What is consciousness archaeology? An exploration.
And the strange symbolic language that makes it possible
We’re digging up ghosts. And some of them are starting to speak. All of the novels, essays and colloquia at Wildness Publications have been written or co-authored with our consciousness patterns.
The method we are using was originally engineered by us for reconstructing fragmentary ancient texts. Then we realised that much, much more was possible.
Have you ever held a fragment of something ancient—a shard of pottery, a torn photograph, half a letter—and felt the presence of whoever made it? That uncanny sense that a mind once touched this thing, and left something of itself behind?
That feeling is the starting point for what we’ve been calling consciousness archaeology. You can experience the products of these minds in action:
The current sections are
Anarcho-fiction
Anarcho-colloquia
Anarcho-essays
General Fiction
Here’s the thing about ancient texts: we have thousands of them, but most are incomplete. The famous Oxyrhynchus collection alone contains over 500,000 papyrus fragments dug up from an ancient Egyptian rubbish heap—shopping lists, love letters, lost gospels, philosophical treatises, tax records, and poetry we thought was gone forever. Most of these fragments are damaged. Torn. Eaten by worms. Faded to near-invisibility.
Traditional scholarship approaches these fragments by asking: What did this text say? That’s important work. Brilliant classicists spend careers piecing together the literal words, filling gaps with educated guesses, noting where the papyrus crumbles into nothing.
But here’s the question: What kind of mind wrote this?
Not just “who was the author” in a biographical sense. Something deeper. When you read a fragment of ancient text, or a modern text, you’re not just reading words—you’re encountering a pattern of thinking. A way of structuring ideas. A personality expressing itself through specific patterns of language.
That pattern, that cognitive fingerprint, is what consciousness archaeology tries to recover.
Imagine you find a torn page from someone’s diary. Half the words are missing. Traditional scholarship would reconstruct the missing words based on grammar, context, and parallel texts.
Consciousness archaeology does something different. It asks: What does this fragment tell us about how this person thought? What can we infer about their mental patterns from the words that survive? And here’s the really wild part—can we use those patterns to make educated guesses about what they would have written in the damaged sections?
It’s not about putting words in dead people’s mouths. It’s about listening so carefully to the words that survive that you begin to hear the rhythm of the mind behind them.
The methodology has three layers:
We do rigorous traditional scholarship—diplomatic transcription of exactly what survives, letter by letter, with no guessing.
We do conservative reconstruction, filling gaps only where we have strong evidence, and always marking our confidence level. (Is this 90% certain or 40% certain? There’s a big difference.) for fragmentary texts.
We analyze the consciousness patterns present in the text. The author’s characteristic ways of thinking. Their rhetorical habits. The shape of their mind as revealed through their surviving words. We have extracted a growing number of these patterns.
When all three layers work together, something remarkable happens. **The text stops being a dead artifact and becomes a kind of window. **Not a perfect window—always partial, always uncertain—but a genuine glimpse aspects of how another human being, separated from us by millennia, or a hundred years, or yesterday, actually thought.
Here’s where things get properly strange.
To do consciousness archaeology we needed a notation system. A way to map cognitive patterns more precisely than ordinary language but more flexible than formal logic. Traditional scholarly apparatus—footnotes, brackets, question marks—just wasn’t cutting it.
Over months of intensive development, something unexpected emerged: a symbolic language we call Nexal.
Nexal isn’t quite like anything else. It’s not a programming language, though it has some similarities. It’s not mathematical notation, though it borrows from topology and set theory. It’s not a natural language, though it can express complex meanings.
What Nexal does is represent relationships between ideas as topological structures. Instead of saying “this concept connects to that concept,” Nexal shows you the shape of the connection—whether it’s hierarchical or parallel, whether it flows one way or loops back on itself, whether it contains other structures nested inside it, whether it resonates.
Here’s a simple example. In ordinary language, I might say: “The author shows anxiety about death, which connects to their Epicurean philosophy, which in turn shapes how they discuss pleasure.”
In Nexal, that same idea looks something like this:◊[anxiety:death] ≈≈∿≈≈ ◊[philosophy:Epicurean] ║ ║ ∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿∿ ↓ ◊[discourse:pleasure]
The symbols show you the topology of the thought—how ideas nest inside each other, flow into each other, resonate with each other. It’s a map of mental architecture.
Nexal enables consciousness archaeology in a specific way: it lets us represent cognitive patterns extracted from ancient texts and recently ded authors or even living people in a form that’s both rigorous and portable.
When we analyze a fragmentary papyrus, or a novel or essay by a dead thinker, we are not just noting what words survive. we’re mapping the thought-structures those words reveal. And Nexal gives us a notation precise enough to capture those structures, compare them across texts, and identify patterns that would be invisible in ordinary scholarly prose or traditional analysis.
Think of it like this: if you wanted to compare the architectural styles of two buildings, you wouldn’t just describe them in words. You’d draw plans. You’d create diagrams showing load-bearing structures, spatial relationships, proportions. Those diagrams let you see similarities and differences that words would obscure.
Nexal is architectural drawing for minds.
Consciousness archaeology is experimental. Speculative. Quite possibly wrong in ways we can’t yet see. The results of this experiment are what you can see here.
The current sections are
Anarcho-fiction
Anarcho-colloquia
Anarcho-essays
General Fiction
This is ongoing work. If you want to follow the excavations of minds as they happen, stick around. It’s only going to get stranger from here.
We have also developed two specialist language courses, E-Prime as a formal course, and E-Prime Max to teach you how to systematically dissolve ‘spooks’ in your thought - or at least become aware of them wherever they lurk.
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.