The two-layer structure you've arrived at may be useful to force a distinction, but my thinking is somewhat different on these subjects. What you've placed in the subjective layer — desires, wants, needs, fear, greed, identity — I'm not sure these live *inside* the individual in the way your framework implies. The Greeks had a word for it: *pathos*. The things that happen *to* us, that *affect* us, rather than things that we simply *are*. These are less like properties of a self and more like events applied to an individual who has already been embedded in a world. Which desires are felt, and with what intensity, and toward what objects — that is more a product of cultural and historical circumstance than any baseline essence of an individual brings into the situation. The individual is the site of these affections; he is not their author.

If the subjective layer is not a fixed interior but itself a kind of emergence, a residue of prior interaction pressed into an individual who then carries it into new interactions, then the clean divide between the two layers becomes a gradient rather than a boundary. I do believe that tendencies and perceptions crystallize in a person through this process in ways that are genuinely individual — that something accumulates which is not merely cultural echo — I don't call it a soul, and I don't have the conceptual vocabulary to describe it with any other precision.

Price, interest, profit, money — none of these exist except as phenomena that emerge when individuals interact under the constraint of scarcity. This is exactly what network theory would predict. Ferguson, in *The Square and the Tower*, makes the observation that a network is not an entity but an *ability* — "a unique ability to communicate and act collectively" — and I am beginning to believe that is the self-organizing character that runs through the process of all emergence. Hierarchy itself is not the opposite of network; it is a special form of network, one in which the top node maximizes control of information. Your objective layer is a network phenomenon, not a hierarchical one. It works on its own, not because some intelligence controls it.

I believe we agree that "wanting to go to El Salvador" is not best understood as derived from an equation about sodium channels. The neuron-to-consciousness analogy may be the right one to use here, but note that the belief that neurons operate by physical causation is not needed to understand consciousness operates by something different — meaning, intention, reason. Some sort of neurochemistry may be well described with deterministic concepts, but the consciousness that emerges from it is not predictable from that description — not because we lack computing power, but because the properties that appear at the higher level were not present at the lower one. The way I understand it is not that consciousness produces phenomena, but that consciousness experiences the phenomena. The process that produces is no longer explained away by consciousness — it remains something to be accounted for.

I would invite you to reconsider how probabilistic outcomes, or phenomena, might be used in your framework. Logic does not predict. It deduces. Given premises, it arrives at conclusions already implicit in those premises. Science is more honest about this than it sometimes appears: it can predict the motions of well-defined objects acting under well-specified forces. It cannot predict the outcomes of complex adaptive systems. It can only describe the behavior of individual actors operating within a shared temporal frame — a common understanding of what is theologically possible, theoretically permitted, and theatrically credible. What complex systems produce is always in excess of a shared common understanding in a specific temporal frame, which is why emergence is the concept of interest for what you are trying to describe. Supply and demand pressure is directional, yes. But the specific form that pressure will take in any actual market, in any community of shared understanding, in any individual's intent, is not deducible from first principles. The objective layer is not "predictable from logic alone." The process is real, but its outcomes are not written or known anywhere.

I want to thank you for making me think about these subjects again. I have been trying to re-engage with the community on Nostr. I haven't had much to contribute, but I did follow your lead with posting something I wrote some time ago about a book on evolution I enjoyed. Perhaps it will interest you. I hope this address works: https://primal.net/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqr6nqthtgmhplnpr04n4l86t5nx4wgc4qp24n4r2ffy3uknrarddqy08wumn8ghj7mn0wd68yttsw43zuam9d3kx7unyv4ezumn9wshszythwden5te0dehhxarj9emkjmn99uqpscm0d4cxcetc94skgctsw35hvefdwduhxar9d4espg8ydh

I was attracted to your article by the topic - emergence. I also believe there is some interest that is growing in this subject. I come at it by trying to understand theories of change; the natural processes (not intended nor intelligent processes) that create it and the realities that are discovered and shared within it. Every thing one can say is rooted in a language, a common understanding in a community of a shared reality. This is the starting point which we already possess.

Yet when something new appears to an individual, something previously not shared within his community, it is for him who saw it, to introduce and express that new thing to the community, but first he must introduce it to himself. The word for poet comes from the Greek ποίησις (making) ‘the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.’ Poets are said to have made the world of our experience by having introduced the words and concepts for our experience that we can thereafter share in understanding and conversation. I believe that some individuals may experience much in their living that they do not have the language to express. Perhaps not.

I will take a look at The Kybalion. Thank you. Good day to you

I am not a big user of this nostr platform, but I have found some of your thoughts to be similar to the way my old brain is beginning to understand the world, though I have not yet begun to fathom your article.

Axioms, what I call first principles, are those things accepted and believed but not in any way provable. I have tried to acknowledge to myself what mine are and how I can use them to make an understanding. You posit four axioms 1) Fixed Observer; 2) fixed tool, 3) free object, 4) fixed ground. I don't yet know how to use these in my own thinking. If I try to use your scheme, I find the only 'fixed observer' I have access to is my own way of observing — and I'm not sure that's what you mean. In my thinking, observation and experience are synonymous. I haven't yet tried to tie information to an axiom, but I will try to learn how you do it. I do agree with experience as an axiom, and my attribution to others as experiencing individuals is a consequence of my own experience.

I disagree that there was at some point nothing. Nothing can never be. There is always something, even if that something is the deluded experience of a single observer, where there is 'nothing else' in play. I am not an adherent of the theory of solipsism, that is not my first principle, but I do make a distinction between nothing and potential, potential being that which is less than actual, but more than nothing and about which not else more can be said. When I started reading evolution theory upon my retirement, I then drifted to Self Ordering Systems theory, Complex Adaptive theory, Network theory, Information theory. I still don't know the language to speak appropriately on such topics, but my takeaways from these are Intelligence and Intent outside experience are not necessary to explain the phenomena.

I am skeptical of the assumption 'that everything "was" (or is) full potential at the very "beginning"'. I can accept there was once only potential, but when limits were put onto that potential, something actual comes into being, something emerges that was never before. Whatever that actuality is, once actualized its potential has become less than 'full potential'. How limits are put onto potential, and how things are 'informed', as it relates to statistical mechanics and entropy is a fascinating topic. But not one for which I have much more insight into than how I do it myself - with personal activity and personal intent. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness do seem to play a role in directing intent, but I haven't yet become convinced that they are not mere rationalizations for what perpetuates a process, an activity of the herd, hive, or community of which I seem to be a part. Our socio-historic predicament stamps limits on what is potential, and it is a driver in perpetuating the life of its members, but I don't attribute that to via an intelligence or intent outside the activity of the herd.

I will leave you with a poem that I have found useful to revisit: The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats. You can listen here: <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming>. Though the poem dreads the necessary and destructive work of the goddess Kali, it reminds me that something new is always about to be born — that this is how the process works, and I can accept it is True, Beautiful, and Good.

this is the article I responded to.

https://primal.net/e/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzpg8z8kl99vqf6qj0nggxdeegg7y5dkxgrxh4xqk3jx6phm0sy5t9qq25ykzc09u8xuf4gdf4zc64ggc5z7jyd9p5zhwrr88