SANE Source: https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.html Canonical HTML: https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.html Generated: 2026-05-26 Description: SANE is a proposed framework for reading coupled changes across somaesthetic practice, anthropotechnical mediation, noetic meaning, and emergent systems. Markdown: https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.md Plain text: https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.txt BibTeX references: https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.bib CSL JSON references: https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.references.csl.json --- Body, tools, meaning, systems SANE SANE is a proposed framework for reading how people are trained, mediated, narrated, scaffolded, stabilized, and reorganized. The acronym names four dimensions: Somaesthetic , Anthropotechnical , Noetic , and Emergent . Use SANE when an experience cannot be explained by body practice, tool design, narrative, or feedback loops alone. The point is not to collapse body practice, tools, ritual, AI, pedagogy, media, and morphogenesis into one grand mechanism. The point is to keep the differences visible while asking how they couple. For example, a breath practice in VR may involve bodily attention, interface design, narrative framing, and feedback loops at once. SANE asks what each layer contributes. The fragmentation problem is ordinary: a posture practice is treated as "body"; a notebook, headset, model, drug, or interface as "technology"; prayer, inner speech, or myth as "meaning"; and feedback, morphogenesis, or emergence as "systems." Real practices often cross those borders. SANE is a sorting instrument for that crossing, not an established academic discipline (Shusterman, 1999 (https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/humanitieschair/pdf/somaesthetics-a-disciplinary-proposal.pdf); Stiegler, 2012 (https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/464-1026-1-PB.pdf); Luhrmann and Morgain, 2012 (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01266.x); Barnett and Seth, 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.014304)). What SANE is (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.html#what-sane-is) Four dimensions (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.html#dimensions) Evidence audit (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.html#evidence) References (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/sane.html#references) Back to work (https://mesmerprism.com/#work) Framework A proposed coupling framework SANE proposes that many difficult cases become clearer when they are read across four questions at once. What is being trained in the body? What technical, institutional, or media scaffold is shaping the practice? What language, ritual, story, or social permission makes the experience legible? What feedback loop, boundary, or self-organizing pattern is stabilizing the result? SANE is a sorting framework, not a discovery report. It keeps somaesthetic practice, AI companions, ritual, psychedelics, XR, pedagogy, and morphogenesis as separate domains that can become entangled in the same scene of change. The framework is useful when it helps sort the scene: sensation from interpretation, affordance from belief, discipline from dependency, emergence from narrative atmosphere. That makes SANE closer to a diagnostic grammar than a theory of everything. It asks what evidence would matter at each scale. A bodily account needs bodily evidence. A technical account needs a route through tools, interfaces, institutions, or protocols. A noetic account needs sources for language, ritual, attention, and social mind. An emergent account needs a boundary, feedback loop, nonlinear relation, or scale shift that does actual explanatory work. Use it to ask - What is being trained? - What is being mediated? - What is being narrated? - What is being scaffolded? - What is being stabilized? - What is self-organizing? Scope limits - SANE is a proposed framework, not an established academic field. - No single mechanism explains every domain. - Emergence cannot replace evidence. - Psychofauna is conceptual vocabulary, not a scientific category. - Practice language and clinical language remain separate. Four dimensions Keep the lines distinct before synthesizing The four dimensions are not four substances. They are four questions that keep different kinds of evidence from being mistaken for one another. 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 (https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/humanitieschair/pdf/somaesthetics-a-disciplinary-proposal.pdf); Shusterman, 2012 (https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139094030); Bullington, 2013 (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6498-9)). 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 (https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503616738); Stiegler, 2010 (https://commons.princeton.edu/eng574-s23/wp-content/uploads/sites/348/2023/02/Stiegler-Taking-Care-of-Youth-and-the-Generations-excerpts.pdf); Stiegler, 2012 (https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/464-1026-1-PB.pdf)). 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 (https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/326C72C8CA5D3E4FAEBE389CE42464D7/9780748645268c1_p1-16_CBO.pdf/technical-mentality.pdf); Simondon, 2017 (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/on-the-mode-of-existence-of-technical-objects); Serres, 2007 (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-parasite); Serres, 2023 (https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816678822/hermes-i/)). 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 (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01197.x); Luhrmann and Morgain, 2012 (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01266.x); Lifshitz et al., 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.05.008); Luhrmann et al., 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016649118)). 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 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2015.12.001); Alderson-Day et al., 2020 (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00221); Alderson-Day et al., 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291722000344)). 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 (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00395); Barnett and Seth, 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.014304); Levin, 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.02.034); Levin, 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3); Hiesinger and Levin, 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.201070)). 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 (https://doi.org/10.3390/neurosci3030032)). Agency ecology Coupling without flattening SANE treats agency as ecological in a modest sense. A person acts through bodily habits, remembered phrases, devices, training environments, social permissions, protocols, and feedback from the world. Those supports do not dissolve the person into a system. They name the conditions under which agency becomes easier, harder, more expensive, more dependent, or more stable. The practical question is control-cost. Some couplings make useful action cheaper: the right practice, cue, social container, or instrument lets a person do something without constant conscious supervision. Other couplings only appear to help because they hide dependency, narrow attention, or substitute a story for feedback. SANE's test is not whether a practice sounds integrative. The test is whether the framework helps locate what is carrying the change. The legacy SANE drafts repeatedly return to this as attentive yielding. The useful version is not blind surrender. It is the trained reduction of coercive control when force is raising the cost of coordination. A musician, teacher, meditator, designer, therapist, athlete, ritual participant, or AI user may all face the same practical question: what can be allowed to carry part of the work, and what still needs explicit boundary, feedback, or refusal? SANE names the companion practice "conducting": arranging conditions so coordination can happen without pretending that one central actor controls every part. This is why the four dimensions stay distinct. If a strange experience appears during meditation, XR, psychedelic use, prayer, AI dialogue, performance training, or illness, the first task is not to crown one explanation. It is to ask: body signal, trained expectation, device artifact, interpretive frame, social cue, emergent pattern, or some mixture? Control-cost questions - Does the practice reduce useful effort or demand constant supervision? - Does the tool widen action or quietly define what action means? - Does the story clarify feedback or protect itself from feedback? - Does the system claim name a real boundary or just add atmosphere? - Is the pattern generated, filtered, amplified, transduced, or merely named? Related comparisons - Plasmatic Multitudes (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/plasmatic-multitudes.html) for embodied media translation. - Phenomenological Control (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/phenomenological-control.html) for absorption and induced experience. - Deep Dream (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/deep-dream.html) for cyberdelic simulation and altered-perception design. Inner ecology Psychofauna as local framework vocabulary "Psychofauna" is SANE's working term for the populated quality of inner life: voices, drives, roles, moods, compulsions, presences, characters, habits, fragments, and semi-autonomous tendencies. It is not an established scientific category. 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 (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016649118); Alderson-Day et al., 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291722000344); Davis, 1998 (https://techgnosis.com/techgnosis-book/); Dos Santos, 2023 (https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111382)). This is also where SANE touches nearby Mesmer Prism work. Tulpas (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/tulpas.html) gives one boundary case for cultivated inner others and headmate language. Prophantasia (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/prophantasia.html) gives another boundary case for projected imagery and source monitoring. Scientific Surrealism (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/scientific-surrealism.html) gives a related apparatus question: how art, method, and epistemic frame change what can be noticed. Evidence audit What is sourced, proposed, speculative, or practical? SANE works only if its evidence burden stays visible. The page therefore separates external lineage anchors from SANE-authored vocabulary, speculative synthesis, design heuristics, and open research questions. The strongest source-backed anchors are the component lineages: somaesthetics and lived body; technics, pharmakon, technical objects, mediation, and relation; absorption, trained inner sense, spiritual presence, felt presence, and voice/personification; interoceptive presence, dynamical independence, bioelectric morphogenesis, connectome harmonics, and transmissive-model vocabulary when it is used only to compare production, gating, filtering, amplification, and transduction (Atasoy et al., 2016 (https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10340); Levin, 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.02.034); Levin, 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3); Barnett and Seth, 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.014304); Rouleau and Cimino, 2022 (https://doi.org/10.3390/neurosci3030032)). Source-backed lineage anchors - Somaesthetics, lived body, and psychosomatic phenomenology. - Technics, pharmakon, technical objects, mediation, relation. - Absorption, inner sense cultivation, spiritual presence, felt presence. - Dynamical independence, interoception, bioelectric morphogenesis. SANE-authored vocabulary - SANE as the four-dimensional coupling framework. - Attentive yielding and conducting as practice terms. - Psychofauna as a local term for populated inner ecology. - Control-cost as a practical diagnostic question. - Dimension sorting as a method for keeping evidence types distinct. Speculative synthesis - Strong bridges between morphogenesis and narrative identity. - AI companions, thoughtforms, ritual presence, and headmates as one comparative lane. - Formal measures for emergent agency or trajectory assembly. - Any transmissive reading that moves beyond bounded cybernetic model comparison. Open research questions - Which couplings reduce useful effort without hiding dependency? - How should inner-social comparison avoid clinical overreach? - When does emergent language add explanatory force? - When is a coordination pattern generated, gated, filtered, amplified, or transduced? - What evidence would distinguish metaphor, design heuristic, and mechanism? Use How to apply the framework SANE is most useful as a set of diagnostic questions, not as a grand metaphysics. 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. References Sources and entry points References are grouped by evidential role. Living pages and public project records were checked for link viability during the May 22, 2026 page refresh. Somaesthetic and embodied practice - Shusterman, Richard. "Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal (https://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/humanitieschair/pdf/somaesthetics-a-disciplinary-proposal.pdf)." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57(3) (1999). - Shusterman, Richard. Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139094030) . Cambridge University Press, 2012. - Bullington, Jennifer. The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6498-9) . Springer, 2013. Technics, mediation, and relation - Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503616738) . Stanford University Press, English edition 1998. - Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (https://commons.princeton.edu/eng574-s23/wp-content/uploads/sites/348/2023/02/Stiegler-Taking-Care-of-Youth-and-the-Generations-excerpts.pdf) . Stanford University Press, 2010. - Stiegler, Bernard. "Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon (https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/464-1026-1-PB.pdf)." Culture Machine 13 (2012). - Stiegler, Bernard, Ben Roberts, Jeremy Gilbert, and Mark Hayward. "A Rational Theory of Miracles: On Pharmacology and Transindividuation (https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.77.10.2012)." New Formations 77 (2012). - Simondon, Gilbert. "Technical Mentality (https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/326C72C8CA5D3E4FAEBE389CE42464D7/9780748645268c1_p1-16_CBO.pdf/technical-mentality.pdf)." Parrhesia translation (2009). - Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/on-the-mode-of-existence-of-technical-objects) . University of Minnesota Press, 2017 edition. - Serres, Michel. The Parasite (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-parasite) . University of Minnesota Press, 2007 edition. - Serres, Michel. Hermes I: Communication (https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816678822/hermes-i/) . University of Minnesota Press, 2023 edition. Noetic, spiritual, and social mind - Luhrmann, T. M., Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted. "The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01197.x)." American Anthropologist 112(1) (2010). - Luhrmann, T. M., and Rachel Morgain. "Prayer as Inner Sense Cultivation: An Attentional Learning Theory of Spiritual Experience (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2012.01266.x)." Ethos 40(4) (2012). - Lifshitz, Michael, Michiel van Elk, and T. M. Luhrmann. "Absorption and Spiritual Experience: A Review of Evidence and Potential Mechanisms (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.05.008)." Consciousness and Cognition 73 (2019). - Luhrmann, T. M. et al. "Sensing the Presence of Gods and Spirits across Cultures and Faiths (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016649118)." PNAS 118(5) (2021). - Alderson-Day, Ben, and Charles Fernyhough. "Auditory Verbal Hallucinations: Social, but How? (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2015.12.001)" Schizophrenia Research 197 (2016). - Alderson-Day, Ben et al. "Voice-Hearing and Personification: Characterizing Social Qualities of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations in Early Psychosis (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00221)." Frontiers in Psychiatry 11 (2020). - Alderson-Day, Ben et al. "Varieties of Felt Presence? Three Surveys of Presence Phenomena and Their Relations to Psychopathology (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291722000344)." Psychological Medicine 53(8), 2023. - Davis, Erik. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (https://techgnosis.com/techgnosis-book/) . 1998. - Davis, Erik. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (https://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/high-weirdness/) . Strange Attractor, 2019. - Dos Santos, Victoria. "(Techno)Paganism: An Exploration of Animistic Relations with the Digital (https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111382)." Religions 14(11) (2023). Emergence and morphogenesis - Seth, Anil K., Keisuke Suzuki, and Hugo D. Critchley. "An Interoceptive Predictive Coding Model of Conscious Presence (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00395)." Frontiers in Psychology 2 (2011). - Atasoy, Selen, Isaac Donnelly, and Joel Pearson. "Human Brain Networks Function in Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10340)." Nature Communications 7 (2016). - Atasoy, Selen et al. "Connectome-Harmonic Decomposition of Human Brain Activity Reveals Dynamical Repertoire Re-Organization under LSD (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17546-0)." Scientific Reports 7 (2017). - Levin, Michael. "Bioelectric Signaling: Reprogrammable Circuits Underlying Embryogenesis, Regeneration, and Cancer (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.02.034)." Cell 184(8) (2021). - Levin, Michael. "Bioelectric Networks: The Cognitive Glue Enabling Evolutionary Scaling from Physiology to Mind (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3)." Animal Cognition 26 (2023). - Hiesinger, P. Robin, and Michael Levin. "The Self-Assembling Brain: Beyond the Genome (https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.201070)." Development 150(6) (2023). - Barnett, Lionel, and Anil K. Seth. "Dynamical Independence: Discovering Emergent Macroscopic Processes in Complex Dynamical Systems (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.014304)." Physical Review E 108 (2023). - Rouleau, Nicolas, and Nicholas Cimino. "A Transmissive Theory of Brain Function: Implications for Health, Disease, and Consciousness (https://doi.org/10.3390/neurosci3030032)." NeuroSci 3(3) (2022). Related Mesmer Prism pages - Mesmer Prism. "Plasmatic Multitudes (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/plasmatic-multitudes.html)." Embodiment and media-art translation. - Mesmer Prism. "Phenomenological Control (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/phenomenological-control.html)." Absorption, expectation, and induced experience. - Mesmer Prism. "Tulpas (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/tulpas.html)." Thoughtforms and headmates as a boundary case. - Mesmer Prism. "Prophantasia (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/prophantasia.html)." Projected imagery and source monitoring. - Mesmer Prism. "Deep Dream (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/deep-dream.html)." Cyberdelic simulation and altered-perception comparison. - Mesmer Prism. "Scientific Surrealism (https://mesmerprism.com/projects/scientific-surrealism.html)." Epistemic-art and apparatus language.