The Functional Mind

A pattern carved into stone is not, by itself, information. It becomes information the moment something can read it and do something different because of it. Without a processor, it's geology. The pattern and the processor define each other — neither exists without the other. This is the recursive pair. It is the mechanism behind everything alive — from the first chemical networks that learned to...

The debate between dualists and materialists has lasted four centuries. Both sides were half right. The dualists were right that the mind is genuinely different from the matter it inhabits. The materialists were right that there is no supernatural ingredient. But neither had the framework to be right about both at once. Inclusive dualism is that framework. Not a compromise between the two position...

Nobody has ever seen an electron. We grant it existence because our best models require it — and those models survive every test we put them to. The immune system earns existence by exactly the same standard. Same method. Same logic. Same rigor. So why has science treated one as real and the other as a convenient shorthand? Lesson 3: Being Objective About Functional Things is live. It makes the ca...

Lesson 2: The Persistence Test Prologue Consider two things left in a field for a year. The first is a bicycle. Steel frame, rubber tires, a chain that was recently oiled. The second is a bacterium — a single cell, one ten-thousandth the size of a pinhead, with no moving parts you could see under anything but the most powerful microscope. Come back a year later. The bicycle will be on its way to r...

The mind-body problem has been framed wrong for centuries. The real question isn't whether mind and body are two distinct things. They aren't — not fundamentally. The real question is what separates living things from nonliving ones. That's where the answer has been hiding. The Functional Mind is a complete argument in 28 lessons, released fortnightly. By the end, you will have a coherent scientif...

The question that has followed me for fifty years: what are we, exactly — not biologically, but scientifically? This is where the journey begins. The Functional Mind is a complete argument in 28 lessons, released fortnightly. By the end, you will have a coherent scientific framework for understanding life, mind, and what it means to be the kind of thing we are. Not a survey of existing ideas — a n...