Inquiry-Guiding Worldviews

When you looked at the image above, what did you see—a face looking right, a face looking left, or a vase? Now ask yourself: which one is true? Perhaps all are true within their respective frames, yet none constitutes the complete or absolute description. What becomes apparent depends partly on the constraints and contexts through which the information is interpreted. The same epistemic discipline is essential to scientific inquiry. Observations do not interpret themselves; the frameworks, assumptions, constraints, and contexts through which we examine them influence the conclusions we draw. At Placeboes Research Foundation, we have therefore articulated six guiding worldview commitments to guide our research and innovation.

World-view Guide   

Constitution of a Conscious Civilization

The Constitution of a Conscious Civilization is a living, openly revised book exploring how advances in the scientific understanding of consciousness might contribute to healthier, more tranquil, and resilient individuals and societies. Rather than presenting a fixed doctrine, the book is intended to evolve as evidence, arguments, and perspectives develop. It brings together consciousness science, contemplative knowledge, lived experience, and wider interdisciplinary scholarship while maintaining epistemic discipline between different ways of knowing. Through continuing review, critique, and revision, the project seeks to build a rigorously curated and evolving body of knowledge from which principles relevant to healthcare, education, communities, and society may emerge.

Six Worldview Commitments

Guiding Our Inquiry. Shaping Our Epistemology.

Ontologies as Epistemic Terminators

Scientific inquiry should not begin by declaring what reality fundamentally is and then interpreting observations through that prior commitment. We begin instead from empirically unavoidable constraints and derive, step by step, the minimal explanatory structures required to satisfy them. Each level is introduced only when the preceding level becomes insufficient. Within this framework, ontological positions arise as consequences of constraint-guided inquiry. The point at which a derivation must stop is treated as an epistemic terminator: a necessary boundary of explanation, but not necessarily an ontology or an ultimate statement about what reality is.

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Ontology-Bracketed Substrate Non-Duality

There is no Cartesian theater inside the brain where the different contents of experience are assembled and presented to an inner observer. Visual, auditory, somatosensory, interoceptive, and other sensory processes ultimately involve patterns of electrochemical activity within the nervous system. At this level, the biological substrate does not intrinsically contain the experiential categories that later emerge from it. The same neural substrate can support profoundly different perceptual, cognitive, affective, and conscious outcomes depending on how its activity is organized and constrained. We use the term substrate non-duality to describe this absence of necessary categorical separation at the underlying biological level. This is not an ontological claim that reality is non-dual, but an ontology-bracketed methodological perspective for investigating how differentiated conscious experiences may emerge from a common biological substrate- which be may be putatively viewed as non-dual.

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Adversarial Harmonization

Competing theories need not be mutually exclusive simply because their claims appear incompatible. Apparent conflicts may arise because theories operate at different explanatory levels, adopt different foundational or ontological assumptions, or place their epistemic terminators at different points in the explanatory hierarchy. We use adversarial harmonization to re-index competing theories within a common constraint-based framework, while bracketing their prior ontological commitments. This allows genuine empirical disagreements to be distinguished from apparent contradictions produced by differences in explanatory level, foundational assumptions, or epistemic terminators, revealing where competing theories may provide complementary descriptions of the same phenomenon and where substantive disagreements remain for empirical adjudication.

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Sustainable Health Care Networks

Microbial life offers a striking lesson in sustainability. In colonies and ecosystems, organisms persist through networks of exchange, cooperation, competition, and mutual dependence. As Fritjof Capra observes of living systems, boundaries preserve identity without requiring separation. We wondered whether the same principle might illuminate healthcare. Clinicians and scientists are expected, in different measures, to be clinicians, teachers, healers, researchers, and entrepreneurs, although no individual can sustainably fulfil every role. Networks offer another possibility: what one person lacks, another can contribute, without either becoming the other. Perhaps part of reducing the burden of disease lies not only in better interventions, but in better relationships. Sustainable healthcare may be a pearl already hidden within our existing networks.

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Contextualized and Individualized Medicine

Reductionism has been extraordinarily productive in medicine. A disease may be investigated at the level of molecules, pathways, cells, or therapeutic targets, and treatment may successfully act at precisely these levels. Yet the level of reduction appropriate for identifying a biological target need not be the level appropriate for delivering therapeutic care. The patient receiving an intervention exists within biological, psychological, social, environmental, and economic contexts that can shape both illness and therapeutic outcomes. CIBEM therefore does not reject reductionism in favour of holism, nor does it claim that any one level is inherently privileged. It asks instead: what level of reduction is appropriate for the problem at hand? For therapeutic care, this may require bringing the biopsychosocial whole back into view to contextualize and individualize evidence-based treatment.

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Six Principal Bioregulators 

Hippocrates is often associated with the idea that disease begins in the gut. Yet the alimentary interface begins earlier, in the mouth, where dentition is far more than an aesthetic concern: it is the first mechanical interface with food and therefore with subsequent digestion and metabolism. Metabolic regulation, in turn, is inseparable from endocrine and immune function, while immunity continuously negotiates our relationship with microbial and infectious exposures. These processes interact with neural systems that regulate sensation, cognition, behavior, affect, and conscious states, disturbances of which may manifest as neurological and psychiatric illness. Our work further explores the possibility that metabolic support and neural connectivity constitute necessary constraints on conscious-state expression. CIBEM therefore connects Dentistry, Endocrinology, Immunology, Infectious Diseases, Neurology, and Psychiatry within a common biopsychosocial framework. Together, these domains encompass a substantial share of the global burden of disease.

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