The Exciting Path Ahead

Almost a year ago, the journey of the Conscious Permanence Project started when a friend texted me Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative, even though the full philosophical architecture was then miles away. That architecture is now becoming clearer, and here's where this project is heading.

Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals aims to show that a supreme principle of morality is possible. His goal is to build a rational argument for why morality is universal and why no person can be treated merely as a means to someone else's ends. Two ideas form the core of Conscious Permanence: that conscious experience is permanent in spacetime and that our choices come about through distributed agency. I now see it's possible that the project's core is the missing piece in a problem that Kant identified but couldn't solve.

In his analysis of Kant's Groundwork, H.J. Paton says Kant knows that a framework of morals can be manifested not only in thinking as such, but also in scientific knowledge and in moral action. And there is the key: scientific knowledge. A physical grounding, built directly from nature and observation rather than reason alone, could carry the weight of moral philosophy. Conscious Permanence has built this physical grounding.

I must explore Kant's practical philosophy to see why he couldn't ground ethics in nature, even though he knew it was real. Kant placed these rules guiding human action in a separate realm beyond physical reality and asked us to trust that reason demanded it. This basis is uncomfortable: not because the ethics were wrong, but because the foundation felt forced rather than demonstrated from nature.

This is where Conscious Permanence enters. Using philosopher Alicia Juarrero's ideas on how complex systems modify their own future constraints, we now have a physical account of how genuine agency operates within a deterministic universe. You don't need a separate nonphysical realm for an ethical foundation. Freedom of choice occurs when a sufficiently complex system, like a human brain, reshapes its own future through the accumulation of all our past actions, defining who we currently are. That's distributed authorship under determinism. And it could be exactly what Kant needed, but lacked due to the state of science in his time.

In other words: Kant got the ethics right. Conscious Permanence provides the missing physics grounding. In the end, Kant's application of the supreme moral principle to real life converges with this project's implications.

The development of these ideas is happening at my project's Bear Blog. There I'll be working through Kant's ethics alongside Juarrero's books, slowly developing the arguments without concern for length or polish. That blog is where my thinking happens out loud, while this site will continue to host finished writings. These two sites are two layers of the same project, and both matter in its development. And the path forward is clearer than it has ever been.

Ready to explore these ideas further? Check out the framework Overview, join our Community, plus subscribe for insights on living with conscious permanence.

© 2026 Cory Lanker. This work is licensed under Creative Commons
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