehension.
 
Again, while this would fall short of proving the Morphodynamic Theory correct in a final sense, it would nonetheless stand as a strong indicator that we may be on the right track.

We’re done living on a flat earth

Now everything changes
 
Solving the mind–body problem has long been a consuming obsession of philosophy. To find half of reality discoverable and the other half an utter mystery is an uneasy position to be in. It leaves too many essential questions unresolved—not least whether life has meaning, whether we have purpose, whether death is final, and what, precisely, we are.
 
Consider this: we have built an entire industry—mental health care—upon inferences drawn from studying behaviour. That is trying to understand the subjective by examining its effects on the objective. We have done remarkably well, considering that we lack direct empirical means to measure subjective experience. More recently, we have begun dreaming of developing Artificial General Intelligence without ever fully grasping what intelligence itself is, what human-level understanding entails, or how the mind manages to deal with novelty so effectively. Again, we have accomplished a lot, but with only half the facts, we will achieve only a fraction of what is possible.

Solving the mind–body problem is akin to moving from a flat-earth perspective to a genuine, three-dimensional understanding. The flat-earth view we have adhered to so far divides reality into two domains: one that we can touch, measure, and control, and another that lies beyond the edge of comprehension. Step beyond that edge, and we tumble into free fall, where we cope by filling the void with myths, gods, demons or theories that lack intuitive understanding—in other words, that remain mystical.
 
Now, that edge has vanished. There is neither the supernatural nor the merely physical. We inhabit an informational world from which both mind and matter emerge as facets of a single narrative. We have uncovered the generative language that give rise to this narrative. This discovery means we can begin to unpack the grammar of reality itself—encompassing mind and matter—and thus, for the first time, gain a true understanding of the world and our place within it.

With this unified framework, we can weave identity, emotion, intelligence, hope, faith, and love into the tapestry of matter, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of incompatible dualities. These dualities become unified without destroying the practical applications they bring to the table. In other words, they become points of perspective on a single canvas, allowing us to precisely and fluidly adjust where the duality needs to be demarcated for the optimal outcome. This brings together concepts such as free will and determinism, the individual and the collective, the evolution of life with meaning and purpose, feelings and emotions with systems and processes, acts of good and acts of evil, and the observer and the observed.
 
Let us briefly look at what this means:
 

  • Unifying free will with determinism (but not in the way compatibilists do) reveals an interplay between moral and causal responsibility. This allows us not only to modulate feelings such as anger, guilt, and anxiety but also to become more compassionate, forgiving, and oriented towards achieving optimal outcomes rather than merely seeking retribution or suffering from excessive guilt.
     

  • ​Unifying individualism with the collective leads us to the pragmatic recognition that what is best for me and what is best for us are, in fact, the same. It is the familiar principle—love your neighbour as yourself, because they are you—but now rooted not merely in ethical aspiration, but in concrete understanding. We become centres of influence within a network of influence that extends who we are.
     

  • Unifying the evolution of life with meaning and purpose uncovers a simple principle that transforms chaos into order and gives birth to the universe, life, and our advanced civilisation. I call it the Principle of Entropic Stability. This elegant, mechanistic principle discloses the meaning of life, our purpose, and a shared vision for the future.
     

  • Unifying feelings and emotions with systems and processes will enable us to establish psychology on a solid scientific foundation—melding first-person affective experiences with precise, repeatable metrics. While we may not yet be able to measure mental data directly, we will at least be able to map behaviour onto a clearer understanding of what transpires within the mind.
     

  • Unifying acts of good with acts of evil does not negate the virtue of the one or the horror of the other. Rather, it evokes the dance of Yin and Yang: each contains the seed of its opposite, and both flow within a single causal current. Seeing virtue and vice as inter-transforming polarities shifts ethics from rigid judgement to dynamic balance, fostering humility in goodness, vigilance in power, and the skill to transmute destructive acts into constructive outcomes.
     

  • Unifying the observer and the observed enables us to recognise that what we call objective reality is inextricably entwined with the conditions and perspectives of observation. By acknowledging this interplay, we can begin to disentangle the contributions of matter itself from those arising through observation, clarifying where reality stands apart from us and where it emerges through our participation.
     

Philosophical curiosity, fuelled by the discomfort of living in a reality we only partly understand, has brought us to this unification of mind and matter. Yet what began as curiosity now holds the promise of profound transformation. As we integrate these insights, we will not only unlock new technologies that draw upon the deeper grammar of reality but also cultivate ways of living that are wiser, more compassionate, and more resilient. By understanding the entangled roles of observer and observed, meaning and mechanism, we gain the tools to design systems that prize both human flourishing and scientific rigour. In doing so, we lay the groundwork for a future where knowledge serves not merely our curiosity but our collective well-being.

Final thoughts

No single language suffices for every purpose. This is precisely why we must uncover—or invent—new languages. They enable us to think more clearly about perplexing questions, allowing us to shape our reality and flourish within it. Mathematics, for example, has revealed the hidden structures and patterns underpinning objective reality. It has given us the means to model, predict, and transform the world in ways no other language can rival.

The language of Sensicles is the language for doing the same for consciousness, but more. It allows us to bring into focus the utterly mysterious half of our experience and to unify it with the half we have been exploring so successfully. This is no minor development; it might be akin to a Second Enlightenment—a moment when a new framework of understanding has the power to reconfigure how we perceive our world and our place within it.

Just as the first Enlightenment equipped us with conceptual tools to liberate science from superstition and to advance human flourishing, so this emerging Morphodynamic framework holds the promise of freeing consciousness itself from the prison of inscrutability. With Sensicles, we stand at the threshold of a more integrated vision—one in which the mind is no longer an enigma skulking at the margins of matter, but part of a shared expression articulated through a generative language.

It is an invitation to join in a collective enterprise: to fully unpack this language, to test its scope, and to explore the possibilities unlocked by transforming our most enduring enigmas into the frontiers of our evolving progress. If we accept this challenge, we may discover that creation has always been an evocation—and that to learn its language is, in some profound sense, to become co-authors of the future of reality itself.

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