theory → embodied collective experiences:
offline and antimeta
Key concepts: communal physical experiences, protests, antimeta,
— Reestablishing bodily awareness diminished by screen time
— Building social trust through synchronized experience
— Creating temporal autonomy outside algorithmic time
— Developing shared meaning beyond individualized content feeds
The Hard Problem
For the last four centuries, philosophy of mind has been revolving around the mind-body problem — an ontological chasm separating mental phenomena from physical processes. The Cartesian division established consciousness as the mysterious presence haunting the mechanical structure of modernity, generating what philosopher Gilbert Ryle aptly termed "the ghost in the machine." For the Western school of thought, deeply rooted in rationalism and physicalism, the presence of a ghost at the center of its intellectual framework posed a profound contradiction, yet the problem remained unresolved for such a long time that mainstream science seems to have come to terms with the constant presence of this elephant in the room.
Philosopher David Chalmers in the 1990s termed this aporia the "hard problem of consciousness", and its longing for resolution represents not merely an epistemological blind spot but a fundamental rupture in the Enlightenment project itself. The hard problem specifically interrogates why physical processes in neural architectures generate subjective experience — the ineffable qualia or "what-it-is-like-ness" that constitutes our phenomenological reality. Supercharged by the broader crisis of meaning evident in the Western culture of late capitalism, and fuelled even further in recent years by political turmoils and technological developments, the hard problem has gained enough momentum to bring back deep self-reflection in areas that Western thought seemed to be long settled on, and invoke some unlikely philosophical resurgences, like panpsychism.
In simple terms, panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is not uniquely a human quality, but rather a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of everything in the universe, including quarks and electrons. Since the late 20th century, panpsychism has crawled from the obscurity back into 'serious' philosophical discussions. All of a sudden, it is not a fringe idea anymore, but rather a valid contender for solving important philosophical questions, most notably the infamous hard problem of consciousness. This revival of panpsychism happens amidst the algorithmic colonisation of consciousness, precisely at the nexus of two seemingly disparate developments: the West's accelerating cultural crisis and the uncanny valley of artificial intelligence. The convergence is not merely coincidental but symptomatic of a profound ontological rupture in the Western episteme.