Member mladixmd

I am a neurointerventional surgeon. My working day is spent inside the arteries of the human brain — threading catheters thinner than angel-hair pasta through the vessels that keep consciousness running, reopening them when a stroke shuts the lights off, and watching, again and again, as a person leaves and then returns. The imaging captures everything about the structure. It captures nothing about the experience. Everything I write begins in that gap. What We Are builds a complete philosophical system — Integrative Realism — from two axioms: that reality has both a structural face, described by physics, and an intrinsic face, which is what consciousness is made of; and that everything complex, from atoms to minds, arises through integration. Volume I works out the nature of reality. Volume II works out what to do about it. Every conclusion is tested against the strongest objections in the literature, on the theory that a philosophy that only survives friendly questions belongs in a drawer, not a bookstore. Born in Des Moines and raised across the Midwest, I trained at the University of Michigan and Lahey Hospital in Boston before settling in Kalamazoo, Michigan — a real place, despite the name. I lives nearby with my wife, two sons, and an Australian Shepherd who contributed nothing to the manuscript but supervised much of it. I am now writing The Architecture of Awareness, a five-volume series on consciousness, because apparently two volumes didn’t empty the drawer.