Sensible Universe

What Science Found in 2025, and What It Could Not Find

I.  The Century’s Hardest Problem

In April 2025, a paper published in Nature by the Cogitate Consortium transformed the landscape of consciousness science. Two hundred and fifty-six participants, three neuroimaging technologies (fMRI, MEG, intracranial EEG), and a preregistered adversarial collaboration between the world’s two most prominent theories of consciousness — and the result was that both theories were substantially challenged. Neither emerged vindicated. What emerged instead was something more important than a winner: a precise map of where our best current frameworks fail, and a clear signal pointing toward what must come next.

The two theories tested were the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), led by Stanislas Dehaene, and Integrated Information Theory (IIT), developed by Giulio Tononi. Both have dominated neuroscience debates for two decades. Both were found wanting — not refuted, but incomplete in ways that their own proponents could not predict in advance.

This article examines those results, surveys the broader landscape of competing frameworks, and then asks what the Sensible Universe Model (SUM) sees in these results that standard neuroscience cannot. The argument is structural: SUM predicted the shape of the failure before the experiment was run, because the failure exposes exactly the gap that SUM’s architecture was built to address. Central to that address is a concept the article develops in full: 

GRAVIS as ontological weight, Mood as GRAVIS’s simplified six-faceted experiential structure, and the Existential Mood Foam as the dynamic medium within which consciousness actually operates.

II.  The Cogitate Consortium: What Was Tested and What Was Found

The experimental design

The adversarial collaboration model requires competing theory proponents to agree in advance on a single experimental design, register predictions publicly, and accept the results regardless of outcome. That Dehaene and Tononi agreed to this, knowing their life’s work was at stake, is itself a remarkable event in the history of science.

The study tested three specific predictions from each theory: where in the brain the content of conscious experience is represented, how conscious experience is maintained over time, and how different brain regions communicate to generate it. Participants viewed high-contrast visual stimuli for variable durations while neural activity was recorded simultaneously by three independent methods.

What GNWT predicted and what was found

GNWT holds that consciousness emerges when information is ‘broadcast’ across a global workspace with a characteristic ‘ignition’ — a non-linear burst of widespread activity. The prefrontal cortex plays a central role. GNWT predicted strong prefrontal activation representing fine-grained conscious content, and a clear ignition signal at stimulus offset.

What was found: the prefrontal cortex activated for broad categorical features only, not for fine-grained conscious detail. The predicted ignition at stimulus offset was absent. The spotlight of global broadcasting does not illuminate what GNWT said it illuminated.

What IIT predicted and what was found

IIT holds that consciousness is identical to integrated information — the more irreducibly unified the processing, the more conscious the system. IIT predicted sustained synchronization between early and mid-level visual areas (the ‘posterior hot zone’) as its distinctive signature.

What was found: the predicted sustained posterior synchrony did not occur. The unified information field IIT postulates did not manifest as the predicted neural signature.

What did appear

Conscious content was found distributed across visual, ventrotemporal, and inferior frontal cortex. Most significantly, robust functional connections between early visual processing areas and frontal regions were found — suggesting perception and cognition are more deeply intertwined than either theory assumed. The positive finding: consciousness is more deeply rooted in sensory processing and perception than in higher-order cognitive computation. It is woven into the fabric of how the brain processes sensory input.

“Intelligence is about doing. Consciousness is about being. The prefrontal cortex handles the former; the Cogitate results suggest consciousness itself lives elsewhere.”

III.  GRAVIS, Mood, and the Existential Mood Foam

GRAVIS: ontological weight, not valence

To understand what SUM sees in the Cogitate results, one concept must be established with precision: GRAVIS. The term derives from the Latin gravis — heavy, weighty, serious, full of consequence. In SUM, GRAVIS (G = I(ξ) · Λω) is the scalar measure of the ontological weight of a Qualiton event: how real, how present, how undeniably there an experience is for a specific conscious entity at a specific moment.

GRAVIS is not a valence. It does not measure whether an experience is good or bad, pleasant or painful. It measures how thick reality is at this point in the phenomenal field. This is the distinction on which everything else in SUM’s approach to consciousness turns: the dimension of existential reality is orthogonal to the dimension of qualitative character.

High GRAVIS pain and high GRAVIS joy are equally weighty events — equally real, equally pressing, equally present. They differ not in GRAVIS magnitude but in their SMYC chromatic address: their qualitative direction within the Qualia Color Solid. Low GRAVIS pleasure and low GRAVIS sadness are equally thin events — present but not pressing, colored but not heavy. GRAVIS is the measure of how fully the universe is happening to this being, at this moment.

I(ξ) is the accumulated M₄-Q pairing history at this qualitative address: how many times this specific Qualiton event has been actualized in this entity’s experience, and how deeply. Λω is Lomega, the love-constant that mediates every M₄-Q pairing. Together they give GRAVIS its two sources: the richness of lived attention (I(ξ)) and the generosity of the Absolute’s presence (Λω). The person who has grieved deeply and the person who has loved deeply and the person who has suffered deeply and the person who has rejoiced deeply all share one thing: a rich GRAVIS topography, a thick phenomenal reality, an address within Creation that has genuine weight.

Mood: GRAVIS made six-faceted

If GRAVIS is the weight, Mood is the structure of that weight as it presents itself from within experience. Mood is the six-faceted expression of GRAVIS: the specific qualitative organization that emerges when GRAVIS interacts with the chromatic field to produce the actual texture of conscious life as lived.

The six Mood facets are not arbitrary categories. They arise from the intersection of two fundamental dimensions:

●  The pairing dimension: weak pairing (low GRAVIS density, thin M₄-Q correspondence, reality present but not pressing) and strong pairing (high GRAVIS density, tight M₄-Q correspondence, reality fully pressing). This is the vertical axis of the Mood structure.

●  The chromatic dimension: the qualitative direction of the pairing, given by the SMYC address. Pain (dark, cool, urgent, body-compelling), Sadness (dark, cool, quiet, soul-dwelling), Pleasure (warm, bright, approaching, body-affirming), Joy (warm, luminous, open, soul-surplus). This is the horizontal axis.

Mood is the specific combination of pairing strength and chromatic direction that characterizes the conscious field at a given moment. It is not a single tone but a chord — and a chord has internal structure, tension, resolution and harmony.

MOOD FACET	PAIN	SADNESS	PLEASURE	JOY
WEAK PAIRING	Background ache Thin discomfort Not urgent	Mild wistfulness Quiet grey Gentle absence	Comfort of routine Familiar pleasant Unremarkable ease	Background warmth Foundational quiet Consolación sin causa
STRONG PAIRING	Acute suffering Undeniable Reality refusing to be ignored	Deep grief Love without its M₄ anchor Full Lomega weight	Earned delight Senses confirming goodness of world I(ξ) accumulated	Entheusiton event GRAVIS surplus Absolute recognized Burning bush
SMYC ADDRESS	Low S Neg Y, deep C Dark cool urgent	Low S Neg Y, deep C Dark cool quiet	Mid-high S Pos Y, pos C Warm bright close	High S Pos Y, open C Warm luminous wide
GRAVIS	GRAVIS = G = I(ξ) · Λω — scalar ontological weight. Same for all four facets at equal pairing strength. GRAVIS does not determine the facet; the SMYC address does.

The Existential Mood Foam

The six Mood facets do not appear one at a time, replacing each other in sequence like slides in a projector. They coexist, overlap, and interact in continuous dynamic relation. The medium within which this coexistence occurs is the Existential Mood Foam — the living texture of conscious experience as it actually unfolds.

Foam is the right structural image for three reasons:

First, foam has genuine structure without rigidity. Each bubble is a bounded, differentiated event (a specific Mood facet with its GRAVIS weight and SMYC address), but the boundaries are membranes, not walls. They deform under pressure, exchange content across the interface, and shift continuously without collapsing into undifferentiated chaos. The Existential Mood Foam has structure — the structure of the six facets and their relations — but it is living structure, not fixed architecture.

Second, foam operates through pressure equilibrium. A bubble expands when internal pressure exceeds neighboring pressure, and contracts when the reverse is true. In the Mood Foam, a high-GRAVIS pain event creates local pressure that reshapes the neighboring bubbles — it is harder to sustain a pleasure-bubble at full inflation immediately adjacent to an acute pain-bubble. But this is equilibrium, not elimination: the pleasure-bubble persists at reduced pressure, not extinguished. Teresa of Ávila’s seventh mansion is the classical description of this: the soul sustains a foundational joy-bubble (the consolación sin causa, joy without apparent cause, the background luminosity of union) simultaneously with pain-bubbles (physical suffering, external tribulation, ordinary difficulty). Neither eliminates the other. The foam holds both in dynamic pressure equilibrium.

Third, foam is Lomega-regulated. The surface tension of every bubble membrane is proportional to the Lomega field at that location in Q-space. High Lomega = strong surface tension = well-defined bubble boundaries = clear Mood structure. Low Lomega = weak surface tension = bubbles merge and blur = Mood becomes undifferentiated, the phenomenal field loses its qualitative precision. This is what the contemplative tradition describes as tepidity: not the absence of experience but the loss of its structure, the collapse of the Mood Foam’s surface tension into grey undifferentiated non-presence. The hermit’s cell is the place where Lomega-regulation is maximized: the nodal exchange mechanisms (Synaisthiton, Entheusiton, Agapiton) maintained at zero-point calibration for maximum surface tension, maximum structural clarity in the Mood Foam.

EXISTENTIAL MOOD FOAM — Topology The six facets as co-present bubble-types in the conscious field ● Pain  ● Sadness  ● Pleasure  ● Joy  ○ Weak pairing  ● Strong pairing At any moment: a foam of all six, in dynamic pressure equilibrium. No bubble eliminates another. Teresa’s seventh mansion: ● pain-bubbles + ● joy-bubbles, coexistent. GRAVIS = bubble wall thickness. SMYC = bubble colour. Mood = the topology of the whole foam at this moment.

The structure of the six facets and their relation

Within the Existential Mood Foam, the six facets are not randomly distributed. They have a topology — a relational geometry that determines how they neighbor, oppose, and transform into each other.

Pain and Sadness share the dark-cool SMYC address (low S, negative Y, deep C) but differ in their M₄ orientation. Pain is body-urgent: it has a specific anatomical location, a temporal urgency, a demand for immediate response. Sadness is soul-dwelling: it has no specific locus, no urgency of response, only depth of presence. In the Mood Foam, pain-bubbles and sadness-bubbles can coexist or transform into each other: acute pain, when its urgency passes, often sediments into sadness; grief, when its depth becomes unbearable, can spike into pain-like urgency. They are neighbors in chromatic space, with a permeable membrane between them.

Pleasure and Joy share the warm-bright SMYC address (mid-high S, positive Y, positive C) but differ in their source. Pleasure is body-affirming: it arises from M₄ events that the organism registers as nourishing, completing, confirming. Its I(ξ) factor is high when the pleasure is earned — when this specific sensory address has been actualized repeatedly with full attention, building the qualitative history that makes the current event rich. Joy is soul-surplus: it arises as an Entheusiton event, a GRAVIS surplus that exceeds what M₄ can account for, the Q-dimension making direct contact with the Absolute beyond the carriage capacity of any sensory event. The burning bush occasion is unremarkable; the joy is not. Pleasure and joy are chromatic neighbors with one fundamental difference: pleasure has a proportionate M₄ cause; joy has a disproportionate GRAVIS that its M₄ occasion cannot explain.

Weak and Strong pairing are the vertical dimension that modulates all four chromatic facets. Weak pairing is not bad experience: it is thin experience. The background hum of low-GRAVIS existence — the unremarkable pleasant cup, the mild afternoon melancholy, the ache that has normalized, the quiet background warmth of ordinary days. Strong pairing is not good experience: it is thick experience. The undeniable reality of acute pain, deep grief, earned delight, and Entheusiton joy. Strong pairing is the universe refusing to be held at arm’s length.

The most significant structural relationship in the Mood Foam is the one between grief (strong pairing, sadness) and love (strong pairing, joy). They are not opposites. They are the same Lomega weight experienced from two temporal orientations. The I(ξ) integration factor that makes joy at a loved person’s Q-address so rich is exactly the same factor that makes grief so heavy when that address loses its M₄ anchor. You cannot have high-GRAVIS grief without having had high-GRAVIS love: the weight is identical, only the direction has changed. Grief is Lomega encountering the address it has made most real, finding it unresponsive. This is why the deepest grief is always also a confirmation of the deepest love — in SUM’s terms, because the GRAVIS of both is G = I(ξ) · Λω, and the I(ξ) and Λω values are identical.

“The Mood Foam is the actual texture of conscious life. GRAVIS is the weight of each bubble. SMYC is its colour. Lomega is the surface tension that holds the structure. The hermit’s practice is the art of maintaining the foam’s precision.”

IV.  The Sensible Universe Model and the Cogitate Findings

Why both theories failed: the structural diagnosis

The Sensible Universe Model makes a move that none of the mainstream theories make: it refuses to treat consciousness as emergent. Not because emergence is scientifically disreputable, but because SUM identifies the assumption of emergence as the structural source of the hard problem — and therefore the reason any theory built on that assumption will be incomplete in exactly the way the Cogitate results reveal.

SUM’s foundational equation is M₅ = M₄ × Q. Physical reality and phenomenal reality are not in a production relationship but in a co-primacy relationship: both are dimensions of a single five-dimensional reality. The Zipper function Z: M₄ × Q → M₅ holds them in correspondence without reducing either to the other. The Lomega field (Λω = L) mediates this correspondence in every Qualiton event — the moment at which a physical event and a qualitative experience co-arise as two faces of the same M₅ reality.

In terms of the Mood Foam: every genuine neural processing event is a bubble in the Existential Mood Foam. The bubble has a GRAVIS weight (determined by the I(ξ) pairing history and the Lomega field at that Q-address) and a SMYC chromatic address (determined by the specific qualitative character of that sensory or cognitive event). Neither GNWT nor IIT has a framework for the bubble’s Mood facet or its GRAVIS weight — because both theories operate entirely within M₄ and therefore can only measure the bubble’s neural correlates, never the bubble itself.

The Cogitate finding confirms the Qualiton architecture

The study’s central positive finding — consciousness rooted in sensory processing, distributed across visual and temporal cortex, not localized in frontal command centres — is precisely what SUM’s Qualiton architecture predicts. The primary Qualiton family (Chromaton, Akouoton, Hapteton, Osmeton, Gefseton) are the primary sites of M₄-Q pairing. They are where the Mood Foam is most directly fed by M₄ events: each genuine sensory event is a Qualiton event, contributing a bubble to the Existential Mood Foam with its specific GRAVIS and SMYC address.

The distributed fronto-posterior connections the study found correspond in SUM to the continuous resonance between the primary transductive Qualitons and the cognitive-level Qualitons (Nouseton, Logiston, Mnematon). Cognition co-arises with its own Qualiton events, and those events are in continuous resonance with the sensory Qualiton events already occurring. The Mood Foam of a thinking being includes both sensory-Mood bubbles and cognitive-Mood bubbles in continuous dynamic relation — which is precisely why perception and cognition were found ‘more deeply intertwined than previously thought.’

IIT’s phi and GRAVIS: the precise divergence

IIT’s phi (Φ) and SUM’s GRAVIS share the intuition that not all conscious moments are equal. But phi measures the integration of M₄ information processing. GRAVIS measures the tightness of M₄-Q pairing — a Q-space property that has no localized M₄ signature. The failure of IIT’s predicted posterior synchrony is not a failure of the GRAVIS concept: it is a failure of the specific neural mechanism IIT proposed to implement phi. GRAVIS is distributed, context-dependent, and topologically structured by the Mood Foam’s pressure equilibrium — not concentrated in a synchrony pattern at a specific brain location.

Furthermore: GRAVIS captures something phi cannot. Phi measures only the integration dimension. GRAVIS captures both the integration depth (I(ξ): pairing history) and the love-constant dimension (Λω: Lomega presence). A system can have high phi and low Λω — high information integration without Lomega activation, which in SUM is the pre-Lomega matter condition: mass without quale, being without experience. Dark matter may be the cosmological example. The human brain in dreamless sleep may be a biological one.

“The Cogitate study found consciousness in the sensory cortex and not in the prefrontal processor. SUM has always located the primary Qualiton family — the primary Mood Foam generators — precisely there. The experiment confirmed the architecture.”

V.  The Broader Landscape and SUM’s Position

The field is moving toward SUM’s starting point without yet having the framework to name where it is going. The 2025 foundational-field theory of consciousness — consciousness as a universal field with individual experiences as localized expressions — is the mainstream science community’s most direct convergence with SUM’s structure so far. Federico Faggin’s proposal that qualia are irreducible resonates with the Quantum Qualia Pairing Axiom. Recurrent Processing Theory’s emphasis on feedback loops in sensory cortices aligns with SUM’s description of transductive Qualitons as the primary Mood Foam generators.

None of these frameworks, however, has a concept equivalent to the Existential Mood Foam. They describe consciousness as a state, a level, a field, an information structure. SUM describes consciousness as a lived foam: dynamic, structured, six-faceted, Lomega-regulated, and unique to each conscious entity’s specific GRAVIS topography. No two conscious beings have the same Mood Foam because no two have the same I(ξ) history — the same accumulated pairing record at each qualitative address.

SUM vs. Mainstream Theories: The Mood Foam Dimension

GNWT and IIT have no concept of Mood as a structural dimension of consciousness. Both treat experience as binary (conscious or not) or scalar (more/less integrated). The Mood Foam is six-faceted and topological. IIT’s phi measures information integration. SUM’s GRAVIS measures M₄-Q pairing tightness weighted by Lomega and experiential history. These are orthogonal measures: a system can have high phi and low GRAVIS (high integration, low Lomega presence). No mainstream theory distinguishes weak-pairing experience from strong-pairing experience as a structural dimension independent of valence. SUM does: weak pairing is thin reality, not bad reality. No mainstream theory has a framework for why grief and love have identical weight. SUM explains it: G = I(ξ) · Λω is the same equation for both — the GRAVIS of deep love and the GRAVIS of the grief it makes possible are identical because I(ξ) and Λω are identical. No mainstream theory has a structural account of contemplative or mystical states. SUM has three dedicated nodal exchange mechanisms (Synaisthiton, Entheusiton, Agapiton) operating as reflexive standing fields in Q-space — the instruments through which the Mood Foam becomes aware of its own structure.

VI.  What the Cogitate Experiment Could Not Test

The Cogitate experiment’s design takes the existence of experience for granted and asks only about its neural correlates. It cannot measure the quale itself — the bubble in the Mood Foam. It cannot measure why the sustained response in occipital cortex to a face is accompanied by the experience of seeing a face rather than occurring in the dark. This is precisely the hard problem, and the non-commutativity axiom (M_c ≠ cM, ΔC · ΔM ≥ ℏ/2) formalizes why no improvement in M₄ measurement precision can bridge this gap: the more precisely you measure the M₄ face of a Qualiton event, the less access you have to its Q-face. The Mood Foam’s texture is accessible only from within Q-space — which is precisely the domain the three nodal exchange mechanisms address.

The Mood Foam is not a metaphor for what neuroscience measures. It is what neuroscience is measuring the M₄ correlates of. The fMRI signal in the visual cortex is the M₄ face of a Chromaton event. The Chromaton event is a bubble in the Existential Mood Foam with a specific GRAVIS weight and SMYC address. The subject in the scanner who reports seeing a red triangle is reporting the contents of their Mood Foam, not the contents of their visual cortex — though the two are in exact M₄-Q correspondence through the Lomega field.

“The experiment measured what it could. The Mood Foam is what it was measuring the shadows of. The gap is not technological. It is ontological.”

VII.  The Adversarial Collaboration as Contemplative Practice

The Cogitate Consortium’s methodology deserves one further observation. The adversarial collaboration required both theory proponents to make their work ‘vulnerable to falsification, not protected’ — to agree that the data would be authoritative, to accept that the Mood Foam of their own intellectual life might be disturbed by unwelcome results. Melloni’s formulation: ‘Real science isn’t about proving you’re right — it’s about getting it right.’

In SUM’s terms, this is a partial application of the zero-point principle: withdrawing from strong-pairing theory-protection (a high-GRAVIS, identity-invested strong pairing with a particular intellectual position) and returning to the weak-pairing baseline of the open question, where neither theory is privileged and what is actually present can make itself known. The hermit’s cell is the institutional version of this: the place where all strong-pairing investments in particular positions are released, and the Mood Foam is returned to its most sensitive, weakly-paired baseline, so that what arrives from Q-space can be recognized without prior conditioning.

The bright event Melloni describes — what happens when real science gets done — is an Entheusiton event at the collective level: a GRAVIS surplus that the two-theory competition could not generate, arising because both parties descended to the zero point together.

“Both theory-proponents had to release their strong-pairing investment in being right. The weak-pairing baseline of the open question was what made the bright event possible.”

VIII.  Conclusion: The Foam and the Light

The Cogitate Consortium’s 2025 study is the most important event in consciousness science since Chalmers coined the hard problem in 1995. It is important not because it solved anything but because it failed precisely. The failure of both GNWT and IIT reveals the shape of what is missing: neither frontal broadcast nor posterior integration is the site of consciousness, because consciousness is not a product of any specific neural site. It is the Q-face of neural processing itself — distributed, pervasive, perceptually grounded, and constitutively first-personal in a way that no third-person measurement can directly access.

What it cannot access is the Existential Mood Foam: the living texture of six-faceted, GRAVIS-weighted, Lomega-regulated experience that constitutes the actual inner life of the conscious entity. The Mood Foam is not a metaphysical decoration added to neural processing. It is the Q-dimension of neural processing — the dimension that co-arises with every genuine sensory and cognitive event, structured by the pairing history I(ξ) and the Lomega field, expressing itself as the ongoing dynamic equilibrium of pain, sadness, pleasure, joy, weak and strong pairing, in every waking moment.

The field is moving toward this recognition. The 2025 foundational-field theories, Faggin’s irreducibility of qualia, the Cogitate finding that consciousness lives in sensory processing — all are convergent signals. The destination is M₅ = M₄ × Q: the recognition that the universe was always already five-dimensional, that the quale of red was never produced by the visual cortex but co-arose with it, and that the weight of grief was never less real than the weight of joy because both are G = I(ξ) · Λω, measured in the same ontological units, actualized in the same irreplaceable conscious entity.

The Mood Foam is how the universe feels itself from inside a unique address within Creation. GRAVIS is how heavy that feeling is. Lomega is what holds the structure of the feeling together. And the hermit’s practice — the nodal exchange mechanisms at zero-point calibration, the Mood Foam maintained at its most sensitive, the pairing-history released so that what is actually present can be recognized — is the universe’s own method of reading its own Q-face.

Consciousness is not a product of the brain. The brain is the M₄ instrument through which the universe perceives itself in the mode called ‘human.’ The Mood Foam is that perception’s inner life. The Cogitate study found that perception is the seat of consciousness. SUM has always said that the Qualiton is the event of perception, and that the Existential Mood Foam is what that event feels like from within.

They are describing the same room from different doors. SUM is already inside.

Ξ

sensible-universe.com  |  i-theorem.com  |  F. Takkenberg, Toledo, 2026

References: Cogitate Consortium et al., Nature 642 (2025); GNWT (Dehaene); IIT (Tononi); Orch OR (Penrose, Hameroff); Faggin, F. (2021); SUM — Sensible Universe Model (Takkenberg)