Cognitive Sovereignty and the Freedom to Experience Your Own Life

As society awakens to just how thoroughly our thought processes are being shaped and ruptured by technology—well before we sit down to write Substack posts like these—many scholars are beginning to advocate for something called “cognitive sovereignty”.

Derived, in part, from an earlier notion of cognitive liberty* that seminal authors say includes “the right to refuse coercive uses of neurotechnology”, cognitive sovereignty essentially refers to the right to control, protect, shape and maintain our own processes of thought (see, for instance, this national security-oriented position paper or this recent academic paper on neurocomputational harm).**

Surely few things could be as important as guarding the integrity of our ability to think freely and autonomously (or at least our attempts to think as autonomously as we can), unless we acquiesce to a pitiful existence as the biological extensions of silicon-based intelligences. But what if one of those “few things” includes a far greater kind of sovereignty that exists prior to cognitive freedom and that enfolds it?

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Through my quest to understand and experiment with integrated, total ways of being (starting with this outline essay originally published on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton), I have come to view humans as fundamentally embodied beings for whom direct experience—perceiving our environment, moving through it, interacting with human and non-human others, interocepting and co-creating meanings—is constitutive of their being and their reality.

Direct experience is therefore the ground for everything that unfolds in our lives, including those labelled as “cognitive processes”. Indeed, from this (phenomenological) perspective, cognition isn’t something separate that can be extracted from the wholeness or flow of our embodied, situated experience, except for specific scientific purposes that should be clearly recognised as artificial—of use under limited circumstances, with special caveats—not be taken as definitive of how live unfolds and is experienced.

In any case, the flow of our direct experience can also become severely disrupted and corrupted through intrusive technologies as well as by experts and indeed any other actors we set up as authorities. When we allow inputs from any such external actors to displace or heavily distort our lived experience—for example, by persuading us to trust the relationship or health advice of a chatbot or Youtuber more than we trust ourselves—we lose something precious as a result. That “something precious” is our very right to fully live our own, integrated lives—our sovereignty of experience.***

That is why it is vital we stop and realise just how significant it is for us to have full access to our own experience of life. Without such access to our experience, we tend to become unwell and suffer the various symptoms of personal, social and ecological disintegration. Without it, there is little hope that we will attain a cohesive sense of being—however imperfectly—or that we will allow the developmental and natural processes that constitute us as embodied human organisms to unfold fully.

In a podcast on how AI will change creative work, the author and speaker Simon Sinek recently concluded that, for an author, the value of a book is in its writing, rather than purely as an output or successful product. The act of writing transforms us and deepens our knowledge, entangling us far more intimately with our topics of inquiry than would be the case if we asked an algorithm to do the writing for us.

In an analogous way, the value of living has got to be in the direct experiencing of life, not in its substitution with or mediation by other agents and authorities that try to do the knowing, living, sensing and experiencing for us—a false promise by default.

So, (although admittedly too huge a topic for a blog post), what is at stake here is not just our cognitive processes but our very right to survive and thrive as experiencing beings.

I will attempt to define sovereignty of experience more concisely in a future post; for now, I hope this piece has given you a flavour of why I believe guarding our direct perception and experience matters so greatly.

Let me leave you with the words of the British poet John Keats, included in a personal letter he wrote around the time he was composing Endymion:

“The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation & watchfulness in itself—That which is creative must create itself.”

(As quoted in Aileen Ward’s Foreword to The Poems of John Keats, The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written Collectors’ Edition, The Easton Press, Connecticut, 1980.)

AI use declaration: The above text was authored by me without any AI processing or proof-reading. I utilised Anthropic’s Claude to explore key references on the topic of cognitive sovereignty, but in my article I have quoted directly from key references I judged to be credible and sufficiently representative of this research area.

*Cognitive liberty and sovereignty are becoming prominent topics also at philosophy conferences such as this upcoming Philosophy of Mind conference in Porto, Portugal (April 2026).

**Note that this concept does not imply or require that we actually know (or ever deeply learn) how to shape or observe our own thought processes, only that we should have the right to attempt to do so without intervention.

***This isn’t to say that all technological inputs or mediated processes are irredeemably bad and harmful, just that we require a radically higher level of awareness of their limits as artificial and extracted constructs with great distortional power (which few of us probably consistently maintain at a moment-to-moment level at present, if we’re honest).

With special thanks to Wes Wing who has awakened in me a love for acquiring and perusing beautifully bound, old-fashioned hardcover books—including the volume on John Keats that I cite from above.