The Exciting Path Ahead
Almost a year ago, the journey of the Conscious Permanence Project started when a friend quoted Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative to me in a chat message: "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end." The full philosophical architecture was then miles away, but it is now becoming clearer, and here's where this project is heading.
Showing Possibility
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: how to ground human freedom in something other than pure reason. Kant placed the 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 demonstrating how freedom occurs from the nature of existence itself.
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. A separate nonphysical realm isn't the only possible foundation for freedom of choice. Human agency occurs when a sufficiently complex system, like our brain, reshapes its own future through the accumulation of all our past actions and experiences, 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.
There may be something deeper here. Kant saw that rational principles govern both scientific knowledge and moral action, and each domain needed its own foundation. Conscious Permanence may provide a single foundation that underlies both. Conscious experience isn't just an ethical concern, but a physical fact about how existence occurs in spacetime. And permanence isn't just a comforting idea, but what spacetime physics implies about the structure of reality.
Once you see that all human experience, for all people equally, is lived permanently in the structure of the universe, you're no longer looking at a purely physical fact or purely ethical fact. The boundary between the physical domain and the ethical domain begins to dissolve. They share the same subject matter. That recognition may bridge how the world is and how we ought to act in it.
In other words: Kant got the ethics right. Conscious Permanence provides the missing physics grounding. In the end, both paths lead to the same place: all people—and their permanent experiences—matter equally. Kant's ethics and Conscious Permanence converge.
A Philosophy of Living
Zeno of the Stoics took parts of existing philosophies of his time, synthesized them with his own contributions, and created Stoicism. That philosophy of life dominated culture for centuries. Similarly, this project aims to synthesize perspectives of established science and philosophy to create a new way to think about our existence, society, and daily living. I’m developing a practical philosophy, not a theoretical one, much in the way Zeno did 2400 years ago.
Like Kant’s Groundwork on the Metaphysic of Morals, I only aim to show that this synthesis of existing science forms a framework that is possible, coherent, and useful. There may not ever be a way to know the true nature of spacetime, i.e., whether four dimensions is the true structure of reality given our position from the inside. Even so, my task is to show this foundation still holds, not that this framework is settled fact.
The scope of this undertaking will extend from science to personal to social. This perspective of permanence will grow into a broad array of implications for how we treat ourselves, how we treat others, and what systems honor those realities. That full scope will be developed layer by layer, with each level needing to hold before the next one, and I've started a blog just for this development.
I'm developing these ideas on a 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.
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© 2026 Cory Lanker. This work is licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).