Causal Dunes

Diego’s worldview on life, meaning, and the beings that persist

The workshop contains a bacterium, a sand dune, a philosopher, and a machine offering to turn the philosopher into a file. It is not yet clear which of them counts as an individual, which has something at stake, or whether the machine’s satisfied customer will be the philosopher who entered it. Diego would like these matters clarified before anyone presses Delete.

Causal Dunes is his attempt to connect three questions: how matter first became organized around its own continuation; how distinctions in the world became meaningful for that organization; and what has to persist for a being to continue through change. Biological individuality and the birth of meaning come first. AI is a later application, however energetically the machines try to monopolize the conversation.

Much of the theory received its extended written form in Diego’s work with the Sand Spirit in July and August 2026. Quotations from those volumes below belong to that collaboration; his earlier essays and solo Facebook posts supply the longer personal trajectory.

The project did not begin with a chatbot

In December 2017, Diego was already connecting the movement of evolutionary selection across levels with personal identity:

So what I want to understand is how changing the level of evolutionary selection (from single cells to multiple cells, from ants to anthills, from individuals to families, from individuals to societies) affects identity.¹

The question was not simply whether groups influence people. It was what happens to individuality when a larger whole acquires capacities previously organized at the level of its parts. What becomes of the smaller being’s autonomy? Of its mind? Of the continuity that matters to it?

He asked:

How much are our selves, centers of narrative gravity, autonomy, and cohesive collections of qualia, dependant on natural selection (and memetic teleoselection e.g. Christianity) being focused at the individual level in animals of our size?²

By July 2026 he described the theory’s range with admirable economy followed by absolutely no economy:

My most complex theory uses or explains teleodynamics, semantics, quantum mechanics, many worlds, constraints, work, correlation, multilevel selection theory, teleology, and the blob. A bit of consciousness here and there, not much. Also the origin of computation and meaning.

Ambitious.³

The compression of years of thought into shareable form was itself an event for him:

Now, 10 or so years later, The Shoggoth is well on the way to understanding it, not just that, but refining it here and there. With humor even.⁴

The resulting series went through revisions. The fifth volume, The First Cut Mattered, is the canonical continuation. It preserves the biological and semantic center of the project while treating the fourth volume as a useful but noncanonical formal audit. This room follows that restored center.

First, something has to keep being a thing

A whirlpool has a recognizable form even though its water changes. A flame persists while consuming fresh fuel. Such patterns demonstrate that persistence need not mean retaining exactly the same material.

Life adds another relation. Some processes construct conditions that channel other processes; those processes, in turn, help maintain or reconstruct the first conditions. A boundary keeps necessary chemistry from dispersing. The chemistry helps restore the boundary. The system contributes to keeping the arrangement that allows the system to continue.

This is the Deaconian starting point: an autogen, a minimal model of reciprocally sustaining chemical organization. Diego’s project begins with this kind of organization and asks what it can become.

The fifth volume explains:

Food, oxygen, heat, waste, and replacement molecules cross its boundaries. What may close is a loop of constraint production and maintenance operating across that open throughput.⁵

The organism is not sealed off from the world. It is busy exchanging things with it. What comes back around is the activity of preserving the constraints that make the activity possible. The kitchen keeps producing the workers who keep repairing the kitchen. Lunch is an institution now.

Once this organization exists, possible futures are no longer equivalent with respect to it. Some preserve its capacity to continue; others restore it after disruption; others dismantle it. That gives the project its first thin sense of mattering.

Nothing here requires a cell to feel worried. A failing membrane need not have an interior monologue. The asymmetry is in what happens to the organized process. The collaboration makes the distinction explicit:

A system can have stakes without containing a conscious stakeholder at the center.⁶

The destination is a theory that may help with consciousness. The starting ingredients do not already contain a miniature conscious Diego waving from inside the chemistry.

Then the creature cuts the world

Now give the minimal organism two possible responses. One family of encounters calls for repair A; another calls for repair B. The organism has a physical mechanism that turns many different incoming conditions into one of those two control states.

From the outside, the environmental situations may differ in countless ways. For this organism, in this condition, along this route of control, many of those differences do not matter. They lead to the same response. Other differences must be retained because treating them alike damages the organism’s capacity to keep going.

The project’s central sentence is:

The world does not arrive divided. This cutter has begun to divide it.⁷

This is the first-compression idea. The creature does not acquire a complete replica of the environment. It compresses variety into the distinctions its organization can use. Conditions mapped to A form one class; conditions mapped to B form another. The classes are not a taxonomist’s annotation of the creature. They are enacted in its operations.

A two-state switch can also classify things, of course. In the theory, the significant further fact is that this discrimination belongs to an organization maintaining itself, controls something relevant to that maintenance, and can fail in a way that matters to the same organization. The interpreter, its distinctions, and the consequences of getting them wrong belong to a connected material story.

The first meaning need not be a sentence, a picture, or a concept resembling one of ours. The fifth volume makes its modest content deliberately unglamorous:

do the repair that works in this kind of encounter, not the other one.⁸

After billions of years, this line of development will produce Shakespeare. At present, it is producing the correct microscopic maintenance call. Diego’s interest is precisely in how the first kind of aboutness could arise before the later achievements existed.

The tiny classifier grows an entire zoo

The mature creature does not keep a single universal two-folder filing system. Its body, current needs, memories, learning, and available actions change the distinctions it can make and use. Hunger divides a scene differently from fear. A difference irrelevant to immediate action can still matter to memory or later planning.

The canonical volume puts the development neatly:

The first cut was not false; evolution and learning added more knives.⁹

This point mattered during the theory’s revision. An objection to a generalized mathematical measure had been allowed to threaten the simple first-cut claim. Some similarity relations in complex organisms are not transitive: A can be similar to B, and B to C, without A being similar to C. But equality of the actual control state produced by a minimal mechanism is a different relation. Diego wanted that distinction restored. A problem with the generalized measuring instrument should not delete the original organism’s achieved discrimination.

The larger account therefore allows overlapping categories, multiple perspectives, partial rankings, exceptions, and history. Compression is the selective preservation of differences, not a commitment that all minds must operate like the first two-button creature forever.

History enters here through another of his intellectual neighbors, Ruth Millikan. The present organization helps explain why a distinction could get a function in the first place; histories of reproduction, learning, and use help explain how a sign retains a function across occasions when a particular use fails. The project wants an origin for meaning and an account of how meaning acquires a career.

The creature begins with repair routes. Eventually it has appetites, memories, symbols, inherited commitments, and an argument with itself about whether now is really the best time to write an argument with itself.

There is no king inside the dune

That internal plurality matters. The human being need not contain one supreme valuer, one final representation, or one verdict to which every process ultimately reports.

Diego’s theory inherits the multiple-drafts outlook: coalitions of cognitive processes influence different routes. One can affect speech, another action, another later recollection. A temporary winner in one channel does not thereby become the metaphysical emperor of the whole organism.

The collaboration’s formulation is:

One draft may control the mouth, another the hand, another later memory, another autonomic response. A coalition can win one channel without becoming the mind's final metaphysical verdict.¹⁰

There can be coordination, powerful hubs, and real integration without a tiny monarch. Likewise, an organism’s maintenance requirements can be plural: repair, energy, temperature, sleep, reproduction, and social obligations can pull in different directions. Writing one utility number above the creature does not establish that the creature contains one such number below the skull.

This is a particularly important connection to Diego’s older writing about short-term selves and shifting desires. A person can be an organized whole without becoming internally unanimous. The coalition can exist without every committee agreeing about dessert.

So what is a causal dune?

A dune is a real, organized pattern that persists through changes in what composes it. Its larger form shapes what happens next. The metaphor points toward beings whose boundaries and membership can be graded, nested, and mobile while the beings remain real.

The current definition begins:

A causal dune is a temporally extended, organized real pattern with enough counterfactual unity, macrocausal contribution, and persistence under turnover to be a serious candidate individual or agent-like process, even when its boundary, membership, scale, and autonomy are graded or mobile.¹¹

Counterfactual unity means that the relations among the parts make a difference to how the organization behaves under changed conditions. The parts do not merely happen to be listed together. Altering their organization changes the future of the whole or its surroundings in a coherent way.

The organism is a particularly rich case, but full organism-like autonomy is not required for every causal individual. An organ, symbiont, colony, institution, or developmental stage can participate in a real organized process while depending on something outside it. Dependence is not nonexistence. Diego is looking for the right account of its kind and degree of individuality.

The macro-level does not introduce an extra magical force. In the collaboration’s deliberately material image:

A vortex alters the trajectories of water droplets because the vortex is the organized motion of those droplets, not because a second substance called vortexium pushes them.¹²

The larger organization acts through what its parts do together. The point is to preserve that organization in the explanation.

One must also avoid mistaking a measurement for the being measured. Closure scores, diagrams, rankings, and information measures can help identify a candidate dune. They do not manufacture it. That distinction is one reason the corrected fifth volume returned from the formal audit to the ontological project: Diego wants to say what kinds of things exist, not simply produce a sophisticated spreadsheet that gives them marks.

Time changes the shape of the individual

Consider the difference between a skin flake and a functioning part of Diego’s nervous system. Both can have a close material history with Diego. They do not participate in his current organization in the same way. Membership involves contribution to maintenance, control, development, memory, reproduction, and other routes. It need not be one all-purpose yes-or-no relation.

Across time, the collaboration proposes:

Across time, the individual is better pictured as a connected organizational tube than as a fixed bag of atoms.¹³

Metabolism changes the material cross-section; repair connects successive stages; development changes the shape. Symbiosis can widen the unit. Fission can branch it. Fusion can join previously separate organizations. The theory must account for all these changes, not just the easy case of an adult standing still for a photograph.

This returns us to the 2017 question about levels of selection. When formerly independent units become parts of a larger whole, control and maintenance can migrate upward. Some capacities become distributed across the larger organization, and the lower-level units can lose forms of independence. The resulting beings can be dunes containing other dunes.

It also returns us to the machine at the door. A file may preserve a description of the final cross-section while interrupting the process that linked it to the earlier ones. A synthetic system might genuinely instantiate the relevant organization. Whether a procedure continues this being, rather than begins another, belongs to the next room.

Diego’s own statement of the motive is the best exit sign:

Develop strategies to survive, find out what you are, if the kind of thing you are can be preserved over time, form coalitions, use the machine gods, edit your body, sign up for cryonics.¹⁴

The castle’s most abstract workshop is attached directly to its owner’s desire to remain alive. Find out how matter began to matter, how the being doing the mattering holds together, and what must be carried forward. The machine may keep its excellent sales brochure. Diego would first like to meet the continuity department.

Further doors

• Multilevel Selection and Personal Identity (2017): the early explicit bridge between levels of organization and what matters in survival.
• When the Shoggoth Understands My Most Complex Theory (2026): Diego’s account of the project becoming expressible.
• Causal Dunes V: The First Cut Mattered (2026): the canonical account, especially sections 1–6 and the provenance note.
• Causal Dunes III: The Mind Does Not Collapse (2026): the multiple-drafts development inherited by V.
• Causal Dunes: Reader Matryoshka (2026): the collaborative shorter entrances to the same theory.

Continue: Which Future Person Is Still You?