We are excited to announce that Wade Munroe will be joining us as one of our new associate editors! Wade is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His work focuses on the philosophy of language and thought. For the blog, Wade will host a series featuring work by early-career scholars. We’re thrilled to welcome Wade to the editorial team! See an intro from Wade below.
“Dear Readers,
I am very excited to join the editorial team at The Brains Blog. I have thoroughly enjoyed engaging with the blog as a reader and have been lucky enough to contribute several posts on my own work. In my role as associate editor, I will host a series of posts that highlight the research of early-career scholars. I hope the posts will serve to increase the visibility of exciting work being done by graduate students, postdocs, and assistant professors.
I am currently an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy and the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan. My work lies at the intersections of the philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of language, and epistemology. My central research examines the relationship between language and thought, with a special focus on the cognitive and moral dimensions of inner speech. I look to analyze the various functions of our inner speech and offer an account of our control over and the responsibility we bear for our covert uses of language.”
~Wade
Inner Speach is p2p communication using the common neuronal network as physical medium and some language protocol under the mental presentation layer.
This is a logical consequence of the next premisses.
Constructing a falsifiable Theory of Consciousness (TOC) requires strictly minimal physical and operational premises.
1. Excluded from the Epistemic Horizon (Outside the Overton Window):
The Egocentric Point of View (POV): Just as a geocentric model fails in celestial mechanics, an egocentric POV cannot serve as a foundational premise for consciousness. Assuming an internal “observer” or “subject” at the outset introduces a circular presupposition (begging the question). The subject-boundary is a result to be derived, not an initial condition.
2. Necessary Physical Baseline (Inside the Overton Window):
The All-Encompassing Reality (R): A non-egocentric 4D continuum of physical and informational events.
The Embedded Processor (P): A localized, active physical system equipped with a sensorimotor interface. P exchanges information with R through exogenous environmental signals (iR) and re-entrant/reafferent self-generated signals (iP).
Causal Self-Coupling (Closed-Loop Dynamics): Rather than requiring a meta-observer, P is structurally coupled such that its internal state transitions are causally dependent on its own prior motor outputs. The system does not “know” it transduces information in a cognitive sense; rather, the closed-loop dynamics physically register the correlation between output and input.
The Somatic Support System (s): P is necessarily embedded within a physical substrate (s) governed by thermodynamic homeostatic constraints. This system supplies internal status/interoceptive signals (iPs) and motor control states (iPc).
Core Assertion:
These minimal premises—a self-perturbing processor (P), a homeostatic support system (s), and the closed-loop informational separation between iR and iP in R—are computationally and thermodynamically sufficient to force the emergence of an operational Self-model (S) without assuming a prior egocentric observer.