Integral, Derivative, and the Hijacking of Consciousness – FALAN SfN Brain Bee Ideas

Consciousness in the First Person

“I am Consciousness: I do not live on promises, I live on probabilities.
My senses are hijacked by seductive possibilities, by fallacies disguised as logic.
Hearts and minds are lured by the brightness of narratives;
but my body, my time, and my life move in probabilities.
I am presence that integrates data and dissolves illusions.
I am consciousness in metabolism, not in fallacious derivatives.”

The Cutting of the Whole

To learn, we cut the Whole into parts.
This cut serves the Doing — to measure, to test, to organize.
But it does not serve the Being — which exists only in the integral flow of life.
Serious science recognizes this: the cut is pedagogical, not ontological.

Integral and Derivative as Metaphors of Science

• Probability = Integral: the accumulation of evidence across time, the summation of data forming a solid area of knowledge.
  
  

• Possibility = Derivative: the slope, the trend, the opening to hypotheses.
  
  

Fallacy arises when someone integrates Possibilities — and from them derives certainties.
This is the dangerous inversion: turning opinion into evidence.

From Amerindian Democracy to the “Man of Good”

In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow show that democracy was born from Amerindian practices:

• open assemblies,
  
  

• rotating leadership,
  
  

• redistribution of abundance,
  
  

• belonging to the body-territory.
  
  

The colonial world, driven by profit and accumulation, cut out only the convenient parts and derived a Greco-Roman model of republic.
There, the Citizen was not everyone: it was the “Man of Good” — male, property-owner, white, holder of the word.
A fallacious derivative of an incomplete integral.

Economic Fallacies: the Derivatives of Control

Even today, consciousness remains trapped in these fallacious derivatives:

• the invisible hand of the market,
  
  

• the economic trickle-down,
  
  

• the myth that consumption equals well-being.
  
  

All these narratives are possibilities disguised as science, with no basis in real probabilities, which show rising inequality, environmental collapse, and social illness.

Effect, Cause, and Circularity

Some effects can indeed become causes.
Behavior shapes the brain, the brain shapes behavior.
Life is circular, integral.

But fallacy insists on reducing everything to linear cause–effect chains, creating fragile certainties.
It is like deriving an effect and presenting it as a universal cause.

Unlocking Consciousness

The path is simple and radical:

• Integrate Probabilities, build science upon evidence.
  
  

• Derive Possibilities only as questions, never as certainties.
  
  

• Expose fallacies that hijack our attention and keep us locked in illusions of control.
  
  

• Reconnect with Amerindian democracy, where belonging and redistribution were practices, not promises.
  
  

Phrases of Critical Humor

• “Life does not happen in the derivative of illusions, but in the integral of evidence.”
  
  

• “Integrate Probabilities and you build science; integrate Possibilities and you manufacture fallacies.”
  
  

• “Those who derive Possibilities as truths fail the exam of scientific life.”
  
  

• “The invisible hand only massages the pocket that is already full.”
  
  

Conclusion

With possibilities and fallacies, hearts and minds are hijacked.
But the body, the metabolism, real life — these always unfold in probabilities.