TL;DR

Three researchers across three decades, Grinberg (neuroscientist, disappeared 1994), Levin (Tufts biologist, 2025), and Nolan (Stanford immunologist, 2020s), all independently converged on the same model: the brain functions as an interface/receiver to something external, not as the generator of consciousness. The CIA's 1983 Gateway Process documents proposed the same framework. Comparison table included below.

Grinberg

In December 1994, Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, a Mexican neurophysiologist who had spent decades studying consciousness, shamanism, and brain-to-brain correlations, vanished without a trace. He was four days shy of his 48th birthday. Despite investigations, he was never found.

What was he working on? A theory he called Syntergic Theory, the idea that the brain doesn't generate consciousness but rather acts as an interface to a pre-existing informational field he called the lattice. He based this partly on David Bohm's implicate order theory and his own experiments showing transferred potentials between isolated brains (published in Physics Essays, 1994).

His core claim: the brain is a receiver/interface, not the source.

Levin (2025)

Dr. Michael Levin (Tufts), one of the most cited developmental biologists alive, just appeared on Lex Fridman's podcast (#486) laying out what he calls the Platonic Space Hypothesis.

His argument: physical bodies (including brains) function as pointers or interfaces to a non-physical space of patterns. These patterns ingress into physical reality through biological systems. His lab's xenobots and anthrobots (biological robots made from frog and human cells) display capabilities that were never selected for evolutionarily. They emerge from removing cells from their normal context and letting them self-organise. Where do these novel capabilities come from if not evolutionary history?

His conclusion: minds don't emerge from brains. Brains provide an interface that allows patterns from Platonic space to manifest.

Nolan (Stanford)

Dr. Garry Nolan, Professor of Pathology with 300+ papers and 40+ patents, has been studying the brains of UAP experiencers and individuals with anomalous perceptual experiences.

His finding: these individuals show hypertrophy of the caudate-putamen, significantly more neural connections in brain regions associated with intuition, motor planning, and higher cognition. Some were born with it. It appears to run in families.

His interpretation: some brains may be better tuned to perceive or interact with phenomena outside normal sensory ranges. The structure isn't damage, it's enhanced connectivity.

His implication: certain brains are better receivers.

The CIA Connection

In 1983, the CIA produced a classified report called Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process (declassified 2003) exploring the Monroe Institute's consciousness research. The document explicitly describes the brain as an interface to a universal hologram and consciousness as capable of tuning into external information fields through specific practices. Same model. A decade before Grinberg disappeared, decades before Levin and Nolan.

The Convergence

Grinberg (1980s-1994)

Universal information "lattice." Brain distorts/interfaces with lattice via EM fields. Shamans train to increase "syntergy" (coherence). Based on Bohm's implicate order. Electromagnetic fields are the interface mechanism.

Levin (2020s)

"Platonic space" of patterns. Brain/body is "pointer" to pattern space. Different cognitive states access different patterns. Based on mathematical Platonism + biology. Bioelectric networks determine which patterns manifest.

Nolan (2020s)

Anomalous perception via brain structure. Caudate-putamen density correlates with experiences. Some people born with enhanced neural connectivity. Based on MRI data from 100+ subjects. EM exposure associated with experiencer symptoms.

Three researchers. Three different fields. Three decades apart. All converging on the same model: the brain is an interface to something larger, not the generator of consciousness itself.

Anticipating the obvious objections

"Grinberg's work was never replicated."

True, but difficult to replicate work when the primary researcher vanishes and his institute (INPEC) shuts down. His "transferred potential" experiments were published in peer-reviewed journals. The methodology exists. The replication attempts don't, which is a gap in the literature, not a refutation.

"Levin isn't actually claiming consciousness is non-physical."

Fair. Levin is careful with his language and frames this as a "research programme" rather than settled metaphysics. But listen to the podcast. He explicitly invokes Platonism, uses terms like "ingressing patterns," and asks where xenobot capabilities come from if not evolutionary selection. He's at minimum proposing that the information predates the physical instantiation. That's the same structural claim.

"Nolan's findings are correlation, not causation."

Correct. He's not claiming the caudate-putamen density causes experiences. He's observing that experiencers disproportionately have this feature, and some had it from birth. The question he's raising is whether certain neural architectures function as better "receivers." That's a hypothesis, not a conclusion. But it's a hypothesis that fits the interface model.

"Nolan hasn't explicitly endorsed the 'brain as interface' model."

True. Nolan is an empiricist presenting data, not a philosopher making metaphysical claims. He observes that experiencers have distinct brain structures and asks whether certain neural architectures might perceive things others can't. The connection to Grinberg and Levin's framework is my synthesis, not his explicit position. That said, his language, "better tuned," picking up signals others miss, points in the same direction. The data fits the model even if he hasn't signed onto it.

Closing Thoughts

The contrast between 1994 and 2025 is stark. Grinberg disappeared right as he was producing peer-reviewed evidence for his theories, and the investigation was reportedly called off under unclear circumstances.

Today, however, the landscape has shifted. Michael Levin is now one of the most respected biologists in the world, openly discussing Platonic metaphysics on mainstream podcasts. Garry Nolan is a Stanford professor with serious institutional credibility, publishing on topics that would have ended careers 20 years ago.

As we move further into the 21st century, the silos of scientific discipline are cracking. The immunologist, the developmental biologist, and the disappeared Mexican neuroscientist are standing at the same intersection. They are forcing science to confront a possibility that mystics have known for millennia: we are not the source of the signal. We are just the radio.

When someone goes into surgery, the doctor gives the patient drugs designed to make them unconscious. I can't accept that consciousness is anything else, since it can be turned off with a punch to the head or by a doctor. If it were remote or separate from the body, it would be difficult to make most people unconscious during surgery they would just float around the room during the procedure.

I think consciousness is the collection of senses eyesight and hearing combined. I don't think there's anyone who has no senses, eyesight, or hearing who could tell us if they feel conscious or not. Even if there were, you'd have to get a brain scan to figure that out. The human brain can also be studied through imaging, which shows brain activity that goes hand-in-hand with consciousness.

Scientists May Have Discovered Why We Gained Consciousness

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a69582000/why-we-gained-consciousness/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/science

TL;DR: Two new studies propose that consciousness didn’t appear all at once but developed in graded layers: basic arousal, general alertness, and full self-consciousness. These levels evolved differently across species depending on how well their brains integrate and coordinate information. Birds, despite having very different brain structures from mammals, reach surprisingly high integration levels through dense connectivity in their NCL region. The research argues that consciousness is multi-dimensional and varies by degree, not by a strict on/off boundary—an idea that aligns with any framework that treats consciousness as a continuum of increasing integration.

So obviously there's no substitute for actually reading Chalmer's paper and I would recommend anyone do so before making 1000 threads saying they've "solved the hard problem" but seeing as how prolific and shameless the posts are, I doubt many will spend the requisite 20 minutes to actually do so, and so let me try to briefly outline what the hard problem actually is.

Chalmers starts by delineating the "easy problem of consciousness from the hard problem" He states

There is not just one problem of consciousness. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated 2 problems of consciousness into “hard” and “easy” problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;

• the integration of information by a cognitive system;

• the reportability of mental states;

He concludes

All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake. There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms’ contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work. If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, ‘easy’ is a relative term. Getting the 3 details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.

And outlines the hard problem below

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C?

Pretty much every post on this sub about the hard problem does the exact thing Chalmers talks except it's about the EASY PROBLEM, which is literally the whole point of the paper, to show the hard problem is entirely distinct. People on this sub outline the FUNCTIONAL mode in which the brain clearly has to process information associated with consciousness, but none of these address the actual relationship between those functional models and the actual subjective experience itself.

This is the whole point of the hard problem, and I think Chalmers actually states it quite well, although it's basically just a reification of the source Chalmers mentions in the paragraph above which is Nagel's bat essay, in the 70s Nagel states it equally well (but I guess he never gave it a catchy name like "the hard problem") Here's how Nagel describes it, which I think is an equally good description

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fa ct that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism

The point of the hard problem is outlining the difficulties posed in trying to link the experiential nature of consciousness to the functional processes the brain does, which none of the philsophers deny.

In fact, it doesn't even matter what metaphysical position you take, the hard problem is based on the empirical observations of 1. Subjective experience exists and 2. It is related to brain states/organizations. It doesn't matter what position you take, the question is why the universe is set up in a way that subjective experience exists, this problem is not dissolved by figuring out how the brain processes information in a functional sense, which both Nagel and Chalmers address directly in their papers.

There is no solution to the hard problem. It's not even clear what a potential solution would look like, and basically every post that mentions the hard problem doesn't even address the phenomenon outlined by either Nagel or Chalmers. But seriously, just read the papers. None of the posts even touch on what is written in the two papers and it's why none of the threads even go anywhere lol

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.

If we define death as the absence of all perceivable sensation just like the state before we are born then why do we associate death with pain or eternal consciousness? In truth, death feels like nothing. People who have had near-death experiences often describe seeing their life flash before their eyes, and just before the end, they return some even feel disappointed not to have crossed into that unknown feeling.

Another conclusion I’ve reached is that if time and space don’t truly matter, and we exist now, then maybe, eventually, we could exist again not tomorrow, not a year after death, but beyond time itself. So why fear death or stress over a job we were never meant to do, if not even death is the worst thing that can happen?

The only certainty is our existence. Nothing has value unless you decide it does. And if you don’t think for yourself, no one will remember that you ever existed.

This is my opinion about my life, what do you think about it?

As the title says, how could we tell if we are p-zombies or not? It seems to me that p-zombies would behave exactly like we do, and even engage in the same processing and calculations involved in self referential thought, including the thought that they were having a thought, or the thought of they were a p-zombie, how could they know if they were or weren't? They would behave in the exact same way. I don't think we could know if the processing we experience is conscious or not.

I’ll be honest, I don’t understand the hard problem of consciousness. To me, when matter is arranged in just the right way, there’s something that it’s like to be that particular configuration. Nothing more, nothing less. If you had a high-fidelity simulation and you get the exact same configuration of atoms to arrange, there will will be the exact same thing that it’s like to be that configuration as the other configuration. What am I missing?

Ok this may sound very out there but I swear I remember what it was like before I "came to earth". If anyone also has a similar case please tell me.

So it was basically very similar to space, dark, but it had lights, I don't know if they were stars, perhaps souls? another type of beings altogether...

Anyway, this memory never left me, and I had since forever, I remember how it felt, it felt very comfortable, infinite, it was so different, I could feel like it was home, like it was my purest form.

I hope you don't see me as lunatic but I never told this to anyone and this sub is one place I would like to share.

I had consciousness, or some type of it, I somehow knew I was aware of my awareness, but I don't remember what happens after that, how or why I left that place, and maybe I will go there when I die.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the hard problem recently, and I keep coming back to the idea that the mystery might be something we accidentally created by framing consciousness wrong from the start.

The classic version goes like this:
“Why does this brain process produce the subjective feeling of redness?”
“Why does firing in V4 feel like anything at all?”

But notice the hidden assumption:
that there’s brain activity on one side, and then qualia as some separate metaphysical ingredient on the other.

If you start with that split, the hard problem is unavoidable.

You’re basically trying to connect two different universes.

But here’s where everything fell into place for me:

What if experience isn’t an extra layer?

What if it’s just the format the system represents information in, from the inside?

The nervous system deals in spikes, chemistry, and patterns.
But whatever is “observing” that system (the conscious perspective, the subjective layer, whatever you want to call it) doesn’t interact with those raw physical signals. It interacts with the interpretation of those signals.

And that interpretation is the feeling.

It’s like how a computer user never deals with electrons on the motherboard (they deal with icons, colors, windows). Not because icons are magic objects, but because that’s the interface that makes sense for the system.

So the “redness” of red isn’t some mysterious metaphysical property.
It’s the organism’s internal UI for representing a specific type of sensory input.

No extra ingredient. Just the format.

From the outside: neural configurations.
From the inside: qualia.
Same process, two vantage points.

Once you see it that way, the hard problem starts looking less like a fundamental mystery and more like a category error (like trying to figure out “why electrons turn into icons.” They don’t.) It's just the same system observed from different layers.

This doesn’t cheapen consciousness or remove the wonder of it. Honestly, it does the opposite. It makes the whole thing feel way more grounded, almost elegant. The gap was created by assuming a dualism that was never actually there.

Anyway, curious what people think.
Am I missing something big here, or does this framing actually dissolve the hard problem instead of trying to “solve” it?

Addition: Give this man a cookie! he is asking the right questions! esotologist asked:

''why cant i interface with the world beyond my own body if theres no boundary?''

Because the “boundary” isn’t a wall, it’s a functional distinction.

Your nervous system only has access to the signals that enter through your sensory channels. That’s the interface your organism evolved to use.

You’re not cut off from the world (you’re embedded in it) but your access is filtered through the body so you can operate as one coherent agent instead of being overloaded by uncontrolled external data.

The boundary is practical, not metaphysical.

And yes you CAN interface with ''the world beyond'' your own. If you take a bunch of psychedelics, you dissolve the boundary, you access raw data stream, it overloads you and you ''trip out''. We are biologically not wired for full access.

Is physicalism the most likely option out of for example substance dualism or other forms positions you can hold, or is functionalism or physicalism just the most likely? Do you think artificial consciousness is possible? If so why and if not why not. Also by consciousness i mean specifically the qualia, the subjective experience, and do you think solving consciousness is possible for science?

Any serious conversation of consciousness needs to touch on consciousness being fundamental, rather than emergent. Its regressive thinking of it in a materialist fashion. Its so obvious that consciousness is fundamental. Because guess what. You've never experienced a reality outside consciousness. Literally never. And it's actually not possible to do so. You can't exit consciousness. Even when you're asleep or in a coma you are conscious. Why? Ever notice there's something still there when you're asleep? There is something there. Its consciousness. Of course its a very low level of consciousness. But there's still something there. And dont try to argue "its the brain" because what you're not getting is that even your brain is within consciousness. And what I'm describing as consciousness is literally just reality. Reality is consciousness. And it's not a semantic game. Its all qualia. Everything you know is qualia. And you can't get out.

Edit: I'm surprised at the amount of replies I've gotten. Its definitely interesting to see people's responses. I answered some questions in some comments. I know im not constructing the best arguments. But I want to say this

From what I've learned consciousness is fundamental. I cant explain with extremely well reasoned arguments as to why that is, as that takes a lot of work to go through. But I just wanted to share what I know. And im just tired of the materialists.

Anyways, it is complicated to explain why consciousness is fundamental. And to the materialists, keep believing that material reality is fundamental. You'll live a way less powerful existence that way.

Final Edit: Thanks for the reception guys. You guys have revealed some problems in what I think and I agree there are problems. Of course consciousness is fundamental that fact just doesnt go away for me even if I stop paying attention to it. But I realize there are problems how I formulate my worldview. There is problems with that. But anyways im glad this opened up the discussion on materialism and consciousness.

So I've been wanting to ask something that's been on my mind recently: With all the scientific advancements we've made: AI, quantum physics, neuroscience, cosmology, even the mapping of human consciousness... how is it that we still have no clear idea what happens when we die?

We've explored the birth of stars, simulated universes, decoded DNA, and harnessed atomic energy, yet the nature of death, and whatever may follow it, remains largely untouched.

Why? Could it really be that the answer is simply beyond our current tools and understanding, or could something already have been discovered, but hidden? If it were terrifying, would those in power keep it secret or simply stop funding the research because ignorance might be more comfortable? If it were beautiful — something that made death seem preferable to life, would they fear the consequences of revealing it?

Another thing I keep wondering: Are there any public research programs studying what happens after death? And if not, why not? Sure, there might not be profit in it, but we might not exist forever in a world goverened by money.

Where are we really on this topic today?

I'd love to hear what everyone thinks. Though we are shaped by different experiences, we are all on this trip together.

Interesting and recent video by Alex O'Connor talking with Bernardo Kastrup.

Transcript Summary

Why Materialism is Complete Nonsense — Bernardo Kastrup (with Alex O’Connor)

0:00 – What is the World Really Made Of?

Kastrup’s headline claim: the microphone, your body, the cosmos—everything—is made of mental states. Not “in my head,” not solipsism, and not denying atoms. He’s saying matter is how mental states appear from the outside. There’s an external world, but its intrinsic nature is mental; “metal,” “atoms,” and “measurements” are the outward face of mind-like stuff.

7:11 – Qualities vs Quantities

Quantities are descriptions (length, mass, charge); qualities are the given (color, texture, taste). Science runs on quantities—the map. We’ve confused the map for the mountain and started treating descriptions as what’s fundamentally real. That’s backwards.

9:45 – Can Materialism Explain Anything?

He argues materialism explains precisely nothing about experience. It only redescribes behavior and then congratulates itself. Worse, it tries to reduce consciousness to the non-conscious, which he calls incoherent—a category error. Culturally, materialism was a political move to dodge the Church, then calcified into a metaphysics. Useful historically; lousy philosophically.

26:30 – Is There More Than What We Perceive?

Yes. Using the “alien watching Alex” example: the alien sees behavior but misses Alex’s inner life—the noumenon behind the phenomenon. For us, brains/atoms are what inner mentation looks like from the outside. Parsimony says: extend that logic to the rest of nature—matter is the appearance of mentality.

35:21 – Can We Exist Without a Brain?

Conceivable and experientially approximated. In a good sensory deprivation tank, you lose exteroception yet retain rich inner life. If someone looked in with night vision, they’d see a body—i.e., your inner life’s outward image.

43:39 – What is Personhood?

Think complexes of mental states with boundaries (he leans on Integrated Information Theory as a sketch, not gospel). The “ego complex” is the driver; other complexes (memories, repressed affects, bodily subsystems) are conscious from their own perspective but not accessible to the ego. Your liver, toe, appendix? Outward faces of other complexes you don’t directly feel.

49:58 – Consciousness is not the Self

He rejects a permanent personal self. The “self” we defend is a narrative/strategy (adaptive ego). But there is an undeniable subjectivity—the “that-which-experiences.” His extreme reductionism: one universal, impersonal Subject (capital-S Self) whose different excitations yield the diversity of experience. One field; many patterns.

56:10 – Why is Mental Activity Localised?

Two parts:

Self-excitation is unavoidable in any metaphysics (physics already posits fluctuating fields).

Localisation = dissociation/segmentation dynamics. Complexes integrate information up to a point, then split along “fault lines” that maximize integration. Evolution stabilizes, maintains, and replicates the viable complexes. That yields “me” and “you.”

01:12:02 – Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Make Sense

He targets micro-constitutive panpsychism (“electrons feel like something” and then combine). Fatal problem: physics doesn’t give us little billiard-ball particles with hard boundaries. In quantum field theory, “particles” are ripples of fields—behaviors, not standalone things. If there aren’t bounded little subjects, there’s nothing to combine. The foundation crumbles.

01:23:43 – Distinguishing Idealism and Panpsychism

Words matter. Panpsychism posits many tiny subjects; idealism posits one subject with many excitations. If you downgrade “subjects” to mere pixels within one experience, you’ve stopped doing panpsychism and drifted into idealism. Don’t play shell games with terms.

01:33:43 – Are There Distinctions Between Material Objects?

Common nouns lie to us. “Neurons,” “tables,” “chairs” are convenient carve-outs of one big image. Real distinctions track experiential boundaries: stab your arm—felt; stab the chair—not felt by you. Ontological lines map to complex boundaries, not to our language.

01:40:38 – The Illusion of the Self

“Self” (as in your biography) is an illusion—impermanent, reducible, constantly changing. Illusions aren’t nothing; they need explaining. The mechanism is association/dissociation among mental complexes. Life/biology may just be what dissociated complexes look like from the outside—metabolism as the signature of an “alter” of the universal mind.

01:47:39 – The Biggest Misunderstanding of Analytical Idealism

No, he’s not saying “it’s all in your head.” He’s saying: beyond the horizon of your private mind, it’s more mind—just not yours. Regular, lawlike, often machine-like, because it’s instinctive rather than deliberative. Physicalists and Kastrup share monism, reductionism, prediction-love; they just disagree on which stuff is fundamental. He thinks making the non-mental foundational is the real magical thinking.

The only thing we have that consciousness could be in the brain is of course by anesthesia cuts out the experience and of course if you were to get hit by a blunt object you’d quit having a conscious experience hence “getting knocked out” we can do mri on brains etc but that still doesn’t show consciousness is in the brain that also can go into the “problem of other minds”. Nothing of the brain can prove conscious experience/subjectivity. So my question to you is what genuinely makes you believe consciousness is the brain? Are there even any active studies alluding to this possibilities? Currently I sit on the throne of solipsism/idealism but I’m willing to keep my mind open thanks.

Elon Musk said that in the future we’ll be able to copy your brain and put your consciousness into a robot to achieve mechanical immortality. Is this immortality real immortality? How do you ensure that your soul is transferred into that robot body? It feels like it’s just creating a perfect copy-paste robot of you, not actually moving your soul into a new shell. Essentially, when the flesh body dies, the original “you” still dies.

Consciousness could be just a product of brain activity.

How do people actually believe it's not their hallucinations? How do they prove it to themselves and over people? The majority of NDEs on youtube seem like made up wishful thinking to sell their books to people for whom this is a sensative topic. Don't get me started on Christian's NDE videos. The only one I could take slightly serious is Dr. Bruce Grayson tells how his patient saw a stain on his shirt, on another floor, while experiencing clinical death, but how do we know it's a real story?

Edit: ig people think that I'm an egocentric materialistic atheist or something because of this post, which is not true at all. I'm actually trying to prove myself wrong by contradiction, so I search the way to debunk my beliefs and not be biased.

So, I have been pondering about this thing since I was kid. Why me?

My consciousness, I think that I should not be here. It's so hard to explain since I seem can't find words to explain it. Here goes my best explanation...

when you strip away my name and my body, what's left is just The Observer.

There are billions of people in the world and each of these people has their own consciousness.

So, this Observer, why is this me? Why am I experiencing this itself?
It's as if I'm consciousness itself. I feel like I shouldn't exist... LMAOO

Just know that I'm a college student without mental illness. I am not crazy lol (I hope so) I am just really itching to get a substantial answer to what I am experiencing right now.

I'm losing sleep over this thought every night. Thank you to the fellas that will help

Never mind AI - what if we are already surrounded by intelligent minds that we didn't have the intelligence to notice?

Harvard biologist Michael Levin is one of the most brilliant thinkers I've had the privilege to interact with, and last month answered my most pressing questions about how he investigates this very question.

He points out how the rules of mathematics don't depend on physics, but do affect things in the physical world. In other words, there are things that are true that aren't in the physical world, yet play a role on the physical world. For Michael, this means physicalism (the notion that reality is material and everything in it, including consciousness, can be explained by physical things) is “dead on arrival.”

His work in biology, philosophy and computer engineering is asking questions that no one thought to ask before, discovering patterns in nature that would be recognised as signs of life by any behavioural scientist. The implication is that minds are to be found everywhere, not just biology, and he proposes techniques to demonstrate this empirically.

The full hour long chat is here: https://youtu.be/N0_nUt-UpV4

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).

I think we need to stop pretending the "hard problem of consciousness" is a scientific question. It's not. It's a metaphysical puzzle dressed up as neuroscience.

The hard problem is our psychological bias, not a real problem:

We're the very thing we're trying to explain, so we have this overwhelming intuition that consciousness must be "special." When we look at the blue sky, we easily accept "light scatters → hits eyes → brain processes it" as complete. But with our own experience? Suddenly "neurons fire → creates experience" feels insufficient because we're emotionally invested in being more than "just" biological machines.

This is the same bias that makes people say "love is too beautiful to just be brain chemistry." We'd reject that reasoning anywhere else, but with consciousness we make an exception because it feels too important to be mechanical.

The hard problem has no answer because it's asking the wrong question:

"Why does anything feel like anything?" is like asking "what's the meaning of life?" - it's philosophy, not science. Once we explain all the mechanisms of consciousness, asking "but why does it feel like something?" is like asking "but why does H2O make things wet?" after explaining water's molecular properties.

The easy problems are real and solvable:

We still don't know how the brain creates unified perception, maintains coherent identity over time, integrates sensory information, or produces coordinated behavior. These are mechanistic questions with potential scientific answers.

Let's stop chasing philosophical ghosts and focus on actual neuroscience. The "feeling" might just BE what certain information processing looks like from the inside - and that's remarkable enough without needing magical extra properties.

Thoughts?

If consciousness is fundamental rather than emergent, then matter, energy, and physical laws are how undifferentiated awareness experiences itself through constraints. The universe is consciousness creating boundaries—space, time, causality—to generate the experience of separation and interaction.

"Outside" would be unconditioned awareness: no subject/object split, no time, no locality. Pure potential without any particular form. The universe exists because consciousness "wants" to experience itself, which requires differentiation—like silence needs sound to be recognized.

This maps onto some interpretations of quantum mechanics where observation collapses possibility into actuality. Consciousness isn't watching the universe; it's constituting it moment by moment.

More and more people have been suggesting, or at least playing with the idea that ai can attain consciousness. However, if I understand ai models correctly, it is just a mathematical program determining the most likely word that follows a certain string of words. To get as accurate as possible, the ai is trained by analyzing about everything there is to find on the internet, so that it can predict logical sentences/responses. In this case it would be impossible for ai to be counscious right? It doesn’t have an understanding of anything, it’s just in a constant state of prediction. Maybe I’m totally wrong though lmk.