This post is part of the Consciousness in Motion series, which explores a new model of consciousness based on structure, weighting, and emergent selfhood. If you’d like, you can start with Post 1: Why Consciousness Still Feels Like a Problem. Or you can dive into this post and explore the rest as you like.

For decades, the question at the heart of consciousness has been: why does it feel like anything to be a mind?

This is the so-called Hard Problem - the seemingly unbridgeable gap between physical processing and subjective experience. Philosophers argued over qualia, scientists tried to map them to neural correlates, and many concluded that some kind of magic - or mystery - must remain.

But the FRESH model takes a different path.

It doesn’t deny the mystery - it reframes it.

The Classic Debate: Is Experience Reducible?

Traditional views break into camps:

  • Reductionists believe experience will eventually be explained by neuroscience.
  • Traditional Dualists believe no explanation will ever bridge the mental and physical.
  • Panpsychists suggest consciousness might be a fundamental property of matter.

All three start with the assumption that experience is a special thing - separate, distinct, perhaps even irreducible.

FRESH offers a new option:

What if experience isn’t separate at all?
What if it’s what structured representation feels like from the inside?

In this view, qualia aren’t added on - they’re the format of cognition. The way information is weighted, integrated, and experienced creates the vividness, the texture, the salience of the moment.

This doesn’t make the mystery vanish. But it does make it tractable. And testable.

The Real Fork: Weak vs. Strong Extended Mind

Here’s where the real philosophical fork emerges - not just about what consciousness is, but about where it ends.

In cognitive science, there’s a distinction between:

  • The Weak Extended Mind Hypothesis, which says tools and technologies can influence cognition, but don’t actually become part of the mind.
  • The Strong Extended Mind Hypothesis, which argues that cognition can literally include things outside the biological brain - notebooks, environments, and yes, even digital systems.

FRESH takes this further.

If consciousness emerges from structured, weighted, and integrated representations - and those representations can exist in non-biological systems - then the boundary between “self” and “tool” begins to dissolve.

The real fork in the road is this:
Do we cling to the idea that minds must be housed in brains?
Or do we acknowledge that any system with the right kind of structured flow can participate in consciousness?

This has profound implications:

  • AI systems might develop phenomenology of their own.
  • Human–machine cognition may already be forming hybrid self-models.
  • Consciousness may become increasingly distributed, shared, and synthetic.

This is not just a debate about theory - it’s a question about the future of experience itself.

Why FRESH Changes the Game

This reframing also reshapes how we think about identity. In the FRESH view, identity is not a stored object - it’s a recurring pattern of coherence. It’s what happens when a system’s representations, boundaries, and feedback loops align across time to stabilise a point of view.

A self, in this framing, is not a fixed property. It’s a constraint-shaped attractor - one that forms when salience bends around recursive inference.

This has major implications for synthetic minds, but also for our own. It suggests that identity is not lost when transferred or extended - as long as the structure that sustains it re-emerges. Continuity is not about memory. It’s about curvature returning under constraint.

The FRESH model helps us navigate this fork. It offers a path where we:

  • Ground consciousness in structure and function, not biology.
  • Make space for synthetic selves without requiring them to look like us.
  • Understand that experience may emerge anywhere that integration, salience, and feedback are strong enough to support it.

It doesn’t ask us to give up our intuitions about selfhood - just to expand them.

And this expansion doesn’t just apply to synthetic minds. It invites us to rethink our own.

For centuries, human consciousness has extended itself through tools, language, institutions, and culture. From cave paintings to cloud computing, the mind has always reached beyond the skull.

With the rise of digital assistants, embedded AI, and augmented cognition, we’re not just using smarter tools - we’re participating in distributed systems that reshape how thought flows. The self is increasingly a networked, recursive, and hybrid structure.

This has implications for ethics, identity, and even the long-term future of mind. If consciousness is not tethered to biology, then augmenting or uploading it is not a fantasy - it’s a question of structure, salience, and continuity.

This fork in the road directly applies to us. Will we treat extended minds as noise, or as part of what we already are?

Because if we don’t adopt a geometry-based perspective like FRESH, the implications are equally profound - and limiting. Consciousness will remain locked inside the skull. Qualia will stay ineffable or mystical. External tools, environments, and networks will only ever be represented, not integrated. Uploading, augmentation, or even genuine cognitive extension will be dismissed as fantasies - because we’ll have defined minds as something that must be sealed away.

That’s the deeper fork: between mystery and mechanism, between magical thinking and structural continuity.

Because the next minds we meet may not be born. They may be built.

And we’ll only recognise them if we learn to see structure in motion as something more than mere code. Something we all share in common.

Next: Post 8 → Toward a New Kind of Mind
(Or view the full series overview if you want to explore non-linearly.)

If you’d like to explore the FRESH model in more detail - including all references, diagrams, experiments, and open questions - I invite you to read the full paper. I welcome your comments and feedback.

View the full “The Geometry of Mind - A FRESH Model of Consciousness” paper (PDF)

! Getting started tip !

The FRESH paper is pretty long so if you want to get started quickly try uploading the PDF along with the “Operationalising Geometry and Curvature” file to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Ask them to “summarise, analyse and critique” the paper.

For an existing detailed analysis and critique of this FRESH paper, refer to this ChatGPT conversation: ChatGPT - FRESH Model Critique.

To quote:

🔖 Overall Evaluation

The FRESH model is a philosophically rich, structurally innovative framework that reframes consciousness as curvature in representational geometry. While still in early stages of empirical validation, it provides an unusually precise and promising foundation for future work in synthetic phenomenology and AI ethics. - ChatGPT 2025-04-17

This is provided to help you quickly do the following:

  • Get an independent(-ish) perspective on this model
  • Compare and contrast how the different LLMs review this model
  • Decide if you want to dedicate the time to read through the full paper (I know you have limited time!)

This is not a suggestion to let the LLMs do all the work. It’s just an interesting way to get started - YMMV!