Thank you so much Phil, this really means a lot! My absolute dream is to be a lecturer in the field of transpersonal psychology and spirituality and do my tarot stuff; so this feedback is so amazing 😍 yes, absolutely, language is so important when discussing our subjective experience - there's loads of research!
Thank you Takim! I loved how you spoke about self as an illusion, which I'm still not sure that I'd be ready to let go selfishly- even though I practice a non-dual Tantric philosophy.
I found your argument against the combination problem interesting and need to sit with it all a bit more...if you have any further literature that you can point me towards reading, I'd love that!
Also, I must mention that, as this was an academic essay, I did need to provide a balanced account of the current theories and their criticisms within the field- so not all of the criticisms fully reflect my thoughts on the topic ✨
Let me sit with all these points a bit longer, you've sparked some interesting questions!
I'm also not ready to let go of self! (Nor do I think that's necessarily the goal, selves can be quite beautiful and powerful illusions, and really the better term than "illusion" might be "construct" or even social construct; just as "real" as money or gender.) The irony is I'm a very ego-driven person, and hyper aware of how much of my suffering stems from that ego orientation.
I take your point about academic balance, I didn't mean to imply the views were all yours, they're just wonderful jumping off points regardless!
I doubt I know of literature you're not already aware of, but Annaka Harris seems to think about these things almost exactly the way that I described. I like her book surveying theories of consciousness, "Conscious" (probably mostly redundant with your essay and your degree). More to the point, she has an interview with Coleman Hughes, where she tries to explain the upshot of split-brain research and hypothetical brain merging scenarios, and the whole time she's having to point out where his intuitions about self are sneaking in to color his understanding. YouTube link here, I would point you to the last 20 minutes, 46:15 to the end. https://youtu.be/6iByGbYPNLo?si=jPy3pUxzkVKb5pZh
Some really interesting questions! Is Consciousness building anything or is just existing? Are we building language, art, culture through our relationship with consciousness as it comes into form? I'll never stop thinking about consciousness 😂
I found the section about the limitations of reliance on empirical evidence via physicalist scientific experimentation & analysis to be very compelling. I agree that it is time for modern science to become less hubristic. We may have reached our limitation of understanding ourselves via materialistic means. It’s time to evolve to a new understanding, which will require new theories, new tools, and new standards of measurement.
The reason first-person accounts don’t hold water in physicalist circles is, in my opinion, because there is a fundamental lack of trust among us. There is an over-reliance on what can be physically observed, measured, and analyzed because “proof” mitigates the margin of error that fundamental distrust and skepticism introduces into any study. And while there shouldn’t be any sense of absolutism in science ever (it is all just theory at the end of the day), there needs to be more room for curiosity for phenomenon when it comes to consciousness and existence because we simply do not “know” anything for certain. Life is a persistent mystery.
But perhaps the first step is adopting a cosmopsychist foundation of universal oneness. Perhaps truth and trust may arise from the nexus point of operating as though we are indeed all waves of one ocean.
What a stunning piece of work! You are BRILLIANT and I am in awe 🙌🏽
I was particularly struck by the wave analogy, which makes huge sense to me in terms of cosmopsychism (if I have that right?).
I have been pondering lately the the thought boundaries linguistics impose on us... especially the sense that in order to describe things we have to reduce, reduce and reduce again, giving us lots of individual components to an idea (impacting on the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, etc.)... often forcing a binary view via presenting options... it's either this, or that? I think this is the basis of scientific endeavour though, isn't it... reductionist approaches. Great for some things, not so much for others...
Anyway, I am way behind your learning on this, but you have poked my consciousness with this, thanks so much for posting!
Really enjoyed this—it’s well outside my usual wheelhouse, but I found it fascinating and unexpectedly resonant. I’m usually more grounded in structural and systems-based thinking (something I call The Weave), but I appreciated the way this piece leaned into curated malleability—shaping our internal landscape through conscious participation. That feels close to how I think about agency: not just reacting to the world, but weaving it as we go.
In The Weave, consciousness isn’t a universal given but something that emerges where threads of perception, reflection, and responsiveness meet. It’s less about everything being aware, and more about awareness arising through relation and agency.
Thanks for giving me something to think with, even if I didn’t follow all the mystical leaps!
I really love what you say about consciousness arises when we weave our relation and agency through it- something I deeply resonate with. It is not something that simply happens, but something we tend to, grow and are in constant relationship with. Thank you so much for reading!
Thanks for this Molly. You've sparked a dissertation. Re the relationship between self and consciousness, a solution to the combination problem, and science fiction as a tool for communicating these ideas.
I tend to think there's an even bigger obstacle to the reception of these consciousness-as-foundational theories than mainstream physicalism: our theories of personal identity (AKA the "self" and/or "ego"), which tend not to be explicitly specified and are thus more invisible and more pernicious in their effect on the discussion.
One's definition of self is whatever they understand themselves to be referring to with the word "I" (which tends to be difficult to pin down and most people can't do it; if you want to be a Socratic asshole it's easy to ask clarification questions they can't answer). The default Western view, which goes hand in hand with default Western physicalism, is that the self is a kind of observer within consciousness; the observer of the observations, the experiencer of the experiences, the thinker of the thoughts... A singular, indivisible, immaterial thing perched within each of our heads, providing the unity to the otherwise disparate contents of consciousness, and making us "who we are." This is essentially the notion of a soul, in its secularized form for atheist materialists, who fail to notice that they've carried over the core contradictions of the religious version.
In the West we readily conflate self with consciousness itself, assuming that one loci of consciousness implies one self, no more no less (part of why DID, as you mention, is so strange and fascinating to us culturally... the notion that selves and consciousnesses could depart from the strict 1-to-1 relationship). We have trouble imagining awareness without self-awareness, and often use the two terms interchangeably (despite the fact that everyone has experienced awareness in the absence of self, during a flow state, for example, or a successful moment of mindfulness in which self-consciousness completely falls away and leaves plain old consciousness in its wake).
The truth is, the self is an "illusion." Westerners like to misunderstand this Eastern claim as a purely metaphysical, theological thing. It is, or can be, a purely experiential, empirical claim. There is no separate experiencer of our experiences, distinct from the flow of experience itself. We have never discovered such a thing when seriously looking for it. There's just the flow, within which are thoughts and ideas and language and theories and more, including thoughts like "my name is Takim" and "I'm a good person" and "I hope they remember me when I die," which collectively prop up the illusion of a self, through mutual reinforcement, if you don't look too closely. But these thoughts are ontologically no different from the sensation of sun on skin or the sight of the color blue or any other qualia... It's just the various contents of consciousness, all the way down.
For an example of how the conflation of self with consciousness directly affects the discussion you've surveyed in this post, I'll make and defend this claim: There is no "combination problem."
You wrote, "I may wonder if my subjective experience of the aliveness and intelligence of my skin cells is legitimate, why am I not overwhelmed by millions of separate voices and experiences?" You say this is a valid critique of panpsychism.
To that I would say, you're already overwhelmed by separate voices and experiences. Consciousness is not as unified for any one person as we tend to act like it is in many of our discussions. We contain multitudes, including multiple voices (even if we think of them all as "our voice," another example of theory-laden interpretation that we tend to pass off as objective truth) contradictory thoughts and desires, etc.
I don't think there are any contradictions to worry about in imagining two loci of consciousness combining into one, any more than there are contradictions in the diverse contents of consciousness in each of our minds combining into one. As they are right now.
The wave/ocean analogy is helpful here. In one sense my point is that you may not have taken it far enough. Loci of consciousness might combine the same way waves run together. Or any bodies of water, really. If two puddles run together, or we pour one cup into another, we don't sniff a metaphysical conundrum. They just... combine. It's not that deep. In other words "combination" is not a particularly mysterious thing, generically. It becomes strange and mysterious in special cases where we've smuggled in assumptions that suggest the elements we're dealing with should be uncombinable. We create the combination problem with the ideology we bring to the table. So we don't need the move to cosmopsychism to solve the problem; we solve it as soon as we realize we don't need the ideology.
The indivisible, unified notion of the Western self is that smuggled ideology: Selves (like souls) are atomized, they can't be split, and can't really be combined or merged in any way that violates their boundaries or essential identity. Because that would be weird, to have half a soul, or whatever.
But we shouldn't be counting souls like that; like discrete, mysteriously static units. We should be counting souls like we count water. There's no half a water. Just the continuous gradations of flow.
(A note here on grammar and counting: we treat the concept of selfhood as a "count noun" whereas I'd like to propose it should be a "mass noun," like "mud." Notice the word mud doesn't have a plural form. You can't have two muds. You just always have mud, or some mud, or more mud, or a lot of mud. To keep our worldview from being biased by our grammar, we may need to talk less in terms of quantified "selves" and "consciousnesses," and more in terms of some self, less self, some consciousness, more consciousness...)
Lol I wrote out a series of thought experiments to make the combining of consciousness more conceivable on an experiential/phenomenological level, to make all the abstractions above more concrete. But this is already getting ridiculous so maybe I'll dm it to anyone who actually reads this comment.
For now I'll just point you to my science fiction. I've had to think about all this at a fairly granular level, to build worlds around these ideas and depict characters dealing with the implications. Check out my stuff if you're looking for ways to make alternative theories of consciousness come to life when nonfiction isn't getting the message across.
But what if consciousness doesn't even reside at the highest phenomenological layers of reality? What if it's just one layer? What if consciousness is just another kind of building block, like those it is composed of and came before it? What is consciousness building? Language, Art, Culture, Society, etc. What are those things building? And what comes after, and what will it be building?
I personally don't believe consciousness to be a privileged position, It's just the position we're in.
I would also like to add that I do have some ideas that overlap with panpsychism, and that my earlier statement isn't exactly against those ideas. More that what is more fundamental than consciousness is creativity, and that is the act that everything is engaged in. This includes the things like ourselves and things we produce and take for granted. There are entire worlds outside of our own that are growing in their own complexity and interrelationships and it's happening all over our heads.
I really love this 🥰 I mention in my piece my own relationship to Non-dual Kashmir Shaivism and how it informs my view of consciousness. I can definitely see creativity, will, the spark to action as a fundamental layer.
Thanks! And I totally get what you're talking about when you say you can experience down to your cells. This is a core part of my own experience as well, but it also extends upwards and outwards, into the objects and tools I interact with and the systems I am a part of. I say I don't have a disjoint or detached, but rather a distributed sense of self. And I think this may have some bearing on what consciousness is, a kind of superposition of experience. This is a major theme behind a lot of what I work on and what I hope to be sharing more of here in the future.
I loved reading about this tension and framing in academic language. I've been having a conversation with my 23 year old son about "why" energy work and tarot is "real". He has been told at university that science can be trusted and unseen forces aren't reliable, so he challenges my work, even though I think he also senses the "reality" of unseen psychic energies. It's so helpful to have some language and concepts to approach these conversations. And so important that collectively we shift the frames in all houses, including academic. I think we will be having more of these dialogues in the coming years, and I don't just mean in my family :-)
Thank you for this! There is so much rigorous scientific study around psi phenomena that is dismissed by the scientific community because it isn't in alignment with the dominant paradigm...time to shift our thinking!
Thank you for sharing this scholarly work on consciousness. I appreciated how different it is from your other writing on Substack, and I hadn’t realized this was a field one could pursue through a master’s degree. I read it slowly, and have sat with it for a few days, letting my responses come up before dashing off a reply.
As I read, I found myself both nodding along and turning toward my own edge. The place where theory meets practice, where knowing becomes lived. The emphasis on subjective experience as valid scientific inquiry is incredibly important, and I’m glad to be reading papers exploring it. Especially your lived experiences, which mirror many of my own.
So many of the frameworks you explore offer meaningful lenses. But I notice, for myself, the moment a theory starts to feel too neat, too external, or too definitive, something vital slips away.
In my own work (I’m thinking of my master’s thesis, which was a first-person study on trauma, ritual, and the witness) I found consciousness revealing itself not through coherence, but through presence. Through the moment-by-moment attempt to stay with what is, no matter how hard, frightening, beautiful, or large.
For me, consciousness isn’t a puzzle to solve, but a relationship to tend. And my question becomes: do the theories help me deepen those relationships? To myself? To the more-than-human world around me?
Your writing does, and I’m grateful. I'd love to continue this conversation, with you and others here on Substack. (Folks other than Molly who stumble on this, consider this an invitation!)
Thank you so much Phil, this really means a lot! My absolute dream is to be a lecturer in the field of transpersonal psychology and spirituality and do my tarot stuff; so this feedback is so amazing 😍 yes, absolutely, language is so important when discussing our subjective experience - there's loads of research!
Thank you Takim! I loved how you spoke about self as an illusion, which I'm still not sure that I'd be ready to let go selfishly- even though I practice a non-dual Tantric philosophy.
I found your argument against the combination problem interesting and need to sit with it all a bit more...if you have any further literature that you can point me towards reading, I'd love that!
Also, I must mention that, as this was an academic essay, I did need to provide a balanced account of the current theories and their criticisms within the field- so not all of the criticisms fully reflect my thoughts on the topic ✨
Let me sit with all these points a bit longer, you've sparked some interesting questions!
I'm also not ready to let go of self! (Nor do I think that's necessarily the goal, selves can be quite beautiful and powerful illusions, and really the better term than "illusion" might be "construct" or even social construct; just as "real" as money or gender.) The irony is I'm a very ego-driven person, and hyper aware of how much of my suffering stems from that ego orientation.
I take your point about academic balance, I didn't mean to imply the views were all yours, they're just wonderful jumping off points regardless!
I doubt I know of literature you're not already aware of, but Annaka Harris seems to think about these things almost exactly the way that I described. I like her book surveying theories of consciousness, "Conscious" (probably mostly redundant with your essay and your degree). More to the point, she has an interview with Coleman Hughes, where she tries to explain the upshot of split-brain research and hypothetical brain merging scenarios, and the whole time she's having to point out where his intuitions about self are sneaking in to color his understanding. YouTube link here, I would point you to the last 20 minutes, 46:15 to the end. https://youtu.be/6iByGbYPNLo?si=jPy3pUxzkVKb5pZh
Ooh thank you! Have saved it to my Watch Later!
Some really interesting questions! Is Consciousness building anything or is just existing? Are we building language, art, culture through our relationship with consciousness as it comes into form? I'll never stop thinking about consciousness 😂
This was fantastic!
I found the section about the limitations of reliance on empirical evidence via physicalist scientific experimentation & analysis to be very compelling. I agree that it is time for modern science to become less hubristic. We may have reached our limitation of understanding ourselves via materialistic means. It’s time to evolve to a new understanding, which will require new theories, new tools, and new standards of measurement.
The reason first-person accounts don’t hold water in physicalist circles is, in my opinion, because there is a fundamental lack of trust among us. There is an over-reliance on what can be physically observed, measured, and analyzed because “proof” mitigates the margin of error that fundamental distrust and skepticism introduces into any study. And while there shouldn’t be any sense of absolutism in science ever (it is all just theory at the end of the day), there needs to be more room for curiosity for phenomenon when it comes to consciousness and existence because we simply do not “know” anything for certain. Life is a persistent mystery.
But perhaps the first step is adopting a cosmopsychist foundation of universal oneness. Perhaps truth and trust may arise from the nexus point of operating as though we are indeed all waves of one ocean.
Oh yes, I so agree! Subjective experiences are rarely considered credible in mainstream scientific circles...but it is changing!
What a stunning piece of work! You are BRILLIANT and I am in awe 🙌🏽
I was particularly struck by the wave analogy, which makes huge sense to me in terms of cosmopsychism (if I have that right?).
I have been pondering lately the the thought boundaries linguistics impose on us... especially the sense that in order to describe things we have to reduce, reduce and reduce again, giving us lots of individual components to an idea (impacting on the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, etc.)... often forcing a binary view via presenting options... it's either this, or that? I think this is the basis of scientific endeavour though, isn't it... reductionist approaches. Great for some things, not so much for others...
Anyway, I am way behind your learning on this, but you have poked my consciousness with this, thanks so much for posting!
BRILLIANT!
Really enjoyed this—it’s well outside my usual wheelhouse, but I found it fascinating and unexpectedly resonant. I’m usually more grounded in structural and systems-based thinking (something I call The Weave), but I appreciated the way this piece leaned into curated malleability—shaping our internal landscape through conscious participation. That feels close to how I think about agency: not just reacting to the world, but weaving it as we go.
In The Weave, consciousness isn’t a universal given but something that emerges where threads of perception, reflection, and responsiveness meet. It’s less about everything being aware, and more about awareness arising through relation and agency.
Thanks for giving me something to think with, even if I didn’t follow all the mystical leaps!
I really love what you say about consciousness arises when we weave our relation and agency through it- something I deeply resonate with. It is not something that simply happens, but something we tend to, grow and are in constant relationship with. Thank you so much for reading!
Thanks for this Molly. You've sparked a dissertation. Re the relationship between self and consciousness, a solution to the combination problem, and science fiction as a tool for communicating these ideas.
I tend to think there's an even bigger obstacle to the reception of these consciousness-as-foundational theories than mainstream physicalism: our theories of personal identity (AKA the "self" and/or "ego"), which tend not to be explicitly specified and are thus more invisible and more pernicious in their effect on the discussion.
One's definition of self is whatever they understand themselves to be referring to with the word "I" (which tends to be difficult to pin down and most people can't do it; if you want to be a Socratic asshole it's easy to ask clarification questions they can't answer). The default Western view, which goes hand in hand with default Western physicalism, is that the self is a kind of observer within consciousness; the observer of the observations, the experiencer of the experiences, the thinker of the thoughts... A singular, indivisible, immaterial thing perched within each of our heads, providing the unity to the otherwise disparate contents of consciousness, and making us "who we are." This is essentially the notion of a soul, in its secularized form for atheist materialists, who fail to notice that they've carried over the core contradictions of the religious version.
In the West we readily conflate self with consciousness itself, assuming that one loci of consciousness implies one self, no more no less (part of why DID, as you mention, is so strange and fascinating to us culturally... the notion that selves and consciousnesses could depart from the strict 1-to-1 relationship). We have trouble imagining awareness without self-awareness, and often use the two terms interchangeably (despite the fact that everyone has experienced awareness in the absence of self, during a flow state, for example, or a successful moment of mindfulness in which self-consciousness completely falls away and leaves plain old consciousness in its wake).
The truth is, the self is an "illusion." Westerners like to misunderstand this Eastern claim as a purely metaphysical, theological thing. It is, or can be, a purely experiential, empirical claim. There is no separate experiencer of our experiences, distinct from the flow of experience itself. We have never discovered such a thing when seriously looking for it. There's just the flow, within which are thoughts and ideas and language and theories and more, including thoughts like "my name is Takim" and "I'm a good person" and "I hope they remember me when I die," which collectively prop up the illusion of a self, through mutual reinforcement, if you don't look too closely. But these thoughts are ontologically no different from the sensation of sun on skin or the sight of the color blue or any other qualia... It's just the various contents of consciousness, all the way down.
For an example of how the conflation of self with consciousness directly affects the discussion you've surveyed in this post, I'll make and defend this claim: There is no "combination problem."
You wrote, "I may wonder if my subjective experience of the aliveness and intelligence of my skin cells is legitimate, why am I not overwhelmed by millions of separate voices and experiences?" You say this is a valid critique of panpsychism.
To that I would say, you're already overwhelmed by separate voices and experiences. Consciousness is not as unified for any one person as we tend to act like it is in many of our discussions. We contain multitudes, including multiple voices (even if we think of them all as "our voice," another example of theory-laden interpretation that we tend to pass off as objective truth) contradictory thoughts and desires, etc.
I don't think there are any contradictions to worry about in imagining two loci of consciousness combining into one, any more than there are contradictions in the diverse contents of consciousness in each of our minds combining into one. As they are right now.
The wave/ocean analogy is helpful here. In one sense my point is that you may not have taken it far enough. Loci of consciousness might combine the same way waves run together. Or any bodies of water, really. If two puddles run together, or we pour one cup into another, we don't sniff a metaphysical conundrum. They just... combine. It's not that deep. In other words "combination" is not a particularly mysterious thing, generically. It becomes strange and mysterious in special cases where we've smuggled in assumptions that suggest the elements we're dealing with should be uncombinable. We create the combination problem with the ideology we bring to the table. So we don't need the move to cosmopsychism to solve the problem; we solve it as soon as we realize we don't need the ideology.
The indivisible, unified notion of the Western self is that smuggled ideology: Selves (like souls) are atomized, they can't be split, and can't really be combined or merged in any way that violates their boundaries or essential identity. Because that would be weird, to have half a soul, or whatever.
But we shouldn't be counting souls like that; like discrete, mysteriously static units. We should be counting souls like we count water. There's no half a water. Just the continuous gradations of flow.
(A note here on grammar and counting: we treat the concept of selfhood as a "count noun" whereas I'd like to propose it should be a "mass noun," like "mud." Notice the word mud doesn't have a plural form. You can't have two muds. You just always have mud, or some mud, or more mud, or a lot of mud. To keep our worldview from being biased by our grammar, we may need to talk less in terms of quantified "selves" and "consciousnesses," and more in terms of some self, less self, some consciousness, more consciousness...)
Lol I wrote out a series of thought experiments to make the combining of consciousness more conceivable on an experiential/phenomenological level, to make all the abstractions above more concrete. But this is already getting ridiculous so maybe I'll dm it to anyone who actually reads this comment.
For now I'll just point you to my science fiction. I've had to think about all this at a fairly granular level, to build worlds around these ideas and depict characters dealing with the implications. Check out my stuff if you're looking for ways to make alternative theories of consciousness come to life when nonfiction isn't getting the message across.
https://open.substack.com/pub/takimwilliams/p/hello-my-other-hello-my-self-encapsulation?r=17mz6p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
But what if consciousness doesn't even reside at the highest phenomenological layers of reality? What if it's just one layer? What if consciousness is just another kind of building block, like those it is composed of and came before it? What is consciousness building? Language, Art, Culture, Society, etc. What are those things building? And what comes after, and what will it be building?
I personally don't believe consciousness to be a privileged position, It's just the position we're in.
I would also like to add that I do have some ideas that overlap with panpsychism, and that my earlier statement isn't exactly against those ideas. More that what is more fundamental than consciousness is creativity, and that is the act that everything is engaged in. This includes the things like ourselves and things we produce and take for granted. There are entire worlds outside of our own that are growing in their own complexity and interrelationships and it's happening all over our heads.
I really love this 🥰 I mention in my piece my own relationship to Non-dual Kashmir Shaivism and how it informs my view of consciousness. I can definitely see creativity, will, the spark to action as a fundamental layer.
Thanks! And I totally get what you're talking about when you say you can experience down to your cells. This is a core part of my own experience as well, but it also extends upwards and outwards, into the objects and tools I interact with and the systems I am a part of. I say I don't have a disjoint or detached, but rather a distributed sense of self. And I think this may have some bearing on what consciousness is, a kind of superposition of experience. This is a major theme behind a lot of what I work on and what I hope to be sharing more of here in the future.
Yes, that buzz of recognition in the consciousness of everything. My cells know the atoms of another 🔮 looking forward to seeing your work
I loved reading about this tension and framing in academic language. I've been having a conversation with my 23 year old son about "why" energy work and tarot is "real". He has been told at university that science can be trusted and unseen forces aren't reliable, so he challenges my work, even though I think he also senses the "reality" of unseen psychic energies. It's so helpful to have some language and concepts to approach these conversations. And so important that collectively we shift the frames in all houses, including academic. I think we will be having more of these dialogues in the coming years, and I don't just mean in my family :-)
Thank you for this! There is so much rigorous scientific study around psi phenomena that is dismissed by the scientific community because it isn't in alignment with the dominant paradigm...time to shift our thinking!
Hi Molly,
Thank you for sharing this scholarly work on consciousness. I appreciated how different it is from your other writing on Substack, and I hadn’t realized this was a field one could pursue through a master’s degree. I read it slowly, and have sat with it for a few days, letting my responses come up before dashing off a reply.
As I read, I found myself both nodding along and turning toward my own edge. The place where theory meets practice, where knowing becomes lived. The emphasis on subjective experience as valid scientific inquiry is incredibly important, and I’m glad to be reading papers exploring it. Especially your lived experiences, which mirror many of my own.
So many of the frameworks you explore offer meaningful lenses. But I notice, for myself, the moment a theory starts to feel too neat, too external, or too definitive, something vital slips away.
In my own work (I’m thinking of my master’s thesis, which was a first-person study on trauma, ritual, and the witness) I found consciousness revealing itself not through coherence, but through presence. Through the moment-by-moment attempt to stay with what is, no matter how hard, frightening, beautiful, or large.
For me, consciousness isn’t a puzzle to solve, but a relationship to tend. And my question becomes: do the theories help me deepen those relationships? To myself? To the more-than-human world around me?
Your writing does, and I’m grateful. I'd love to continue this conversation, with you and others here on Substack. (Folks other than Molly who stumble on this, consider this an invitation!)
Carmen