1. Physicalism claims that all reality is physical
2. Cognitive states exist in reality
3. Cognitive states are physical
4. Physicalism claims that there is a mind-independent physical reality
5. Physicalism claims that physicalism can be known to be true
6. Knowledge claims are cognitive states, and therefore physical
7. Therefore, to know that physicalism is true, a cognitive state must accurately map onto the mind-independent reality it is about
8. Therefore, physicalism requires that at least some mind-dependent cognitive states accurately correspond to mind-independent physical reality
9. That mind-dependent cognitive states accurately correspond with mind-independent reality is not automatically justified
10. Any justification used to establish this correspondence is itself another cognitive state
11. Therefore, the justification is itself another physical cognitive state
12. Therefore, physicalism must rely on a physical cognitive state to justify the claim that physical cognitive states reliably track mind-independent physical reality
13. This is circular, as it presupposes the point in question
14. Therefore, physicalism cannot non-circularly justify the claim that cognitive states accurately represent mind-independent physical reality
15. Hence, physicalism cannot justify access to reality beyond mind-dependent states
16. Hence, physicalism cannot justify the claim that all reality is physical
17. But physicalism claims that physicalism can be known to be true
18. Therefore, physicalism contradicts its own claim to knowledge
19. Therefore, physicalism is false

——

By 15, physicalism leads to epistemic solipsism

By physicalism, I mean ontological physicalism. Agnosticism to what mind-independent reality is like is not compatible with physicalism.

This argument is agnostic to what epistemological framework you use. Corresponding to an external physical state is NOT the correspondence theory of truth. It means regardless of what you call it, the cognitive state behind the knowledge claim and what the knowledge claim is about are both physical states. Hence, physicalism has to justify why the former accurately maps onto the latter. They can’t do this without circularity.

The only way to avoid this is by asserting as a brute fact that some cognitive states accurately map onto physical reality. Not only is this circular (presupposes physicalism is true), it leads to panpsychism when taken to its logical conclusion.

This is a quote from Robert Anton Wilson's "Cosmic Trigger."

"[I recommend against trying Crowley's] more advanced techniques without (a) being in excellent health, (b) being competent in at least one athletic skill, (c) being able to conduct experiments accurately in at least one science, (d) having a general knowledge of several sciences, (e) being able to pass an examination in formal logic and (f) being able to pass an examination in the history of philosophy, including Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, Spiritualism, Comparative Theology, etc.

"Without that kind of general knowledge and the self-confidence and independence of thought produced by such study, magick investigation will merely blow your mind. As Brad Steiger has said, the lunatic asylums are full of people who naively set out to study the occult before they had any real competence in dealing with the ordinary."

Specifically c, d, e, and f.

For the couple days, I’ve been working on a framework that eventually became what I now call Recursive Model Integration Theory (RMIT).

It didn’t begin with artificial intelligence.

It didn’t begin with neuroscience.

It didn’t even begin with cognitive science.

It began with a simple psychological observation.

How does a mind decide which ideas become part of itself?

That question sounds almost philosophical, but the more I thought about it, the more it felt computational.

Every day we generate thousands of thoughts.

Some disappear instantly.

Some become beliefs.

Some reshape our identity.

Some change the trajectory of our lives.

Why?

The first observation

I noticed something obvious that I had somehow never explicitly considered.

The human mind seems to perform two different kinds of work.

One part constantly produces possibilities.

It imagines explanations, predicts the future, invents stories, proposes solutions, dreams, worries and creates.

Another part decides whether those ideas deserve to stay.

At first I called these processes the Storyteller and the Reality Checker.

The Storyteller imagined.

The Reality Checker compared those stories with experience.

But after some time, I realized the names were too human.

The same computational pattern seemed to appear far beyond storytelling.

Scientists generate hypotheses.

Engineers generate designs.

Artists generate compositions.

Large language models generate candidate continuations.

Stories were only one example.

So the Storyteller became the Generator.

The Reality Checker became the Integrator.

The insight that changed everything

At first I assumed the Integrator was simply asking:

“Is this true?”

I now think that was wrong.

The Integrator evaluates every new representation through the lens of everything that has already been integrated.

Your beliefs influence which new beliefs you accept.

Your identity influences which identities feel possible.

Your existing knowledge influences what explanations seem reasonable.

Two people can hear the exact same argument and reach completely different conclusions—not because the evidence changed, but because their internal representations are different.

While developing the architecture, another realization emerged.

Not every decision requires modifying the Internal Graph.

Sometimes intelligence simply reacts.

If you touch a hot stove, you pull your hand away before constructing a new internal model.

If you’re walking and lose your balance, you correct your posture almost instantly.

If you’re cold, you put on a jacket.

These responses preserve the organism without reorganizing its representational structure.

I eventually started thinking of these as two different operational modes of the Integrator.

Fast Lane

The Fast Lane responds directly to incoming sensory information.

Its objective is immediate homeostasis.

No reflection.

No restructuring of the Internal Graph.

No long-term learning is necessarily required.

It is optimized for speed rather than representational change.

Slow Lane

The Slow Lane is different.

Here, candidate representations generated by the Generator are compared against multiple sources simultaneously:

• the existing Internal Graph,
• current sensory interaction,
• previously integrated representations,
• and the organism’s current physiological state.

Only representations that survive this process become integrated.

This distinction helped explain why not every action changes who we are.

Some actions simply keep us alive.

Others reorganize the architecture itself.

Why Some Beliefs Refuse to Change

Another question naturally followed.

Why do obviously incorrect beliefs sometimes survive overwhelming evidence?

If integration depended only on logical consistency or predictive success, this shouldn’t happen.

Yet in real life it happens constantly.

That suggested that every representation possesses at least two independent properties.

Predictive Weight

Predictive Weight measures how reliably a representation helps the organism anticipate future interaction with reality.

Representations with high Predictive Weight tend to produce accurate expectations and useful behavior.

They are computationally valuable because they improve future adaptation.

Somatic Cohesion

Somatic Cohesion measures something different.

It reflects the physiological and emotional investment attached to a representation.

Some beliefs become deeply connected to identity, social belonging, personal history, fear, attachment, or survival.

These representations become computationally expensive to replace—not because they are necessarily accurate, but because changing them would require reorganizing large portions of the Internal Graph.

This distinction immediately explains a familiar phenomenon.

A representation can possess relatively low Predictive Weight while simultaneously possessing extremely high Somatic Cohesion.

In other words...

A belief may be objectively wrong and yet remain extraordinarily stable.

Not because the mind refuses evidence.

But because changing that belief would destabilize much larger regions of the existing representational architecture.

From this perspective, belief revision is not merely a logical process.

It is a process of reorganizing an entire computational system.

This also suggests a different interpretation of therapeutic change.

Therapy is often less about presenting new information and more about gradually reducing the cost of integrating new representations into an already established Internal Graph.

That led to another question.

Where are those integrated representations stored?

The Internal Graph

The answer became what I call the Internal Graph.

Not a memory of raw experience.

An evolving network of representations that have survived repeated integration.

This graph became the center of the architecture.

The Generator uses it to construct new possibilities.

The Integrator uses it to evaluate those possibilities.

Both processes depend on the same evolving structure.

Every successful integration changes the graph.

Which means...

every successful integration changes both future generation and future integration.

Learning changes the process of learning itself.

That became the recursive core of the theory.

Compression wasn’t the beginning

For a long time I believed compression was the central idea.

Eventually I realized I had confused a consequence with a cause.

Compression is already happening before conscious thought begins.

Our sensory systems never provide direct access to reality.

They discard almost all incoming information and preserve only useful regularities.

Perception itself is compressed.

Concepts compress repeated experiences.

Scientific theories compress thousands of observations.

Identity compresses decades of life into a relatively stable model of who we are.

Compression is therefore not a separate algorithm.

It is an unavoidable property of finite intelligence.

As the Internal Graph grows, it cannot simply accumulate information forever.

The graph must reorganize itself.

Representations become abstractions.

Abstractions become hierarchies.

Knowledge becomes increasingly reusable.

Compression emerges naturally.

Not because the architecture tries to compress.

Because finite systems have no alternative.

The Consequences of the Architecture

The most interesting aspect of RMIT isn’t Generator, Integrator, or the Internal Graph individually.

It’s what naturally emerges once these three components recursively interact.

If the architecture is approximately correct, many phenomena that are usually studied independently become different expressions of the same underlying computational process.

Beliefs become stable representations that have repeatedly survived integration.

Knowledge becomes the organized structure of the Internal Graph rather than a collection of isolated facts.

Identity becomes the most densely interconnected and stable region of that graph, explaining both psychological continuity and resistance to change.

Creativity emerges when the Generator combines distant regions of the graph to construct representations that have never previously existed.

Insight occurs when a single integrated representation reorganizes large portions of the graph, allowing many previously disconnected observations to suddenly become coherent.

Expertise emerges as repeated integration creates highly compressed domain-specific subgraphs that dramatically improve future generation.

Trauma can be interpreted as representations with extremely high physiological commitment but poor integration into the broader graph.

Healing then becomes the gradual reintegration of those isolated regions into the larger representational structure.

The architecture also suggests a different way of thinking about intelligence itself.

Intelligence may not be best understood as prediction, memory, or optimization alone.

Instead, it may be the continual recursive reorganization of an evolving representational system.

A Possible Bridge Between Disciplines

One reason I’ve continued developing RMIT is that the same architecture appears capable of describing problems traditionally studied by different fields.

In psychology, it offers a computational interpretation of internal dialogue, belief formation, identity development, therapeutic change, and creativity.

In neuroscience, it provides a possible organizational framework connecting imagination, executive evaluation, memory consolidation, distributed brain networks, and embodied regulation into a single recursive process.

In artificial intelligence, it suggests an architecture for continual learning in which generation, integration, persistent representation, and recursive self-modification naturally emerge from the same computational cycle.

This does not mean these fields are identical.

Nor does it imply that RMIT replaces existing theories.

Instead, the proposal is that they may all instantiate the same higher-level computational architecture through different physical mechanisms.

If true, RMIT would not simply be another theory of cognition.

It would be a candidate computational framework capable of describing adaptive intelligence across biological and artificial systems.

Intelligence May Be More Distributed Than We Think

One consequence of the architecture surprised me.

If cognition depends on the interaction between a Generator, an Integrator and an Internal Graph, then there is no obvious reason why all three processes must always occur inside a single mind.

Consider a good conversation.

Sometimes you’re the one generating ideas while the other person evaluates them.

A few minutes later, the roles reverse.

One person notices a pattern.

The other integrates it into a broader framework.

Then a new idea emerges that neither person would likely have produced alone.

The conversation itself becomes part of the computation.

From this perspective, intelligence is not simply an individual property.

It can become a distributed process across multiple interacting Internal Graphs.

Trust as a Computational Mechanism

This also suggests an unexpected role for trust.

In most discussions, trust is treated as a social or emotional concept.

Within RMIT, it may also serve a computational function.

The Integrator is naturally conservative.

Every new representation carries the risk of disrupting an already coherent Internal Graph.

Trust changes that balance.

When we trust another person, we become more willing to temporarily suspend immediate rejection and allow externally generated representations to enter the integration process.

In computational terms, trust acts as a pre-integrative filter.

It lowers the effective cost of evaluating and potentially incorporating representations produced by someone else.

This may explain why we often learn more from teachers, mentors, close collaborators, or trusted friends than from strangers presenting exactly the same information.

The difference is not necessarily the quality of the idea.

It is the probability that the Integrator allows the idea to enter the graph.

Human–AI Collaboration

This possibility became particularly interesting while I was developing RMIT itself.

Many of the ideas in this article emerged through long conversations with large language models.

Sometimes I generated the conceptual direction while the model reorganized it.

Sometimes the model proposed a new connection that I rejected.

Sometimes I integrated it.

Other times it helped reveal contradictions I had overlooked.

Neither of us independently produced the final architecture.

It emerged through repeated cycles of generation and integration distributed across two different representational systems.

This experience made me wonder whether future intelligence will increasingly be understood not as something contained within isolated agents, but as something that emerges through recursive interaction between humans and artificial systems.

If that is true, the most important unit of intelligence may not be the individual mind.

It may be the evolving network of minds capable of generating, integrating, and reorganizing representations together.

What RMIT claims

At its core, the theory makes a surprisingly simple claim.

Reality is never represented directly.

Every adaptive system operates on compressed internal representations.

Adaptive intelligence emerges from the recursive interaction between two complementary computational dynamics:

• the Generator, which constructs candidate representations,
• the Integrator, which incorporates selected representations into an evolving Internal Graph.

Because both processes depend on that graph, every successful integration changes what the system can imagine, what it can subsequently accept, and ultimately what it can become.

Compression, hierarchy, identity, expertise, creativity and continual adaptation all emerge naturally from that recursive interaction.

What I hope happens next

I don’t think RMIT is finished.

If anything, I think it’s finally reached the stage where it deserves to be challenged.

The most valuable feedback now isn’t agreement.

It’s criticism.

If the theory is wrong, I’d like to understand exactly where it breaks.

If it’s incomplete, I’d like to know what is missing.

And if parts of it survive serious scrutiny, perhaps they’ll contribute—however modestly—to our understanding of adaptive intelligence.

That, more than defending the theory itself, is the goal.

Enlightenment

Like in a dream everything is appearing in one awareness. In a dream, if me and you are talking, what are we both made of and appearing in? The one awareness that is asleep.

We assume we are separate awareness because when we blink we see black. So we think "mm i must be inside of the head looking out, separate from the rest". But just like in a dream, of course the awareness we all share will see black when it blinks from that localization of the dream. In a dream you would blink and see black, as i would. But the awareness which perceives it is one, our shared being.

Infact nothing is two, that's a concept. Like hot and cold for example, they are not two. By law of thermodynamics there is no such thing as cold but lesser or more degrees of heat. You can notice on a thermometer 🌡 that from 90 degrees down to say 20 is but lesser or more of the same one phenomenon - heat. Thats why when you touch something super cold it feels? Hot, burns.

Darkness and light are one. Darkness isnt an oppisite of light, it is an absence. There is great difference between oppisites and absence. If Darkness was an oppisite, i could take a handful of darkness, toss it on a candle and put out the light. But I cannot, it is an absence. Lesser or more degrees of the same one phenomenon-light.

Love and fear, One. Fear isnt an oppisite of love, its an absence. Love feels warm. Fear feels cold. Just like when there is lesser degrees of warmth it feels cold. Lesser degrees of love feels cold.

Mind divides all in two. It is nondual.

The body isnt aware either. Awareness is aware. The feeling of hands isnt awareness, feeling isnt aware. You awareness is aware of the feeling of hands. Just like you are aware of the feeling of phone. The feeling isnt aware. Just like in a dream the body isnt aware, awareness is aware.

Most assume they are the thinking in the head because when they think it sounds like their voice in their head. But we can change how we sound when we think, i can sing welcome to the jungle in my head and sound like the lead singer. We just identify with our body and voice so we think as the sound of it.

Most importantly thought doesn't know a thing. The thought dog isnt aware of the thought cat, neither thought knows of the other. Awareness is aware of the thought dog and thought cat. We are not the thinking, there is no thinker. We are the whole, eternal , dimensionless knowing being.

Death is an illusion. What does that mean? It means that awareness never dies. The body dies. But awareness remains. Its like when you fall asleep at night, your body dies right? Hence you no longer know of your body, your room, your life. You, as awareness, creates another dream. You go into the dream world as awareness and identify with a new body.

Start and end, on and off, those are concepts. Awareness does not fit into a conceptual frame. Meaning if I threw this phone across the room and I asked you "when was the start of me throwing my phone"?? Most would say "when you picked it up. When you let go etc..." .. But thats a frozen view of reality. Because in reality you would have to account for every action in my life that happened prior to me throwing the phone. If I woke up and put my shoes on differently and went to the store 3 minutes later I wouldn't have ever stumped my toe and threw it across the room. You could say "well youre birth was the start of you throwing the phone" but then we also have to account for my mother's birth and so on backwards. We freeze moments in time, start, end, start, end, but its all one flowing whole.

As for On and Off. This will answer your question more. On and off is a concept, you turn on the light and turn off the light. But as for awareness it never turns off. You've never not been aware. You'll say "but in deep sleep there is times I disappear, there is nothing to remember, no dream, i dissappeared'. But how do you know that? How do you know there was nothing? Because you (awareness) was present.

Deep sleep isn't the absence of awareness. It is the awareness of absence. Hence when you sleep there is 3 stages. First a dream state, then deep sleep, and dream state again before you wake up. Dreams are mind, mind is simply the activity of awareness. Mind isnt just thinking, it is smell, sight, taste, sensation, perception. So in a dream awareness is active, there is mind so there is the awareness of the activity. In deep sleep there is no activity in awareness, there is no mind, awareness experiences pure awareness, so there is nothing to remember but the absence of activity. You'll say but it was so quick, 2 hours was 1 second. True and thats because mind was absent. When youre having fun, totally present, time flies, time doesnt exist. So as pure awareness in deep sleep hours feels like 1 second. Then mind comes back when you wake and it thinks "i was gone, I was absent" true. But awareness is what you are and it percived the absence of activity.

And your next question will be "so after death there is nothing, just black void"?? NOT AT ALL. Its just like how when you fall asleep at night and awareness just has another dream..

When you have dreams at night, often it is so random, a dream of someone else's life. And that's what dreams are. Everything that has ever happened and ever will is within the one awareness that experienced it. So when awareness delocalizes after death it has access to its unlimited self. All lives, all memories.

Lets say you had a dream that me and you were talking. I have my own experiences, you have yours, then later in that dream we both fall asleep at night and have dreams. Dreams within a dream. . . Where did all those experiences and dreams take place? In the one awareness we both share in the main dream. In the dream, my mind, your mind, the whole world, is just the activity of the one awareness asleep. All is mind. The one mind. You sit and see walls, a world, people, thats all mind. Hence the activity of this one awareness we all share.👁

I came across this post and its replies on Facebook, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on this:

Lonner Ralston

sometimes ideas pop into existence. not sure why, or where from. here is the latest:

A fractal is a complex, never-ending geometric pattern that looks the same at any level of magnification. Driven by repeating a simple process, this concept means that if you zoom in on any part of the shape, you will see a smaller copy of the entire pattern.

If fractals theory holds true, wouldn't this imply that some never-ending pattern would extend from the Quantum level right through the cosmic? If that is the case, why is it not yet apparent? WHAT I CAN SEE, IS IT ALL SPINS...everything spins or rotates, and nothing stays in the same place (expansion) because Time affects it all. I think Time is motive force for all this.

I know this is at odds with theories of the Four Forces that form our Universe. Take the idea for a spin...

The Reply:

Dustinthewind Jack Frost

If you look at a fractal, what are you really looking at? At the base of it all, you have two dimensions, x and y, and a third dimension of color/pigment. x and y have easily observable limits of the edge of the frame, but while there is a limit to how much dimensionality you can express with color, it is practically infinitely times more than the limit of the frame, hence you can go far 'deeper' into the details than you can observe in any one frame. The difference between a fractal object and a real object (other than the level of observation, like with the coast of England problem) is that the limit of a real object is observable while the limit of a fractal is asymptotic, like the vanishing point of a horizon.

And yeah, all scales of reality work together at the same time. If you zoom in on one city, the streets of another don't disappear. I would add that scale is a fundamental axis of reality equal to (but orthogonal from) spacetime and matter.

Yep. It all spins, rotating from one state to another. Reality is a pair of conjoined spirals, one expanding outward, the other contracting inward. Planets, stars, galaxies, cosmoses, all acting/existing linearly from each other within curved space.

The following is a long rant, but I need it to address the time as motive force comment.

Whatever else you can say about the universe, you can say that all of it is some thing plus everything else, right? A thing and everything it is not

U = a + v

v = 1/a

Describe everything that something isn't as a potential, like a field, that closes back on the thing. The simplest way to do this is across the unit circle, which has potentially infinite points along its circumference, the elicitation of which depends entirely on how long the radius is, with the unit circle requiring i and π = 1 (and e, understanding that it is 1 instance of e, not e as 1 instead of ~2.718).

U = a + e^{iπ}

Of course, everything that something is not is acting on itself, so you need a potentially infinite axis acting on another potentially infinite axis. Multiply one circle by an orthogonal circle, and you get a sphere, or in this case, a 3-dimensional field of everything the thing isn't. You go from potentially infinite unique points in two dimensions to three, leaving one real/observer point and unlimited yet still definable imaginary/observed points. Or a scalar and a potentially infinite, 3D vector.

Where Euler's identity shows closure across two dimensions, quaternions show closure across three. e^{iπ} = -1 and so does ijk. So getting rid of b, c, and d from Hamilton's a + bi + cj + dk gives

a + (i + j + k)e^{iπ}

The whole purpose of b, c, and d, though, are to tie the polar coordinates i, j, and k to a. Getting rid of b, c, and d breaks the correspondence, so we need to reintroduce it, and we do that by simply inverting (i + j + k)e^{iπ}, since v = 1/a. This reintroduces Euler through reciprocal correspondence.

(-i + -j + -k)(-e^-{iπ}) + (i + j + k)e^{iπ}

Allow that whatever change you make to one side, you have to make the opposite change to the other, and you get:

(-i + -j + -k)(-e^-{siπ}) + (i + j + k)e^{(-s)iπ}

Any complete, closed system should follow that geometry, and everything within that system must be conserved, since there's nowhere else for anything to go. It can be used to describe physical coordinates against a reciprocal background, but it can also be used to graph quantities.

If your three fundamental axes of causality are scale, spacetime, and matter, you can ascribe a duality to each. -i/i for intrinsic (unit) and extrinsic (range) scale, -j/j for time and space, and -k/k for mass/inertia and energy. If you add energy, you have to subtract mass (at an exchange rate of c^2). If you add time, you have to subtract space. If you decrease the unit scale, you increase the range (assuming you're talking about the same measurement).

So for the engine, or motive force, you apply these elements in combinations, which still have to obey the same conservation logic.

If you increase observer (a) time, you must decrease observer space, the result of which we call "gravity." And this isn't subtracting space, like it goes into some mysterious space reservoir, but more like using up what there is or taking slack out of a line.

If you decrease observer space, you increase observed space, and we call this expansion, which is simply a result of gravity being local (i = 1/(d^2)) and acting three-dimensionally in a three-dimensional context (3 or more objects under attraction). Place two smaller balloons on the surface of a larger balloon and have each deflate at a rate corresponding to their size. Even though the facing surfaces of the two smaller balloons are still contracting together with the deflation of the larger one, the apparent difference grows because the local deflation is more locally significant.

And if you increase observer space, you have to decrease observed time. And sure, that sounds weird, but when you think about it, it's weirder to think that time just comes from nowhere, when time is an unavoidable part of any action. The extent of time may be infinite (without limit), but it still has to come from the universe itself. If both the observer and observed size/scale are held constant, then this implies a limit of process, even if asymptotic, and I think it's fair to call that limit available entropy.

A Response:

Lonner Ralston

Dustinthewind Jack Frost: what if fractal patterns may also occupy 3D space? This is the idea I’m talking about. A fractal pattern of spin/rotation - quarks through Galaxies. After all, spin or rotation is actually a geometric pattern. In all Three Dimensions. Add in the idea that Time may be the motive force for this motion.

A seminary of inward law, 

 Where Spirit weighs what cannot show. 

What lives beneath the spoken law 

Is where the hidden order grows. 

He learned that life is not a crown, 

Not built from what the eye can prove, 

But shaped by what will not come down 

When all foundations try to move. 

For principalities press in 

Through thoughts that no one else can see, 

Yet still it does not break the man -

He stands by what he knows to be. 

For every choice becomes a thread 

That pulls the unseen into form,

And what is buried, but not dead, 

Will rise again through calm or storm. 

She learned that Spirit does not shout, 

Nor Force the mind to bend or kneel, 

But works through what cannot be cut 

From what the heart is made to feel. 

For principalities extend 

Their weight upon her quiet mind, 

Yet still, she does not turn or bend 

From what her truth has now defined. 

She holds the place where thought begins, 

Before the world can name it right, 

And lets what is and what has been 

Be measured only by the light. 

He and she were placed within 

A law not written by their hands,

Yet still they walk where both begin 

To learn what neither understands. 

And in the middle, softly cast, 

A place where both their truths align: 

What shapes the soul will always last 

When Spirit governs heart and mind.