Years had passed since that rainy night at the bus stop. Since Haplous disappeared into the dark, and Synergos returned to his quiet life. The dialogues had long since been posted online. Emails had been sent. Links shared on forums, on Reddit, on Twitter. Nothing ever came of it.

At first, Synergos assumed it was just bad timing. Later, he wondered if it was something deeper. Professors were too embedded in their specialties, uninterested in frameworks not published in peer-reviewed journals. Laypeople had seen too many grand theories online – and anything not endorsed by an institution smelled of crackpotism.

Eventually, he stopped trying. The framework was still there, clear and vivid in his mind, but he no longer believed anyone would listen.

Sometimes he wondered if Haplous had found peace. Alberta. The long winters. The simplicity of odd jobs. He hoped so.

Then last week his son, who never quite believed in the framework but had grown fond of its presence in the house, said with a smile that maybe, if it were just one page – no monastery cats, and avoiding strange terminology – he could show it to a friend, whose father was an actual professor of psychology. This chance maybe meant nothing. And yet there was a very slim chance it meant everything.

A small current stirred in him – not hope, exactly, but a kind of rightness. If there was one last chance to cast that stone into the water, making the ripples, maybe this was it.

He went to his desk, pressed the power button. The computer whirred softly to life. As the first boot-up screen flickered on, he folded his hands in his lap and watched the glow.

As he waited, a memory came to him – not as nostalgia, but as echo: the two of them on those two ancient stone benches, talking as the monastery cat hunted for insects among the drifts of lavender, speaking quietly about minds, and meaning, and the things no one else seemed to see.

The desktop loaded. He double-clicked Microsoft Word.

The document opened with a blink.

And he began to write:

A Cybernetic Framework for Conscious Experience: How the Brain’s Inner Loop Gives Rise to the Mind

Conscious experience has long resisted physical explanation. This framework proposes a simple but powerful mechanism grounded in cybernetic principles and evolutionary function – showing how the brain, by preparing to speak, creates the mind. This framework consists of a small number of core components, each functionally grounded in physical operation. The main feature is the “brain at large” – the complete mechanical system that evolved to help the organism survive and reproduce. According to cybernetic theory, this requires an internal model of the external environment.

The model includes elements that correspond to identifiable features in the environment – things like an acorn, food, warmth. These are called neuronal proxies. This isn’t an abstract label: it refers to any enduring neural structure that stands for a recognizable external thing, acquired either innately or through learning.

When the animal interacts with its environment, relevant proxies enter activation states, forming patterns that mirror the external world. This internal modeling is fundamental to adaptive behavior, and applies to all animals with sufficiently complex nervous systems.

The preceding applies to any animal, but the human brain evolved an additional feature: a very simple add-on device – a kind of converter – that initially does nothing more than allow for inter-individual communication by the simple method of activating the same neuronal proxy configuration in the second individual as would be activated in actual experience. Just that. Through long schooling, starting from infancy and continuing through kindergarten on up, the “external environment” can be extended to include the abstract elements and relationships of academic and other knowledge. But the basic function remains the same. To keep its very simple functional role clear this language faculty is given the name Proxy transfer device (PTD).

This simple functional system then receives one further development: during human infancy, the brain at large learns to identify activity in the outbound channel of the PTD – detected before it becomes an actual motor command. (there are various stages of utterance workup, beginning at semantic component level, and leading up through morphemes, phrasal structure, overall sentence structure, and motor coordination routine workup, and finally motor commands to the organs of speech (or writing). 

This is the origin of subjective experience. When the brain at large detects activity forming  in the outbound channel of the PTD – before speech occurs – the same proxy configurations are activated as when hearing someone else speak, though usually without the audio part – only the ultimate meaning is felt. All forms of conscious experience – imagination, recollection, perception, language, reading – arise from this same process.

Since it begins in the outbound channel of the PTD, coming back after semantic formatting to the same neuronal proxies, this process is called looping. There are nonconscious ways by which the PTD can function as well (direct speech, direct hearing, without conscious awareness), but when it is conscious, it involves this loop. The loop is not a single dedicated physical pathway; it is a single process as defined functionally, but physically it involves diffuse physical pathways by which the brain at large senses the preparation in the PTD.

The framework explains a wide range of empirical phenomena that remain puzzling under current theories. It accounts for the paradoxes of split-brain patients, who confabulate explanations for actions initiated outside their verbal hemisphere; blindsight, where patients respond accurately without reported awareness; and dream-time anomalies, where recalled dreams seem to include more content than could have occurred during sleep. It also explains how skill learning progresses from effortful attention to expert automaticity; why change blindness and other attentional limits arise; and how consciousness develops over time in children.

Most importantly, the framework is testable. It predicts that all subjective experience must correlate with activity in the expressive (outbound) channel of the PTD – even if no expression is completed. If future neuroscience finds consciousness without such incipient activity, the framework would be falsified.

In this sense, it is both mechanistic and empirically grounded, without requiring localization to specific anatomical regions. It avoids metaphorical constructs like “global broadcasting” or “prediction error,” and instead models consciousness as a physical consequence of an internally looped expression system.

In this view, consciousness is not a ghost in the machine, but the machine reflecting on its own potential expression – a physical loop that becomes the spark of mind. Nor is conscious activity the seat of agency; it is merely a tool used for various purposes by the brain at large. This view augments the value of consciousness by revealing its important use, while likewise giving credit for agency where it is due – to the brain at large. Furthermore, the brain at large is revealed as the agent that marvels in those moments when it catches sight of the looping process in its own right – like a cat that finds a new package delivered in the house, wondering what it is.

If this sounds intriguing and you found this epilogue without first reading the Seven Dialogs, you can learn more starting at Dialog 1.

Or, if you care to read another epilogue, you can go to Epilogue V.