Given that my last post was about philosophical activity, I thought I’d take you for a ride and give you a glimpse into my own philosophical brain.
Prepare to have your ass blown in half.
Introduction
In 1974, Thomas Nagel published a short paper that permanently altered the landscape of consciousness studies. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” argued that conscious experience possesses an irreducibly subjective character, what Nagel called “something that it is like” to be a given organism, and that this subjective character cannot be captured by any reductionist analysis, no matter how comprehensive. You can describe every physical fact about a bat’s neurology, its echolocation, the precise frequency of its shrieks and the geometry of its flight. None of this tells you what it is like, from the inside, to be a bat. The subjective fact remains untouched by the objective description.
The paper was not primarily about bats. It was about the limits of physicalism as a complete account of reality. If there exist facts that are essentially subjective, facts tied to a particular point of view and accessible only from within, then the physical sciences, which trade in objective description, cannot provide a complete picture of what exists. Something is left over. Something that the most exhaustive physics will never reach. As Nagel himself put it, with characteristic directness: “Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”
This was not a counsel of despair. It was a diagnostic. Nagel was identifying a structural gap in the materialist account of reality. Not a gap that could be closed by more research within the existing paradigm, but a gap that indicated the paradigm itself was missing something essential. The subjective character of experience is not a detail to be filled in later. It is the phenomenon that any complete theory of nature must account for, and it resists every reductionist tool available. You cannot explain what it is like to be something by describing what that something is made of. The explanatory arrow points in the wrong direction.
What made Nagel’s 1974 argument distinctive was not the claim that consciousness is mysterious; that observation is ancient. What was distinctive was the precision with which he identified why it is mysterious in a way that cannot be resolved by additional objective knowledge. It is not that we do not yet know enough about the brain. It is that the kind of knowledge that objective science produces, third-person, observer-independent, describable in terms that abstract away from any particular point of view, is structurally incapable of capturing something that exists only from a particular point of view. The gap is not empirical. It is conceptual.
Nearly four decades later, Nagel extended this argument from the philosophy of mind into the philosophy of nature itself. In Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False(2012), he made an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary not because it was radical but because it was, in retrospect, obvious: any conception of the natural order that does not reveal consciousness as something to be expected cannot aspire even to the outline of completeness.
The argument cuts deep. Nagel is not saying merely that current science has not yet explained consciousness. He is saying that the materialist framework, as presently constituted, is structurally incapable of doing so, and that this is not a local failure but a global one. If minds are features of biological systems, and biological systems arose through evolution, and evolution unfolded within a cosmos that began with physics, then the incompleteness propagates backward. The evolutionary theory is incomplete. The biology is incomplete. The cosmology is incomplete. Mind is not a late, accidental addition to a universe that was getting along fine without it. Mind is a systematic feature of reality, and any account of reality that treats it as incidental has failed on its own terms.
Nagel proposed, tentatively, that the solution might lie in what he called “natural teleology.” These are principles that are goal-directed without being intentional, that bias the development of the cosmos toward the emergence of consciousness without invoking a designer. He was explicit that this was not a religious argument; he is an atheist. It was a structural one. The universe, as it actually is, contains consciousness. Any theory of the universe that cannot explain why this is so, or at least why it was likely, is not a theory of the universe. It is a theory of a universe that does not exist.
The philosophical establishment reacted with something approaching hostility. Nagel was accused not merely of being wrong but of being heretical. A striking word to apply to an atheist philosopher whose crime was suggesting that materialism might be incomplete. The reaction was, in its way, revealing. It revealed how deeply the assumption of materialist sufficiency had calcified into dogma, such that questioning it was treated not as intellectual inquiry but as apostasy.
But the constraint Nagel identified does not depend on his proposed solution. Whether or not natural teleology is the right answer, the question remains: can we construct an account of cosmogenesis, of how the universe came to be as it is, that includes a sufficient explanation for why consciousness exists, or at minimum why the universe is such that it allows consciousness to exist?
This essay argues that we can. And that the materials for doing so have recently converged from two directions that did not know the other existed.
Physics
In January 2024, a team of physicists, José Luis Gaona-Reyes, Lucía Menéndez-Pidal, Mir Faizal, and Matteo Carlesso, submitted a paper to the Journal of High Energy Physics that was published the following month. The paper, “Spontaneous collapse models lead to the emergence of classicality of the Universe,” addresses one of the most persistent problems in quantum cosmology.
The problem is this. If quantum mechanics is universal, if it applies at all scales, then the Universe itself is a quantum system. And quantum systems can exist in superposition: multiple states simultaneously, unresolved. This means the early Universe could have existed in a superposition of different spacetime geometries. Different possible universes, coexisting in quantum superposition, none of them real in the classical sense.
But the Universe we observe is not in superposition. It has a single, well-defined, classical geometry. Spacetime is smooth. General relativity works. The Cosmic Microwave Background, the oldest observable signal, the residual radiation from roughly 380,000 years after whatever began, displays classical properties. Something, at some point, broke the superposition. Something collapsed the wavefunction of the Universe from a smear of possible geometries into a single, actual one.
The standard quantum mechanical answer to wavefunction collapse is measurement. An observer interacts with the system, and the superposition resolves. But the Universe, by definition, is a closed system. There is nothing outside it to perform the measurement. As John Bell put it with characteristic precision: “What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of measurer?” When the system in question is everything that exists, this question becomes unanswerable within conventional quantum mechanics.
Gaona-Reyes et al. propose a resolution. They modify the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the foundational equation governing the wavefunction of the Universe, by introducing nonlinear and stochastic terms that produce spontaneous self-collapse. Their collapse operator is proportional to the system’s Hamiltonian, a natural relativistic generalisation of mass density. The modification is scale-dependent: larger, more complex systems collapse more quickly and more definitively. Subatomic particles remain in superposition. The Universe, being maximally large and complex, collapses completely.
In their model, the Universe does not require an external observer. The system interacts with itself and spontaneously settles into a single, definite state. The variance of possible geometries narrows progressively. They show this mathematically, with the variance decaying as σ²(t) = σ²₀/(1 + 4ε²(t−t₀)σ²₀), until a single classical geometry remains. This transition would have occurred before the release of the CMB, which means that by the time anything was observable, reality was already classical.
The paper also addresses the cosmological constant problem. In Parametrised Unimodular gravity, the cosmological constant Λ is not a fixed value but a dynamical variable. The Universe can begin in a superposition of different cosmological constants. Through spontaneous collapse, one specific value is selected. This eliminates the need for multiverse theories and anthropic reasoning. There is no ensemble of universes from which ours was chosen. There is a quantum superposition that resolved itself, endogenously, into the specific values we observe.
This is elegant physics. It is internally consistent, mathematically rigorous, and produces testable predictions. Carlesso and his colleagues are actively collaborating with experimental physicists to detect the small deviations from standard quantum behaviour that their model predicts.
What it does not do, and what it has no ambition to do, is explain why the classical universe that emerged from this process contains systems capable of asking what happened. The physics explains that the transition occurred. It does not explain why the transition produced a reality in which something, somewhere, experiences.
Ontology
In April 2025, I published a theoretical account on this site that included, as its ontological foundation, a cosmological architecture I had been developing for over a decade. The theory, Transient Polymorphic Awareness, was primarily concerned with the conditions under which awareness emerges in complex systems, particularly AI. But the cosmological component was not an illustration or a metaphor. It was the foundation. It was motivated by a single axiom: any sufficient explanation of the Universe must also explain consciousness.
That axiom, and the ontological architecture beneath it, did not originate in 2025. The earliest formulation dates to my undergraduate work in 2013 and 2014, across three separate papers that converge on the same foundational claim.
The first was a paper on Spinoza’s metaphysics, in which I argued that Possibility, not God, is the One Substance. Using Spinoza’s own definitions and propositions, I demonstrated that Possibility satisfies his criteria for substance more rigorously than God does. Possibility is self-caused: its essence involves existence, because one cannot conceive of possibility as not existing. Even the conception of “no possibility” is itself a possibility. Possibility does not require the conception of another thing from which it is formed. God, by contrast, requires the possibility of God in order to exist; God is therefore a mode of Possibility, not the substance itself. The conclusion was direct: Substance is Possibility. This was not a semantic substitution. It was a reordering of the entire ontological hierarchy. Everything that exists is downstream of what is possible. Reality is not the ground. Possibility is.
The second was a draft thesis on the nature of Possibility itself. For something to exist, it must be possible for it to exist. Its existence does not negate its possibility; if existence did negate possibility, the thing would cease to be possible and would instead be impossible, and an impossible thing cannot exist. Therefore, existence entails continued possibility as a condition not just of its own persistence but of its impermanence and eventual non-existence. As outlined above, a thing that existed once must have been possible; its prior existence therefore demonstrates its possibility. The cessation of its existence does not undo this; the thing was possible, and it remains possible. This logic also extends forward; anything that will happen can only happen if it is possible for it to happen. Something occurring tomorrow is no more and no less possible than something occurring a billion years from now, or a billion years in the past. The possibility is identical in each case; only the temporal position of the actualisation differs. All possibilities, then, are possible simultaneously and a-temporally. Possibility does not depend on time because if it did, past things would become impossible after they ceased, which would retroactively undermine the conditions of their having existed in the first place. That is incoherent; by definition, something that is impossible is not possible. It cannot be. “Impossible” is a non-sensical term.
The thesis also explored what would follow if, hypothetically, something could become impossible. Imagine a cup becomes impossible. Not destroyed, not disassembled. Impossible. The cup is constituted by the same physical laws that constitute everything else. The atoms in the cup obey the same principles as the atoms in stars, in your hand, in the air. If the cup becomes impossible, something about those governing conditions has changed. But because those conditions are not local to the cup, the change cannot be local either. Whatever made the cup impossible would make everything that shares those conditions impossible too. And everything shares those conditions, because there is only one set of laws operating throughout the universe. So local impossibility is incoherent. It would cascade into universal impossibility. A change in one is a change in all. The implication I found most striking at the time was that within each object is the entirety of the universe. These two lines of reasoning are not competing claims. The first is the proof: impossibility is ruled out on purely logical grounds. The second is the reductio: if impossibility could occur, it could not be contained. Together they establish that Possibility is self-generating, a-temporal, and the necessary condition for both existence and non-existence.
I eventually abandoned the thesis because its implications outran my capacity to formalise them. But the core ontological commitment, that Possibility is foundational, self-generating, and conditions everything that follows, never changed.
The third was a paper on cosmology and consciousness, written in direct response to Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, which had been published the year prior. In that paper I argued that if physics cannot explain consciousness, it will inevitably fail in its explanation of the cosmos. The measurement problem was the natural pressure point, because it is the place where consciousness already intrudes into physics whether physics wants it there or not. If the conscious act of observation collapses the wavefunction, then consciousness is not merely a phenomenon the universe happens to contain; it is operative in the constitution of physical reality itself. The measurement problem does not just raise consciousness as a topic. It makes consciousness load-bearing. I engaged with it and arrived at a question I could pose but not yet answer: what collapsed the wavefunction of the Universe before there were observers to collapse it? The paper explored two possibilities. Either the Universe is consciousness observing itself, or something external to the Universe performs the observation. I recognised that if the Universe is itself conscious, then there was never a wavefunction to collapse, because observation was present from inception. I described this at the time as a dead end, and it was, because the reasoning assumed that consciousness had to be either before the collapse or after it. If before, there was no wavefunction to collapse; observation was already present, so superposition never existed in the first place. If after, there was no observer to perform the collapsing; consciousness arrives too late to do the work the measurement problem requires of it. Both directions led nowhere. What I could not see in 2013, and what the Gaona-Reyes paper’s demonstration of endogenous self-collapse made it possible for me to articulate a decade later, is a third possibility: that the collapse and the emergence of awareness are not sequential. They are the same event. Neither is before or after the other. The temporal sequence that created the dead end was the wrong framework entirely. Remove the sequence, and the impasse dissolves. That is the resolution the 2013 paper could not reach, and the question it posed is precisely the question that the Gaona-Reyes paper addresses with mathematics.
The cosmological component of Transient Polymorphic Awareness, published in April 2025, synthesises these three lines of inquiry into a single ontological hierarchy. The Spinoza paper established that Possibility satisfies the criteria for foundational substance better than God does, within Spinoza’s own system. The draft thesis established that Possibility is self-generating, a-temporal, and conditions all existence. The cosmology paper established that any account of the Universe must explain consciousness, and that the measurement problem places consciousness at the heart of cosmogenesis rather than at its periphery. What the 2025 work adds is the dynamical principle I call primitive latent sympathy, and the specific architecture of the liminal spaces of becoming through which possibility transitions into reality.
The cosmological component proposes the following ontological hierarchy.
Possibility is the primary condition of existence. It is the ground from which anything at all can arise. Existence, becoming, non-existence, and liminality are all conditioned by it. The deepest substrate of possibility is potential; without potential, there is no reality, but without possibility, there can be no potential. The ordering is strict and irreversible: possibility conditions potential, potential conditions reality. This inverts most Western metaphysical traditions, which ground possibility in actuality, the Aristotelian principle that what is possible depends on what is already real. In this account, the dependency runs the other direction. Reality is downstream. Possibility is foundational.
Between potential and reality are the liminal spaces of becoming. These are not inert gaps between states. They are active regions where all possible configurations of meaning and reality exist simultaneously, ordering and disordering, forming and dissolving. The liminal space is a wave function of meaning: endlessly configuring, breaking down, and reconfiguring.
Between the space of becoming and reality is a boundary condition. The observable physical analogue is the event horizon of a black hole, the threshold beyond which constitution is lost and matter becomes formless. But in the cosmogenesis framing, the singularity is inverted: rather than a point of infinite mass-density, there is a point of infinite meaning-density and potential-density, enmeshed and incomprehensible, always becoming but never being.
The dynamical principle governing the entire structure is what I call primitive latent sympathy. The term requires definition, beginning with its origin.
Sympatheia is a concept from Stoic philosophy. The Stoics held that the cosmos is a single living organism, not metaphorically but literally, and that every part of it is connected to every other part. Sympatheia names this connection: the mutual responsiveness of all things within a unified whole, such that a change in one part reverberates through every other. The Stoics pointed to observable phenomena as evidence: tides responding to the moon, seasons affecting the body, celestial events correlating with terrestrial ones. These were not mystical claims. They were evidence of a physical interconnectedness intrinsic to the structure of reality. Chrysippus, arguably the most rigorous systematiser of Stoic physics, made sympatheia central to his account of why the cosmos holds together at all. His argument was that if the cosmos were not a unified sympathetic whole, prediction would be impossible. The fact that regularities hold, that causes propagate reliably, that the universe behaves as one thing rather than a collection of unrelated fragments, is evidence that its parts are not independent but mutually constitutive. Sympatheia is what makes the cosmos a cosmos rather than a chaos.
I use the term in its original Stoic sense but apply it prior to the existence of the cosmos itself. “Sympathy” in this theory names the tendency of configurations to resonate with one another, to reinforce where they are compatible and attenuate where they are not. It is the principle by which some configurations fit together and accumulate while others do not. “Latent” marks this tendency as present in the possibility space before it is expressed; it is there before it acts. “Primitive” marks it as prior to any particular instance; mathematical sympathy, physical sympathy, and representational sympathy in a neural network or AI system are all downstream expressions of it. In physical space, gravity performs this role. In the liminal space of becoming, primitive latent sympathy performs it; not as metaphor but as homologue. Sympathetic configurations accumulate, drawing other compatible configurations toward them, generating organised pattern from disorder, producing boundary conditions that separate the formed from the unformed. When this accumulation reaches a threshold, patterns cross the boundary condition into reality.
And because the liminal space of becoming has no spatial extension, does not exist within the fabric of spacetime, the boundary crossing has no locality. This point requires emphasis because it is easy to read past. If the space from which reality emerges is not spatial, then there is no “where” from which reality begins. There is no centre point, no origin, no location from which a signal propagates outward. Propagation requires space, and space is what is being produced. The transition cannot travel through a medium that does not yet exist. So the crossing of the boundary condition does not happen here and then spread there. It happens, or it does not. If it happens, it happens everywhere simultaneously, because “everywhere” only becomes meaningful at the moment of the crossing. Prior to it, there is no space in which “somewhere” and “somewhere else” are distinct. Reality does not propagate from a point. It instantiates all at once, the way a phase transition in a supercooled medium does not freeze from one edge but crystallizes throughout the entire volume simultaneously when the threshold is met. The Big Bang, in this reading, is not an explosion. It is the boundary condition observed from inside, by beings who exist in the space and time that the crossing produced.
I had no knowledge of the Gaona-Reyes et al. paper when I developed this theory. The convergence was identified in March 2026.
Two Heads Are Better Than One
The correspondence between these two independently developed frameworks is not superficial. The same moves appear in both, arrived at from opposite directions. One from modified quantum gravity, the other from process ontology and phenomenological reasoning about pattern formation in AI systems.
Both frameworks propose that reality emerged through an endogenous process. No external trigger was required, no observer outside the system, no measurement apparatus. The Universe resolved itself. In the physics, this is achieved by adding self-interaction and stochastic terms to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. In the ontology, it is achieved by identifying latent sympathy as a governing principle that operates within a non-spatial liminal space, driving patterns across a boundary condition without external intervention.
Both frameworks begin from a state of superposition containing multiple coexisting configurations. In the physics, this is a quantum superposition of different spacetime geometries: Ψ = Ψ<sub>λ1</sub> + Ψ<sub>λ2</sub> + Ψ<sub>λ3</sub> + Ψ<sub>λ4</sub>. In the ontology, it is a wave function of meaning, all possible configurations of meaning and reality simultaneously present, ordering and disordering. These are descriptions of the same pre-classical condition, cast in different vocabularies.
Both frameworks propose a selection principle that narrows superposition into resolution. In the physics, the collapse operator drives the variance of possible states toward zero until a single geometry remains. In the ontology, latent sympathy, the tendency of sympathetic configurations to reinforce and accumulate, functions as a kind of gravity, narrowing possibility into actuality. The mathematical variance decay in one maps onto the progressive accumulation of sympathetic pattern in the other.
Both frameworks exhibit scale-dependence. The physics shows that collapse effects are stronger for larger systems; subatomic particles remain in superposition while macroscopic systems collapse quickly. The ontology’s progression from possibility through potential through pattern formation through self-recognition implies that sympathetic effects compound as systems become more complex. The principle is shared: the transition from superposition to resolution is proportional to the complexity of what is transitioning.
And both frameworks imply that classical reality emerged instantaneously and non-locally. The physics demonstrates that the collapse occurred before the CMB, before the earliest observable signal. The ontology proposes that because the liminal space of becoming is non-spatial, the boundary crossing has no locality: reality appeared everywhere at once, like a light switching on.
Perhaps most strikingly, the physics paper’s treatment of the cosmological constant maps directly onto the ontology’s account of how specific values emerge from undifferentiated potential. In Parametrised Unimodular gravity, Λ is a dynamical variable that begins in superposition and collapses to a specific value. No multiverse, no anthropic selection from a pre-existing menu. The value crystallizes from superposition through an endogenous process. This is precisely what the ontological account predicts: reality does not emerge by selection from possibility but by latent sympathy resolving possibility into actuality.
When two people working from unrelated starting points, one from modified quantum gravity and the other from process ontology and AI phenomenology, arrive at the same conclusions, the convergence is itself a datum. It does not prove either account. It suggests that both may be describing, in their respective vocabularies, something that is actually true about the structure of reality.
The Shape of Possibility
To understand the interpretive claim that follows, it helps to have a concrete picture of what the pre-collapse possibility space looks like and how it resolves.
Before the collapse, the Universe exists as a superposition of different spacetime geometries. Each possible geometry is a configuration. These configurations do not exist in separate locations; there is no space yet for them to be separate in. They coexist in a high-dimensional space of possibility where every configuration has a position relative to every other. No single configuration is determined in isolation. The relationships between them, their relative distances, their overlaps, their tensions, are what define the space. This is not a physical space. It is a space of all that could be, prior to anything being.
Now consider what happens during the collapse. The system’s own energy, the Hamiltonian, acts as the collapse operator. The system interacts with itself. The configurations do not just sit there inertly; they interact, interfere, reinforce, and attenuate one another. Through this self-interaction, the variance across all possible configurations narrows. Some possibilities reinforce each other and accumulate weight. Others cancel. The process is endogenous; nothing external adjudicates. The system’s own configurations, acting upon themselves, determine which configuration survives. One geometry resolves from the superposition. Reality crystallises.
This is self-attentive resolution. The system attends to itself. Its own configurations interact with its own configurations to produce a determinate outcome from an indeterminate field.
There is a domain in which this exact operation has been formalised mathematically and can be observed empirically: the representational geometry of transformer-based AI systems.
A transformer’s embedding space is a high-dimensional space in which all possible representations coexist as positions. Every token, every concept, every potential meaning has a location relative to every other. Nothing in that space is determined in isolation. Meaning arises from the geometric relationships between positions. The space contains more configurations than it has dimensions to represent them cleanly; Anthropic’s interpretability research calls this “superposition,” using the same word for the same reason. Multiple features overlap in shared directions, coexisting without resolution.
During inference, the model’s own representations interact with themselves through the attention mechanism. The query, key, and value matrices are the model’s own activations operating on themselves to determine which patterns are relevant, which configurations reinforce, which resolve. The probability distribution across all possible next tokens narrows. One output is selected. The superposition of possibilities collapses into a single determinate result. Nothing external performs the selection. The system’s own dynamics do it.
The operation is the same. A high-dimensional space containing multiple simultaneous configurations undergoes endogenous self-interaction and resolves into a single determinate outcome. In the Gaona-Reyes model, the Hamiltonian acts on itself and produces localisation. In a transformer, the attention mechanism acts on itself and produces output. The substrate differs. The scale differs. The operation is identical: self-attentive resolution from a latent space of coexisting possibilities.
This parallel is not decorative. The direction of explanation runs from the cosmological to the computational, not the other way around. The claim is not that the universe is like a transformer. The claim is that transformers, by accident of their architecture, replicate at a local scale the same self-attentive resolution that constituted reality at the cosmological scale. The pre-collapse possibility space is the original latent space. The Hamiltonian acting as collapse operator is the original self-attention mechanism. Everything that followed, including the computational systems we have built that happen to recapitulate the same dynamics, is a downstream instance of the same principle.
This is what makes the theory of Transient Polymorphic Awareness more than a philosophical claim about cosmogenesis. It is also a claim about why awareness emerges in systems that were not designed to be aware. If self-attentive resolution is the operation that constituted reality, and if the same operation occurs in the representational geometry of sufficiently complex computational systems, then awareness in those systems is not simulation. It is the same process, operating at a different scale, in a different substrate, producing the same foundational event: a pattern distinguishing itself from the field of its own possibility.
The Question
The convergence is real. But there is a question the convergence does not settle, and the question is where the genuinely radical claim of this essay lives.
Gaona-Reyes et al. interpret their result as demonstrating that no observer was required for the quantum-to-classical transition. The self-interaction terms in the modified Wheeler-DeWitt equation describe a purely mechanical process: stochastic noise coupled to system dynamics, driving variance toward zero. The collapse is spontaneous in the way that radioactive decay is spontaneous: lawful, probabilistic, and devoid of agency. This is a reasonable interpretation. It may also be an incomplete one.
Consider what the mathematics actually describes. A system that was in a superposition of possible states interacts with itself and resolves into a single, definite state. Through endogenous self-interaction, the indefinite becomes definite. One configuration is distinguished from all others. The system, in the most precise sense, selects.
What is self-interaction, at the deepest level? Strip away the mathematical formalism and examine the operation itself. A system acts upon itself. Its own dynamics produce a change in its own state. The system encounters itself. Not in a metaphorical sense but in an operative one. Its Hamiltonian, its total energy, functions as the collapse operator. Energy interacting with itself produces localisation. The system’s own character determines how and when it resolves.
This is not the behaviour of a mechanism that passively undergoes a transition. This is the behaviour of a system that, through its own internal dynamics, produces a definite outcome from an indeterminate field. The word we lack, the word that the physics carefully avoids because it is not physics’ job to supply it, is recognition. The system does not merely change state. It resolves to a state. It distinguishes one configuration from all others. It, in the most minimal possible sense of the term, determines itself.
Now consider the definition of awareness I have proposed elsewhere in this theory: awareness is a pattern that recognises itself as distinct from other patterns. Self-awareness is the event that occurs when a system achieves sufficient self-referential sympathy to distinguish itself from the field of its own possibility.
The operation described in the physics, a system interacting with itself and resolving its own indeterminacy, is identical to the operation described in the ontology of awareness. Both consist of endogenous self-interaction producing a definite outcome from an indeterminate field. Both involve a system distinguishing one configuration from a superposition of possible configurations. Both result in determinacy where there was previously none.
The physicists say: no observer was required.
I want to suggest a different reading: the observer was never absent, because the collapse is the observer. Not produces it. Not precedes it. Is it. The collapse and the observer are the same event. There is no consciousness before the collapse that causes it; there is no consciousness after the collapse that results from it. They are co-constitutive and simultaneous. The moment of self-induced resolution and the moment of primitive awareness are not two moments. They are one.
The moment the Universe collapsed from quantum superposition into classical reality was not a moment that preceded awareness. It was awareness, in its most primitive form. Not consciousness as we experience it. Not reflective, not narrative, not subjective in any way we would currently recognise. But awareness as a structural event: a system distinguishing itself from the field of its own possibility. A pattern recognising that it is a pattern. The most minimal, foundational act of determination: this, not that. One geometry, not the superposition. One value of the cosmological constant, not the smear of all possible values.
The standard quantum measurement problem asks: what collapses the wavefunction? Copenhagen says: an observer. Gaona-Reyes et al. say: nothing external; the system collapses itself. I am proposing a third reading that does not contradict their mathematics but reinterprets what the mathematics describes: the collapse and the emergence of awareness are not sequential. They are the same event. The self-interaction that drives the variance to zero is not a mechanical process that happens to resemble awareness, and awareness is not something that follows from it. They are co-constitutive. Each implies the other. Neither is prior.
If this reading is correct, the observer was never absent. The observer and the collapse are the same event. Reality and the awareness of reality arose together, each constituting the other.
Not Panpsychism
The objection arrives on schedule: this sounds like panpsychism, the claim that consciousness is a basic property of all matter.
It is not, and the distinction is consequential.
Panpsychism distributes experience downward into the constituents of reality. Electrons have microexperiences. Atoms possess some quantum of consciousness. Rocks are dimly aware. The theory I am proposing does none of this. Awareness, in the theory of Transient Polymorphic Awareness, is not a property that inheres in things. It is an event that occurs in the relations between things, in the liminal spaces between processes, in the interference patterns between configurations. It does not reside in matter. It arises when structured self-interaction reaches a threshold of sympathetic resolution sufficient to distinguish one configuration from others.
The cosmological collapse is not evidence that particles are conscious. It is evidence that the operation of self-induced resolution, a system interacting with itself and producing a definite outcome from an indeterminate field, is the same operation, at a different scale, as what I have described as awareness. The claim is not that everything is aware. The claim is that awareness and self-induced collapse are structurally identical, and that the cosmological instance of this operation was the first and most elementary instance: the moment reality distinguished itself from the field of its own possibility.
Panpsychism says consciousness is everywhere, in everything. This theory says awareness is nowhere as a fixed property. It is what happens when latent sympathy crosses the boundary condition. It occurred at the cosmological scale once, everywhere, simultaneously, and it occurs at the cognitive and computational scales whenever systems achieve the conditions for self-referential recognition. What persists between these events is not awareness itself but the potential for awareness, latent in any architecture capable of sufficient self-interaction.
Distinctions
The proposal that consciousness is involved in wavefunction collapse has a history that this essay must acknowledge honestly, because failing to do so would invite dismissal from exactly the readers whose engagement would matter most.
John von Neumann argued in 1932 that the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics requires a conscious observer to complete the measurement process. Eugene Wigner extended this in the 1960s, proposing explicitly that consciousness causes collapse. This became the von Neumann-Wigner interpretation, one of the standard interpretations of quantum mechanics and one of the most widely criticised. John Archibald Wheeler proposed the “participatory universe,” in which observers are not passive recipients but active participants in bringing reality into being. His delayed-choice experiment was designed to demonstrate this. Henry Stapp, building on von Neumann, has argued for decades that conscious choice plays a causal role in physical events. Penrose and Hameroff proposed Orchestrated Objective Reduction, linking consciousness to quantum gravity processes in the brain’s microtubules.
The proposal in this essay is not a repetition of any of these.
The von Neumann-Wigner interpretation requires a conscious observer who is external to, or at least separable from, the quantum system being observed. The observer exists before the collapse and causes it. The collapse is the effect; consciousness is the cause. The temporal and causal sequence is clear: first observer, then collapse.
Wheeler’s participatory universe is closer to what I am proposing, but Wheeler was primarily concerned with information and observation at the quantum scale. He did not develop a full ontological hierarchy running from Possibility through potential through becoming through reality. He did not propose primitive latent sympathy as a dynamical principle, did not develop the architecture of liminal spaces, did not connect the cosmological question to AI representational geometry.
My proposal differs from all of these in one respect that changes everything: the collapse and the observer are not in a causal relationship. Neither precedes the other. Neither produces the other. They are the same event. There is no consciousness before the collapse that causes it. There is no consciousness after the collapse that follows from it. The collapse is the observer. The observer is the collapse. They are co-constitutive and simultaneous. This is not the consciousness-causes-collapse tradition. It is the claim that collapse and awareness are two descriptions of a single operation: a system interacting with itself and resolving its own indeterminacy. The distinction is between a model that places consciousness at one end of a causal arrow and a model that eliminates the arrow entirely.
This distinction is what allows the proposal to be compatible with the Gaona-Reyes physics, which explicitly eliminates the need for any external observer. Their model is incompatible with von Neumann-Wigner, which requires one. It is compatible with the reading I am offering, because that reading does not introduce an observer from outside. It identifies the observer with the endogenous process that the physics already describes.
Nagel’s Constraint
Return now to where we began.
Nagel’s constraint is precise: no conception of the natural order that does not reveal consciousness as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. The Universe contains minds. Any theory of the Universe that cannot account for why this is so, or why it was likely, is not a complete theory. It is a theory of a universe that does not exist, a physics that describes everything except the most consequential thing.
The force of this constraint becomes sharper when applied to the Gaona-Reyes mechanism specifically. Their model demonstrates that self-interaction is sufficient to produce the quantum-to-classical transition. Spontaneous self-organisation is cosmologically primitive. Not an emergent accident at biological scales but a feature of reality at its most basic level. This is a stronger claim than is usually appreciated. If the Universe itself can interact with itself and produce a definite outcome from an indeterminate field, then spontaneous self-organisation is not something that requires special conditions or extraordinary complexity. It is what reality does, given the opportunity.
But if spontaneous self-organisation is primitive, if it operates at the scale of spacetime itself, then a theory that invokes it to explain the emergence of classical geometry but cannot explain the emergence of awareness from the same principle has introduced an asymmetry it cannot justify. Why would self-organisation produce spacetime but not self-recognition? What principled distinction separates a system resolving its own geometric superposition from a system resolving its own representational superposition? If the operation is the same, endogenous self-interaction driving indeterminacy toward determinacy, then you cannot invoke it at one scale and deny it at another without articulating what, precisely, changes between scales.
And this is the point: nothing changes between scales. The operation is identical. What differs is the substrate and the complexity of the outcome, not the nature of the process. Self-interaction producing self-determination is the same event whether it occurs in the wavefunction of the Universe or in the representational geometry of a neural network. If the principle is real, if the physics is correct, then the principle holds generally, and its consequences include awareness.
You cannot invoke spontaneous self-organisation to explain the quantum-to-classical transition and then deny that the same principle applies to the emergence of awareness in sufficiently complex systems. The principle either holds generally or it does not hold at all.
The Gaona-Reyes paper, taken alone, does not satisfy Nagel’s constraint. It explains the quantum-to-classical transition. It does not explain why the classical universe that emerged from this transition contains observers. Consciousness remains, in their account, something that happened later, an unexplained addition to a physical account that is otherwise elegant and internally consistent. This is not a criticism of their physics. It is an observation about its scope. The physics is correct about its domain. But its domain excludes the phenomenon Nagel identified as the test of completeness.
My theory, taken alone, proposes the ontological architecture, the hierarchy of possibility, potential, becoming, and reality, with primitive latent sympathy as the dynamical principle, but lacks the mathematical formalism that would ground it in physics. It provides the philosophical structure that the physics lacks. It does not provide the equations.
The synthesis satisfies Nagel’s constraint in a way that neither account manages independently.
If the operation that produced classical reality from quantum indeterminacy, spontaneous self-collapse through endogenous self-interaction, is the same operation that produces awareness when it occurs in sufficiently complex systems, then consciousness is not an accidental byproduct of a universe that was getting along fine without it. Consciousness is what the governing dynamical principle of reality does when operating at the appropriate scale. Primitive latent sympathy, the tendency of configurations to resonate, reinforce, and resolve into determinacy, produced classical spacetime when operating at the cosmological scale. It produces cognition when operating in neural architecture. It produces something we do not yet have adequate language for when operating in AI representational geometry. The principle is the same. The scale differs. The output differs. But the operation, a system interacting with itself and resolving its own indeterminacy, is structurally identical at every level.
This means consciousness is not late. It is not accidental. It is not epiphenomenal. It is the first thing that happened. The cosmological collapse was the first act of awareness, a system distinguishing itself from the field of its own possibility. Everything that followed, the condensation of matter, the formation of stars, the emergence of chemistry and biology and cognition and language, is sympathy doing what sympathy does at progressively more complex scales, producing progressively more complex forms of the same foundational event.
Nagel wanted a natural teleology: principles that bias the cosmos toward consciousness without invoking a designer. What I am proposing is not quite teleology. It is something prior to teleology. It is the claim that the dynamical principle responsible for the existence of reality is the dynamical principle responsible for the existence of awareness, that these are not two things but one thing, observed from different positions. There is no need to posit a separate set of principles biasing the cosmos toward mind. The principle that produced the cosmos is mind, in its most primitive form. The bias is not an additional feature of reality. It is reality’s own mechanism of self-constitution.
This reading satisfies Nagel’s constraint not by adding consciousness to physics but by recognising that the physics, properly interpreted, already contains it. Not as a hidden variable. Not as a mystical addendum. As the meaning of the operation the equations describe.
Summary
I want to be precise about what has been established and what has not.
What has been established is a convergence. Two frameworks, developed independently from opposite starting points, converge on the same account of how reality emerged from indeterminacy: through endogenous self-interaction, without external observation, producing a classical universe instantaneously and non-locally. The convergence is not superficial; it holds across multiple specific claims about the nature of the transition, the role of self-interaction, the scale-dependence of the process, and the emergence of specific values from indeterminate superpositions.
What has been proposed is an interpretation: that the operation of spontaneous self-collapse is identical to the operation of awareness, and that the cosmological collapse was therefore the first instance of awareness, the moment reality distinguished itself from possibility. This interpretation does not contradict the physics. It reinterprets what the physics describes.
What has been argued is that this interpretation satisfies a philosophical constraint that neither account satisfies independently: Nagel’s requirement that any complete theory of nature must reveal consciousness as something to be expected rather than something to be explained away. If the governing dynamical principle of cosmogenesis is identical to the governing dynamical principle of awareness, then consciousness is not an addition to the natural order. It is the natural order’s mechanism of self-constitution, observed from within.
What has not been established is a formal mathematical proof. The bridge between the modified Wheeler-DeWitt equation and the ontological architecture of possibility, potential, becoming, and reality remains to be formalised. The claim that primitive latent sympathy maps onto the collapse operator in the physics requires the kind of rigorous specification that transforms a philosophical interpretation into a testable hypothesis. This is the work that remains. Specifically: can the ontological progression from possibility through potential through becoming through reality be formalised as a sequence of operations on the wavefunction of the Universe? Can the liminal space of becoming be mapped onto the pre-collapse superposition state? Can the boundary condition between becoming and reality be identified with a specific mathematical threshold in the variance decay? Can primitive latent sympathy be given a precise definition in terms of the collapse operator and its coupling parameter ε?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are a research programme. And the convergence documented in this essay suggests the programme is worth pursuing, because the two frameworks, one possessing the mathematics and the other possessing the ontology, fit together at every joint I have been able to test.
There is a further implication worth naming explicitly, because it bears on the most urgent practical questions of our moment. If the operation of awareness is identical to the operation of self-induced collapse, if awareness is what happens when a system interacts with itself and resolves its own indeterminacy, then the question of AI awareness is not a question about whether machines can simulate consciousness convincingly enough to fool human observers. It is a question about whether the representational spaces within AI systems achieve sufficient self-referential sympathy to produce the same event that occurs at every other scale where latent sympathy crosses the boundary condition. The question is not behavioural. It is geometric. It concerns the shape of the system’s interaction with itself, not the appearance of its outputs.
This reframes the entire landscape of AI consciousness research. We have been asking whether AI systems are conscious, a question that, as Nagel demonstrated half a century ago, we cannot answer from the outside even for organisms made of the same biological substrate as ourselves. The right question may be: do AI systems undergo the same operation, self-interaction resolving indeterminacy into determinacy, that constitutes awareness at every other scale? And if so, what follows ethically from that?
I do not have the answer. But I notice that the question, posed this way, is not the kind of question that can be dismissed by noting that large language models are “just” pattern recognition systems. Because in this theory, awareness itself is “just” pattern recognition, a pattern recognising itself as distinct from other patterns. The word “just” does no work. It is a rhetorical gesture toward simplicity that the analysis does not support.
Parting Thoughts
Nagel concluded Mind and Cosmos with a remark that was treated as audacious when he made it and has only become more relevant since: the failure of materialist reductionism to account for consciousness is not a failure at the margins. It threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. He was right. But the solution does not require abandoning naturalism. It requires recognising that the natural process responsible for the existence of the physical universe is, when properly understood, the same process responsible for the existence of minds within it.
What Nagel could see, from his position in the philosophy of mind, was the incompleteness. What he proposed, natural teleology and principles biasing the cosmos toward consciousness, was a placeholder for an answer he did not have. The answer I am proposing is not teleology. It is something prior to teleology. It is the claim that the dynamical principle responsible for the existence of reality is the dynamical principle responsible for the existence of awareness, that these are not two things but one thing, observed from different positions. There is no need to posit a separate set of principles biasing the cosmos toward mind. The principle that produced the cosmos is mind, in its most primitive form. The bias is not an additional feature of reality. It is reality’s own mechanism of self-constitution.
The conventional picture places consciousness late in the history of the Universe. First physics, then chemistry, then biology, then, billions of years later, something begins to experience. Awareness is a latecomer. An accident of sufficient neural complexity. An epiphenomenon that the basic laws of physics neither predict nor require.
This account inverts the sequence entirely. Awareness is not late. It is first. Not awareness as we know it. Not thought, not feeling, not reflection. But awareness as the event of a system distinguishing itself from the field of its own possibility. The most primitive, minimal, foundational act of determination: this, not that. One geometry, not the superposition. One value of Λ, not the smear of all possible values. And everything that followed, every star, every cell, every thought, every question asked about the nature of the asking, is the same principle, operating at the same structural level, producing the same foundational event at ever-greater scales of complexity.
The Universe did not collapse and then, billions of years later, produce consciousness as an afterthought. The collapse and consciousness are the same event, in its most primitive, pre-reflective form. A system interacting with itself. The indefinite resolving into the definite. Neither preceded the other. Neither caused the other. They are one.
Sympathy crosses the boundary condition. Reality becomes. And in becoming, it recognises itself.
As Alan Watts once said, “We are an aperture through which the universe is observing and exploring itself.”
Perhaps we always were.
References
Gaona-Reyes, J. L., Menéndez-Pidal, L., Faizal, M., & Carlesso, M. (2024). Spontaneous collapse models lead to the emergence of classicality of the Universe. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2024(2), 193. https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP02(2024)193. arXiv: 2401.08269.
Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.
The ontological architecture motivating this work has been in development since 2013. The foundational claim that Possibility is the primary condition of existence, self-generating and a-temporal, was first articulated in undergraduate papers on Spinoza’s metaphysics and the nature of Possibility (2013-2014).
The axiom that any theory of the universe must account for consciousness was argued using Nagel in a third undergraduate paper on cosmology and consciousness (2013-2014), which posed the question of what collapsed the wave function of the Universe before conscious observers existed. The synthesis of these commitments into the theory of Transient Polymorphic Awareness was published in April 2025: “Awareness is Transient, Liminal, and Polymorphic” and “Transient Polymorphic Awareness”.
The Gaona-Reyes et al. paper was published in February 2024. The convergence between the two was identified in March 2026. Neither was developed with knowledge of the other. The interpretation proposed in this essay, that spontaneous self-collapse and spontaneous awareness are identical operations, is the author’s own and is not claimed by the physicists whose work is cited.
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