The Impetus Behind the Geometry of Intention
GoI began as my attempt to solve the mind-body problem. I’ve been thinking about the nature of consciousness for 40 years. Until 2025, I had spent three decades as an atheist, certain that spirit was a myth, and yet I could not wrap my head around how matter could become conscious. That proposition seemed nearly as inexplicable and extraordinary as a ghostly “something” haunting this flesh.
The philosopher David Chalmers brought focus and urgency to this mystery in the 1990s with his famous Hard Problem of Consciousness. He sharply distinguished the “easy problems” of consciousness—explaining behavior, cognition, perception, reportability, and brain functions—from the Hard Problem: why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience at all. His famous formulation asks: even after we explain all the mechanisms of cognition and behavior, why is there “something it is like” to be a conscious subject?
The philosopher Thomas Nagel deepened the mystery in MIND AND COSMOS, where he argued that consciousness is not merely an unexplained leftover within materialism, but evidence that the reigning materialist neo-Darwinian picture is fundamentally incomplete. His claim is not that evolution is false, but that a purely physicalist account of mutation, selection, and survival does not explain why a universe governed by such processes should produce subjective experience, reason, value, and intelligibility. In that sense, Nagel escalates Chalmers’s challenge: consciousness is not just hard to explain from matter; it may reveal that matter, life, mind, and value require a broader teleological or non-reductive account of nature.
I became convinced that consciousness could not be a bottom-up phenomenon produced by particles and fields. Indeed, consciousness calls into question the very notion that bottom-up causation is the only kind of causality reality has to offer. Why should causality only arise in one ontological “direction?” What set that priority or metaphysical “vector” in the first place? It’s only an assumption based on the success of explanations that depend upon it. But success in one area doesn’t exclude the possibility of different kinds of explanations, especially for phenomena that resist a bottom-up account. There is no methodological or principled reason for excluding such a possibility out of hand, only the perceived lack of available evidence.
But consciousness is precisely that evidence. There are certain transformations of matter that cannot come about without top-down causation. Not a single piece of technology can become a reality without the future-oriented, goal-setting intentions of humans. Every working device we build requires more than bottom-up causation. It doesn’t matter how much detail you pack into an explanation of neurons firing. Matter does not make plans for the future. Matter does not have purposes or goals. The universe isn’t supposed to have any teleology. And yet, we do. A human intention, goal, or purpose cannot be reduced to non-teleological constituent parts, which when combined in the correct way spontaneously produce teleological wholes. If the universe inherently proscribes purpose or meaning, how would a bottom-up chain of causes ever amount to purpose/meaning?
This is the “Even Harder” Problem of Consciousness that no one is talking about. It’s one thing to assume that consciousness can supervene upon matter, but purpose? Supervenient consciousness can be thought of as consistent with bottom-up physical causation, as long as you think of consciousness as epiphenomenal (i.e. causally impotent). But it’s another thing entirely to say that physical causation produces a supervenient phenomenon which in turn has a brand new form of causation that’s entirely incompatible with the metaphysical form of the causation which produced it. How does a purposeless bottom-up cause produce an effect which is simultaneously a purposeful top-down cause? Science doesn’t even attempt to ask this question, much less answer it.
The Turn to Teleology
It seemed clear to me that there are forms of causality that cannot be accounted for through bottom-up causation. It wasn’t just purpose, goals, or intentions–it was all forms of causality that originate from the hard side of the mind-body dichotomy. Emotion moves the masses to ends that physics cannot predict. In building technology, someone first had to come up with the idea, understand how to create it, make the conscious choice to follow through with it, and (hopefully) doing so with a view to the ethical implications of building it. This project may even fulfill a personal “destiny,” a narrative tied to an individual’s identity. And there is usually a view to how this technology will benefit others, even if it’s just an estimate of market demand.
In Aristotle’s classical account, explanation includes not only material and efficient causes, but also formal and final causes: what a thing is structured to be, and what end or fulfillment it tends toward. Modern science largely retained efficient causation while bracketing final causation. The Geometry of Intention begins by reopening that bracket: if purpose, meaning, emotion, and intention have real causal effects, then teleology cannot be treated as merely subjective projection.
GoI does not simply revive Aristotle’s final cause. It asks what kind of reality must exist for finality, intention, and meaning to have causal force at all.
That distinction matters. Aristotle helps situate you historically, but originality is not “bringing back final causes.” move is
The Rise of Dimensionality
This led me to the idea of orthogonal causation: distinct domains of causality that are irreducible to one another but capable of interacting. Emotion, intention, ethics, identity, and collective meaning are not merely subjective states; they are higher-order causal degrees of freedom. The Geometry of Intention is my attempt to map those degrees of freedom rigorously.
The result is a twelve-dimensional ontology: not twelve spatial directions, but twelve irreducible causal domains, moving from bare being through physical structure, law, meaning, emotion, will, ethics, selfhood, communion, and finally global coherence. Philosophy provides the entrance, science provides the discipline of formalization and testing, and spirituality provides the symbolic horizon where the same structure has often been intuited in mythic form.
The Consciousness Manifold 