Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 3, 2026
Tonetto, Bruno
Physicalism often relies on the idea that every physical event has a sufficient physical cause (causal closure), but quantum mechanics does not provide this. Classical mechanics offered deterministic closure, but quantum theory replaced it with statistical closure: probability distributions are fixed, but which specific outcome occurs is not determined by the formalism. This openness is a structural feature, not a knowledge gap. The choice of which observable to measure (von Neumann's Process 1) is not even statistically constrained, with experimentally confirmed consequences. Bell's theorem rules out local determinism. Restoring closure, as in Bohmian mechanics, requires adding unobservable structure, a metaphysical commitment rather than an empirical discovery.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 3, 2026
Tonetto, Bruno
The apparent conflict between consciousness science and consciousness-first metaphysics is largely an artifact of ontological packaging rather than of the empirical findings themselves. Contemporary theories of consciousness each package a structural discovery about consciousness inside an ontological commitment the discovery does not entail. When separated, five recurring structural features emerge: integration, global accessibility, self-reference, anticipatory modeling, and non-trivial unity. These features are ontologically portable and describe a common structural territory any complete framework must accommodate. The production inference—the move from the brain correlates with consciousness to the brain produces consciousness—is a metaphysical commitment rather than an empirical finding. The essay argues that the structural findings of consciousness science do not entail physicalism, and the recurring structural features must be accommodated by any complete framework.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 3, 2026
Tonetto, Bruno
For over a century, conscious experience—the one thing every investigation of nature presupposes—has been treated as a byproduct of the physical world it was used to study. This essay traces how that inversion occurred through a historically contingent conflation of scientific method with materialist metaphysics, not through philosophical proof. It argues that reversing this inversion, adopting analytic idealism—consciousness as the ontological primitive with dissociation as the mechanism of individuation—resolves more than it costs. Both physicalism and idealism carry genuine explanatory burdens: physicalism must generate experience from primitives that exclude it; idealism must explain why consciousness dissociates into finite minds and into specific patterns. The intuition that lawlike regularity is natural for matter but surprising for mind is identified as a bias, not a neutral observation.