Consciousness of the Real — References, Affinities, and Resonances — Sylvain Lebel

This treatise was developed independently, arising from an inner experience of reality, a progressive reflection on change, and an effort toward conceptual coherence. Nevertheless, certain ideas or formulations resonate — through affinity or convergence — with other thought-systems found in philosophical, scientific, or spiritual traditions. Without claiming direct affiliation, I wish to acknowledge these resonances, as a gesture of intellectual kinship and open dialogue.

On the philosophical level, the idea of a single, immanent, and self-deploying substance echoes the thought of Spinoza in his Ethics, where Nature is God and thought is one of its modes. The discernant substance I refer to as THAT also indirectly relates to Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, where each event is an act of creative prehension. The view of reality as dynamic and structured by the perception of change also aligns with insights from Henri Bergson, especially in Creative Evolution, where duration and vital impetus take precedence over fixed structure. Finally, the perceptual grounding of my logic shares similarities with phenomenological approaches, notably those of Merleau-Ponty, and with the thought of Gilbert Simondon, who sees individuation not as a static fact but as a continuous process.

On the scientific side, the idea of a dissipative, self-organizing universe, not fully determined at its origin, finds echoes in the work of Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures, as well as in Lee Smolin's hypotheses on the evolutionary nature of physical laws. The relational view of space-time and the rejection of an absolute background align with Carlo Rovelli's proposals in loop quantum gravity. The idea that forms stabilize by minimizing tension in a nonlocal dynamic resonates with David Bohm's theories on implicate order, and with the computational vision of reality found in the work of Stephen Wolfram and Max Tegmark, for whom the universe has a fundamentally mathematical structure.

In the domain of cognition and artificial intelligence, my eight-level model of discernment can be read as a cognitive architecture that is both perceptual, logical, and reflexive. It evokes Marvin Minsky's modular hierarchy, Stanislas Dehaene's research into metacognition, and the theory of autopoiesis developed by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, where cognition emerges from the self-organization of a living system. Layered processing structures, as found in deep neural networks (notably studied by Yoshua Bengio), also offer technical analogues of this stratified logic of discernment.

On the spiritual plane, although my approach is not rooted in any religious doctrine, the concept of THAT resonates metaphysically with certain non-dual traditions such as Advaita Vedānta, where Brahman is both origin and fabric of all that exists, or with Taoism, where the flux of the real unfolds without subject or external goal. In a different register, some forms of Christian mysticism, especially in Meister Eckhart or John of the Cross, evoke the idea of an inner presence — undefinable yet active in the world. Lastly, in Madhyamaka or Zen Buddhism, the void is not nothingness, but the basis of all possible differentiation — a notion closely aligned with the idea of a spation as pure structural distinction without fixed substrate.

Several cross-disciplinary inspirations also deserve mention: Kurt Gödel for his demonstration of the internal limits of any formal system; George Spencer-Brown, whose Laws of Form is built on the act of distinction itself; and more heterodox figures such as Rudolf Steiner or Arthur Young, whose speculations on the evolution of consciousness, though unconventional, occasionally intersect with the themes explored here.