Traditional Chinese Medicine - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

The concept of the self remains fragmented across philosophy, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and traditional medical systems. Cognitive and narrative accounts struggle to explain why agency collapses under metabolic or affective stress, while biological accounts fail to explain meaning, identity, and continuity over time. This white paper proposes a unifying framework in which the self is understood as a stacked architecture of viability-regulating interfaces, rather than a unitary entity or representational construct.

Building on Antonio Damasio’s typology of proto-self, core self, and autobiographical self, the paper anchors the proto-self in mitochondrial psychobiology, identifies molecular signaling (neuropeptides, cytokines, hormones, and mitokines such as GDF15) as the primary translation layer from cellular viability to felt experience, and situates consciousness in brainstem–hypothalamic affective circuits as articulated by affective neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. Higher cortical networks — salience, default mode, and frontoparietal control — are shown to extend, interpret, and regulate felt viability across time, giving rise to narrative identity and agency without originating value.

Integrating insights from modern neuroscience with the grammar of viability and qualia-as-interface, the paper also reinterprets Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda as disciplined interior sciences tracking felt invariants of regulation rather than metaphysical substances. The result is a rigorously naturalistic, non-reductive account of the self as life regulating itself from the inside, with direct implications for psychiatry, trauma, ethics, and integrative medicine.

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.