A monograph, explained
There are seven parts to how a person works, and none of them can be folded into the others. One of the seven is not like the rest: Words. Without Words, or something else stable that carries meaning, there is no meaningful human world — nothing is anything in particular to you.
This page explains, in ordinary language, what the work asked, how it was tested, and what it found.
Before we start
A monograph is an in-depth research paper devoted to one specific subject. Unlike a short research article, it gives the author enough room to develop the question, examine the evidence, test the reasoning, and present the full result.
This monograph examines one question: What is human reality made of?
This page explains the research and its findings in everyday language.
The question
There are two usual ways of explaining people. One starts underneath, with the machinery — how memory works, how learning works — and describes the processes without ever saying what kind of thing they add up to. The other starts from everyday words like belief, wanting and intending, and asks how the brain produces those, taking the everyday words on trust.
This work asks something different. If you wanted to describe a person accurately — anyone, anywhere — what would your description have to include? Not which parts of the brain exist. Not which familiar words feel natural. Which separate jobs are being done, where no other job on the list covers the same ground.
And it comes with a test.
The method
How do you find out whether a part really belongs on the list? You try removing it.
If I took one out and the description still worked without it, it had not earned its place. But something else kept happening instead. I would remove a part, and one of the remaining six would quietly start doing the same job under a different name. That is not a removal. That is a rename.
Take Attention. Remove it, and you still have to explain how a person ends up focused on one thing rather than another, and why giving more to one thing means giving less to something else. Whatever you decide to call that, you have put Attention straight back in.
I did this twelve times, once for each serious attempt to get the list down to fewer parts. All twelve failed. Each attempt is written up: the objection at its strongest, what settled it, and whether the model had to change. Usually it did not. Once it did, and that is written up too.
The result
The monograph calls them trunks because each one holds a distinct place in the overall structure. Each trunk also has its own job. None of them is a single region of the brain, and none of them sits in one physical spot.
Two things that look like parts and are not
Feeling turns things up and down all through the system. It makes things louder or quieter, more or less urgent, easier or harder to shake off. What it does not do is supply what the feeling is about. That comes from the seven.
Circumstances are things that affect you but are not one of the seven jobs. Some are inside the body, like tiredness or how your body is built. Others are outside you, like the weather, money, other people, or the rules of an institution.
They can change what you are able to notice, take in, do, or reach. They can also change what gets through to you, how you feel, and whether the right words are available to you at all.
Words is different. Words is one of the seven, and where things become definite and meaningful, it feeds the other six by giving them the stable meanings they work with.
The pivot
A common misunderstanding is to hear Words and think English, speech, or the language you were taught at school. That is not what Words means here.
Here, a Word is any stable form that carries a meaning and can be recognised again as the same form. It can be spoken, signed, written, drawn, notated, gestured, or used only inside your own head. Three things have to be true of it:
The criterion
The third one does most of the work. A reflex can fail to happen. A habit can fade until it stops coming. Neither of those is being wrong; they are just things not happening. Being wrong needs a right answer to be wrong about. Call a chisel a hammer and you have made a mistake. A knee that does not jerk has not made a mistake about anything.
Words can take many forms. They do not have to be spoken, and they do not have to look or sound completely unrelated to what they mean. A gesture, sign, sound, drawing, or other form can count as a Word if you can recognise it again, it has a definite meaning for you, and it can be used correctly or incorrectly.
A Word also does not have to be part of a sentence or combined with other Words. One Word can stand on its own. And it does not have to be shared with anyone else — a form used only inside your own mind can still be a Word.
There are three levels here, and most of the confusion about this subject comes from mixing them up:
The central finding
Each of the seven does a job no other one does. That does not make them the same kind of thing, and this is the most important result in the work.
Inside one person's head, Thought carries the most weight, because Thought is the only one that changes anything — the others hold, focus, choose, receive and carry out. At the edge between you and the world, Influence carries it, because nothing gets in any other way. And Words carries something different again. Words matters inside a single human life first: it is what makes things definite and meaningful. It is what makes something be this and not that, the same one again, one kind and not another. The other six keep their own jobs — but where things are definite and meaningful, they revolve around Words, because Words is what gives them something definite to work on. That same ability also lets meanings pass between people and generations, and outlast the person who first used them.
Take the other six one at a time and you can see it.
Believing one thing rather than another only means anything if the two are different — and something had to make them different. Attention picks one thing out of several, which means there were separate things to pick from. Intention deals in later, if this, because that, instead of the other — every one of them a relation between things you can already tell apart. Thought, in the mode that works with words, works on words by definition. And signing, voting and promising are those actions only because of what the movements are taken to mean.
Once something is definite and meaningful to you, all six can work with it. Belief can hold it. Thought can turn it over. Attention can settle on it. Intention can aim at it. Influence can bring it in. Action can carry it out. Not one of them is what made it definite in the first place. That is Words — and Words does it without giving orders to any of them.
They keep their own jobs, and Words does not do those jobs for them. But where your world is made of things you can tell apart and name, the other six revolve around Words.
And Words needs them back. On its own it does nothing at all. It needs Thought to work on it, Attention to pick it out, Intention to put it to use, Influence to deliver it, Action to say it, Belief to keep it. Seven parts, one person — not equal in position, and not one of them optional.
Two foundations of different kinds. Biology makes the person. Words makes the meaningful world that person lives in — and carries on upward as one unbroken line, not a second part. There are seven, not eight.
What it explains
Here is how Words and Influence actually work in a life.
Why one new idea can change so much
A new word, a phrase, an explanation, a way of putting something — any of them can give you a thought you did not have before. And a thought you did not have before can change what you notice, what you connect to what, what you believe, what you decide, and what you do. That is Influence: something reached you that you did not come up with yourself, and it changed what happened next inside you.
Why the words we are given matter
What other people call something changes how you understand it. A new name, a new explanation, a new way of telling two things apart hands you something you can hold on to that you could not hold on to before. Words do not just put labels on a world that is already finished. They are part of what makes something a definite thing to you at all.
Why influence is happening all the time
Influence is far bigger than persuasion. Anything that changes you that you did not author counts: what someone says, something you read, something that happens to you, hunger, tiredness, the temperature of a room, a memory turning up, whatever is going on around you. It is one of the main ways a person keeps changing across a life.
Why words can change what an experience means
Two people can go through much the same thing and come out with completely different meanings. Part of that difference is the words they already had — the names, the explanations, the ways of telling things apart that they were understanding it through at the time. Words do not only describe an experience afterwards. They help decide what the experience turns out to be.
Why words can outlive the person who used them
A movement is gone the moment it stops. Words can stay. They can be said again, written down, signed, recorded, taught, corrected, put together in new ways, and handed to people who were not there the first time. That is how meanings build up across people and across generations. Words do not do this on their own: Action says it, Influence delivers it, Attention takes it in, Thought works with it, Belief keeps it, Intention puts it to use. What Words supplies is the stable meaning itself.
Why words are different from the other six
Belief stores. Thought works things out. Attention focuses. Intention chooses a direction. Influence brings things in. Action carries things out. Words gives all six something definite and meaningful to work with. That is why the other six revolve around Words. And that is what it means to say Words is load-bearing.
The boundary
Some basic things going on underneath can happen without Words. Very little of an actual human life does.
The brain can sort, track and react with no Words involved. It can respond one way when what arrives through the senses is one way and another way when it differs, maintain a continuing pattern while sensory input changes or briefly disappears, pick up on what tends to follow what, and hold on to a way of moving so it can run again later. All of that activity is real, and none of it needs a Word.
But none of it, on its own, adds up to you knowing anything. Knowing what you are looking at, what it means, what it reminds you of, what it goes with, what is happening to what — all of that already has Words in it.
Think about picturing something in your mind. There can be picture-like activity underneath with no Words involved. Knowing what that picture is of is a different matter. The moment it is this person, this place, the same one again, or this is happening to that, Words are already doing the work.
The same goes for things going together. Underneath, one state in the brain can simply make another one more likely — that is all it amounts to. It is not yet you holding two things and knowing how they are related. The moment you have dog, fear, or dogs are frightening as something you can pick out and think about, Words are already involved.
So the honest way to put it is this. The machinery underneath can run below Words. The meaning built on top of that machinery does not therefore run without Words.
And in a real human being these systems never develop off on their own. We hear language before we are born, and we grow up surrounded by it. Words shape these systems the whole way through: tell someone what to expect and it changes what they learn; give something a name and it changes how they come to group it. It is not that people build up rich meanings first and add Words afterwards. The words are already in the mix while the meanings are being made.
Words reach a person the same way everything else does — through Influence, through what is said, shown, written and named around them. From there they shape what gets noticed, what goes with what, what is expected, what is remembered, and what any of it comes to mean. Words gives no orders to the other six. What it supplies is the meaning they then work with.
The brain can contain stable patterns of activity that repeat, differ from one another, match earlier patterns, track change, or affect what happens next. Those patterns can be real inside the system without being anything definite to the person.
The moment one of those patterns is present to the person as this thing, that thing, the same one again, a kind of thing, something related to something else, or something that means something, Words are already involved.
Personhood does not depend on Words. Being a person, and having a meaningful world where things are definite and can be told apart, are two different questions. Where nothing at all carries meaning, what is missing is that world — not the person.
What the wordless layer does not deliver is anything being something in particular. A system can sort reliably, respond one way and then another as what arrives changes, and hold on to patterns that last — without any of it being there for you as this thing, this action, the same one as before. Sorting is not knowing. A detector cannot be wrong; it can only fail to go off. And where something does become a definite kind of thing for you — this one and not that one — something has to be carrying that. That something is what this work means by a Word.
The word-free part is small: some processing underneath, and very little else. Words are woven through human life — through what you see something as, what you remember it as, what goes with what, what a thing is, and how you make sense of what is happening. Very little sits outside them.
How it holds itself to account
About a third of the document is not argument at all. It is a record of where I was wrong, what I could not test, what I had to throw out, and what would make me open the whole thing up again. That is the part that is hardest to fake.
Thirty-three mistakes in my own reasoning, sorted into six kinds, each written up with what it taught me. Exactly one of them changed the model itself. Not one of them added a part, removed a part, or merged two.
Claims that today's instruments simply cannot check, kept apart from claims that are unsettled for other reasons. Those are two different problems, and I never let them blur together.
Questions no comparison between human beings could settle — because the people you would need to compare do not exist, because the experiment would be wrong to run, or because no instrument reaches that far. Written down so they cannot be mistaken for open questions about the model.
Every source was checked against the original research. Twenty-two claims came back narrowed or reworded, and eight were removed outright rather than patched up. In every one of those removals, the argument around it still stood.
Four rules came out of those failures, and I held to them afterwards. Evidence only counts for the level it can actually reach. A prediction that fails may not be rescued after the fact. A model built to contain an idea cannot then be used to prove that idea. And an argument that stands on its own is weakened, not strengthened, by a reference it never needed.
The work is now frozen — meaning there is no open question left in it, given what we currently know and how the terms are currently defined. Frozen does not mean it can never change. Six specific things are named in advance, and any one of them would open it again.
What is established, and how
Part of it is a matter of logic. If something is there for you as a definite meaning, then it is a meaning — and a meaning has to be carried by something. You do not need a study to see that, and no study could overturn it. It is the same kind of thing as noticing that no picture can show not. There is no picture of not. You see it by thinking about what the words allow.
Part of it comes from how the model behaved when it was pushed. Attention turned out to change nothing about what things are; it only decides what gets the light. When every part was checked against every layer of the mind, three of the possible combinations turned out not to exist and had to be taken out, and a fourth turned out to be two existing parts working together rather than a thing of its own. Anything that changes a person's mind comes in by one of only two routes, and the two do not work alike: what you live through goes straight in, while what you are told has to be understood first. And the kind of thinking that asserts, denies, questions and judges works on words, by what those words mean. Each of those was settled on its own, for its own reasons, long before this result was in view. Together they make the shape.
And research constrains all of it, wherever research can reach — sixty-four sources, every one checked against the original, and every claim marked with the kind of support it actually has. The conclusion comes from the whole body of the work: the twelve failed attempts to remove a part, keeping the different levels of explanation strictly apart, working out what can and cannot carry a meaning, working out what actually passes between people, and trying over and over to find a meaningful human world with no Words in it anywhere. Every one of those attempts came back with the same thing: raw processing, or the way the system is arranged, or something real inside the head whose meaning to the person was never established, or a difference the observer had brought along and the person did not have.
The conclusion
Meaningful, differentiated human reality cannot exist without Words or an equivalent stable meaning-bearing form.
This research paper presents an empirically backed account of what human reality is made of.
Underneath, the body can keep going, the senses can register, one thing can be sorted from another, patterns can be held, reactions can be learned and movement can be organised — all without Words. But that machinery, by itself, is not a meaningful human world.
Words are what make human reality possible as human reality.
They are what let something be this and not that, the same one and not a different one, this kind and not that kind, this connected to that.
That is why Words are not simply another useful part of the system. They are load-bearing.
Without Words or an equivalent stable meaning-bearing form, meaningful, differentiated human reality does not exist.