If were to ask someone to "Define the experience of the color blue" they would likely tell me about light rays, and how a certain intensity of a certain wave of light effects our neurons, and our eyeballs in a way that produces the "experience" of the color blue.

that is only a relational description of what is going on, that doesn't tell me what it is like to see blue, you cannot give me a non-circular description of what it is like to see the color blue.

you can say "blue is the color of the ocean" or "this light activates cones in my eyes" but that only tells me what is happening that doesn't tell me what it is like.

Facts about an experience, do not equate to an explanation of phenomenal character of having that experience.

On top of this, we can experience the color blue, such factors are absent. I can close my eyes and imagine a blue square right now, without the light waves "required".

Thus, the experience of the color blue cannot be reduced down to a particular composition of physical components.

On top of this, when I imagine the color blue, "where is it?" the question seems kind of stupid, I must admit, but it does have implications. When I imagine the color blue, do I see it with my eyes? my eyes only see data from light, but the imagined blue is not coming from actual light. is the experience in my brain? what part of my brain?

If it cannot be physically reduced, nor physically localized, I am led to beleive that it is not physical at all.

I don't think I'm nessecarily making an argument from a gap in our knowledge, atleast not my argument from the irreducability of the experience of the color blue. It can't be defined in a way that isn't circular.

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The Question is exactly what is said in the title.

In our sleep, we dream I do not think we can seperate dreaming from experience. To dream is to behold multiple sensations while asleep. Dreams often include the experience of sight, as in, we see things in our dreams, they often even include the experience of sound.

Surley experiences require being conscious, thus so as long as we are dreaming, we are never truly "unconscious".

are we ever truly unconscious?

God is us from the future. Everything is cyclical.The human mind strives for super-intelligence.

What do you think?

По-видимому, во всей вселенной есть только один элемент, который имеет хоть какую-то ценность - это сознание, душа, разум. Все остальное ничтожно и не имеет никакого смысла.

Это означает одно из двух: либо Сверхразум является конечным продуктом вселенной, либо все во вселенной циклично, и вселенную создал некий Сверхразум.

Consciousness and the brain are clearly separate but work perfectly together. Consciousness isn't the brain itself, and there's no mechanism for it. If you say the brain is consciousness, that means it's the source, not the mechanism. Consciousness is a subjective experience; you can't see it in a lab or experience mine, just like I can't experience yours. It's based on firsthand subjective experience, not just the brain. I see that a lot of people make up answers for the mechanism of consciousness. We don't know the mechanism of consciousness. That's why the whole concept of the problem of consciousness is proposed by actual people who study these things, like neuroscientists, not by people outside of these fields, because even they know there is such a thing as a problem with consciousness, in that we know this cannot be some physical thing. We cannot see consciousness itself. We can only see what correlates with consciousness, which would be the brain because consciousness and the brain work so perfectly together.

Physics shows that reality contains far more than our senses can detect: electromagnetic waves outside visible light, atomic and molecular structures, magnetic and electric fields, neutrinos, gravitational waves, dark matter, and quantum phenomena. It seems reasonable to assume that consciousness, as we experience it, is only one of the many other versions of consciousness that we will never experience or understand.

^(Please note this has been posted to a few other groups as I'd love all the input and differing opinions and thought processes as I can get.)

Hello my gorgeous humans of Reddit,

I’ve been thinking about free will from the perspective that, at the physical level, everything happening in our brains ultimately comes down to chemistry and electrical activity as well as past experiences influencing those factors. Neurons will communicate through electrochemical signals, neurotransmitters influence how those networks behave, and our brains are continuously being shaped by genetics, development, memories, and our past experiences. In that sense, when I make a decision, there doesn't seem to be a separate “self” sitting outside my brain and directing the chemistry. The decision itself appears to be part of the chemistry. I was talking to someone today and he brought it up as a 'equation', because at the end of the day it really can be as simple as saying:

Free Will and Perception of reality = electrical brain activity + chemicals + lived experience

But this is where I find the question of free will interesting. We can describe the physical processes involved, but does describing those processes actually explain the person making the decision? My brain isn't just a collection of isolated chemical reactions; it is an enormously complicated system carrying the effects of everything that has happened to me. My experiences change the physical structure and function of my brain, those changes influence future decisions, and those decisions then become part of my future experience. There is a continuous feedback loop between the physical brain, the environment, and the history of the individual.

This makes me wonder whether saying “it's all chemical reactions” actually settles the free-will question. Perhaps it does if free will requires some kind of non-physical soul or force that can independently intervene in the brain. But if we define free will as the ability of a sufficiently complex organism to process information, consider alternatives, respond to reasons, and act according to its internal state, then the fact that all of this happens physically might not necessarily eliminate it.

At the same time, there is an obvious unknown here. We still don't have a complete scientific explanation for consciousness, subjective experience, or exactly how the physical activity of the brain gives rise to the experience of being a person. That doesn't mean we should insert “life” or consciousness as a mysterious force and call it an explanation- we don't have evidence for that. But it does mean I’m hesitant to say that we have completely reduced the question of human agency to “just chemicals.”

I find this question cool because I’ve had personal experiences with psychedelics and periods of psychosis that radically changed how I experienced reality. Those experiences made me much more aware of how strongly perception, thought, emotion and our sense of what is “real” can depend on the physical state of the brain as well as the experiences that are strong enough to permanently alter both the brain's hardware and situational responses. The external world may not have changed, but my experience of it could change dramatically depending on what was happening neurologically. It makes me wonder how much of what we consider our normal, stable sense of self and reality is ultimately an emergent product of brain chemistry and past experience. At the same time, experiencing those changes firsthand makes me hesitant to assume we already understand exactly how the brain produces consciousness and subjective experience.

So , I’m curious where people here draw the line: if we eventually understood every chemical and electrical process occurring in someone's brain, including their genetics, memories, environment, and past experiences, would that completely explain why they made a particular decision? And if it did, would you consider that proof that free will doesn't exist, or could that physical process itself be what free will actually is?

Thank you for reading this <3

I am working on my routines every day and trying to stay fully conscious of my mind and body instead of forcing everything to be perfect. When I let go of overthinking, my headaches go away and I finally feel in the flow, but it is hard to keep this mindset every day. Who is on this spot right now, maybe you can sahre your experience how you manage it, so maybe we can lern something from it.

Looking for others' experiences about the one find or 'secret' of the nature of the mind that comes about from sudden or drastic changes in one's conscious experience, through life, trauma or drugs, that others seem to be unaware of?

In *Approaching the Buddhist Path*, His Holiness the Dalai Lama puts forward the following 4 claims.
I’m wondering if these claims represent (or are consistent with) the broad consensus. Here they are (and thanks in advance!);

1. “\[By\] simply looking at chemical processes in the brain, we cannot determine if a thought is valid— if it is an instance of knowledge or affliction.”

2. “By examining brain processes we cannot discern whether a mental event is a direct perceiver of a sense object, or a conception (a memory or thought about something).”

3. “At the experiential level, there is a great difference between the pain we experience due to our own situation and the pain that comes from compassion for others’ suffering. The experience of our own pain arises involuntarily and forcefully, and we usually respond to it with fear and anger. The pain that is attendant upon compassion for another’s suffering has an element of deliberate sharing and embracing of that pain, and we react to it with courage. *However, in terms of the biochemical processes in the brain, these two types of pain are indistinguishable”* (emphasis mine).

4. “Tears can well up on our eye when we are joyful or very sad. On the physical level, our eyes do not distinguish the two. But on a mental level, there is a big difference the cause of the tears and how we experience them.”

As the title suggests, I have very clear memories of my existence before being born. Not in like a past life having a different family type of way, but I remember just simply existing. Not having words for the void space that I existed, not even have a sense of I necessarily, but purely aware and conscious. No feelings, no sight, no hearing, just aware and knowing. Then suddenly I was in the womb, and being ultrasounded. I've wrestled with this all my life because the experience suggests that whatever makes you and I us, persists after death. Whether that be in an endless void of blackness or otherwise, it for sure means that we aren't just our minds or bodies. Has anyone else had this experience, and if not does anyone have any science based insights into something like this?

Hi,

So, I would say I am in the physicalist camp and believe that human consciousness is emergent from our brain and body. My thought being that all of the parts in a human body create a single human consciousness.
What I am wondering is something similar to a China Brain thought experiment, which is if the collective of all the people, organisms, and the planet overall creates an emergent phenomenon that we don't know exists. Sort of in the same way the sum of our parts creates the conscious human experience.

I understand this question has an unprovability aspect built into it, as we as humans can't really understand what emergent phenomena would exist from our point of view, but I am still interested in whether there have been thoughts or considerations on a worldwide "consciousness".

A follow up to this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/s/X6w8lj52tw

When the doctor opens the head, he looks inside. He sees red blood and a grey brain.

But the red blood and the grey brain are not the true, outside world. They are entirely new shapes and colours created strictly by the doctor's own mind. The doctor's mind creates these shapes to help the doctor stay alive.

The doctor forgets this fact. He thinks his created shapes are the absolute truth. He searches for your feelings, qualia, consciousness and your thoughts inside his own colours. Because he cannot find your feelings hidden inside his colours, he decides your feelings are not real.

The doctor expects your true, hidden mind to show up inside the shapes and colours his mind invented.

He looks strictly at his own mind's creations and falsely decides you do not exist.

Just something i thought was interesting.

I am sharing my latest research, The Amadeus Project, a 128-page theoretical paper proposing that consciousness is not a magical emergent property, but an integral process dependent on continuous perception, structural memory, and temporal integration.

While current Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked debates about machine sentience, this paper argues they fundamentally fail to achieve consciousness because they are "frozen snapshots" of intelligence. They lack the continuous integration of time and the structural plasticity required for genuine subjective experience. You can read or download the whole pdf file from the github link of my repo.

You can read in here without downloading the whole pdf file: https://zenodo.org/records/21980916

TL;DR: We often look at consciousness too high up the stack (as pure experience). What if we modeled it as a runtime operating system instead? This shifts our view from the "screen of experience" to underlying processes like prediction, attention, and possibility, introducing functional concepts like the Operator and the OP Gap to explain self-observation and awakening.

What if we're trying to understand consciousness from too high up the stack? We talk about consciousness as experience. Thoughts. Qualia. Self-awareness. The feeling of being someone. But what if we also need to ask what is running underneath all of that? Not the brain as hardware. The runtime.

Think about an operating system. An OS doesn't just "think." It manages processes. It allocates attention-like resources. It handles signals. It maintains states. It predicts what processes need. It stores information. It prioritizes some inputs over others. It coordinates actions. It updates itself from feedback. And most importantly: most of what the system is doing isn't directly visible to the user. You don't normally see the OS managing memory. You just see an application running.

Something similar may be happening with human consciousness. We experience: "I saw something." "I thought something." "I felt something." "I decided something." But underneath that experience could be a much larger runtime continuously doing things like: Possibility → Detection → Attention → Prediction → Meaning → Identity → Choice → Action → Feedback

And even that isn't really a straight line. These processes constantly influence each other. Prediction affects attention. Attention affects what becomes available for prediction. Identity affects meaning. Meaning affects identity. Feedback changes predictions. And the whole configuration changes what becomes possible next. So perhaps consciousness isn't simply the "screen" where experience appears. Perhaps conscious experience is partly what it looks like when a complex runtime becomes available to itself.

But there's something even more interesting.

Before prediction, there has to be something that can be predicted. Before change, there has to be possibility. Before the system selects one interpretation, there has to be a space of possible interpretations. Before attention selects a signal, there has to be something that can potentially be detected. So I've started thinking about Possibility as a more fundamental layer than change itself. Not "possibility" in the philosophical sense of every imaginable thing. More like: the set of states the current system can potentially enter or make available.

The system isn't changing from one state to another in an empty space. It is changing within constraints. And those constraints can themselves change. That's where this starts becoming interesting. A system can learn a new response. But a more fundamental change happens when the system learns that its previous rules for generating responses were themselves adjustable. In other words: learning can change the model. But sometimes the system changes what determines how it learns.

Then there's the strange part.

What happens when the runtime starts observing its own runtime? You can observe a thought. Then you can observe yourself reacting to the thought. Then you can notice the prediction that generated the reaction. Then perhaps you can notice the identity structure involved in maintaining that prediction. At some point the system isn't simply processing information anymore. It is processing information about its own processing.

And that raises a weird question: If the runtime can observe its own execution... what exactly is doing the observing? I don't mean a little homunculus sitting somewhere inside the brain. That would just move the problem one level deeper. I'm talking about a functional capability: a system becoming able to represent aspects of its own currently running processes while those processes are still capable of being modified. That's the idea behind what I've been calling the Operator. Not another self. Not a soul hidden somewhere inside the machine. A position in the runtime from which the current trajectory can become observable and potentially interruptible.

And this might explain something about the experience people call "awakening."

Maybe the interesting change isn't: bad thoughts → good thoughts or: emotion → no emotion

Maybe it's: automatic execution → observable execution

The thoughts can still appear. Fear can still appear. Anger can still appear. Predictions can still appear. But the system doesn't necessarily have to execute every prediction simply because it appeared. There can be a functional gap between: what the system generates and what the system does with what it generates.

I'm calling that the OP Gap. Not a literal hole in the brain. Not a magical space. A condition in which an otherwise dominant trajectory becomes observable while alternative continuations are still operationally available.

So maybe the interesting question isn't:

"Is consciousness produced by the brain?" Maybe that's too low-level. And maybe: "What is consciousness?" is too broad.

Perhaps a more useful question is: What would an operating-system-level model of consciousness actually look like?

What are its primitives? What are its processes? What are its feedback loops? What are its failure modes? What happens when it becomes rigid? What happens when it modifies its own constraints? What happens when it becomes capable of observing its own execution? And perhaps most importantly: Can such a model make distinctions or predictions that simpler descriptions of consciousness cannot?

Because if it can't, then "OS for consciousness" is just a metaphor. But if it can... then maybe we're looking at consciousness from the wrong layer.

I could as you what is physical reality? Each person will just say they're own thing. There won't be any consensus as to what exactly is this thing we call physical reality.

One might say:

> "Physical reality refers to the totality of matter and energy."

What is matter?

> "Its a word we use to refer to tight cluster or specific arrangement of atoms."

What are atoms?

> "Atoms are collection of subatomic particles like.....

What are subatomic particles?

> A particle is a word we use to refer to different kinds of physical excitation of the physical fields of the universe.

What is a field?

> We don't know.

Or something like that. What im trying to demonstrate here is that all this words&mdash; particles, atoms, gouge bosons, etc&mdash;are just words we invented to refer to other words we invented. So we end up with a complex web of words we invented. We call this web: scientific theory or framework.

One might say:

> No. They're based on empirical observations.

What does observation mean?

> It means to record a physical event.

What's a physical event?

> Its what we physically perceive with our sensory organs or measure with scientific instruments.

How do we perceive?

> Our sensory organs like the skin receive physical data of the surrounding environment. They translate these into electrical impulses..... the brain then.... which then renders physical reality as we experience it.

You mention "translation". So the skin receives the raw sensory data -> translation -> electrical impulses?

> Yes.

Which are then sent to the brain for processing?

> Yes.

Is what the skin receives isomorphically identical to the resultant of the translation process?

> No. The raw sensory data aren't electrical impulses. The skin is a filter. 99.9% of sensory data is decarded. The resultant is actually homomorphically correlated with the raw sensory data. This is due to thermodynamic limits and such.

And those electrical impulses are further processed by the brain (another form of translation)?

> Yes.

So what is rendered is a translation of a translation? The first translation was mere 0.1% of the raw sensory data?

> Yes.

---

One might say

> But science, hadron colliders...

I will ask this question. Do these "prosthetic" sensory organs escape the previous physical limits of translation?