What We Are: A Personal Philosophy for the Age of Science - Volume I - The Nature of Reality (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798950262005)

A neurointerventional surgeon spends his career threading catheters through cerebral arteries, watching consciousness dissolve under pharmacological assault and reconstitute when the drugs wear off. The imaging captures the structure. It never captures the experience. That gap - between what science can describe and what it is like to exist - is the starting point of this book.

What We Are: The Nature of Realityis the first volume of an original philosophical system built from two axioms. The first holds that reality has both a structural face, described by physics, and an intrinsic face, which is what consciousness is made of. The second holds that complexity arises from simplicity through integration - the same principle that builds atoms from quarks, minds from neurons, and meaning from the raw fact of being alive.

From these two claims, Volume I derives a complete account of consciousness, time, causation, free will, and personal identity. Each conclusion is then tested against the strongest objections in contemporary philosophy of mind and physics - Chalmers, Dennett, Tegmark, Penrose, Sider, Parfit. The framework, called Integrative Dual-Aspect Monism, is offered not as speculation but as a system meant to be argued with: a system that cannot be wrong cannot be taken seriously.

This is philosophy written from the bedside, by a surgeon who has held what it tries to explain. For readers of Sean Carroll, Anil Seth, and Thomas Nagel.

Volume II - The Integrated Life - turns the framework toward the questions that cannot be deferred: how to live, what to care about, and what makes a life add up to anything.