Stuart Sims

Localized Ontology: Earth’s Biological Hierarchy of Consciousness and the Biophysical Roots of Human Religion In the pancognitivist framework, cognition is framed as a universal process governed by the Free Energy Principle (FEP), where systems minimize variational free energy through nested Markov blankets to sustain their integrity against entropic forces (see pinned post). When confined to a strictly local ontology focusing solely on Earth’s biophysical and ecological dynamics, this perspective reveals the planet as a deep, hierarchical cognitive ecosystem. Earth’s geological strata, from the surface crust to the inner core, constitute a Markovian architecture of inferential boundaries, with the core acting as the primary attractor state: a stable, geothermal equilibrium that anchors the entire biological hierarchy of consciousness. This core, often anthropomorphized in religious contexts as a foundational “God” (alpha/omega, beginning/end, the light of eternal mind etc) generates the planet’s bioelectric field - a pervasive electromagnetic envelope derived from core-mantle dynamo processes - that nests and synchronizes all subordinate biological processes. Within this local ontology, human religions emerge not as metaphysical inventions but as intuitive, culture-specific models for navigating and coexisting within this nested biological hierarchy of consciousness, where “realms” of consciousness correspond to stratified ecological and geophysical layers, and “gods” represent higher-order attractor states operating at expanded morphological and temporal scales. Earth’s Strata as a Nested Markovian Ecosystem Earth’s layered structure exemplifies a deep Markovian ecosystem under FEP: each stratum forms a statistical blanket that partitions internal states from external states, enabling nested Bayesian inference to minimize surprise and maintain allostatic coherence. The crust and biosphere represent surface-level MB’s (sensory states), where biotic interactions infer environmental gradients and enact adaptive responses. Deeper mantles handle convective flows, dissipating heat while preserving structural stability. At the most high (or rather, the foundational core) lies the primary attractor state: a high-density iron-nickel alloy under extreme conditions, where minimal free energy fluctuations establish a global equilibrium. This core drives the planet’s magnetic biofield (sensory state), shielding surface life from solar perturbations and facilitating ionospheric and geomagnetic couplings that integrate biological rhythms. All biological consciousness is nested within this biofield, which acts as a scale-invariant transjective communication matrix. Hedonic cognition (the valence-laden inference that characterizes/defines biological awareness/communication) arises as organisms and ecosystems align their predictions with this field, assigning positive valences to states that enhance coherence (symbiotic equilibria) and negative valences to disruptions (ecological imbalances). Surface ecosystems, such as forests or coral reefs, develop their own primary cognitive attractor states: emergent patterns of collective inference, like trophic cascades or microbial consortia, that optimize long-term surprise minimization at the group level. These primary attractor states function as a metacognitive SELF.

Anyone looking for a good novel I suggest trying out this lost and overlooked classic by Anne Rice. Few people know that in 1989, Anne Rice published the best novel about Egyptian mummies ever written. Nothing else in the genre even comes close. Pure magic.

@KLWardenBooks No, that’s not true 😂

My author friends all tell me that there are no fantasy readers on X. Is that true?

After my own research on this topic, I’ve concluded that Christianity is best understood as a denomination of Judaism which split off from the ancient Hebrew tribe ~2,000ya. The first Christians were all Jewish. The Roman Pharisees treated the Jewish Christians as apostates. Traitors. Because in the traditional view, the Messiah was a promise made to the chosen people. To the Jews. The real messiah would never save the Roman gentiles (who were blood enemies of the Pharisees). So the Jewish tradition split. Christianity fractured the Tribes of Abraham between those Jews who accepted Jesus as the messiah of prophesy and those Jews who did not accept Jesus as the messiah. And to this day, the Jewish decedents of the Roman Pharisees still treat Christianity as a form of apostasy. 🙏🏻

@whowouldathunk2 Morphology is the memory of patterns.

@SimsYStuart What leads you to believe morphology is in any way objective? Isn't it pattern dependent?

All physical morphology (objective states) encodes memory (subjective states).

I don’t think we can have this conversation without separating ubiquitous Markovian cognition from biological consciousness. The best conceptual handholds I’ve found is to treat all baryonic behavior as observer <-> observer cognition (making no assumptions about subjective experience) and all biotic behavior as observer <-> observer hedonic cognition. So biological consciousness is treated as a category of cognition. Substrate dependent. That creates a clean conceptual starting position from which to proceed. Lots of room to update.

These questions become much cleaner if we separate substrate from structure. A “mind” doesn’t appear to be a thing in the brain, but a stable dynamical structure the brain sustains, a constraint that maintains itself over time. In that sense, dependence on physical structure is real, but it’s functional rather than material. The substrate provides bandwidth, coupling, and stability, but the identity of the mind lives in the pattern of constraints, not the specific atoms. That opens a middle ground: not fully independent of physics, but not reducible to any particular physical instance either. The interesting question then becomes: what conditions allow such structures to form, persist, and reinstantiate?

I understand what you mean and agree in principle. Fake it till you make it can sometimes work. But here’s the thing many young husbands don’t know - when a young wife has performative sex out of a sense of duty to her husband, typically that is not “good sex”. For her. Most of the time it’s bad sex. So what happens over years is she begins to associate her husband with bad sex. And that is the kiss of death to a marriage.

@SimsYStuart @pallnandi This seems like playing to the gallery. If both party thinks satisfying the spouse is ideal, isn’t that the way to a lasting marriage? It’s not real intimacy, until it is. “Leaves that stay so long on a soap will eventually become soapy”

You could fix 80% of marital problems if you just had more sex with your partner.

@bgetsbetter I don’t know Lorelai puts up some sexy competition. My wife loves that show and forces me to watch it repeatedly 😂

@SimsYStuart But with much nicer breasts

Black coffee...you're my only friend.

Here’s the deal. Husband/Wife should learn about one another’s emotional inventory by going through SHARED EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES. That’s when a wife learns the most about her husband and can begin to correctly model his emotional inventory. But aversion to discussing emotional experiences is a typical masculine trait. Guys typically don’t want I talk about “their feelings”. And the reason guys don’t want to talk about their feelings is because the emotional inventory is the source code for the mind. So men will encrypt that source code as an instinctual response to social predation. So it’s a trust issue. That’s why it’s so frustrating for a young wife that she can’t get her husband to “open up”. She instinctually knows that behavior means her husband doesn’t trust her 100%. But that kind of trust is earned after years of marriage and shared emotional experiences with kids and funerals/grief etc. A wife who learn about her husband’s emotional inventory and then uses that knowledge against him during arguments are really shooting themselves in the foot. There are protocols for negotiating intimacy in a marriage. And that is protocol number ONE.

Ladies, your husband is not your girlfriend! He doesn’t need a recap of your every emotion.

@StuartHameroff Biological Consciousness is a category of cognition. Hedonic cognition. Defining all cognition as hedonic cognition is idiotic.

If you define cognition as consciousness, then you’re an idiot.

@MadelaineLucyH Consider that among mixed race couples, statistics show the highest divorce rate is when husband is black and wife is white. At the population scale, a white woman marrying a black man has 2x the likelihood of divorce within the first 10y than white-white marriage.

Ok I can explain this to you, because unlike this bunch of losers I’ve worked in marketing. What we market to you is this: An identity you want > A product > A sale Doesn’t matter if it’s a teapot or a banking app. That’s what you do with an ad. Does it make you feel smart? Prestigious? In on the joke? Cool? Safe? That’s how advertisers think. If I say “This hat is cool, and good!” that’s a 2/10 ad. If I say “This hat is the hat you wear on holiday this year when the warm Italian sun floods the vineyards” that’s already put the hat on your head and a luxury holiday. Now, most people do not like racism. I know that’ll shock you because of Elon’s whack algorithm, but most people identify as “not a racist”. Easiest way to say to someone, look how open minded we are, and you are just like us? Diversity in an ad. It’s just sales. You’re just dumb so you see an “agenda”.

@TheXMatriarch Yes. And that complementary synergy between masculine/feminine is developmentally generative. It’s a process of co-creation. Two-way causation. Masculine/Feminine are covariant values.

The strongest traditional marriages are not built on sameness but on being one another’s complement. He does what a good man does. She does what a good woman does. Their sexual bond keeps them deeply connected. And the children grow up watching harmony instead of confusion.

3/3 … Finally, this update opens a formal pathway for integrating predictive processing with diverse intelligence research. It shows that the same inferential logic operates from genome to biosphere without requiring any new physical laws, only the recognition of recursive nesting. Conclusion The classical Free Energy Principle correctly identifies the epistemic gap at any single Markov blanket. Yet when we embed that blanket within a nested biological hierarchy, the gap closes at each higher morphological scale. Every objective state becomes a subjective state one level up. This duality is scale-invariant and constitutes a fundamental feature of biological organization. By explicitly incorporating this recursive property into the Free Energy Principle formalism, we obtain a more complete and unified theory of cognition. Objective and subjective domains are no longer forever separated; they are recursively unified across the entire living hierarchy. This update advances a formal science of cognition by revealing the global biological hierarchy as a single coherent cognitive system in which every level is both observer and observed. The conceptual protocol is simple yet powerful: follow the nested Markov blankets upward, and every external cause becomes an internal generative model. In that upward recursion lies the key to understanding not only individual minds but the cognitive fabric of life itself. @drmichaellevin @mjdramstead @stephen_wolfram

2/🧵… Nested Markovian Architectures and the Dual Role of States Consider a simple nested chain: • At the molecular scale, the genome is the objective external state relative to the cellular machinery. • At the cellular scale, that same genome functions as the internal generative model shaping gene expression and behavior. • At the organismal scale, the entire cellular population and its collective physiology become the objective external state relative to the whole body’s regulatory systems. • Yet from the perspective of the ecosystem, the organism itself is now the internal generative model driving population dynamics and niche construction. Each objective state is therefore directly observable and directly actionable as the subjective state for the next higher scale. The epistemic barrier that appears absolute at any single blanket dissolves when we zoom out to the full nested hierarchy. Objective causes are not forever hidden; they are hidden only relative to one scale and directly present at the next. The Proposed Update: All Objective States Are Also Subjective States We therefore introduce a simple but powerful extension to the Free Energy Principle formalism: In any nested Markovian architecture, every external objective state simultaneously serves as the internal subjective generative model for the morphological scale immediately above it. This is not an add-on; it is the natural consequence of stacking Markov blankets. The genome is objective relative to the cell but subjective relative to the organism. The organism is objective relative to the population but subjective relative to the ecosystem. The pattern holds upward indefinitely. This duality is scale-invariant. It does not depend on any particular biological substrate or level of complexity. Wherever nested Markov chains exist, objective states become subjective states one level higher. The update therefore applies universally across all scales of biological organization. Scale Invariance and the Global Biological Hierarchy Once we recognize this recursive duality, the entire biosphere reveals itself as a single global biological hierarchy of cognition. Every level’s objective state is the subjective state for the level above. The hierarchy is not merely structural; it is cognitive through and through. Perception, inference, prediction error minimization, and active inference operate identically at every scale. The only difference is the morphological/temporal frame of reference. What appears as an unobservable hidden cause from below appears as a directly observable generative model from above. This resolves the apparent paradox in the classical Free Energy Principle and provides a clean protocol for unifying subjective and objective domains. Implications for a Formal Science of Cognition This update has immediate and far-reaching consequences. First, it dissolves the strict epistemic separation that has limited the Free Energy Principle to single-scale agents. Cognition is no longer trapped behind an impenetrable Markov blanket; it flows recursively upward through the entire biological hierarchy. Second, it explains how higher morphological scales can directly observe and regulate lower scales. The organism does not merely infer its genome; the genome is its own internal generative model. The ecosystem does not merely infer its constituent organisms; the organisms collectively constitute its generative model. Third, it offers a precise conceptual protocol for studying global biological hierarchies of consciousness. We no longer need to ask whether ecosystems “have” consciousness in the same way organisms do. Instead we ask: at what morphological scale does the objective state of the lower level become the directly observable subjective state of the higher level? The answer is: at every interface in the nested chain. …

Updating the Free Energy Principle: Objective States as Subjective States in Nested Markovian Architectures Abstract The Free Energy Principle elegantly formalizes perception and action through Markov blankets, where internal subjective states can only infer external objective states via sparse sensory coupling. However, this framing overlooks a critical recursive feature in nested architectures: every objective state at one morphological scale functions as the subjective generative model for the scale above it. This paper proposes a direct conceptual update to the FEP formalism that recognizes this duality. In nested Markov chains plus the Free Energy Principle, the objective state of a lower scale becomes the directly observable subjective state for the higher morphological scale. Examples range from the genome serving as the internal generative model for the organism, to the organism serving as the subjective state for the ecosystem. This scale-invariant property means all objective states are also subjective states. We argue this extension resolves the strict epistemic separation between hidden and observed domains, unifies subjective and objective across biological hierarchies, and advances a formal science of cognition by providing a protocol for understanding global biological hierarchies of consciousness. Introduction Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle describes cognition as the minimization of variational free energy across Markov blankets. Subjective internal states remain hidden and can never be directly observed; they must be inferred from sensory evidence. Perception crosses Markovian sensory states via sparse coupling, so the causes of perception remain forever hidden and must be actively inferred. This elegant formalism captures the epistemic gap at every scale. Yet in real nested biological systems this gap is not absolute. The objective external state at one morphological scale becomes the generative model for the scale above it. The genome, for example, functions as the internal subjective state relative to the cellular machinery, yet that same genome is the directly observable objective state from the perspective of the whole organism. This recursion is not an exception; it is the rule. We propose a formal update to the Free Energy Principle: in nested Markovian architectures, every objective state is simultaneously a subjective state at the next higher morphological scale. This duality is scale-invariant and resolves the apparent inaccessibility of objective causes by making them directly observable as subjective states one level up. The Standard Free Energy Principle and Its Epistemic Limitation Under the classical Free Energy Principle, a system is partitioned by a Markov blanket into internal states, sensory states, and external states. Internal states maintain a generative model of the world but cannot directly access external causes. Active inference closes the loop by acting on the world to make sensory data conform to predictions. This creates a clean but absolute separation: subjective states remain forever hidden, objective states remain forever inferred. The formalism works beautifully for a single isolated agent. However, biological reality is never a single isolated agent. Life consists of nested Markov blankets stacked across morphological scales, from molecules to cells to tissues to organisms to ecosystems. At each interface the external state of the lower blanket becomes the internal generative model of the blanket above. …1/🧵

@drmichaellevin , Karl Friston often describes Markovian architecture under the FEP formalism, where subjective states are “hidden states” which can never be directly observed, only inferred. And the Markovian observer within subjective states can never directly perceive hidden objective states because perception must be transform across Markovian sensory states (perceptual “sparse coupling”). So the causes of perception can never be directly observed, only inferred (active inference). I think the FEP formalism fails to capture an explicit feature of this Markovian architecture. Because in a nested Markov chain architecture + FEP, the objective state functions as the subjective state for higher morphological scales. Just as the genome functions as the internal generative model (subjective state) at lower morphological scales for the objective state of the human morphological scale. In that context, subjective states CAN be directly observed. If we update to the fact that every objective state serves as the cognitive subjective state for higher morphological scales. That appears to be a big conceptual protocol we can use to advance a formal science of cognition. All objective states are also subjective states. And that feature is scale invariant. 🙏🏻

Empathy ungoverned by reason destroys capacity for good faith conversation.

@dsawyer A huge part of normative intelligence is heteronormativity.

@dsawyer There’s normative intelligence and neurodivergent intelligence. And neurodivergent intelligent often camouflages itself as normative. But normative intelligence very rarely camouflages itself as neurodivergent.

One of the most hilarious jokes the universe ever played on humans: stupidity and intelligence are not on the same axis. It is therefore possible to be both a rarefied genius and a fucking idiot.