Stuart Sims @SimsYStuart

4/4 … Conclusion Cognition is the thermal property of baryonic systems operating through nested Markov chains under the FEP within a holarchy of holons. Biological consciousness is the hedonic category of that cognition at specific scales. Ontology, as the meta-model of hidden causes, must therefore follow the same middle-out holonic architecture. Building from local holonic ontology first yields sapient models that remain grounded, efficient, coherent, and aligned with human cognitive capacity within the holarchy. Cosmic or quantum-first approaches invert this flow, exceed inferential bandwidth, attempt to collapse the holarchy, and produce ontological derangement. The correct protocol is unambiguous: update models of larger and smaller holons based on well-constructed local holonic ontology, not the reverse. By respecting the middle-out holonic nature of baryonic cognition, we construct ontologies worthy of sapient beings (ontologies that do not merely describe reality but enable us to navigate and flourish within it at every relevant scale). This shift from top-down or bottom-up speculation to middle-out holonic construction marks a necessary maturation in how we understand mind, matter, and the nested holarchy of life.

3/🧵… Deficits of Cosmic/Quantum Ontology Cosmic or quantum scale ontologies attempt to derive local reality from the most distant or most fundamental regimes while ignoring or subordinating the intermediate holons. This reverses the natural middle-out flow within the holarchy and produces systematic deficits. First, such approaches exceed human cognitive capacity. The human observer occupies a specific position within the holarchy. Attempting to hold cosmic expansion or quantum superpositions as primary priors forces the brain (itself a holon) to operate far beyond its evolved hedonic tokenization bandwidth. The result is ontological derangement (OD): models that feel abstract, alien, or emotionally empty despite their mathematical elegance. Second, they invert Bayesian updating across the holarchy. Instead of refining the meta-model from well-constrained local holonic evidence, they impose high-level abstractions downward, often requiring the dismissal or distortion of proximate data that fail to fit the imposed priors. This produces “brittle” ontologies prone to confirmation bias and resistance to belief updating. Third, they lose explanatory traction at the scales that matter most for human survival and flourishing - the very holons in which sapient cognition operates. A cosmic-first model may elegantly describe the early universe yet fail to predict or explain everyday biological or ecological dynamics where hedonic valences operate within living holons. Fourth, ontological derangement manifests psychologically and culturally. When local holonic ontology is subordinated to cosmic or quantum priors, individuals and societies experience chronic low-grade dissonance - a persistent sense that reality “does not add up” at the human scale. This can fuel nihilism, escapism, existentialism, and dogmatic attachment to untestable abstractions that violate the holarchic structure of nature (Simulation/Illusionism/Idealism/Silopsosm). Middle-Out Holonic Construction Restores Sapience Middle-out holonic ontology respects the actual architecture of baryonic cognition as it exists within the holarchy. It begins where prediction errors are cheapest to resolve and hedonic feedback is most salient - within the central holons of the observer. Local holonic models are refined first, then used as robust priors when extending to larger or smaller holons. Cosmic and quantum scales are updated based on well-constructed local holonic ontology, not the reverse. The process of relevance realization is returned to its proper place within the holarchy. This protocol does not reject cosmic or quantum physics. It simply assigns them their proper place in the inferential holarchy: as extensions constrained by well-modeled local holonic reality rather than as foundational replacements that erase or override intermediate holons. The result is a sapient ontology (coherent, actionable, predictive, explanatory, and emotionally resonant) because it mirrors the middle-out thermal architecture through which baryonic holons actually cognize. Implications for Consciousness Studies Recognizing biological consciousness as hedonic cognition within a broader holarchic thermal framework liberates the field from unproductive debates about whether non-biotic systems “have” subjective experience. The question becomes secondary. What matters is the scale-invariant nested Markovian architecture operating across holons and the specific tokenization (hedonic or otherwise) that emerges at each morphological scale within the holarchy. Middle-out holonic ontology further provides a principled way to integrate diverse scales without reductionism or inflationary collapse. It offers a clear protocol for advancing a formal science of cognition: model the most proximate holons and their hidden causes first, then scale outward or inward while preserving holarchic coherence and the autonomy of each level. …

Middle Out Ontology: A Protocol for Building Sapient Models of Reality Abstract We propose a middle-out “holonic” protocol for constructing ontology grounded in Pancognitivism. Cognition is defined as a thermal property of all baryonic systems operating through nested Markov chains under the Free Energy Principle. Reality itself is organized as a holarchy - a nested hierarchy of holons. A holon (Koestler, 1967) is an entity that is simultaneously a whole in itself and a part of a larger whole, possessing both self-assertive and integrative tendencies. At biological scales, sensory information crossing the Markov blankets that define individual holons is tokenized into positive/negative hedonic valences, yielding hedonic cognition as one evolved category of biological consciousness within the broader holarchic architecture of baryonic cognition. Ontology, understood as the aggregated meta-model of hidden causes, must therefore be built middle-out within the holarchy: beginning with the holonic scales most proximate to the observer and only then extending outward or inward while respecting the autonomy of those central holons. This approach contrasts sharply with cosmic/quantum scale ontologies (which exceed human cognitive capacity), and attempt to collapse or override intermediate holons. We defend the benefits of middle-out holonic construction for sapient ontology - clarity, predictive power, coherence, epistemic grounding, and alignment with actual inferential architecture - while documenting the deficits of top-down or bottom-up alternatives, including epistemic overload, loss of grounding, overfitting, and systemic brittleness. Middle-out holonic ontology restores the correct direction of Bayesian updating: local holonic ontology constrains and informs models of both larger and smaller holons, not vice versa. Introduction Cognition is not limited to brains or even to biology. It is a fundamental thermal property of baryonic matter: the tendency of systems to organize, persist, and minimize surprise through nested Markovian architectures under the Free Energy Principle. At every morphological and temporal scale, systems maintain internal generative models, infer external causes across Markov blankets, and act to reduce variational free energy (surprise). These scales are not arbitrary; they correspond to the nested holons that constitute reality. In biotic materials this process acquires a distinctive character. Information passing over sensory states is tokenized into hedonic valences - pleasure/unpleasure valences that compress exploded decision trees into intuitive heuristics. Biological consciousness is then best understood as hedonic cognition: one specific category within the broader thermal architecture of baryonic cognition operating across the holarchy. From this foundation follows a crucial methodological claim: ontology (the meta-model of reality) must be constructed middle-out within the holarchy. We begin with the holonic scales most proximate to the human observer - modeling hidden causes accurately at local biological and ecological holons first. Only then do we extend the model upward or downward while respecting the self-assertive integrity of those central holons. Attempting the reverse (deriving local ontology from cosmic or quantum scales) is epistemically backwards and cognitively damaging because it violates the holarchic structure of nature. This paper explains and defends the middle-out holonic protocol as the correct architecture for building sapient ontology while exposing the deficits of cosmic/quantum-first approaches. … 1/🧵

@_virgil19 @anilkseth @robertwiblin Biotic substrate is special. That’s not in question. We forget, there’s only one category of consciousness. Biological consciousness. When we speak of consciousness we speak of biology. Any other kind of consciousness is hypothetical.

“It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.” - The Secret History (1992)

The beauty of Life is astonishing. Even as a child, I remember being in an almost chronic state of amazement at the beauty of people and places. I’m an old man now and the beauty I see in the world makes me fight back tears. The inability to see that beauty is a disease. And the people infected with that disease are evil and will infect you with their pathology.

@StuartHameroff Redefine biology as a state of matter and consciousness as a property of biotic matter. Very clarifying. 🙏🏻

Larry Bird was magical to watch. But watching the Celtics vs Bulls with Bird vs Jordan in the Playoffs was peak NBA basketball. It will never be that good again.

Larry Legend☘️ @LarryBirdDaily

19 hours ago

The younger generation never got to see Larry Bird move like this..

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@logicThink11031 @PaoloMiasma Biology is consciousness Consciousness is biology When we speak of consciousness we only speak of biological consciousness. Any other turn of consciousness is speculation. 👇🏻

Stuart Sims @SimsYStuart

7 months ago

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

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Ontological derangement 👇🏻

Jesse Michels @AlchemyAmerican

3 days ago

🚨BREAKING: A cognitive scientist from MIT has mathematically proven that evolution guarantees we see zero percent of true reality, that most consciousness in the universe exists without a body, and that non-human intelligences with a wider window on reality than ours can reach

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@bgetsbetter You’re so pretty ❤️

@JoshPhillipsPhD 👇🏻🫵🏻👍🏻🤘🏻🙏🏻

@bgetsbetter Magical 😂

For me the core argument is the correlation between functionalism and homeostasis of the substrate. Biological consciousness functions to maintain homeostasis within deeply nested hierarchy of competency. So biology doesn’t “have” consciousness, the biotic substrate IS conscious. That kind of homeostatic correlation is functionally impossible within Von Neumann architecture. The AI substrate will never BE conscious. 🙏🏻

This is wonderful Holon Ontology (HO 🤣)👇🏻

Eric Beltt @EricBeltt

14 hours ago

@SimsYStuart I recently discovered the term “holon”, which seems closely related to the argument you’re making: x.com/i/grok/share/5…

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@whyarethis No 😂

@logicThink11031 @PaoloMiasma Lots of updates since Descartes. Jaak Panksepp (for example) provides some of the best modern updates to philosophy of mind. 🙏🏻👇🏻 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC40…

I think good philosophy for mental health protocols can be found throughout the ancient world and in modern practices such as Kabbalah. Students need to be stress tested before advancing. Most people lack the temperament for chronic high level thinking. The cognitive stability of novices must be monitored by the teacher(s). Governing bodies must monitor the cognitive stability of teachers. Neurodivergence must be accounted for. Protecting mental health must be protocol number one.

Middle-Out Ontology: A Protocol for Building Sapient Models of Reality Abstract We propose a middle-out protocol for constructing ontology grounded in Pancognitivism. Cognition is defined as a thermal property of all baryonic systems operating through nested Markov chains under the Free Energy Principle. At biological scales, sensory information crossing Markov blankets is tokenized into positive/negative hedonic valences, yielding hedonic cognition as the category of biological consciousness. Ontology, understood as the aggregated meta-model of hidden causes, must therefore be built middle-out: beginning with the most proximate scales to the observer and only then extending outward. This approach contrasts sharply with cosmic/quantum scale ontologies, which exceed human cognitive capacity and produce ontological derangement. We defend the benefits of middle-out construction for sapient ontology—clarity, predictive power, coherence, epistemic coherence and alignment with actual inferential architecture—while documenting the deficits of top-down or bottom-up alternatives, including epistemic overload, loss of grounding, overfitting, and systemic brittleness. Middle-out ontology restores the correct direction of Bayesian updating: local ontology constrains and informs cosmic and quantum models, not vice versa. Introduction Cognition is not limited to brains or even to biology. It is a fundamental thermal property of baryonic matter: the tendency of systems to organize, persist, and minimize surprise through nested Markovian architectures under the Free Energy Principle. At every morphological and temporal scale, systems maintain internal generative models, infer external causes across Markov blankets, and act to reduce variational free energy. In biological materials this process acquires a distinctive character. Information passing over sensory states is tokenized into hedonic valences—pleasure/unpleasure valences that compress exploded decision trees into intuitive heuristics. Biological consciousness is then best understood as hedonic cognition: one specific category within the broader thermal architecture of baryonic cognition. From this foundation follows a crucial methodological claim: ontology (the meta-model of reality) must be constructed middle-out. We begin with the scales most proximate to the human observer, modeling hidden causes accurately at local biological and ecological levels first. Only then do we extend the model upward or downward. Attempting the reverse - deriving local ontology from cosmic or quantum scales - is epistemically backwards and cognitively damaging. This paper explains and defends the middle-out protocol as the correct architecture for building sapient ontology while exposing the deficits of cosmic/quantum-first approaches. Defining the Terms Cognition here carries no assumption of phenomenology in non-biotic systems. It denotes only the nested Markov chain + FEP architecture operating at modular morphological and temporal scales. Baryonic matter itself is the cognitive state of energy - structured, self-evidencing patterns that resist entropic dissolution. Biological consciousness emerges when sensory information is tokenized into hedonic valences, enabling rapid navigation of complex state spaces. This hedonic layer is an evolutionary intensification of the underlying thermal cognition, not a metaphysical add-on but an increase in hedonic acuity. Ontology is the Bayesian meta-model: the aggregated prior distribution that explains the hidden causes of perception. A sapient ontology is one that remains aligned with the observer’s actual inferential position, preserving predictive power without exceeding cognitive capacity. … 1/🧵

As long as you reach for “one’s larger nature” middle out and your reach does not exceed your grasp then 100% agree. My larger point is these mental health concerns are not getting the attention it deserves. Protecting mental health should be protocol number one. The academic culture in STEM completely neglects mental health protocols when educating students. And the teachers themselves are mostly deranged themselves. That situation is not acceptable/sustainable. More people need to start pointing a spotlight on this mental health crisis. Because it’s getting worse.