open.substack.com/pub/alancolq...

Cheers!

I really wasn't sure if I should commit this idea (what started as a merely reflexive hunch) to public scrutiny

But as I began to thresh it out, I gradually realised that my driving experience was like Alice's rabbit hole: a microscopic window onto a much more general aspect of reality

Indeed it was (is)

That bracket fungus, in particular, is about half a meter across and it has already hollowed out one fallen tree (the one behind my head in the right hand photo), so it has clearly been mulching away, turning these trees into compost, for a while already...

But in theory, or at least in principle, we could reproduce the transductive mechanism - the continuous, selfcoupled electrodynamic architecture that evolution 'discovered' in neural tissue - and thereby reproduce consciousness itself

The practical challenge is immense:

we still don’t know precisely how neural charge distributions generate the field coherence observed in living brains, let alone how to stabilise such coherence in synthetic matter

The field’s stability has to matter (in some quasi evolutionary sense) to the system’s persistence - an analogue to metabolism or homeostasis - so that the organisation is 'motivated' to maintain itself in the face of perturbation

We'd need to implement recursive modulation

The system’s own field configuration must influence its next configuration, creating the ongoing reflexivity that, in the mind, we call 'self awareness' or 'attention'

The field should also be 'closed' and 'cohesive' enough that every local perturbation is globally consequential - since, if I'm right, this is the physical condition for a unified point of view or 'perspective'

We'd need to be able to replicate the field topology

ie. Build a system in which charge flows are continuous, not discretised clock cycles - a medium where electromagnetic fields generated by local currents can act back upon those same currents across the whole structure

If sound, it implies something very interesting which I've always hesitated to affirm and often flat out denied:

We could, in principle, engineer consciousness by replicating the transductive aspect of brains

It’s easy to forget that Mary Shelley was only 18 when she began Frankenstein - a work of such philosophical and emotional depth that it feels almost prophetic

Visually it’s sumptuous, but what lingers is the tone: elegiac rather than horrific, tragic yet suffused with grace

Del Toro hasn’t reimagined Frankenstein so much as completed it

I think it shows that del Toro’s imagination has always been moral rather than macabre - he looks for beauty in what the world rejects and finds humanity where others see horror

Its tone and emotional texture are strikingly close to The Shape of Water: that same lyrical sympathy for the outcast, that same sense that what we call 'monstrous' is merely misunderstood grace

And in a profoundly moving departure from earlier versions, the creature ultimately forgives Victor

The ending achieves something Shelley only intimated - a sense of pure redemption

The creature survives his maker, though in a state beyond life and death, a being transfigured by compassion

Del Toro strips away the old gothic bombast and lets the moral core breathe

This is a story not of scientific hubris but of innocence, rejection and the ache of responsibility

The relationship between the creature and the blind man is rendered in a beautiful montage - humane and devastating

Some surprising appearances from Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Elijah Wood, Bob Hoskins, Juliette Binoche and Natalie Portman (and many other well known actors)

Thank you

I doesn't completely eliminate the mystery but I do believe gets closer to the reality than any other idea