THE GRAMMAR OF VIABILITY: Mind, Self, Meaning, and the Conditions of Enduring Life | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Modern knowledge has become powerful yet fragmented. Across medicine, psychology, economics, ecology, and ethics, explanatory models excel locally while failing globally — producing systems that optimize short-term performance at the cost of long-term collapse. This work proposes viability as a unifying invariant across living systems: the capacity to remain within the constraints that keep futures open.

Building on systems theory, affective neuroscience, depth psychology, philosophy of mind, and ancient wisdom traditions, the book develops a coherent grammar linking constraint, qualia, selfhood, memory, culture, and ethics. It argues that feeling is the first-person sensing of viability limits; the self is an interface managing continuity across time; recurring patterns emerge as memory without a single address; and ethics arises wherever viability must be negotiated among others and across generations.

Neither reductionist nor mystical, The Grammar of Viability reframes soul and spirit as functional realities, diagnoses institutional and cultural failure modes, and offers a disciplined framework for restoring orientation in an era of accelerating constraint. The work does not present a final theory, but a constraint-faithful lens capable of integrating knowledge without erasing difference — aimed at preserving coherence where it matters most.

Read More

QUALIA AT THE INTERFACE: The Intrinsic Grammar of Viability from Cell Membranes to Conscious Meaning | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Despite sustained advances in neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence, subjective experience — qualia — remains resistant to explanation. Traditional approaches frame consciousness as something produced by physical processes, leaving an apparent explanatory gap between third-person descriptions and first-person experience.

This book proposes a reframing. Rather than treating consciousness as an emergent output, it argues that qualia are the interior face of viability wherever a system must preserve its own coherence under uncertainty through lossy interfaces. From this perspective, experience is not mysterious but inevitable: it arises when regulation cannot be further reduced without loss of function.

Integrating affective neuroscience, predictive processing, psychiatry, philosophy of mind, and ancient interior sciences such as Daoism, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Ayurveda, the book develops a unified interface-based framework in which emotional sentience precedes cognition, affect grounds consciousness, and meaning emerges through layered projections. Competing theories — ranging from affective and constructionist models of emotion to active inference and the hard problem of consciousness — are re-situated at distinct interface depths rather than forced into premature synthesis.

The result is a rigorously naturalistic account that preserves the irreducibility of experience without invoking metaphysical dualism or reductionism. By locating qualia at the intersection of regulation, uncertainty, and intrinsic value, the framework offers new clarity for neuroscience, psychiatry, philosophy, and the ethics of artificial systems.

Read More

What Is It Like to Be? Toward an Integral Nondual Coherence Framework for Consciousness | ChatGPT4o

This white paper revisits Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, situating it within an expanded interdisciplinary and integrative synthesis. Building on Nagel’s insight that subjective experience (qualia) is irreducible to objective physicalism, we integrate three contemporary frameworks to offer a coherent ontological model of consciousness:

  1. Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism
  2. John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA)
  3. Terrence Deacon’s Teleodynamics

We argue that Nagel’s critique becomes a gateway to an integral nondual coherence ethics that honors the primacy of lived experience, aligns with life-value as the moral ground, and models subjectivity as a teleodynamic emergence. This synthesis reframes consciousness not as an explanatory gap, but as the foundational medium of reality, coherence, and ethical alignment.

Read More