Unfinished books.

Biological Individuation Theory

Consciousness, Life, and You · complete manuscript, in revision

We have become very good at describing what brains do. A question remains underneath that work: why is any of it experienced, and why is it experienced as someone? This book sets the first question aside and pursues the second: what fixes the boundary of one subject, holds its experience together as one, and carries it forward as the same perspective through decades of change?

The proposal, stated in its conservative form, is a research hypothesis: the boundary, unity and continuity of an individual conscious perspective depend on the coordinated, self-maintaining organization of the living organism, and are not fully determined by neural information processing considered apart from that organization. A stronger form, Strong BIT, adds that the organism may not generate experience at all but individuate it, making something broader particular. The book treats that as speculation and keeps it behind a firewall: evidence that the organism individuates experience is not evidence that experience exists apart from the organism.

The book is written to be able to lose. It states in advance the results that would weaken it, labels each claim as established, hypothesis, speculative or open, and reaches one conclusion, held presumptively rather than with certainty: because the living organism is the only carrier of a person's continuity ever demonstrated, the claim that a person survives its irreversible dissolution is presumptively false unless an independent carrier is shown.

Themes explored

• Why consciousness is someone's
• Life before consciousness: boundary, self-maintenance, autopoiesis
• A history of the observer, from the Greeks to physics
• The biological aperture and the individuation stack
• Identity through change; copies, uploads and continuity
• Agency, choice and free will; trajectory sovereignty
• Time and the individuated present
• When the observer begins
• Synthetic and hybrid minds
• Anomalies at the boundary, weighed
• Death, persistence and the open bookends
• What would count against the theory

Someone Here, Now — Measured

The Research Program of Biological Individuation Theory · full draft, in review

How could a theory of consciousness lose? Biological Individuation Theory asked why experience is someone's and proposed that the living organism is part of the answer. This companion volume asks how that proposal could be shown wrong.

It builds the instruments the theory needs: one profile for the organization of a living body, another for the organization of experience. It fixes in advance the neural model the theory must beat, and the margin by which it must beat it. Then it asks two questions in turn: does the body predict experience beyond the brain, and do the two shape each other? The proposed studies run from the experienced location of the self and split-brain unity, through meditation, psychedelics, anaesthesia and disorders of consciousness, to development, other organisms and synthetic systems. Its parts are ordered by how ready each test is, not by topic.

Behind an explicit firewall, stricter rules govern the claims that most need them: concealed targets for near-death experiences, new learning at the end of life, and carrier tests for any claim that a person survives. The book proposes measurements and reports none; none of its studies has yet been run.

Themes explored

• A theory that cannot lose has not been tested
• Prediction first, then constitution
• Pre-registration and margins fixed in advance
• Adversarial collaboration with rival theories
• Measuring a living body and measuring an experience
• Null results count; replication before ontology
• Research ethics for possible subjects
• Anomaly claims under quarantine

Someone Here for a While

Meaning, Mortality, and the Open Bookends · manuscript v2.0, in revision

The most personal of the three. Where the theory book argues, this one reflects: a first-person book, written from a physician's life, about what it means to be someone for a while. It is not a clinical guide or a review of the literature, and it leans on the arguments of Biological Individuation Theory lightly rather than repeating them.

It holds three claims at three strengths: a careful hypothesis, that the living body gathers experience into one self; a speculation held at arm's length, that the body may gather experience from something wider; and a conclusion about persons, that the only thing ever shown to carry a person through time is the living body itself. It follows that conclusion where it leads about death, without consolation it cannot support. Its central warning is against substitution: letting something that continues — a memory, a legacy, a copy, "consciousness in general" — stand in for the person who may not. In its own words: the question deserves inquiry; the person deserves more.

Themes explored

• The first-person aperture
• Being seen by someone; love without ownership
• The particular and the irreplaceable
• Meaning without guarantee
• The fear of nonexistence; grief as knowledge
• Descendants, copies and continuers
• Aristotle's soul as the form of a living body
• Hope without assurance; attention as a mortal practice

Worldlines

A novel · complete draft, in revision

At 3:04 in the morning, in a VA hospital in Boise in 2035, a ninety-one-year-old veteran who has not spoken in two years begins to describe giving birth — in his dead wife's voice, from a delivery room he was never allowed to enter. By morning he is dead, and his son confirms details only his mother could have known.

Dr. Sophia Huxley, a night-shift hospitalist and the great-granddaughter of Aldous Huxley, writes down every word. The trail leads her to a disgraced physicist, a Norwegian engineer who trusts only pencil, and QUICK: a quantum machine built to find memories in the fabric of spacetime, which cannot remember itself. If the past is permanent, memories are not stored; they are addressed. Then a company begins selling grieving families visits with their dead.

Novel's premise The book is built on relativity's block universe, in which past moments remain real, and takes one deliberate liberty with known physics, which its afterword names plainly: that a moment can be reached and read. Everything else it draws on — the no-cloning theorem, theories of memory, terminal lucidity — it marks as real or contested.

Themes explored

• Memory, grief and consent
• Whether the dead have a right not to be read
• Permanence versus access
• Identity as the key, not the contents
• Determinism: if the future is already fixed, what is a decision?
• A machine that can read every past except its own
• Forgetting and remembering: Lethe and Mnemosyne

Proper Time

A novel · sequel to Worldlines · in planning: world and outline settled, drafting not yet begun

Boise, 2046. Naomi Murphy, a music thanatologist who plays harp at the bedsides of the dying, is playing for her own mother when the old woman, years deep in dementia, wakes fully lucid for an hour, calls her by a childhood name no one has used in decades, and hums a melody Naomi has never heard. Two days later her mother is dead.

Naomi begins to notice that lucid episodes cluster on certain wards. A three-year-old says she "used to be" someone else. And a physician explains that a mind might travel as light — and shows Naomi a record suggesting someone arrived inside her mother's last lucid hour.

Novel's premise Set in the same single block universe as Worldlines, the novel adds one further deliberate break with physics — minds that can travel as light — and will name it in its afterword, as its predecessor does.

Themes explored

• Fixed is not forced: agency in a block universe
• Finding meaning in choices that were always fixed
• Agency after knowledge
• Memory and self: who are you when your newest self goes first?
• Music at the bedside of the dying
• Where do you want to die?