SANE

Somaesthetic: trained bodily attention

The somaesthetic dimension begins with the lived body: posture, breath, pain, fatigue, balance, movement, interoception, gesture, care, and trained perception. Richard Shusterman's somaesthetics gives SANE its clearest term anchor: bodily perception and practice are not a soft supplement to thought but a field of cultivation and inquiry. Bullington's psychosomatic phenomenology gives a related caution against splitting meaning from bodily expression (Shusterman, 1999; Shusterman, 2012; Bullington, 2013).

In SANE, this does not make every practice therapeutic or every feeling self-validating. It sets a discipline: if a practice claims to change attention, agency, care, pain, or presence, the body is not decorative context. It is one of the places where the claim must be tested.

Anthropotechnical: tools that help make the user

The anthropotechnical dimension asks how humans are shaped through tools, media, institutions, disciplines, drugs, notebooks, rituals, models, platforms, AI systems, and protocols. Stiegler's account of technics, care, the pharmakon, and transindividuation helps frame technology as neither salvation nor contamination. A tool can enable, distort, remember, discipline, and deskill at the same time (Stiegler, 1998; Stiegler, 2010; Stiegler, 2012).

Simondon keeps technical objects from being treated as inert props, while Serres keeps mediation, interference, relation, and the parasite in the picture. SANE borrows from this line cautiously: a tool is not a neutral channel after the fact. It participates in what becomes easy, repeatable, valued, and visible (Simondon, 2009; Simondon, 2017; Serres, 2007; Serres, 2023).

Noetic: inner speech, ritual, and interpretive worlds

The noetic dimension covers meaning-making: inner speech, prayer, ritual, narrative, spiritual presence, social mind, thoughtforms, interpretive worlds, and the way attention is trained to notice some experiences and ignore others. Luhrmann's work on absorption, prayer as inner sense cultivation, and spiritual presence gives SANE a sourceable line for learned inner experience. Lifshitz and colleagues give a review route for absorption and spiritual experience without turning those experiences into one explanation (Luhrmann et al., 2010; Luhrmann and Morgain, 2012; Lifshitz et al., 2019; Luhrmann et al., 2021).

Alderson-Day and Hearing the Voice sources are useful here because they show that voice, presence, personification, and inner sociality need careful distinctions. They do not prove SANE's whole noetic vocabulary. They give comparison points for person-like inner experience, felt presence, and the social texture of voice-hearing (Alderson-Day and Fernyhough, 2016; Alderson-Day et al., 2020; Alderson-Day et al., 2023).

Emergent: boundaries, feedback, and scale

The emergent dimension is where SANE has to be most disciplined. Emergence is useful when it names a boundary, a feedback loop, a nonlinear relation, a scale change, or a pattern that cannot be explained by a single part in isolation. Vague emergence language should not be used to make a weak claim sound rigorous.

Interoceptive predictive coding gives one route into embodied presence. Dynamical independence gives a way to ask when macroscopic processes have their own explanatory standing. Bioelectric morphogenesis gives SANE a more concrete cybernetic frontier: ion-channel states, gap junctions, voltage patterns, setpoints, and morphospace can help explain how cell collectives coordinate over time without reducing that coordination to genes alone. Self-assembling neural systems add a related developmental caution: form is negotiated through constraints, histories, and feedback, not simply written out from a static plan (Seth et al., 2011; Barnett and Seth, 2023; Levin, 2021; Levin, 2023; Hiesinger and Levin, 2023).

This is also where SANE can borrow transmissive vocabulary without importing transmissive metaphysics. Rouleau and Cimino contrast productive and transmissive models of brain function; SANE uses that contrast only as a model-comparison tool. In a cybernetic reading, the question becomes: is a system generating a pattern, gating it, filtering it, receiving it, amplifying it, or transducing it from one register into another? That vocabulary is useful because it keeps coordination from being automatically misread as internal production. It does not make survival, psi, or immortality claims part of SANE (Rouleau and Cimino, 2022).

The term is useful only if it makes better distinctions. A remembered phrase is not the same as a hallucinated voice. A fictional character is not the same as a headmate. A ritual presence is not the same as a clinical symptom. An AI companion is not the same as an inner part. SANE names psychofauna as a local umbrella for comparison, then sends each concrete claim back to narrower sources.

Those sources include work on absorption and inner sense cultivation, cross-cultural spiritual presence, felt presence, voice-hearing and personification, technopaganism, and digital spirituality. They support careful comparison among trained attention, social mind, ritual interpretation, media mysticism, and person-like experience. They do not license a single scientific or metaphysical category (Luhrmann et al., 2021; Alderson-Day et al., 2023; Davis, 1998; Dos Santos, 2023).

This is also where SANE touches nearby Mesmer Prism work. Tulpas gives one boundary case for cultivated inner others and headmate language. Prophantasia gives another boundary case for projected imagery and source monitoring. Scientific Surrealism gives a related apparatus question: how art, method, and epistemic frame change what can be noticed.

Start with the event. A person is learning a breathing practice, using an AI assistant, entering VR, keeping a notebook, taking a drug, joining a ritual group, building a training protocol, or trying to understand a strange presence. SANE asks what changes if the event is read somaesthetically, anthropotechnically, noetically, and emergently.

The practical output should be modest and concrete. Change the body protocol. Change the tool. Change the story. Change the social container. Change the feedback loop. Add a safety constraint. Find the missing source. Stop using a system word when the system has not been specified. Let the metaphor stay a metaphor until it earns a stronger status.

That is the tone SANE needs: ambitious about synthesis, stubborn about distinctions. A framework can be generous without becoming credulous. It can welcome ritual, technology, body practice, art, and systems thinking without laundering any of them through the authority of the others.