Consciousness Is Spatial

Body-territory, Weichö, and the way out of the local optima of knowledge

Each field of knowledge has its own jargon.

Physics speaks of fields, energy, space, time, symmetry, force, particles, and relations.
Chemistry speaks of bonds, reactions, concentration, gradients, catalysts, and transformation.
Genetics speaks of DNA, expression, differentiation, regulation, inheritance, and variation.
Medicine speaks of diagnosis, symptoms, exams, markers, treatment, and prognosis.
Psychology speaks of behavior, cognition, emotion, memory, desire, and trauma.
Economics speaks of markets, debt, credit, risk, interest, productivity, and scarcity.
Politics speaks of the State, power, representation, territory, law, and sovereignty.
Religion speaks of meaning, faith, ritual, salvation, belonging, transcendence, and death.
Art speaks of form, presence, gesture, rhythm, beauty, image, and sensitivity.

Each field creates its own language to enter more deeply into one piece of the world.

That is powerful.

But it also creates a risk.

Each field can become trapped in its own local optimum.

A local optimum is a place where a field works very well within its own assumptions, methods, metrics, and jargon, but begins to struggle when speaking with other fields. Knowledge advances inside its own territory, but loses bridges with other territories.

Jargon protects precision.

But when it becomes a wall, it makes important analogies more difficult.

And some analogies may be precisely the way out of the local optimum.

This text proposes a simple question to open those walls:

Is it day or night now?

The question for 8.3 billion body-territories

Let us ask every inhabitant of the planet:

Is it day or night now?

The question seems simple.

But the answer changes according to body, territory, position, scale, and frame of reference.

For someone in Brazil, it may be day.
For someone in Japan, it may be night.
For someone in the Arctic, depending on the season, the question may require another understanding of light, cycle, and season.
For someone on a space station, the answer changes many times in a single Earth day.
For someone in a closed room with artificial light, immediate perception may move away from the outer cycle.
For someone in grief, celebration, fear, or vigil, the lived quality of time also changes.

So, is it day or night?

The correct answer needs coordinates.

External reality exists. Earth rotates. The Sun illuminates different regions. There are physical relations between planet, star, rotation, tilt, atmosphere, territory, and time.

But no body-territory lives external reality in its pure state.

Each body-territory builds a situated answer.

The question “Is it day or night now?” shows that truth does not disappear when we recognize point of view.

It gains coordinates.

Truth without coordinates can become imposition.

Truth with body-territory can become dialogue.

Each body-territory builds world

In our concept, the body-territory is the minimum unit of the State.

But before that, it is the minimum unit of experience.

Each body-territory perceives, feels, anticipates, remembers, interprets, suffers, desires, learns, and belongs from its own position in the world.

Each body-territory has a Weichö.

Weichö is used here as a respectful conceptual extension: a unique form of world, a singular mode through which a body-territory perceives, organizes, and expresses reality. It is more than style, opinion, or preference. It is a living mode of world-construction.

When each body-territory can perceive and express its own Weichö, the collective gains more reality.

It gains more angles.
It gains more signals.
It gains more experiences.
It gains more warnings.
It gains more forms of care.
It gains more questions.
It gains more pathways toward the future.

The State also becomes larger.

Not larger as an authoritarian machine.

Larger as a living field of representation.

A State that listens to many Weichö recognizes more world. A State that forces one single truth impoverishes collective reality.

The body-territory is not merely an administered citizen.

It is a living territory of perception.

Chalmers, Seth, Damasio, and Pereira Jr.: questions that need to speak to one another

David Chalmers drew attention to the “hard problem of consciousness”: why are physical, cerebral, and functional processes accompanied by subjective experience? Why is there something it is like to be someone, to feel pain, to see red, to hear music, to desire, to remember, to suffer, or to perceive beauty?

This question mattered because it prevented consciousness from being reduced to information processing without experience.

Anil Seth shifts part of the debate toward what he calls the “real problem”: explaining, predicting, and controlling properties of conscious experience through bodily, cerebral, and behavioral mechanisms. Instead of staying only in the philosophical gap between matter and experience, he proposes investigating how specific experiences appear, change, and relate to biological processes.

Philosophy opens great questions.

Neuroscience tries to build operational bridges.

The problem appears when each field returns too quickly to its own jargon and loses the chance to complement the other.

Damasio helps place the body back at the center of consciousness. The Damasian mind is not merely an abstract brain. It involves body, feeling, interoception, homeostasis, images, and subjective perspective.

Alfredo Pereira Jr., with Triple-Aspect Monism, helps us think that one and the same reality can be approached through physiological, informational/formal, and experiential/sensitive aspects. Conscious life does not need to be flattened into one single language. It can be understood as an integrated reality with different aspects.

Our proposal enters this field with a simple sentence:

consciousness is spatial.

Consciousness is spatial

Consciousness is spatial because every perception needs to happen somewhere in the body-territory.

To perceive is not to copy the external world.

To perceive is to create and update an abstraction represented inside the body.

This abstraction has space.

In our model, perception is represented inside the body-territory in five dimensions:

3D, movement, and qualia.

3D is the inner space of representation: length, width, and height where abstractions of lived experience gain material form.

Movement is the dynamics of these representations: they increase, decrease, shift, compete, combine, gain priority, lose strength, return, disappear, and reorganize.

Qualia are the sensitive intensity of experience: fear, pleasure, pain, urgency, beauty, threat, confidence, joy, belonging, hope, strangeness, peace.

Thus, to perceive is to build a spatial world inside the body-territory.

The ball does not enter the player in a pure state.

Light does not enter the eye in a pure state.

The word does not enter the ear in a pure state.

The face of the other does not enter the brain in a pure state.

Everything is transduced, compared, filtered, anticipated, felt, and represented inside bodily spaces that carry memory, culture, body, language, affect, biology, and territory.

The world exists outside.

But life happens inside the body-territory.

A common language for many fields

When we say that consciousness is spatial, we are not saying that every problem has been solved.

We are proposing a common language.

A language that can speak with many fields.

Physics can dialogue with space, movement, system, field, relation, and scale.

Chemistry can dialogue with gradients, metabolism, concentration, blood, hormones, and interoception.

Genetics can dialogue with DNA, gene expression, differentiation, development, plasticity, and biological time.

Medicine can dialogue with symptoms, exams, markers, physiology, diagnosis, and treatment.

Psychology can dialogue with emotion, behavior, memory, trauma, learning, and desire.

Religion can dialogue with experience, ritual, meaning, belonging, death, hope, and transcendence.

Politics can dialogue with body, territory, State, representation, citizenship, violence, and care.

Economics can dialogue with debt, anxiety, currency, time, scarcity, capture, and existence.

Art can dialogue with form, gesture, rhythm, image, presence, body, and qualia.

The 5D Body-Territory does not replace these fields.

It offers a common table.

A place where different jargons can partially translate their phenomena without completely losing their precision.

Quantifying without reducing

If consciousness is spatial in the body-territory, we can investigate it through several layers.

Without reducing everything to one single measurement.

EEG can observe electrical frequencies, functional connectivity, rapid temporality, rhythms, oscillations, and dynamic connectomes.

NIRS and fNIRS can observe cortical hemodynamic changes, oxygenation, social interaction, hyperscanning, and bodies in movement.

fMRI can observe activated areas, functional networks, connectivity, spatial variations, and deeper patterns of the nervous system.

ECG and HRV can observe autonomic regulation, arousal, indirect breathing patterns, allostatic load, and bodily states of threat or safety.

Blood tests can observe inflammation, glucose, lactate, hormones, metabolism, immune markers, and bodily conditions that modulate interoception.

Video and tracking can observe gesture, posture, displacement, rhythm, facial expression, coordination, distance, approach, escape, pause, and interaction.

Structural exams can observe form, lesion, development, degeneration, anatomical connectivity, and material limits.

Phenomenological reports can observe qualia, meaning, experience, personal language, suffering, beauty, faith, fear, and belonging.

None of these measurements captures consciousness as a whole.

But each one can create a partial bridge.

To quantify is not to kill the phenomenon.

To quantify is to create partial forms of dialogue between dimensions of the phenomenon.

Luria, Peirce, and the way out of the isolated brain

Alexander Luria, one of the founders of modern neuropsychology, helps us greatly here.

His neuroscience integrated brain, culture, language, history, and social environment. He proposed that higher mental functions, such as language, memory, planning, and reasoning, are not fixed pieces in isolated areas, but complex functional systems built through interaction between brain and social world.

Luria helps us leave the isolated brain.

Charles Sanders Peirce also helps.

His semiotics shows that the human world is crossed by signs, interpretation, and semiosis. Meaning is not only in the thing, nor only in the isolated mind. It emerges through processes of relation, mediation, and interpretation.

Peirce helps us leave the isolated word.

Luria helps remove the mind from the closed brain.

Peirce helps remove meaning from the silent thing.

The 5D Body-Territory tries to remove consciousness from isolated jargon.

Consciousness is spatial because it happens in bodies that interpret world in relation.

The local optimum as epistemological risk

Each field of knowledge finds its local optima.

Neuroscience can become trapped in activated areas.

Philosophy can become trapped in questions without operationalization.

Economics can become trapped in models that forget the body.

Medicine can become trapped in protocols that lose territory.

Psychology can become trapped in categories that ignore biology, politics, and culture.

Religion can become trapped in truths that erase other worlds.

Politics can become trapped in institutions that forget the citizen’s breathing.

Technology can become trapped in efficiency without asking efficiency for whom.

The local optimum of a field is useful while it solves problems.

But it becomes a prison when it prevents questions from crossing borders.

The question “Is it day or night now?” works because it dismantles the arrogance of a single point of view.

It forces us to ask:

where?

for whom?

in which body?

in which territory?

at which scale?

in which frame of reference?

with which language?

with which consequence?

This simple question removes knowledge from the abstract absolute and returns it to the body-territory.

Economics, capture, and the anxiety of the State

Economics also has jargons.

Market.
Risk.
Expectation.
Confidence.
Investment.
Growth.
Austerity.
Debt.
Inflation.
Exchange rate.
Liquidity.
Productivity.
Pricing.

These terms can describe real phenomena.

But they can also hide real bodies.

When economic jargon disconnects from the body-territory, society begins to accept strange sentences as if they were natural laws:

“the market is nervous.”

“the market is uncomfortable.”

“the market reacted badly.”

“the market demands adjustment.”

But who is this market?

Which bodies speak for it?

Which interests are protected?

Which lives are left out of the account?

Which territories pay the price?

In captured societies, different sectors can function as channels of conversion between economic power, political influence, public debt, moral narrative, and social legitimation. The problem is not only one isolated sector. It is the circuit.

Capital, State, media, credit, lobbying, religion, technology, crime, privatization, financialization, and propaganda can form systems of capture when they stop serving common life and begin organizing society around extraction.

In this logic, the State enters anxiety.

Fiscal anxiety.
Exchange-rate anxiety.
Debt anxiety.
Credibility anxiety.
Capital-flight anxiety.
Anxiety about market approval.
Anxiety about captured budgets.
Anxiety about purchased governability.

But anxiety is an effect.

The deeper cause lies in how money, credit, debt, and institutional capture organize the collective body.

When money is born mainly as debt, the social body begins to breathe in debt.

“This is already priced in”: when jargon becomes an escape from reality

One of the most common answers from economists trapped in the local optimum of the market is:

“this is already priced in.”

The phrase sounds sophisticated.

In some technical contexts, it can be useful. It may indicate that a given set of financial agents has incorporated an expectation into its models, assets, risks, prices, and strategies.

But many times, it functions as an artificial full stop.

It ends the conversation before the next question.

Priced in by whom?
With which data?
In which market?
At which scale?
With what access to information?
From which body-territory?
Who had the power to form that price?
Who merely received that price as destiny?
Who profits from this pricing?
Who becomes ill because of it?
Who is left out of the account?

“This is already priced in” becomes a local-optimum phrase when it transforms a market hypothesis into a total truth about reality.

The market can price assets.

But the body-territory lives consequences.

Hunger is not fully priced in the body that wakes up without food.

Debt anxiety is not fully priced in the breathing of a family.

The destruction of the Forest is not fully priced in the territory that loses water.

The fear of unemployment is not fully priced in the sleep of someone sustaining a household.

A childhood without future is not fully priced in the eyes of a child.

The exhaustion of a mother is not fully priced in the interest rate.

The humiliation of a citizen before a public service is not fully priced in the fiscal balance.

The grief of a community struck by environmental disaster is not fully priced in the risk report.

The expression “this is already priced in” can exchange reality for model.

It can exchange body for abstraction.

It can exchange territory for financial expectation.

It can exchange a living question for dead jargon.

It can transform a partial answer into a blockage of consciousness.

Consciousness is spatial because every perceived reality must happen in some body-territory. So, before accepting that something “is already priced in,” we need to ask:

in which body did this pricing arrive as care, and in which body did it arrive as collection?

This question takes economics out of its local optimum and returns it to the world.

Mercenaries of monetization

Mercenaries of monetization appear when suffering becomes an opportunity for extraction.

Social anxiety becomes market.
Debt becomes market.
Illness becomes market.
Attention becomes market.
Faith becomes market.
Childhood becomes market.
Fear becomes market.
Hope becomes market.
Prediction becomes market.
Loneliness becomes market.

Betting markets are a clear example.

They capture the human capacity to predict the future and transform it into clicks, deposits, losses, near-wins, and repetition.

But the logic is larger.

When a society is organized to make people ill, many industries begin to profit from illness. Some sell relief. Others sell distraction. Others sell control. Others sell promises. Others sell escape. Others sell treatment after the social organization itself has produced the wound.

Therefore, we need to ask:

is the economy reducing suffering or producing monetizable suffering?

Is technology caring for the body-territory or capturing its signals?

Is medicine treating social causes or only individual effects?

Is politics protecting existence or administering debt?

Is the State creating belonging or delivering bodies to markets that promise belonging?

Body-Territory Diplomacy

If the body-territory is the minimum unit of the State, then every relation between the State and a citizen must carry diplomacy.

Diplomacy, here, is not only a relation between countries.

It is a form of presence.

It is the way an institution approaches a living body without crushing its Weichö, without erasing its history, without reducing its existence to a number, debt, taxpayer ID, medical record, legal file, password, registration, productivity, or suspicion.

A decolonial State does not speak to the citizen as if administering an object.

It speaks as one entering into relation with a living territory.

Every public service encounter is diplomacy.

Every school is diplomacy.

Every health clinic is diplomacy.

Every income policy is diplomacy.

Every police approach is diplomacy.

Every judicial decision is diplomacy.

Every public currency is diplomacy.

Every collected data point is diplomacy.

Every technology applied to the body is diplomacy.

Because each body-territory carries world.

It carries memory, culture, language, hunger, fear, dream, trauma, joy, ancestry, territory, family, religion, biome, expectation, and future.

When the State encounters this body, it does not encounter only an isolated individual.

It encounters a situated world.

The question stops being:

“how do we fit this citizen into the system?”

And becomes:

“how can the system encounter this body-territory without destroying its capacity to belong, perceive, revise, and express itself?”

This is State diplomacy applied to the body-territory.

The Butterfly Effect of belonging

The Butterfly Effect helps us think about the small gestures that reorganize collectives.

One word changes breathing.

One public encounter changes trust.

One humiliation changes belonging.

One act of listening changes the future.

One data point collected without care changes the relation with the State.

An income transfer that arrives without humiliation changes the breathing of a household.

A school that listens changes a child’s relation with their own intelligence.

An environmental policy that remunerates those who care for the Forest changes the relation between territory and economy.

The State also needs to learn how to remain on the flower.

To remain on the flower is to stay long enough with the real body before escaping into the label.

When the State reacts too quickly, it labels.

When it labels too quickly, it loses the body.

When it loses the body, it sees only category:

poor, delinquent, patient, student, suspect, beneficiary, voter, user, taxpayer, debtor.

Body-territory diplomacy demands another posture.

Before labeling, listen.

Before charging, understand.

Before punishing, contextualize.

Before digitizing, protect.

Before measuring, ask what the measurement will do to the measured body.

Before creating debt, ask whether that body received real conditions for existence.

This small shift creates belonging.

And belonging changes the State.

Belonging as public infrastructure

Belonging is not an emotional detail.

Belonging is State infrastructure.

A citizen who feels belonging is more likely to participate, revise, care, study, denounce capture, protect territory, trust public policies, and build a common future.

A citizen humiliated by the State tends to move away, harden, distrust, obey only through fear, or seek belonging in captured groups.

For this reason, body-territory diplomacy is also an anti-capture policy.

It reduces space for false leaders.

It reduces space for predatory markets.

It reduces space for betting platforms.

It reduces space for platforms, militias, algorithms, companies, or institutions that promise belonging while capturing the body.

The State that offers belonging with care strengthens true Jiwasa.

The State that abandons the body-territory delivers its citizens to the mercenaries of monetization.

Citizen DREX and the decolonial economic question

Here we return to money.

If the body-territory is the minimum unit of the State, public money needs to encounter this body with diplomacy.

Not only as credit.

Not only as debt.

Not only as a humiliating benefit.

Not only as score.

Not only as registration.

But as recognition of existence.

Citizen DREX, as a conceptual proposal, could be thought of as a public digital currency oriented toward the dignified existence of body-territories.

Not as an official program that already exists.

But as a question of institutional design:

what if the digital infrastructure of money could serve life first?

What if public currency could remunerate care, preservation, regeneration, education, health, belonging, standing Forest, and territory?

What if the State used monetary technology to reduce existential anxiety instead of merely sophisticating financial markets?

The colonial economy asks:

“how much do you owe?”

The decolonial economy asks:

“what does your body-territory need in order to exist with dignity now?”

This is the turn.

Consciousness is spatial, and politics is too

Consciousness is spatial because every lived world needs to appear somewhere in the body-territory.

Politics is spatial because every right needs to reach some body in some territory.

Economics is spatial because every debt tightens a breath, a home, a family, a city, a Forest.

Science is spatial because every measurement begins from a position.

Religion is spatial because every meaning needs to touch a body that suffers, waits, loves, fears, and dies.

Medicine is spatial because every symptom happens in a situated body.

Psychology is spatial because every emotion has body, history, relation, and environment.

Technology is spatial because every data point leaves some body and returns as a decision over bodies.

Space is not only external.

It is also internal.

It is perceptual.

It is affective.

It is political.

It is economic.

It is spiritual.

It is institutional.

It is body-territory.

The way out of the local optima

The way out of local optima begins when one field accepts visiting the language of another.

Philosophy can bring good questions to neuroscience.

Neuroscience can bring measurements to philosophy.

Medicine can bring body to politics.

Politics can bring territory to economics.

Economics can bring debt to psychology.

Psychology can bring suffering to medicine.

Religion can bring meaning to science.

Science can bring humility to religion.

Art can bring qualia to all.

The goal is not to dissolve the fields.

The goal is to create zones of translation.

Places where concepts cross borders and return stronger.

A researcher can step slightly outside the local optimum of their field, visit another language, find an analogy, formulate a new question, and return with a new experiment.

This is how knowledge breathes.

Final neurochallenge

The question “Is it day or night now?” seems small.

But it opens the planet.

It shows that every human truth needs body, territory, scale, and relation.

It shows that each body-territory builds world from its position.

It shows that each Weichö is a living reference for the collective.

It shows that a decolonial State needs to listen to worlds, not merely administer individuals.

It shows that science needs measurements, but also translation.

It shows that economics needs to leave debt and return to existence.

It shows that politics needs to practice diplomacy with every body-territory.

It shows that consciousness is spatial.

When each Weichö can express itself, the collective gains more world.

When the collective gains more world, the State becomes larger.

And when the State becomes larger in belonging, it needs to capture less, punish less, and humiliate less.

It can care more.

Perhaps this is the final point of the series:

to stop treating bodies as units of debt, vote, consumption, data, or productivity

and begin treating them as living territories of perception.

Consciousness is spatial.

The State must be spatial too.

Post-2021 references and foundations for dialogue

Seth, A. K., & Bayne, T. (2022). Theories of consciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
An important review of contemporary theories of consciousness, useful for situating debates among philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive theories, and explanatory models.

Seth, A. K. (2021). Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Faber & Faber.
A contemporary basis for thinking about consciousness, perception, body, prediction, and the shift from the “hard problem” toward more operationalizable problems of experience.

Damasio, A., & Damasio, H. (2024). Homeostatic Feelings and the Emergence of Consciousness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Helps ground the relation between homeostatic/interoceptive feelings, image production, body, subjective perspective, and the emergence of consciousness.

Pereira Jr., A. (2023). Qualiomics: The metaphysics of consciousness.
Brings the consciousness debate closer to an approach that considers physiological, informational/formal, and experiential aspects, in dialogue with Triple-Aspect Monism.

Theriault, J. E., Katsumi, Y., Reimann, H. M., Zhang, J., Deming, P., Dickerson, B. C., Quigley, K. S., & Barrett, L. F. (2025). It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function. Neuron.
Supports allostasis as central to brain function, helping us think of body, prediction, regulation, and experience as inseparable processes.

Delgado, M. R., et al. (2023). Characterizing the mechanisms of social connection. Neuron.
Helps ground social connection as a regulatory mechanism, important for belonging, State, care, and Jiwasa.

Czeszumski, A., et al. (2022). Cooperative Behavior Evokes Interbrain Synchrony in the Prefrontal and Temporoparietal Cortex. eNeuro.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of fNIRS hyperscanning, useful for thinking about synchrony between bodies and true Jiwasa as an operational hypothesis.

Zhang, H., Liu, H., Li, Z., & Zhang, D. (2025). Distinct fNIRS Inter-Brain Coupling Patterns for Cooperation versus Competition in a Tennis Game. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Brings fNIRS hyperscanning closer to sports contexts and helps think about competition and cooperation as distinct forms of coupling.

Zaragocin, S., & Caretta, M. A. (2021). Cuerpo-Territorio: A Decolonial Feminist Geographical Method for the Study of Embodiment. Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
An important reference for the body-territory concept as a decolonial method for studying embodied and territorialized experience.

Tan, B. J. (2023). Central Bank Digital Currency and Financial Inclusion. IMF Working Paper.
Helps discuss CBDCs and financial inclusion, serving as a basis for thinking of Citizen DREX as a conceptual horizon for public currency oriented toward existence.

OECD. (2023). Central Bank Digital Currencies and Democratic Values.
Contributes to thinking about public digital currency through privacy, democratic governance, trust, and risks of control.

Central Bank of Brazil. (2024–2026). Drex — Digital Real and Drex FAQ.
Official basis for distinguishing existing Drex, still in its testing phase, from the conceptual proposal of Citizen DREX.

Brazil. Law No. 14,119, January 13, 2021. National Policy for Payment for Environmental Services.
Legal basis for thinking about remuneration for conservation, recovery, and sustainable environmental management.

Brazil. Law No. 15,042, December 11, 2024. Brazilian Emissions Trading System.
Legal basis for thinking about a regulated carbon market and the need to ensure that climate assets benefit territories and caretaker communities.

Complementary classic references

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Classic reference for the “hard problem of consciousness,” the difficulty of explaining why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience.

Luria, A. R. (1966/1973). Higher Cortical Functions in Man / The Working Brain.
Classic foundation in neuropsychology for thinking of higher mental functions as complex functional systems, articulating brain, language, culture, and social environment.

Peirce, C. S. (classic texts on semiotics and semiosis).
Philosophical basis for thinking about signs, interpretation, and meaning-making as relational processes, useful for connecting perception, language, and world.