A philosophical manifesto challenging the foundational assumptions of modern cognitive science, physicalism, and the philosophy of mind. Utilizing a simple thought experiment ("Luca on the beach"), this text frames consciousness not as an interior attribute, but as a dynamic coordination scheme operating across system-environment boundaries. By tracing an evolutionary lineage from cellular phototaxis to deep learning architectures, the author argues that qualitative experience is a structural necessity—a forced compression of a distributed biological history into an immediate first-person readout. Ultimately, this framework dissolves traditional dualism in favor of an active, adaptive "scanning" epistemology.
Luuk Vierhout (Tue,) studied this question.