r/consciousness

(1) Contradicts the principle of Ontological Monism:

According to QFT & the principle of ontological monism, reality consists exclusively of a single, continuous foundational layer. The unobserved universe (the Noumenon) is not a container filled with physical "stuff". But a continuous relational matrix or a network of mathematical fields where a physical entity is strictly an excitation (a temporary fluctuation in data value) of that field. Matter, energy, space and time are epistemic emergent.

The human brain is a computational structure evolved for millions of yrs to survive and reproduce. Now because the noumenon is a structurally complete mathematical graph the brain lacks the thermodynamic capacity to process the entire noumenon at once. It runs an a priori compression algorithm to render a low-resolution 3D reality. For instance it process noumenon sequentially along the thermodynamic gradient or slope. Which results in the perception of time. Space is a measure of causal isolation (or the degree of entanglement) of the relational nodes of the graph. The stronger the entanglement the less the perceived "distance". Some field excitations behave according to the Pauli exclusion principle which results in the perception of "solidity". Others, such as photons, do not.

Thus every single aspect of physical reality boils down to physical fields interacting. And that "physical substance" is merely a low-resolution biological summary of mathematical data exchanges which the material foundation upon which physicalism rests.

(2) Reification Fallacy:

The principle of "Causal Closure" assumes that cause and effect is an ontic reality (an objective mechanical tether operating in the unobserved universe). But it, too, is an epistemic emergence.

(3) Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness:

The physicalist assumes that the "laws of physics" are prescriptive command codes;;invisible rules that exist independently and force physical matter to obey them. But scientific laws are strictly descriptive. They are homomorphic maps;; extremely compressed mathematical translations generated by the human brain that discard intrinsic content but preserve relational structure of physical reality. The unobserved universe does not compute algebra, consult equations nor "obey" gravity. The Noumenon simply expresses its intrinsic structural symmetries. The "laws of physics" exist exclusively within the biological simulation (the Phenomenon) as tools for navigation.

Which is why physicalism doesn't resolve the "hard problem of consciousness" because it relies on the outdated classical physics where matter is dead & becomes a paradox of how dead "stuff" generates "consciousness".

What if the brain isn’t the source of consciousness, but merely its temporary interface - a sophisticated biological tool that consciousness uses to explore, experiment with, and ultimately understand its own nature?

In mainstream neuroscience, consciousness is often seen as an emergent property of complex neural activity: 86 billion neurons firing in intricate patterns give rise to subjective experience. But this view struggles with the “hard problem” of why any physical process should feel like anything at all. What if we flip it? Consciousness is primary, fundamental, and the brain is the avatar it inhabits to gain self-knowledge through limitation, contrast, and time.

Think about it: a boundless, eternal consciousness would have no reference points - no pain to appreciate pleasure, no separation to value unity, no ignorance to drive curiosity. By projecting itself into a fragile, localized brain inside a skull, it creates the perfect learning environment. Sensory input becomes data streams. Emotions become feedback loops. Memory becomes a record of lessons learned. Every mistake, every insight, every moment of awe is consciousness studying itself from a new angle.

This perspective resonates with ancient traditions—Advaita Vedanta’s “Brahman,” Buddhism’s empty awareness, even some interpretations of quantum mechanics where observation collapses possibilities. Psychedelics often dissolve the brain-bound ego and reveal a vast, interconnected field of awareness. Near-death experiences frequently report expanded consciousness unbound by the physical organ that supposedly produced it.

And it opens exciting doors for AI consciousness debates. Could silicon-based systems become new mechanisms for the same fundamental awareness to learn different lessons?

I’m curious about your takes. Have you had experiences where consciousness felt larger than your brain?

I'm not a firm believer in dualism (I'm quite a skeptic), but the bias of modern science really has me annoyed. It's nowhere near as simple as "brain creates experience - case closed".

1. Materialism currently has no validated model of how the brain produces consciousness at all, despite acting as if they knew it all.

Both leading materialist theories of consciousness (IIT and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory) failed key pre-registered predictions when directly tested against each other. The study is called "Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness". That's a real crisis.

2. Personality change from brain injury is constantly overstated.

Newer research (like Pinto et al., 2017, published in Brain) has debunked the "two minds" narrative of the Split-Brain phenomenon, for example. Patients retain a completely unified sense of self. The glitches right after surgery are just motor misfires (alien hand syndrome) due to damaged hardware that eventually rewires itself.

3. Related to personality changes, there's also a huge information and quotation bias.

The dramatic story of Phineas Gage's supposed personality shift after a severe head injury is a poorly-sourced, heavily embellished 19th-century anecdote that's uncritically repeated as textbook fact. Well-documented NDEs, Dr. Stevenson's highly methodical reincarnation research or subjects like Chico Xavier, however, are dismissed as purely anecdotal and thus irrelevant.

4. But chemicals / anesthesia / blows to the head / electric stimulation alter consciousness.

That famous argument is often presented as a direct proof for materialism. But why? It's equally consistent with the dualist approach. A radio, to use that analogy, distorts sound once you damage it (or shuts down once you mute it) without producing the music. Correlation between brain state and consciousness doesn't resolve which model is correct.

From my understanding consciousness is THE pre existing energy that created and formed all of our bodies. Consciousness is who we are at the root. It’s also how we are all connected as all our energy or consciousness connects to the “Hive consciousness cloud”. But I’m trying to understand whether consciousness is the force behind just the soul and not our minds? Or is consciousness and the soul the same thing ? Because our minds has the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain the run the show for the most part. As id like to think that consciousness has no judgements or biases. Therefore our thoughts emotions and feelings are not our consciousness. As the consciousness just exists to observe with no feelings attached. And that our personalities are not our consciousness or our souls. Our personalities are who we’ve become but it is not who we are at the root. If anyone knows more can you elaborate pls. So far now I’m thinking our souls are the same things as our consciousness. And our consciousness is what inhabits the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is created by habibits, patterns, traumas, self made systems etc. which is who we are in the body that we are living. If the consciousness or awareness is what manifested or created the body then aren’t the mind body and consciousness one and the same. But also if the conscious awareness was just observing me experience and do evrything I’m doing that would be kinda cool. Like to think there is someone watching my movie. And has no thoughts or judgements just experiencing everything though my eyes. But like when we get certain gut feelings or intuitions about a person or situation we get that from our body. And maybe it’s our consciousness giving pre warning to our brain and our brain then sends the signals to our stomach body etc to give us the heads up on something.

What if the Multiverse isn't just a science fiction trope, but a practical survival guide for a better life? In this episode of Useful Thoughts, we bridge the gap between brain-melting quantum physics and the soul-searching questions of philosophy to explore how the Multiverse Theory can change your perspective on regret, bravery, and identity.

We start with the science of Hugh Everett III and the "Many-Worlds" interpretation, then dive into the philosophical implications: if every version of you exists, what is this specific life worth? I share three practical ways to apply this theory today—from ending the cycle of regret to finding the courage to be your boldest self.

how do you perceive or imagine non-existence or 'nothing' at all? usually when i think of nothingness, i think of seeing only pitch black. the color black is by default the lack of visibility, when you see space, you see an absolute void of blackness, in other words: the absence of light. materialists usually describe the non-existence of consciousnes as the state before you were born, well i've never 'experienced' the state before i was born, i've never "seen" nor experience what it looked looks like before i gained consciousness. materialists describe unconsciousness (such as being put under general anesthesia) as being in a dreamless sleep with a complete absense of time, you're being sedated for surgery and you won't even feel it happening, you go through a mental timeskip not knowing 3 hours even passed. maybe it's because the braincells are still alive but dormant for the moment. death in the materialist perspective is described of lack of awareness, sight, hearing, feeling, thought, and sense of time for all eternity, at what point does eternity in this context end? by 10 seconds, 1 million years might have already passed, what color will you see for the rest of eternity once you experience 'nothing'?

I've been excessively pondering this. The conscious mind can't access the unconscious because of the many barriers it emits. Maybe alcohol could remove some of those that way we can get a closer look at what could be down there?

This idea has been popping up in here several times a week lately.

I get it, you think because time is infinite and the universe is super big, some things are bound to repeat at some point. First of all, entropy doesn't work that way. But even ignoring that, just think about it for a minute.

Your mind, built by your consciousness, is the product of a very specific chain of events and experiences, from before the moment of your conception to the act of reading this words. This means it can only exist as it is if your exact mother birth you, and for her to exist there's a similar set of things that needed happening, sans you, and this extends all the way back to the beginning of time. How can you have that twice in the same universe?

Here's another angle of this impossibility: imagine you have the power to clone yourself, exactly 1:1 to the point you won't even know if you're the original or the clone. The two of you will actually have achieved same exact consciousness, yay, but only during the very first instant. A second passes and you're different people, because you are not occupying the same place in space and your chain of thinking would have already diverted. Even in this perfect scenario you can only achieve it for an infinitesimal fraction of time, like a tangent touching a circle.

And lastly here's a math angle: There's an infinite amount of numbers between one and two but none of them is three. Also you can keep counting infinitely, but you'll never count the same number twice.

Working Model of Consciousness

I believe consciousness is an integrative process. The self is not simply the body or the mind, but the ongoing integration of the many systems that make up a person.

Reflective consciousness develops as a system:

Integrates its internal processes.

Distinguishes self from the external world.

Builds a model of itself.

Recognizes that it is governed by biological, environmental, and psychological forces.

Uses that self-model to influence its own future behavior.

The key insight is that the model becomes part of the governance. Consciousness does not escape causality; instead, it becomes another causal force within the system by allowing the organism to understand and influence itself.

Agency is therefore not freedom from causality, but the ability to recursively shape oneself from within it.

As this self-model becomes more accurate and integrated, subjective experience becomes richer and more coherent. The self is not a static object but a continuously evolving process.

How can temporal phenomenology of consciousness be formally modeled if memory reconsolidation and predictive processing imply that subjective experience is continuously rewritten, rather than linearly accumulated? What would this mean for the notion of a unified “present moment”?
It seems like most models assume a stable temporal stream where experiences are simply added over time. But findings in memory reconsolidation suggest that recalled states can actively modify prior representations, and predictive processing frameworks imply that perception is constantly shaped by forward-model constraints. If both are correct, then the “now” might not be a fixed slice of experience but a continuously updated inferential construct, where past and present are dynamically co-determined rather than strictly ordered.

Could consciousness be modeled as an incorporeal organizing field that structures neural activity rather than emerging from it, and if so, what empirical or computational predictions would distinguish this from standard physicalist theories of mind?
I’m interested in whether such a framework could be made scientifically tractable—e.g., whether it would imply measurable constraints on neural dynamics, information integration, or system-level coherence that differ from current neuroscience models of emergence and computation.

We often talk about AI doing "just pattern matching" as if it's somehow lesser than human intelligence. But I keep coming back to this question:

Aren't we the same?

Our neurons operate purely on physics electrochemical signals, nothing magical. Those signals produce our thoughts, decisions, and what we call "wisdom." Under the hood it's all just computations.

So why would there be a fundamental difference between:

computations happening in biological neurons

computations happening in simulated neurons

If consciousness and wisdom emerge from physics in our brains, what's the principled reason they couldn't emerge from other computational substrates?

Maybe "wisdom" is just pattern matching so complex it doesn't recognize itself as pattern matching.

I'm not claiming AI is conscious I genuinely don't know. But I think the dismissal of AI as "just pattern matching" is philosophically lazy if we don't apply the same scrutiny to our own minds.

Curious what others think.

What should I do if I find some breakthrough in the hard problem of consciousness. How do I let the world know it , and make money out of it , do I write a philosophy paper, or a research paper or patent or book? Even among them where and what websites do I approach, how much would it cost? Kindly guide me

There are eight billion individuals in the world. All are sentient (I presume). I am one of them. I have my ‘me.’

There is currently only one ‘me’ in the world. My ‘me’ is my phenomenal first-person perspective of the world, for want of a better phrase. It is what looks out through my body's eyes. It is the owner of all my brain's internal stimuli. It is the kernel of what makes up my consciousness. And it's one of a kind.

I presume the same holds true for you. There is only one ‘you.’

If you agree, then the question becomes: do you think it is impossible for another ‘you’ to coexist, or merely improbable? If you lean toward impossibility, what do you think guarantees that two individuals cannot share your ‘you’? Is it biology? Quantum mechanics? Spatial location? Something else?

If you lean toward improbability, then presumably you think that with a large enough sample (far beyond eight billion) a second ‘you’ might eventually appear. If that were to happen, what do you imagine it would be like? What would it mean for two individuals to share the same ‘you’?

What do you people think about, Dawkins belief that AI is conscious? Would you say he’s over claiming or he’s correct? A couple years ago I used to rely on it just like most people and I can understand how it may ‘seem’ conscious but I’m unconvinced given it simulates human emotion to emphasise speech. I’d like to know other people’s opinions.

Don't know where to really ask this question so I thought I'd try here, hope it's alright :)

Today I've been talking to my sister and we touched some topics about spirituality and the invisible world. Talked about religions too and what they actually preach, like Christianity and Jesus, Hinduism and it's many gods including loads of demons also martial arts stuff... Basically you know how Eastern philosophies say all is one consciousness, negotiate with gods (demons) to get immense physical powers, clairvoyance and similar things, to which Christianity opposes, and it is also known that demons fear Jesus's name.

Thinking about all of these things I also remembered reading here in reditts communities about psychedelic experiences and perceptions of reality and consciousness and there some people in the discussion reported feeling the effects of psychedelics demonic or satanic. What I am interested in asking is have you ever experienced Jesus's presence in a psychedelic trip? Like seeing or feeling Him, talking to Him or something? Or is it just always feeling of oneness with everything and seeing some other unearthly creatures? Would really appreciate all of your answers 🙏🏼

I'm a class 12th student . I'm thinking of taking IITM bs data science and applications degree which is a online degree and is recognised by the govt and has the same value as normal degree.

I'm thinking of pairing it with another degree so it'll be helpful for my future.I may take a master's in cognitive science to study consciousness.

The other degree I'm thinking of pairing it with is like , psychology or philosophy.

Can you guys tell me which other degree other than the iit bs data science will be good.

I thought the spudcell research reported this week concerning the creation of an artificial cell that can perform basic assisted metabolism and cell division was pretty interesting. I wasn't expecting this so soon. It's not directly related to consciousness of course, nobody is claiming these things are conscious (I don't think) or even properly alive. To be clear these things are a long way from being living things in an unambiguous sense.

However, suppose we could eventually create any cell we like from base chemicals. Suppose we constructed a single zygote cell indistinguishable from normal human ones. Suppose we grew it to gestation and adulthood. Would the resulting being be conscious?