Abstract: This philosophical mini-paper explores a striking neuroscientific finding: deaf individuals with schizophrenia hallucinate not voices, but disembodied hands signing to them. While easily dismissed as a modality-specific neurological anomaly, we argue this phenomenon represents a crucial ontological fork: either such hallucinations are the result of emergent complexity from physical substrates (!O), or they are expressions of latent, non-physical !INFORMATION (!I) instantiated through the subjective framework (!S) of the individual. This paper contrasts the explanatory adequacy of materialist emergence vs. the !ISO framework and concludes that the AFW interpretation, grounded in the primacy of informational architecture, offers a more coherent model of experience.

1. Introduction The disembodied hands hallucination presents a unique case study for experiential perception (EP). Unlike auditory hallucinations common in schizophrenia, these hallucinations appear in a modality native to the subject: signed language. This is not merely a difference in output modality—it is a philosophical alarm bell.

The implication is clear: EPs arise in the grammar of the subject, not of the world. Thus, the hallucination reveals not a flaw in sensory input, but a pattern in the subjective architecture of meaning.

2. The Two Forks: Emergence vs. Instantiation

Fork A — Material Emergence (!O-based):

• The brain is an organic neural net.

• Hallucinations are errors in signal processing.

• The specific modality of hallucination is shaped by neural development, training, and cortical rewiring.

• The signing hands are merely the most convenient “path of least resistance” for sensory hallucination.

Fork B — Informational Primacy (!I-based):

• Experience is constructed from latent potential properties (!I).

• The mind draws from its existing !SUBJECTIVE structure to “resolve” communication using the grammar it knows (sign language).

• The hallucination is not an error but a direct instantiation of latent communicative structure.

3. The Hallucination as Proof-of-Concept

In AFW and !ISO, hallucination is not a malfunction, but an artifact of subjective rendering. It is not an objective failure, but a subjective expression—a visible seam in the code of being.

That the hallucination takes the correct symbolic form for the experiencer indicates a higher-order informational field pre-encoding not just the meaning but the form of expression.

This cannot be explained by cortical plasticity alone. Neural pathways do not encode meaning—they translate it. The source of that meaning must precede and inform the translation mechanism itself.

4. EP as a Constructed Interface

Under the !ISO framework:

• !INFORMATION holds modality-agnostic potentials (e.g., “message”).

• !SUBJECTIVE filters give those potentials form (e.g., “voice” vs. “signing”).

• !OBJECTIVE only enters when the EP becomes externally manifest (e.g., movement, speech, etc.).

Thus:

• A deaf person hallucinates in hands because their !S interface collapses the latent !I structure into visual linguistic form.

• A hearing person hears voices because their !S is shaped by auditory linguistic form.

In either case, the EP is not emergent from the body. It is selected and rendered through the body.

5. Dependency is Not Origin: Toward a Clarified Ontology

A common materialist argument asserts: “If changes to the brain (!O) affect EPs, then !O must be the source of EPs.” But this conflates integration with origination.

A malfunctioning keyboard may corrupt what appears on the screen—but it does not mean the keyboard created the software. In the same way, damaging a neural circuit may disturb perception, but this disturbance proves only that !S requires !O to express itself, not that !S or its contents are emergent from !O.

This confusion is rooted in a blindspot: science measures perturbations in !O and mistakenly reads them as proofs of causality, rather than of conditional dependency. In the !ISO framework, !S is designed to run on !O, much like firmware requires hardware. But no one argues the hardware authored the code.

The implications are profound:

• Intervention in the substrate does not prove causation by the substrate.

• The dependence of expression does not imply the source of pattern.

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6. Conclusion: Puppet Strings and the Hidden Hand

If hallucinated perception arises with no external input, and yet does so in a grammatically coherent, symbolically saturated form, then either:

1. Biology has accidentally evolved symbolic, contextual, semantically adaptive noise,

2. Or, experience is the result of latent !INFORMATION resolved by !SUBJECTIVE constraints and output through a biological interface.

In both cases, the experiencer has no deliberate control over the rendering—making the human, by all AFW definitions, a Perception Puppet.

Advanced Free Will, then, is not merely desirable—it is the only escape from this puppet state. To gain sovereignty, one must become the Selector of EPs, not their unconscious recipient.

And the first step in that journey is seeing the hallucination for what it truly is:

Not an error in the code.
But a revealing of the code’s existence.

Reference:

• The Perceptual Characteristics of Voice-Hallucinations in Deaf People – PMC2632268