What Kind of State Appears When We Begin with the Body-Territory?

Perhaps the legal individual is necessary. But not sufficient.

Before a child has a tax ID, national ID, income, debt, property, or any other identity recognized by the State, that child already has a history.

There is a body taking shape.

There is food — or the absence of it.

There is sleep.

There is temperature.

There is care.

There is fear.

There is language surrounding that body.

There is a mother or another caregiving body who is also shaped by work, income, housing, violence, affection, and territory.

There is water.

There is air.

There is a biome.

By the time the State formally recognizes that person, many of the conditions that will participate in what they can perceive, learn, and do are already in motion.

Perhaps, then, our political architecture begins too late.

What if the minimum unit of the State were not only the abstract individual, but the Body-Territory?

Not to erase the individual.

Not to weaken individual rights.

But to recognize that a person never exists outside the material, relational, cultural, and ecological conditions that make their existence possible.

Nine texts later, the question has changed

Across the previous nine essays in this series, we began seemingly far from constitutions.

We asked whether deciding not to want something was the same as no longer wanting it.

We saw a brain comparing what it expected to find with what it actually encountered.

We asked whether confusion could interrupt automatisms.

We examined the time that exists between acting and stopping.

We saw how a pianist’s body is transformed by practice itself.

We asked whether immersive technologies could teach the body movements that were not yet part of its repertoire.

We entered a natural conversation and discovered that studying only one brain might not be enough to understand an interaction.

Then we moved to two brains cooperating.

And finally, we asked:

Does consciousness speak a language?

These questions seem different.

But they all point toward the same problem.

What we are able to perceive and do depends on an embodied history.

The Body-Territory learns, consolidates performance spaces, automates some forms of doing, pre-activates others, combines memories, perceives possibilities, and reorganizes its next movement.

Experience changes the body that will have the next experience.

We represent in order to move; by moving, we transform the body that will represent again.

If this is relevant to learning, language, action, and cooperation, then an unavoidable question appears:

Is the State governing abstract individuals, or is it continuously participating in the formation of the Body-Territories those individuals can become?

Body-Territory as the minimum unit of the State

Here an explicitly BrainLatam hypothesis begins.

Modern law needs the individual as a subject of rights, duties, protection, and freedom.

BrainLatam does not propose eliminating that individual.

It proposes adding another unit of analysis:

Body-Territory as a minimum unit of policy, economy, and care.

That means asking not only:

“Does this person formally possess a right?”

But also:

What real conditions allow this Body-Territory to transform that right into a possibility for action?

Two children may formally possess the same right to education.

One slept eight hours, ate adequately, lives in a safe environment, and has access to books, the internet, and available adults.

The other arrives hungry, slept surrounded by noise and violence, spent two hours commuting, and spends the morning struggling to stay awake.

The written right may be identical.

The field of possible movements is not.

In BrainLatam language:

their APUS is not the same.

A Causally Intelligent State would therefore ask:

Where did the causal chain begin?

At what point did the State intervene?

Is it changing a cause, a mediator, or merely managing a consequence?

What kind of Body-Territory is that policy helping to produce?

Does it expand possibilities, or merely register afterward who failed to reach them?

From “I” to Jiwasa

But Body-Territory alone does not solve everything.

Because no one learns, works, loves, creates a language, or builds a democracy alone.

In Blog 8, we encountered an important experimental clue. Leiva-Cisterna and colleagues manipulated synchronization between participants in dyads and observed effects on cooperative coordination in a specific task.

The study allows us to causally discuss aspects of that interaction.

It does not demonstrate the existence of a “collective mind.”

This is precisely where the boundary matters.

Neural synchrony is not Jiwasa.

Jiwasa is a BrainLatam conceptual extension used to ask what may emerge when two or many Body-Territories stop being merely separate units placed side by side and begin to construct possibilities for action together.

It does not dissolve the self into the collective.

It asks:

What movements become possible for me only because they become possible for us?

A collective can expand possibilities.

But it can also massify.

It can cooperate.

But it can also capture.

It can produce belonging.

But it can also produce obedience.

Perhaps, then, a Body-Territory democracy should not ask only how to form collectives.

It should ask:

What kind of Jiwasa are we forming?

Body-Territory Recognition

Today, States recognize people through identification documents, property, income, debt, credit scores, addresses, tax histories, and an enormous range of administrative records.

The BrainLatam hypothesis would partially reverse that logic.

Before asking how much someone owns or owes, the State should be capable of recognizing the real conditions in which that Body-Territory exists.

We call this:

Body-Territory Recognition.

Not as a system of bodily surveillance.

Quite the opposite: any architecture of this kind would require strict safeguards for privacy, autonomy, and non-discrimination.

Recognizing the Body-Territory would mean integrating questions that today arrive fragmented:

food;

health;

education;

housing;

mobility;

environment;

safety;

digital access;

time;

territory.

The State sees a school enrollment.

Then a medical appointment.

Then a social benefit.

Then a police report.

Then a court case.

But perhaps there is one single Body-Territory moving through all of those systems.

Biome Income: Forest Standing, Citizen Standing

There is another strange separation we have inherited.

We call forests, water, soil, and biodiversity the “environment,” as if they were merely scenery surrounding the economy.

But there is no Body-Territory without ecological metabolism.

This gives rise to another BrainLatam hypothesis:

Biome Income.

It does not simply mean paying someone because they live near a forest.

It means recognizing that sustaining the ecological conditions that support life constitutes the production of collective value.

If a territory preserves water, forest, food systems, biodiversity, climatic stability, or other conditions necessary for the continuity of life, part of the value generated through that preservation should return to the territory itself.

Return to people.

But also to water.

To soil.

To childhood.

To health.

To education.

To culture.

To science.

To the regeneration of the biome itself.

Forest standing. Citizen standing.

Economics would then cease to mean extraction followed by compensation alone.

It would also include maintaining the conditions that allow existence to continue.

Citizen DREX: Money as Return

Here another distinction must be explicit.

The official Drex is an initiative of the Central Bank of Brazil involving infrastructure for transactions with digital assets.

Citizen DREX is not a Central Bank project.

It is a BrainLatam hypothesis.

The proposal asks whether a future public digital infrastructure could also participate in a constitutional mechanism for returning value to the Body-Territory.

Not assistance.

Not favor.

Not charity.

A right.

A form of constitutional income grounded in belonging and participation in a form of wealth that is never produced by an isolated individual.

Infrastructure, knowledge, currency, institutions, nature, previous generations, workers, communities, and biomes all participate in what we call production.

Citizen DREX would ask:

How can part of that surplus return to the Body-Territories that make the State itself possible?

We are not proposing a final monetary mechanism here.

We are proposing a constitutional question.

Can a Constitution See Causality?

Chile offers an important reminder of how difficult such a task can be.

The country submitted two distinct constitutional proposals to national plebiscites, in 2022 and 2023, and both were rejected.

This does not make Chile a constitutional failure.

Perhaps it makes Chile an extraordinarily important Latin American question:

How can a society collectively imagine another architecture of the State without replacing one form of massification with another?

BrainLatam does not possess the answer.

But perhaps it can offer principles through which such an architecture could be explored:

Recognize before labeling.

Understand the cause before managing the effect.

Protect before digitizing.

Treat belonging as public infrastructure.

Recognize that territory and biome participate in human possibilities.

Preserve the individual without imagining that the individual exists in isolation.

Build the collective without transforming Jiwasa into a mass.

Use technology to expand possibilities, not to reduce autonomy.

And perhaps the most difficult principle:

Evaluate the State also by the movements its population never had the opportunity to choose.

Because we can also be massified by the choices we were never given.

Where Does Science End and BrainLatam Begin?

We should close this series where we began: by separating evidence from hypothesis.

E1 — Scientific evidence

Body states, interoception, perception, learning, memory, and social relationships participate in experience and behavior. Contemporary work on consciousness increasingly emphasizes bodily and interoceptive processes, while interaction research shows that coordination between people can be studied experimentally.

E2 — Plausible synthesis

Material, bodily, relational, and environmental conditions shape trajectories of perception, learning, and action.

E3 — BrainLatam hypothesis

Body-Territory, APUS, Jiwasa, Biome Income, Body-Territory Recognition, Citizen DREX, and Causal Intelligence of the State are conceptual proposals that must generate testable hypotheses and institutional designs that can themselves be evaluated.

E4 — Political and constitutional project

Transforming these concepts into rights, institutions, monetary systems, or constitutional articles requires democratic debate.

No neuroscience experiment, by itself, authorizes a Constitution.

This boundary does not weaken BrainLatam.

It is precisely what allows BrainLatam to ask new questions without presenting metaphors as scientific discoveries.

Neuro Challenge Latam

Choose a real problem from your territory.

It may be school dropout.

Violence.

Hunger.

Mental health.

Mobility.

Deforestation.

Housing.

Technological dependency.

Now do not begin with the consequence.

Follow the Body-Territory.

Where did the causal chain begin?

Which movements gradually became impossible?

At what point did the State appear?

What policy would have needed to exist earlier?

And finally:

If you could write only one article of a new Constitution, which condition of the Body-Territory should the State be constitutionally required to protect before it becomes harm?

Perhaps a Constitution does not need to begin only by asking:

“What are the powers of the State?”

Perhaps it can begin with an earlier question:

What Body-Territories Do We Want to Make Possible?

The future does not begin from zero.

The future is ancestral.

Essential References

DAMASIO, A.; DAMASIO, H. Homeostatic Feelings and the Emergence of Consciousness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36(8), 1653–1659, 2024. DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_02119.

LEIVA-CISTERNA, I. et al. Sensory multi-brain stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 20(1), nsaf104, 2025. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsaf104.

CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL. Drex — Digital Real; Drex Pilot.

SERVICIO ELECTORAL DE CHILE. Official results of the 2022 and 2023 constitutional plebiscites.

BIBLIOTECA DEL CONGRESO NACIONAL DE CHILE. Constitución Política de la República de Chile.