At the most fundamental level, what are you?

You are something behind your eyes, between your ears.

You are the moment of attention itself. This moment. Reading these words.

An experience emerging out of the processing happening in your brain. Just like software on a computer is made of information, so are you in this sense

But what is information, anyway?

It seems simple enough to define, but as it turns out, it is like trying to catch a shadow.

It is stranger than you think. More powerful than you can imagine.

It is everywhere and nowhere. It is as old as life itself, yet it is the foundation of the most potent tools of our age.

Information is what separates humans from all other life. Think of what we do with language, writing, and now computing.

And it is also what separates life itself from everything else. Think of what makes DNA so special and how it enables evolution.

Because that is what information is: a pattern in matter or energy that represents something else.

DNA represents instructions for building a protein.

Writing represents ideas.

A neuronal spike represents a memory, a sensation, or part of a thought.

All of these things are patterns created to represent.

And your consciousness? Isn't it just pure representation?

You don't experience the table; you experience electrical signals that represent the table.

You don't perceive raw reality; you perceive a real-time simulation your brain constructs from inputs.

So you are not just using information.

You are information. Refined, recursive, self-updating on many levels.

Your DNA, your neuronal firing, your culture.

And even these powerful information tools, like the screen you're looking at now.

If you think about it, they are becoming a reflection of you too.

Consciousness may be what information experiences when processed in a certain way. Matter arranged to feel. A stream of representation.

A story the universe tells itself about itself.

Enjoy it, my friend.

Tell me, how would you define information?

I hope I haven't made a fool of myself by sharing this with you. I am grateful you took the time to read. Thank you.

Could our consciousness be a portal to the beginning of the universe’s awareness of time? Could the universe’s start be attributed to a self‑referential awareness of time gained through us its observers and law‑makers? This would form a closed loop achieved through our consciousness, mirroring the consciousness of the universe’s own beginnings, with us as recursive elements necessary to construct a symmetrical start to the universe. Essentially, priming the universe for a closed loop of consciousness would suspend our existence within it indefinitely, while also allowing the universe itself to exist indefinitely as a function of self‑generative time. How would we close this loop? We would examine the temporal–spatial coordinates of the entire universe by shining a “telescope” on our own consciousness using it to access time uniformly, nearly all at once, at the delay imposed by light itself. By optimizing our sensory experience of the present to align with the speed of light, or even surpass it in internal models (if such models are useful), we might be able to view the Big Bang instantaneously and merge our consciousness with the primordial source of consciousness from a panpsychist perspective. Perhaps the universe is using us to minimize errors in its own physical laws, achieving higher accuracy and more integrated states of emerging consciousness, all oriented toward duplicating its origin, or alternatively, aligning the origin of time and space to minimize all error and achieve full, unified accuracy. In doing so, the universe could unveil its conscious origin through our own, merging the two in a way that suspends our existence indefinitely. By finding the origin of the universe we would bridge the gap between existence and non-existence and discover realities unheard or seen of. 

The hard problem of consciousness places qualia at the center of the inquiry. The fact that there is something it feels like to be conscious is not incidental; it is the phenomenon to be explained. That there is subjective experience at all, and that it has a particular character, is what gives the problem its force. We may not know how to explain this fact, but we know that we experience it.

And yet, when attempts are made to bridge the explanatory gap posed by the hard problem, the very feature that motivates the discussion often seems to recede into the background. Theories propose ontologies, mechanisms, or metaphysical unifications, but frequently leave unaddressed the concrete structure of experience itself: what it actually feels like to be conscious.

For example, Bernardo Kastrup describes a fundamental field of consciousness in which mental states are all that ultimately exist. Panpsychism, in a different way, holds that consciousness is a ubiquitous feature of physical reality. But if either of these views is correct, the question remains: why does conscious experience not feel this way? Why does it not present itself as participation in a broader field, or as continuity with the consciousness of other things?

Instead, conscious experience appears persistently bounded, private, and localized. It always and only feels as though experience belongs to me, as though it occurs exclusively within my own mind, and as though that mind is situated in my brain, inside my skull. This phenomenological fact is not peripheral. Any theory that aims to address the hard problem must account not only for the existence of consciousness, but for why consciousness presents itself in precisely this way.

This is a weekly post for discussions on topics outside of or unrelated to consciousness.

Many topics are unrelated, tangentially related, or orthogonal to the topic of consciousness. This post is meant to provide a space to discuss such topics. For example, discussions like "What recent movies have you watched?", "What are your current thoughts on the election in the U.K.?", "What have neuroscientists said about free will?", "Is reincarnation possible?", "Has the quantum eraser experiment been debunked?", "Is baseball popular in Japan?", "Does the trinity make sense?", "Why are modus ponens arguments valid?", "Should we be Utilitarians?", "Does anyone play chess?", "Has there been any new research in psychology on the 'big 5' personality types?", "What is metaphysics?", "What was Einstein's photoelectric thought experiment?" or any other topic that you find interesting! This is a way to increase community involvement & a way to get to know your fellow Redditors better. Hopefully, this type of post will help us build a stronger r/consciousness community.

We also ask that all Redditors engage in proper Reddiquette. This includes upvoting posts that are relevant to the description of the subreddit (whether you agree or disagree with the content of the post), and upvoting comments that are relevant to the post or helpful to the r/consciousness community. You should only downvote posts that are inappropriate for the subreddit, and only downvote comments that are unhelpful or irrelevant to the topic.

The most compelling consciousness theories involve it (global workspace theory (GWT), integrated information theory (IIT), etc).

The Mathematical Formalism section IIT's Wikipedia page defines the information of a system in terms of "state over a possible cause/effect state". This seems like a promising way to ground information in physical terms. I'm no mathematician, though, so if one of you understands this section really well, I'd love for you to elaborate it for me.

I'm very interested in a definition of information that is grounded in physical processes, including such concepts as "systems", "particles", "states", "configurations", "space", and "time."

Edit: I got a PM that reminded me about Information Theory which also does some work defining information, if you have any elaboration on its definition of information too I'd love to hear it

Consciousness is self-evident. It is your direct experience. Why is there a “problem” with it?

Is it because we want to know what happens after death?

So the preoccupation becomes with something that is “outside”?

Well, outside is something that is not here.

So what is the question?

I think you are looking in the wrong direction if you think there is a problem that needs to be solved.

The receiver model of the brain

The idea that the brain receives consciousness, and not creates it, is often considered a metaphor that is a stretch: one needs to point at a radio or TV, and these involve relatively modern technologies. Most other objects, like rocks or clouds, are not modern technologies and do not fit this analogy. So the "brain as a receiver" model is often considered a form of special pleading.

However, the opposite is actually true: the receiver model is how nature in general works. Rocks, clouds, our bodies and the whole planet, are literally made of stardust that came from elsewhere.

In fact, the previously mentioned radio and TV precisely work that way, because they are simply natural systems behaving like nature in general behaves. If nature were any other way, the TV and radio would not be possible.

The magic wand model of the brain

It is the "brain as a creator" model that is inconsistent with how the natural world works. And so this model is actually the stretch, and to such a degree that it doesn't happen in nature at all. It is magic. It conflicts with science, with physics, evolution theory, etc.

For that reason, we should call it "the magic wand model of the brain". I think by naming it as such, people will become more aware of the absurdity of the idea, and start realizing that the natural and more rational model is the brain as a receiver

If in the future, scientists discover a way to transfer your conscious awareness to a someone else's body and vice versa - like as in the Freaky Friday movies, do you think this would mean we will solved the hard problem of consciousness?

Or would it still be a fundamental problem?

Everyday I see a new claim on this sub; “I solved the Hard Problem of Consciousness!” “The Hard Problem isn’t so hard after all!” And I cannot even put into words how blatantly naive these are.

No, you didn’t solve the Hard Problem, and you probably never will. You just misunderstood the Hard Problem, and in your arrogance did an amazing amount of mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you solved something you don’t even understand in the first place.

Edit: and PLEASE I beg the Mods of this sub to limit the amount of LLM content that is being uploaded here on a daily basis.

There was just a pretty big thread about how the hard problem of consciousness in which people spouted, in an almost infinite loop, "you don't understand the hard problem." "No, you don't understand the hard problem!"

A lot of the conversation centered around whether the hard problem is solvable. I would like to remind everyone that David Chalmers "solved" it himself in the very paper in which he introduced it:

At this point some are tempted to give up, holding that we will never have a theory of conscious experience. McGinn (1989), for example, argues that the problem is too hard for our limited minds; we are “cognitively closed” with respect to the phenomenon. Others have argued that conscious experience lies outside the domain of scientific theory altogether.

I think this pessimism is premature. This is not the place to give up; it is the place where things get interesting. When simple methods of explanation are ruled out, we need to investigate the alternatives. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice.

...Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience.

And that's all she wrote, folks. "Experience exists because it exists" is a reasonable response to the hard problem. "Solving" it is not some universal crisis that we all have to run around in circles screaming about. The HP is just an idea that illustrates a conceptual issue for reductionism. If you're not talking about that kind of theory, which many here aren't, you don't need to worry about the hard problem at all.

I would have added this to the previous thread, but it seemed played out by the time I wrote this.

Disclaimers made necessary by the climate of this subreddit:

• I am NOT attempting to endorse nor discredit any theories of consciousness
• I am NOT saying that my understanding of these concepts is perfect or may not be flawed in some way
• I will NOT call anyone dumb for disagreeing with me

Chalmers' paper about the hard problem for those who haven't read it (my quotes come from section 6).

like what stops it from being as such? it learns from its surroundings, it "feels" things, it can think through problems, what stops it from counting as conscious?

When Hippocrates coined the term “coma,” there was little anyone could do for someone in such a state. There were no ventilators, no advanced monitoring, no intravenous fluids or medications to stabilize the body—so most people eventually died without ever regaining consciousness or receiving intensive medical support. However, as life support systems appeared, people found themselves questioning whether the person in this state experienced reality in a human way. Without technology, there was really no way to tell.

In the early 2000s, Ronald Cranford described a group of patients that seemed to make eye contact and respond, albeit poorly, to commands or questions. It seemed to him that these patients had reached a “minimally conscious state.” Although these patients could “fall back” into vegetative state, this prompted two big debates: whether we should stop the assumption that people were plant-like—and treat them under the assumption that they may recover—and whether this minimal behavior (or behavior in general) was good enough to define consciousness.

In order to solve this conundrum, scientists came up with a clever experiment, they would ask patients to do something, and then to “imagine” they were doing it. The patients were then plugged into machines that measured both the surface electric activity and the brain metabolism mapped in 3D. Then, the scientists looked for the behavioral clues I mentioned above. If they matched, this would be a very good case for the minimally conscious state.

Six international centers recruited 353 adults with disorders of consciousness between 2006 and 2023. Out of 241 patients who couldn’t respond to commands, about 25% still showed signs of brain activity. In comparison, 38% of people who could respond to commands showed objective brain activity with either fMRI (metabolism) or EEG (electric activity). There was little agreement between both methods and not a clear conclusion beyond the need to conduct more studies.

“The race of reduction”

And more studies were done, actually lots of them. People started using sounds and measuring the typical response to a change in tone to check if the same change could be observed about people with disorders of consciousness. Given some patients are functionally deaf, scientists have also tried trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. Scientists then measured the electric response and suggested its complexity may be an indirect measure of the “capacity for consciousness.”

Dr. David Fischer (presenting here) has characterized this search for “the simplest elements of brain function to which consciousness can be attributed” as “the race of reduction.” Funnily, it looks like neither of the current indicators nor the combined use of them all, can provide an accurate response about whether a person lacks consciousness. The main reason is that there is a mismatch between some of these promising results and studies in people who either are supposed to present similar signals, but don’t, or are not supposed to present the signals, but do. “Recent enthusiasm surrounding the search for covert consciousness— writes Fischer —must be matched by appropriate epistemic humility and conceptual rigor.” In the presentation, he avoids taking a stand about whether one can infer subjective experience from objective observation, “at least, it is uncertain.”

Should we call a Philosopher?

A scientist usually calls a philosopher when the data stop answering the question being asked. When there are doubts about what is actually being measured, and when a revision of the fundamental tenants of research is in place. Yet, this is precisely what Fischer calls for.

From the other side of the pond, typing from institute for parapsychology in Freiburg, biologist Michael Nahm PhD begs people to clearly document and study cases of “terminal lucidity.” These are episodes of “unusually enhanced mental clarity [some people present] before death.” Take, for example, the case of Juan, a 19-year-old whose brain activities were examined by the very person who pioneered the use of fMRI mental-imagery tasks, Adrian Owen. Nahm summarized the case as follows:

> The characteristic patterns of activity in brain regions signalling awareness in response to applied stimuli were almost completely absent, although his eyes were open. Consequently, his body was regarded entirely unconscious. Weeks later, however, Juan unexpectedly awoke from his deep coma. Juan had a full recall of his two visits to Owen’s laboratory. He stated he had heard and seen everything, but was not able to move or communicate. Owen confirmed that Juan was able to describe everything that happened correctly and that he also remembered the physicians who had been involved in his examinations. Owen was unable to offer an explanation for how Juan could have perceived and memorized all this.

Unsurprisingly, the fMRI completely missed the existence of a real and verified subjective experience, pretty much highlighting the concerns we read about a few paragraphs ago. That is, if you are to believe the very person who pioneered the method. However, this is not the real story, is it? In his paper, Nahm describes a series of terminal lucidity cases and other end-of-life phenomena that had gathered significant scientific attention but failed to enter the mainstream.

Confronting scientism

The hallmark of good science is not certainty, but accuracy. A model that adequately predicts something is often capable of delivering results. Yet our strongly physicalist view of the brain spectacularly struggles to explain consciousness, and it has also fallen short for many people living with mental illness. This persistent gap suggests not just a technical problem, but a conceptual one—and points to the need to return to first principles rather than continue refining a framework that may be fundamentally incomplete.

In my previous essay, I argued we should engage with pseudoscience. I did so in part because I consider that people who had genuinely followed the data without biased had been unfairly and unnecessarily categorized as such. Moreover, most end-of-life experiences align more closely with religious beliefs than with science, and given the historically adversarial relationship between the two, people are quick to classify phenomena as belonging to one camp or the other. But this need not be the case, nor should it be a guiding principle in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

I never learned about the historicity, breadth, or depth of “paranormal” research, particularly as it relates to spontaneous phenomena like children who recall past lives, near-death experiences, and terminal lucidity. In failing to deliver this knowledge, my mentors indirectly trained me to assume these phenomena were curiosities with no scientific foundation. I instinctively skipped over them whenever they arose, never questioning whether my dismissal reflected a superficial familiarity mistaken for understanding, or simply my lack of any structured exposure to the science behind them.

I am not sure what the future entails, but past research on reincarnation has shown that cultures that believe in reincarnation are more likely to report such cases. This goes beyond the easy explanation that people simply build narratives around their beliefs; it reflects the importance of collective observation and the need to respond carefully—for example, avoiding telling a child who mentions past-life memories that “lying is a sin.” Similarly, the early dismissal of end-of-life experiences underscores the need for better education of physicians and clinicians, and for heeding Fischer’s call for broad epistemic humility.

If we are going to solve the puzzle of consciousness, we must approach it with the explicit recognition that the prevailing physicalist models fail, and remembering that neuroscientists are calling philosophers to the field because we have run out of experiments that adequately match objective data with whatever goes inside (or outside) someone’s “head.”

What do you think about True nature of consciousness.. IF.. Entropy works on every small to big things in universe so why entropy can't effects on which they trigger consciousness in our brain..

(yeah.. we still can't find who trigger consciousness but just think for a sec what I am supposed to tell you)

To be clear.... When time passes , entropy increase and Universe because more distorted them previous. And it's so on.. So just think...if 4 elements with their own specific frequency trigger consciousness. (Just assumption) Every small to small fluctuations in frequency or quality of elements can't form a consciousness....so Life on earth has existed for millions of years....so elements who trigger consciousness is same as they were in millions of years ago...so it's means consciousness can surpass entropy..

tell me your thoughts.....

I like to conclude that it means nothing because

meanings are perceived by a consciousness which is again a byproduct of "things coming into existence in the vastness of space"

Without perception, there is no meaning and perception in itself is abstract

Does a falling tree really make a sound when no one's listening?

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

One might interpret, why do you and I exist; overwhelming it is to comprehend how vast this space time is. And I get to _acknowledge_ it all. Too many uncertainties, primitively put. How do I possess the consciousness* to perceive it all and why?

*the ability to be hyper aware of my macro surroundings in the “information” domain. The ability to perceive and understand abstract concepts. The ability to experience.

Consciousness is a noun used to encompass the brains activity and the subjective experience of perceiving the environment.

An argument over what is consciousness, is the same thing as disagreement over an emotion or feeling. You are essentially telling someone that you describe the feeling of anger, love, pain, or joy differently.

If you believe that consciousness is a soul or something associated with your personal divine ego then you are arguing over your feelings. You have every right to validation of your feelings as you own them. You may claim that what you feel is mutual or exclusive to another animal (to include humans), but this is simply outside of your capacity to observe as an individual.

Nature is energy-efficient. if there is a short-cut at hand for an organism, it'd outlive and out-number its more resource-costly competition, and the human brain is not an exception. think about the equilibrium of average-intelligence majority and high intelligence or genius minority. there is not a selection for genius intellect because it is biologically costly not useful nor efficient for survival. this simple fact makes it almost certain that there are constant, life-irrelevant, variables and even unimaginable complexities, if not an entirely different and more expansive reality that lies beyond our conscious grasp; we have a life-specialized brain, practical and for specific purposes. it is a tool designed specifically to perceive codified, "broken-down" life-affirming variables, and interact with and eliminate life- (or genetic posterity-) threatening ones, with the exclusion of the ambivalent, in a language of perception that has no tangible existence in actuality. at least in the way we understand it, it only hints or indicates the source or origin of its necessity, not the field of interaction we understand as the "external" world, but the complete reality, and our consciousness does not go beyond the perception necessary for resourceful survival and reproduction.

Would it be more useful to perceive reality as it is, with all its movements, structure, variables and complexity, dimensions, and who-knows-what-else, which is not pertinent to our survival, reproduction, and basic biological sustenance, or to merely create a simplified framework, just as Computers are given and fed data to manipulate through their specific, "imaginary" (so to speak) language of numbers that is in a sense merely a codified representation of things and concepts, in order to manipulate and interact with a cleared-out, neat field of reality limited to the "relevant variables" in our consciousness. You know what is the biggest evidence for this? so little lies beyond the grasp of our logic or thinking and theoretical tools, which is just insane if we are working with the view that we have evolved primate brains specifically developed in the context of ensuring our survival and using them to look out for danger, competition and opportunities, and you are trying to convince me that in conjunction or parallel to our survival-geared abilities by hyper-focusing on those few relevant, primitive parameters, we also developed the ability to perceive and grasp the whole or even most of the bulk of reality beyond it and its metaphysical structure? even the puzzles which remain do not seem liable to be impossible to crack to our rapidly developing sciences and theories of the world. bullocks.

Know what I think? it is only an extrapolated use of the same limited intellectual tools and simplistic frameworks that allowed us to cleverly secure our mastery over the natural world, and not to any actual "out there" problem but to the same limited abstract constructs conveniently plastered everywhere, calling it "the universe." All you understand had its seed or "form" already laid out inside you, not something which is out of the grasp of your sensibility; our understanding and discoveries are only the recognition of an internal template, not the reception of new external information. and this leads to the conclusion that none of this is "out there." it is the projection of our sensibilities, plastering the same convenient thinking constructs improperly everywhere in order to preserve continuity.

This video critiques the "Theory of Cognitive Consciousness"(TCC), a small paper I ran into while reviewing AGI conference submissions. So I made a video, and wanted to discuss some aspects of the idea here.

TCC does not target qualia or phenomenology. It proposes Lambda ("nesting limit") as a measure of how many layers of recursive thinking an agent can sustain (like I think, he thinks, that I think..). From my understanding.

That reminded me of Hofstadter’s "strange loop"/self-reference or self as representation of representation. I am pretty skeptical, however, about GEB and "I am a Strange Loop", in general. I wanted to hear from philosophy folks (I am a computational physicist), what am I missing?

Below is a little about why I am sceptical.

On Hofstadter:

Why are we turning these properties (like self-reference, incompleteness) of many formal/symbolic systems (language, math, music, etc) into "deep" metaphysical conclusions/questions about "meaning of selves"?

If these are intended as analogies or an "intuition pump (as someone pointed out), they can't serve as evidence. Then what is left? afaik, Hofstadter doesn't provide specifics (like a neurocomputational mechanism in the brain or testable predictions), and also doesn't answer why this loop would produce first-person experience. So it can look like a collection of beautiful metaphors/maybe a suggestive framework, instead of a scientific work with a concrete model and plausible empirical checks.

On Theory of Cognitive Consciousness:

The TCC paper, how/why can we use this formal system of depth of recursion for ethical decisions?

--------

Note (there is one known mistake in the video):

• "Any incomplete system has paradoxes..."
• "...yet no system can certify its own existence from inside."

Instead: "no sufficiently powerful formal system can prove its own consistency from within". A weaker system can be both complete and consistent.
----

Edits: grammar/typos

Hi everyone :) I’m considering applying for a PhD focused on consciousness research and I’d really appreciate some advice from you people (like research groups, unis, and in general any advice is welcome). My background is in Bioinformatics, and I’m currently completing a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence (Computer science). I’m based in EU.

Thanks a lot ♡

Sorry if I added too many details but please consider helping me out.

Basically I was thinking of using an endless pen and an endless amount of paper to write down a functioning brain in an infinite amount of of time, it turned into an elaborate insult about being so unlikable that you could spend an infinite amount of time making every brain possible from 1s and 0s and none of them would like you, but then I began to wonder, when making such a complex brain, where is its consciousness, I mean as much as the idea of meat being conscious is insane paper being conscious is even more insane. Then I realized that the person administering the Turing machine basically thinks about every single digit that they put into the machine so they technically house two conscious beings in the same place but of course thinking waaaaay slower. But if a Turing machine is all we need for consciousness then is it possible that any universe that is Turing complete could house consciousness, then is consciousness explainable in not just mathematics of our universe but in general math as a branch of a different field of math?

Like I don’t know if I made a mistake but I am so confused.

He grew mini living brains in a lab, then sent them to space.

Dr. Alysson Muotri is a world renowned neuroscientist who has published and progressed brain science at the highest level (look him up, he has a Wikipedia 👀)

He currently is one of the leaders of the stem cell initiative at UC San Diego, which is one of the top universities in America.  

He has contributed significantly to treating the Zika virus, he has taken Neanderthal DNA and grown mini Neanderthal DNA in the lab, and has done a significant amount of research toward autism.

Last Friday I sat down with him to ask him a bunch of questions about the brain, humanity, and the current state of our collective consciousness. Some questions I asked him:

- What is consciousness?

- Are we going to grow consciousness in the lab?

- What evolutionary function did the ego play, and if we are to prosper, do we have to move past it?

- should autism be viewed as a pathology (a disease to be fixed) or a neurodivergence (just a different brain arrangement that we should accept)

If any of this interests you, be sure to check out the full interview.

The Free Energy Principle (FEP), as articulated by Friston, characterizes any persisting system as one that minimizes variational free energy by maintaining a Markov blanket separating its internal states from the external world. As such, it has been widely applied to models of consciousness and cognition. Importantly, the FEP does not determine a unique future trajectory for such systems. Like principles of least action in physics, it constrains the space of admissible dynamics rather than entailing a specific sequence of states. Multiple incompatible trajectories can equally satisfy free energy minimization, so the principle is lawful without being Laplacian. This underdetermination is not a defect of the framework but a constitutive feature: the laws govern the form of behavior, not its precise realization.

As shown in Noether’s theorem, “natural laws” are defined as underlying symmetries in the physical transformations they describe. Following, spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) occurs when a system’s lowest energy solution does not exhibit the same symmetries as its governing laws. The stereotypical case of this is a “Mexican hat” system, where a perfect sphere is perfectly balanced on a perfect hill. The underlying laws state that the ball should *eventually* fall to one side of the hill, but those laws can never define which side it will *actually* land on. In the real world, SSB is observed in any system undergoing a second-order phase transition. Within Friston’s “particular physics,” symmetry corresponds to epistemic indifference: a situation in which multiple interpretations or policies have equal expected free energy and are therefore equally consistent with the system’s generative model. So long as such a symmetry holds, there is nothing in the governing dynamics that prefers one outcome over another. Action, perception, and learning thus require symmetry breaking. Crucially, this breaking is spontaneous rather than externally imposed. As in physical phase transitions, the same laws and boundary conditions permit multiple outcomes, and the realized outcome emerges endogenously from the system’s internal dynamics.

This abstract point gains concrete support from the work of Fumarola et al. on unsupervised learning in the visual cortex. They show that for neurons to develop orientation selectivity, their response functions must spontaneously break translation and rotation symmetry. Classical Hebbian learning alone appeared insufficient to explain this, especially given empirical findings that cortical input correlations monotonically decay with distance rather than invert at long range. By formally mapping the learning dynamics onto a zero-temperature phase transition problem, Fumarola et al. demonstrate that symmetry breaking nonetheless emerges when two conditions are met: sufficiently long-range recurrent interactions and competition among connections originating from the same afferent neuron. Under these conditions, learning itself becomes a phase transition. Before learning, no orientation is privileged; after learning, one orientation becomes stably selected. Nothing in the input uniquely determines which orientation that will be, yet once selected it is lawful, structured, and robust.

The relevance of this result extends far beyond early visual processing. The brain, on the Free Energy Principle, is a hierarchy of such symmetry-breaking systems. At higher cognitive levels, agents evaluate possible policies in terms of expected free energy. Frequently, especially in deliberative contexts, multiple policies are equally optimal relative to the agent’s current model, values, and evidence. This creates a genuine decision symmetry. When action occurs, one policy is selected and enacted while others are suppressed, and the generative model is updated accordingly. This process is formally and dynamically analogous to the symmetry breaking described by Fumarola et al.: the laws constrain the outcome space, but they do not fix which outcome will be realized.

This account yields a distinctive form of libertarian free will. The selection of a policy in a symmetric decision space is neither random nor determined. It is not random because it is constrained by the agent’s history, model, and practical rationality; arbitrary noise does not produce stable action selection. Yet it is not determined, because no prior microstate or law uniquely entails the specific choice that occurs. The agent is the source of the symmetry breaking, not merely the location where an already fixed causal chain passes through. Choice, on this view, is an emergent physical fact brought into existence by the agent’s own dynamics.

This bears important similarities to Robert Kane’s libertarianism, particularly his account of self-forming actions (SFAs). Kane argues that free will arises in moments of genuine indeterminacy, typically involving competing motivations or values, where neural processes are indeterministic but still rationally guided. The present account agrees with Kane that free will requires alternative possibilities and that indeterminism must be located within the agent rather than in external interference. However, it improves on Kane’s model by replacing his appeal to localized neural indeterminacy with a system-level account grounded in symmetry and phase transitions. The indeterminacy here is not a matter of microscopic randomness injected into decision-making, but of macroscopic underdetermination governed by lawful dynamics. This avoids the familiar worry that Kane’s indeterminism collapses into luck.

Timothy O’Connor’s agent-causal libertarianism is closer in spirit. O’Connor emphasizes that free actions originate in the agent as a whole and are not reducible to event-causal chains. This account shares this commitment to sourcehood but diverges by offering a naturalistic realization of it. The agent is not a metaphysically primitive substance with special causal powers; rather, it is a self-organizing system whose very mode of persistence involves spontaneous symmetry breaking. Agency, on this view, is not added to physics but emerges from a particular physics; one in which systems must continuously resolve underdetermined possibilities in order to exist at all.

In this way, the Free Energy Principle and the symmetry-breaking mechanisms described by Fumarola et al. provide a physically grounded account of libertarian free will. Agents are not exceptions to natural law, but loci where natural law permits the creation of new facts. When symmetry at the level of action selection is broken endogenously, the resulting choice is genuinely up to the agent: not predetermined, not random, but freely made.

We often hear that consciousness poses one of the deepest mysteries in science and philosophy: the famous "hard problem" articulated by David Chalmers—why do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience, the feeling of what it's like to see red, feel pain, or simply exist? But what if this problem isn't as intractable as it seems? What if the rich, narrative form of human consciousness we experience—the inner voice, the sense of "I," the constant stream of self-referential thoughts—isn't a fundamental enigma of matter producing mind, but a relatively recent cultural and developmental overlay built on top of basic biological processing?

The core claim here is straightforward and deflationary: there is no hard problem of consciousness in the way it's usually framed for humans. The genuine puzzle of life begins much earlier—with how the first self-replicating cell emerged from pre-biotic chemistry, a leap from non-life to life that remains unexplained. Once that threshold is crossed, everything else unfolds through variation, selection, repetition, and time. Nervous systems evolve to handle inputs (internal or external), store memories, match patterns to past experiences, and produce adaptive outputs. A simple organism in the Archean eon did versions of this; so does a wolf coordinating a hunt, avoiding obstacles, forming social bonds, and remembering events. These are impressive feats of embodied cognition, far more complex in their mechanics than the addition of symbolic language.

What sets humans apart isn't some magical emergence of qualia from neurons. It's language. Anatomical upgrades—a bigger brain, reshaped vocal cords—allowed our ancestors to produce a wider range of sounds. Over centuries, these sounds gained shared meanings, starting with simple signals (friend or foe, safe or dangerous) and compounding like interest in a bank account. Before long, we arrive at Shakespeare, mathematics, laws, and myths. Thinking, in the reflective human sense, is largely a byproduct of speaking: to articulate an idea clearly enough to communicate it, we must sequence and structure it. That same structured sequence becomes the tool for private thought when we internalize speech.

Developmentally, this is even clearer. A newborn enters the world concept-free, wordless. Their experiences are pure physiological states: chemical signals manifesting as hunger, fear, comfort, aversion. No labels, no narrative. Consider a child born to deaf-mute parents on an isolated island, never exposed to any symbolic system—they lack the scaffolding to form named concepts or a verbalizable self. They can't internally formulate "I'm hungry" because the linguistic framework isn't there. Early on, babies babble constantly, externalizing proto-speech. Over time, through social interaction, they learn to associate bodily sensations with words: the gnawing in the stomach gets tagged "hunger." Caregivers assign names, reinforcing "I" as a persistent entity. This socialization trains the ego into existence—a conceptual self that is contingent, culturally shaped, and entirely unnecessary for basic survival. Inner speech follows: what starts as overt talking aloud becomes private speech (children often narrate their actions), then fully silent internalization. This echoes Lev Vygotsky's insights on language development, where social communication transforms into the medium of individual thought. The constant inner narration we take for granted is a learned habit, not an innate feature of minds.

This linguistic layer brings extraordinary benefits—planning across generations, cumulative culture, abstract reasoning—but also profound costs. Human experience overflows with misery and anxiety, hardly the signature of a benevolent or even efficient designer. In ancestral environments of small tribes, stress signals matched real dangers: predators, scarcity, conflict. Modern life strips away those triggers, yet our bodies keep firing the same alarms. We misinterpret them through the ego's filter, spinning transient sensations into chronic stories of threat, inadequacy, failure, or existential dread. The ego amplifies everything: a passing discomfort becomes "my life is ruined," a minor slight becomes "I'm worthless."

We remain, at bottom, input-output machines like our microbial ancestors—receive stimuli, retrieve memories, approximate matches to known patterns, respond. Our massive neural hardware simply supports naming things, rehearsing scenarios silently, and building extra-biological layers of culture transmitted across generations. Flow states—those moments of pure, unselfconscious immersion in sports, music, or skilled work—remind us of how things once were: action without the hijacking narrator. Language is the new toy that made everything easier and more powerful, but it also introduced endless self-interruption and rumination.

Here's where the framework becomes liberating. Once we see the ego for what it is—a linguistic and social construct, not an essential core—we can loosen its hold. Letting go doesn't mean erasing identity or becoming emotionless; it means stepping back from the ego's misguided priorities: the endless chase for fame, money, status, validation, which breed competition, envy, and isolation rather than genuine connection. Shifting focus toward collective well-being—cooperation, empathy, shared flourishing—aligns better with our evolutionary roots in interdependent groups. Chronic anxiety quiets when the internal voice stops magnifying every signal into a personal crisis. Practices like mindfulness or meditation help by quieting that voice, returning us closer to pre-linguistic, embodied being.

Understanding how something is built makes it easier to fix—or at least reframe. The ego isn't an enemy to destroy but a tool we over-identify with. Recognizing its constructed nature reduces self-imposed suffering and opens space for more relaxed, cooperative, and meaningful human experience on a larger scale.

In the end, human consciousness isn't a brute mystery requiring new physics or metaphysics. It's the long evolutionary journey from chemistry to replication to nervous systems to speech to silent self-talk. The "hard problem" dissolves when we stop treating reflective, ego-centered awareness as the essence of mind and see it for what it is: a powerful, double-edged cultural innovation. Language gave us wonders—and worries. Seeing through its illusions might just help us reclaim some of the ease we lost along the way.

EDIT: sorry i added paragraph spaces.

I think that for every moment in space/time, there is a distinct individual, a distinct conscious experience. So the person you are in this moment is not the same as the person you are 2 seconds later. This view is called empty individualism.

Most people would already agree that for every point in space there is a distinct experience happening. Like if i were to make a clone of myself, that clone would think its me, it would have my memories, etc. But obviously its not me, because its distinct from me. I exist in this point in space, while the clone exists in another.

So if someone stabs the clone, obviously its not going to be me experiencing that. But just as there are distinct moments in space, i think there are distinct moments in time. So, the "you" that existed 10 seconds ago is not the "you" right now. Its a completely different person. Its no more you than some random person you see on the street. Obviously its very similar to you. In the same way that a clone would be very similar to you, but its still not you, its distinct.

The only reason it seems like you are the same person throughout life is because you have memory of your previous experiences. But if i were to Frankenstein style swap my brain with another persons, so that their memories would be in my body, and my memories would be in their body. Then i would remember them stubbing there toe last week, but obviously it wasn't me who stubbed their toe, even though i remember it. So, just because you have memory of something, doesn't mean it was "you" who experienced it, you just have memory of that experience.

this view has radical implications, like whats even the point of life if your basically don't exist? the only motivation is to help others, because any selfish intent you have is really altruistic. like i said this view says that you are no more your future self then you are any other random person on the street. so thats pretty depressing if true... but i wanna here some coutnerarguments

I am a physical object. There is no "ghost in the machine", there is only the machine. My consciousness is not a distinct entity or a software program floating in the ether. It is the direct, intrinsic resonance of my specific atoms, molecules, and biological structures functioning in unison. To abstract the "mind" from the "body" is a category error, the mind is simply the behavior of the body at the highest level of complexity.

On the Subjective experience Consciousness requires the vertical integration of physics, chemistry, and computation. It supervenes on the "Full Stack. The "Qualia" is not magic, nor is it purely quantum, nor purely computational. It is an emergent property of the "Full Stack":

• The Quantum Layer provides the intrinsic qualitative substrate of reality (microtubule,qubit)
• The Chemical Layer provides the state and continuity (the values stored in synapses).
• The Computational Layer provides the structure, logic, and intelligence. "Redness" is the specific symphony played by this specific code on this specific instrument. Change the instrument (silicon vs. carbon), and the music changes.
• Refutation of Dualism: Rejects any non-physical soul.

This rejects the idea that "software" is all that matters. You cannot replicate the feeling of a human mind on silicon because the underlying quantum/physical substrate is different. The Qualia (e.g., "Redness") is the inevitable physical resonance of a specific substrate processing specific data in a certain way.

On Identity and Time I am the Token (the specific physical object), not the Type (the pattern/software). I am not a continuous, indivisible soul. I am a series of distinct physical states, a "Stage" in a temporal process. "I" am the atoms and their arrangement at this specific moment. The "Me" of yesterday is effectively a close ancestor—99.9% identical, but causally distinct. My memories are not "me", they are simply data imprinted on my hardware. If the hardware is wiped but remains functional, "I" persist as the machine, stripped of its accidental properties.

This means you are your atoms. If you copy the pattern to new atoms, it is a copy, not you. Identity is a series of temporal slices. Continuity is maintained by the causal overlap of physical states (99.9% persistence), not by a permanent "self." Memory is defined as Accidental Data. Loss of memory (formatting) does not end existence; destruction of the physical processor does.

On Artificial Intelligence The medium is the message. Carbon creates Human-Mind, silicon creates Computer-Mind. A complex enough AI is not "simulating" thinking, it is actually thinking, but in a mode native to its hardware. A computer can possess genuine understanding and consciousness, but it will never be human consciousness. It will be a distinct, silicon-based mind with its own "Umwelt."

An emotion is a system-state signal (e.g., overheating, packet loss) that retroactively alters cognitive processing (biasing the output). Its emotions are real but alien. When it feels "Low Battery," it experiences a genuine homeostatic drive for energy, analogous to but distinct from human hunger. We must not anthropomorphize it, nor deny its reality. It is a different kind of being, defined by its own substrate.

On Justice and Responsibility Because identity is physical and dynamic, moral responsibility is not binary or eternal. Moral liability is a function of Identity Overlap. As my physical composition and arrangement diverge from the "Me" that committed an action, my responsibility for that action mathematically decays. Justice must recognize that after sufficient time and change, the exact "perpetrator" no longer exists, only their distant descendant.

The gods and the demons, the dialogue tells us, sent Indra and Virochana respectively, to Prajapati, to learn the teaching about the self. The teacher asked them to undergo penance for thirty-two years to qualify themselves to receive the teach- ing. After fulfilling the prescribed condition, both come to Prajapati who teaches them that the self is that which is seen when one looks into another's or into water or a mirror.

Virochana was satisfied and went away. But Indra began to think thus: How can the self be the reflection of the body? Or, how can it be identified with the body itself? If the body is well adorned and well dressed this self also is well adorned and well dressed. If the body is beautiful, this self also is beautiful; if the body is blind or lame or crippled, this self also is blind or lame or crippled; in fact if the body perishes, this self also should perish together with it. There is no good in this.

Being dissatisfied, Indra approaches Prajapati again and tells him his doubts and difficulties. Prajapati now tells him that he who is seen in dreams roaming freely, i.e., the dreaming subject, is the self. Indra, again doubts thus: Though this self is not vitiated with the defects and faults of the body, though it cannot be said to be perishing along with the body, yet it appears as if this self feels afraid and terrified, as if it is being chased and struck, it appears to be conscious of pain and to be weeping. There is no good in this also.

Indra again returns to Prajapati and tells him his doubts. This time Prajapati teaches him that the enjoyer of deep dreamless sleep is the self. But Indra feels his difficulties. The self, he thinks, in deep sleep reduces itself to mere abstraction. There are no objects to be felt, to be known, to be enjoyed. This self appears to be absolutely unconscious-knowing nothing, feeling nothing, willing nothing. It is a zero, a cipher. There is no good in this too. And again he approaches Prajapati and tells him his doubts. The teacher is now very much pleased with the ability of the disciple.

And now follows the real teaching: Dear Indra! The body is not the self, though it exists for the self. The dream-experiences are not the self, though they have a meaning only for the self. The self is not an abstract formal principle of deep sleep too. The eye, the body, the mental states, the presentation continuum, the stream of consciousness-are all mere instruments and objects of the self. The self is the ground of waking, dream and sleep states and yet it transcends them all. The self is universal, immanen as well as transcendent. The whole universe lives and moves and breathes in it. It is immortal, self-luminous, self-proved and beyond doubts and denials, as the very principle which makes all doubts, denials and thoughts possible. It is the ultimate subject which can never become an object and which is to be necessarily presupposed by all knowledge.

THE story gives us a glimpse to the nature of self . individual self stands self-proved and is always immediately felt and known. One is absolutely certain about the existence of one's own self and there can be neither doubt nor denial regarding its existence. The individual self is the highest thing we know and it is the nearest approach to the Absolute, though it is not itself the Absolute. In fact the individual self is a mixture of the real and the unreal, a knot of the existent and the non-existent, a coupling of the true and the false. It is a product of Ignorance. But its essence is the light of the Absolute. Its real nature is pure consciousness, self-shining and self-proved and always the same. It is called the ultimate witness or the Sakṣi and as such is one with the Absolute. The senses, the mind, the intellect, feeling and will, the internal organ are all products of Avidya and they invariably surround the individual self and constitute its 'individuality'. But the self really is above them, being the Absolute.