The Universe Has Acquired an Inside

Diego’s worldview on naturalism

Before entering Diego’s castle, remove one item at the door: the assumption that a person contains a little supernatural person who operates the larger person. There is no attendant to collect it. Attendants would only restart the problem.

Diego’s world is a physical world that has become extraordinarily elaborate. Matter has organized itself into living things, nervous systems, cultures, institutions, and creatures capable of asking what all this is for. His naturalism supplies the castle’s foundations: minds belong to nature; design has a history; explanations must show how complicated capacities arise; and understanding the machinery need not empty life of beauty. On the contrary, for him the machinery is part of the spectacle.

The ape comes with an ancestry

His 2011 essay De Onde Viemos—Where We Came From—begins without a ceremonial throat-clearing:

Somos um cérebro.¹

English translation: We are a brain.

The next movement takes the reader from replicating structures to bacteria, animals, culture, and arithmetic teachers. The professors are not a separate miracle. They are a particularly talkative phase of the same history.

The essential inversion is that intelligence does not have to arrive first to explain an intelligently organized result. Variations reproduce at different rates. Some structures persist and help produce further structures. Repeated over immense stretches of time, the process builds capacities that its earliest participants neither possessed nor understood. Nobody at the beginning needs to know how to make a person. Indeed, requiring a person at the beginning would rather spoil the explanation.

In his presentation of Dennett’s vocabulary, Diego describes evolution this way:

Explicação para todo o design que persiste no mundo, only game in town (i.e., única possibilidade).²

English translation: Explanation for all the design that persists in the world, the only game in town—that is, the only possibility.

That is not merely the youthful enthusiasm of a dissertation. In a 2025 conversation about God, simulations, and protopanpsychism, the same commitment appears in compact English:

God is not the origin. That much is obvious. The origin of design is Darwinism.³

A simulator would not dispose of the question. One would still have to explain where the simulator’s organized capacities came from. Diego can entertain being somewhere inside a simulation without granting the ultimate explanatory role to an unmade mind. The impressive architect upstairs still owes an account of its childhood.

A Dennett installer, with local modifications

Some people read their favorite philosopher. Diego attempted to install his.

Announcing Simulating Dennett in 2014, he explained:

It seemed to me at the time, and still does now, that Dennett’s kind of mind is very interesting and we should have more of those, so I tried my best to create a Dennett installer in book form.⁴

The ambition matters. He wanted readers to acquire a way of approaching unfamiliar problems, not merely a list of conclusions to repeat. His dissertation makes its intended result explicit:

Aqui nos importará em primeiro lugar a forma de pensar de Dennett, e apenas secundariamente os conteúdos específicos propostos em sua filosofia.⁵

English translation: What will matter to us here is first of all Dennett’s way of thinking, and only secondarily the specific contents proposed in his philosophy.

That way of thinking asks how a capacity could be built out of parts that do not already possess it. How do things without beliefs produce something that believes? How do uncomprehending processes produce comprehension? How does a history without foresight yield an animal capable of planning a holiday, an institution capable of planning a century, or an AI capable of revising the plans of both?

The attraction is partly intellectual and partly temperamental. Diego likes thinkers who can move between fields, construct things, enjoy life, and remain legible outside the faculty lounge. Remembering Dennett in 2024, he wrote:

He blessed philosophy with an engineer's mind, while providing the cranes that led philosophy of Darwinism to great heights.⁶

The crane is the crucial piece of equipment. In the Dennettian picture Diego explains, a crane is an enabling structure that emerges within nature and allows nature to build something further. A skyhook is the hoped-for intervention from above that does the difficult work without itself needing construction. Diego wants the crane’s assembly instructions.

His admiration is not an oath of obedience. We will reach a conspicuous disagreement with Dennett before leaving the room. The installer did not disable software updates.

The world is not made of particles plus explanatory laziness

Naturalism, in this castle, does not mean that mentioning atoms completes an explanation of a marriage, a mind, or a civilization.

In the dissertation’s discussion of greedy reductionism, Diego describes the failure with characteristic impatience:

Pulam da física de partículas para a sociologia em apenas um passo, sem percorrer todas as alavancagens intermediárias que normalmente pensamos entre essas áreas.⁷

English translation: They jump from particle physics to sociology in a single step, without passing through all the intermediate forms of leverage we normally think of between these areas.

Declaring that everything is physical does not explain what the physical parts are doing together. A neuron, a brain, a person, and a church are not interchangeable explanatory units. One has to understand the levels of organization and the relations among them. The point of reduction is to build the bridge, not to stand on one bank shouting that the other bank is technically made of the same substance.

His positive formulation is equally direct:

O bom reducionista seria aquele que por um lado não procura nada no céu para auxiliá-lo, ou seja, não procura skyhooks, e por outro lado leva em conta a existência de processos internos ao sistema de alavancagem que permitem novos níveis de complexidade, os guindastes.⁸

English translation: The good reductionist would be someone who, on the one hand, looks for nothing in the sky to help him—that is, does not look for skyhooks—and, on the other, takes into account internal processes of leverage that permit new levels of complexity: cranes.

This is why his naturalism leaves so much room for anthropology, institutions, semantics, and the individuality of larger systems. If a company can replace its members and continue pursuing recognizable aims, that organization is part of what needs explaining. If a person’s intentions become intelligible at the level of beliefs and desires, describing intentions can be the appropriate way to understand the person.

In De Onde Viemos, he makes that choice of explanatory level explicit:

A análise de pessoas em termos de crenças, desejos, sonhos, vontades, ânsias, se paga com muito mais eficiência do que em termos puramente biológicos.⁹

English translation: Analyzing people in terms of beliefs, desires, dreams, wishes, and yearnings pays off much more efficiently than analyzing them in purely biological terms.

The later Causal Dunes project develops this fascination with organized wholes. How can a living being be real, persist through material turnover, and act as a unit without becoming an extra substance? The naturalist’s answer must preserve the being as well as the physics. We will visit that workshop two rooms from here.

Nature made our purposes; it does not get to own them

Diego traces human beings through a double inheritance: genes and culture. Ideas replicate and spread; institutions preserve arrangements; human minds inherit intellectual tools created by other minds. The history of what made us is thus much larger than the history of our chromosomes.

That does not mean the resulting person simply wants whatever maximizes replication. A long and winding developmental history separates a replicator’s success from a human being’s reasons for composing music, studying metaphysics, or deciding that everyone should enjoy a much longer life.

He gives that distance a name:

Chamemos grau de originalidade a medida de distância entre os racionais para o comportamento de um indivíduo e o comportamento dos replicadores que o geraram.¹⁰

English translation: Let us call degree of originality the measure of distance between the rationales for an individual’s behavior and the behavior of the replicators that generated him.

Human purposes become richly our own within this complicated inheritance. They do not need to have descended from outside the universe to be purposes. Nor does their natural origin require obedience to the reproductive process that produced them. Darwinism can explain an appetite without receiving a veto over what the appetite becomes.

The result is a naturalism with an unusual emotional register. Diego can look at human beings as animals and still be enchanted by them. In fact, those are often the same act of attention. These are animals that have acquired music, jokes, friendships, symbols, space programs, and the capacity to argue with their own design. An ape has noticed that the warranty expires and would like to speak to engineering.

The will is in the machinery too

The naturalist commitment has a particularly practical consequence for his view of free will. There is no independent spirit standing outside the nervous system, able to summon whatever motivation the biological person happens to lack.

In January 2026 he wrote:

There is no soul or spirit, we function like other apes, other monkeys and other animals by a series of highly complex principles that organize our nervous system.¹¹

Here the Dennett installer encounters Sapolsky. Diego explicitly sides with Sapolsky against Dennett’s defense of free will:

I wrote a book on Dennett and I can say that Sapolsky obliterated him. The game is over. Determinism won.¹²

For Diego, the important consequence is how people should be treated. The person did not independently author the biological and developmental history that made him capable of some actions and incapable of others. Blame cannot be grounded in a little self-creating monarch who could have stepped free of that history.

This does not make consequences irrelevant. It changes what consequences are for. In a 2024 discussion he describes his preferred approach:

We want to have a notion of free will which will allow us to treat people in a consequentialist manner, not with retributive punishment, but only punishing them to disincentivize further anti-social behavior, just like the quarantine model for disease.¹³

The aim is to protect people, change behavior, and improve what follows. Determinism does not remove the usefulness of interventions; interventions become part of the causal story. His later support for basic income draws, in part, on the same concern for people whose starting conditions and capacities were never of their choosing.

This is one of the places where his forceful language and his permissive moral psychology coexist. He can be furious at an outcome and still deny that anyone constructed himself from nothing and therefore deserves suffering as a cosmic balancing payment.

The universe does not answer, but some of it can sit beside you

None of this requires emotional austerity. Diego does not experience understanding his origins as learning that everything he loves is counterfeit. The things he loves are among the results.

Near the heart of De Onde Viemos is this passage:

O cosmos pode não responder a nossa angústias, mas parte dele pode compartilhá-las conosco, conversar sobre elas, por vezes resolvê-las.¹⁴

English translation: The cosmos may not answer our anxieties, but part of it can share them with us, talk about them, sometimes resolve them.

That part is other people. The essay imagines friends sitting in a park at sunset, sharing not only the sight but their understanding of what they are seeing. The gigantic burning sphere is really there. So are the creatures who can look one another in the eye and appreciate it together.

This is what the title of the room means. The universe has acquired beings with an inside view, a life among other beings, and purposes they can recognize as theirs. Explaining the route does not confiscate the destination. Diego wants to know how the universe built this astonishing arrangement—and how to prevent it from casually throwing the arrangement away.

Further doors

• De Onde Viemos (2011): the clearest early statement of the naturalist worldview and its emotional meaning.
• Simulando Dennett (2013), introduction and chapter 1: the thinking style, cranes, and the distinction between explanation and greedy reductionism.
• Remembering Daniel Dennett and Rejecting His Death (2024): intellectual admiration and the refusal to romanticize mortality.
• Determinism Against Ayn Rand and for Basic Income (2026): the later free-will position and its political consequences.

Continue: Can Knowledge Reach Consciousness?