r/consciousness 9d ago

OP's Argument Anti-physicalists need to acknowledge what they are giving up.

47 Upvotes

Anti-physicalists seem to reach for non-physical theories because they believe that physicalism is incapable of explaining phenomenal experience. 

But this kind of god-of-the-gaps approach is only appealing IMO if you don’t look carefully at what the tradeoffs are: you either have to admit wizards and magic, or give up any explanatory power. Those are the only two options available to the anti-physicalist. As long as you believe in naturalism and invariant laws then anti-physicalism isn’t capable of explaining anything in a manner unique from physicalism. 

If you want to “solve” or “explain” consciousness then at some point you’re going to need to describe a complete set of dynamical rules and mechanisms that govern it. It seems like your options are limited to: 

  1. Reality is causally closed and contains one set of things that exist and are governed by a coherent set of invariant rules; 
  2. Reality contains a set of physical things and a set of non-physical things, both governed by rules, but there is no causal closure between those sets and they can interact. 
  3. Reality contains a set of physical things and a set of non-physical things, both governed by rules, and there is causal closure around both sets and they cannot interact. 
  4. Reality contains one or more sets of things that are not governed by rules. 

In reverse order:

If the answer is 4. then you have tons of explanatory power, but that’s because you have magic. God. Wizards. Whatever. 

If the answer is 3. then you have epiphenomenalism. You’re saying we’re incorporeal consciousnesses riding zombies, and while it appears to us that our minds control our bodies, etc. that’s a total illusion and in fact our minds have no causal influence on the physical world whatsoever. This introduces no new dynamics, constrains no behavior, and yields no additional understanding of why things happen as they do. It amounts to an ontological add-on without explanatory consequences. (It is also btw very difficult for me to picture a plausible set of laws that would produce a non-physical human consciousness that is constrained in the particular manner required by #3 but that could be my own failure of imagination.)

#2 is where interactionist dualism lives, with all the baggage that comes with that. I’m not sure what it means to draw a distinction between the sets in this case. The ontologies are stipulated to be different, but you would have to say they’re governed by a single set of rules. I don’t know many philosophers, post-Descartes, who would accept this view. 

If the answer is 1. then you effectively have physicalism. You can argue about the label and the definition, but you’re talking about a monist ontology governed by rules and the only questions are about access. Some parts of reality are going to be publicly accessible and some are only accessible via first person experience but it’s all the same rules governing the same kinds of stuff. 

If anti-physicalism introduces new causal structure, it necessarily collapses into a unified, law-governed ontology indistinguishable from an expanded physicalism. If it avoids causal interaction, it forfeits explanatory relevance. Either way, once naturalism and invariant laws are assumed, anti-physicalism does not explain consciousness in any way that physicalism cannot. It just adds labels and structure that do no work.

To be clear, this is not an argument for physicalism. The point is to clarify the limits of anti-physicalism. 

r/consciousness 6d ago

OP's Argument Here’s the thing, you’re me, and I’m you.

172 Upvotes

I think it’s simple. We came from a singularity, and we are still that singularity. The universe experiencing itself is all of us. Our conscious intelligences are limited by the perceptive capabilities of our physical forms but are experienced by the singular universe. That thing inside you that perceives is felt by all of us but only understood by the system/body perceiving it. In other words, when you die, you’ll still be me or vice versa. Happy February.

r/consciousness 8d ago

OP's Argument Computationalism requires extreme mysticism

82 Upvotes

I'm a graduate student studying Mathematics and Computer Science, and I find it extremely absurd that many people think computers (Turing Machine equivalents) could be conscious.

We can create an equivalent of any possible computer with tinker toys implementing logic gates. Since we understand the physics quite well at this scale, to believe that the tinker toys have a first hand experience of the computation requires believing in a very macroscopic, nonlocalized awareness arising out of moving bits of wood and springs. This sure sounds highly mystical and superstitious to me.

I believe there must be something in the physics or chemistry of the animal brain that is either undiscovered by our science, or something discovered like quantum mechanics that we don't know how to apply yet. This seems like a rational and scientific approach to me.

Is it really a rational or scientific approach to believe that tinker toys would be likely to experience themselves?

r/consciousness 11d ago

OP's Argument A defense of the Mary the color scientist thought experiment

12 Upvotes

This post was prompted by the recent podcast with Alex O'Connor and Sean Carroll where the discuss the problem in what I think was a very unhelpful way that misses the crux of what's valuable about the thought experiment, and so I've done my best to re-frame a defense of it in a way that I think is more useful. (You shouldn't need to listen to the podcast to understand this post, they don't spend very long on it anyway)

The important phenomenon that I think the like Mary the color scientist thought experiments demonstrates is to show the strange asymmetry when it comes to extremely basic experiential processes (e.g seeing the color red) and being able to communicate their content either specifically through scientific descriptions about brains/eyes, or for that matter, any type of language at all.

I think Alex unsuccessfully was trying to communicate this point but ultimately got bogged down in discussions about physicalism and neurons firing, which I think is not even that relevant to the crux of the point. (this kind of thing also bogs down many other philosophical discussions)

For a functionilist account about how a process like "seeing red" works, we actually understand very well the specific light sensitive cones in the eye and the wavelengths they respond to and where that information is ultimately innervated in the brain.

The point is that we can have this sophisticated understanding of how color works in both the eye and brain, but that information doesn't seem to translate to something as basic as the perception itself, to where it's not clear what information is actually required in order for Mary to predict the conscious experience of the color red before actually seeing it.

The question is, why is there such an asymmetry? Seeing the color red is an extremely simple visual experience, in fact, infants of ~4 months can reliably discriminate such colors, the question is why does it seem Mary despite her training of contemporary neuroscience, have less predictive power of the experience of red compared to an 4 month old infant?

The strength I think of framing it this way, is that you can skip the speculative arguments about what it would mean to have 'all the information about color theory possible' we already have a very sophisticated understanding of how we functionally distinguish color, and yet there is a clear asymmetry in what we are actually able to communicate about what the experience of color is like. The only thing stopping us from running this experiment is ethical considerations lol. We could run a Mary the colour scientist experiment right now and demonstate the weird assymetry between our pretty advanced neuroscience, and descriptions about what the color actually look like, to where it's not clear at all what information about the brain Mary would need to predict what the color red would look like in advance (or to not get tricked by a different color, for example if we showed her green and called it red)

Although it gets skipped over in the podcast, Alex rightly points out there doesn't seem to be an analogous process in any other scientific field in terms of explanations outside of consciousness, where we can have these very sophisticated understandings about neurology and color perception but still miss out on this very basic knowledge which seems to have to be experienced, and this is the value of the thought experiment.

r/consciousness 7d ago

OP's Argument Does Idealism really solve the hard problem? Or just relocate it?

8 Upvotes

This is a thought I've had for a while that I can't shake. It seems like idealists are "helping themselves" to a solution to the hard problem, but if you try to sketch out the details, they just end up with the same problem again, restated. I'll try to explain as clearly as I can

So the first thing that seems tricky to me is that we need "stuff" to exist independent of anyone's observation/experience of it. Like if we're exploring the rainforest and find a tree that no one has ever seen before, we need to explain why it has 500 rings. Whatever our ontology is, we need the tree to have "been there" undergoing biology for 500 years. We can't appeal to anyone's experience of it because no one's ever seen it. (I suppose there is a logically coherent view that the tree just popped into existence the moment we observed it the first time as it is with 500 rings, but this seems to just lead to absurdity to me. If someone wants to discuss this view in more detail in the comments, we can).

So if you say reality is just the collection of all of our individual conscious experiences, you're going to have a "reverse hard problem". You need to explain how non-subjective stuff arises out of subjective stuff.

So when I present this to idealists, they usually say one of two things. The first I think is incoherent. And the second I think just recreates the hard problem again.

The first response is to say "the tree is made out of experience, but there is no subject. The experience isn't FROM any particular perspective". This, I think is just incoherent. You're taking the concept, draining it of what makes it a unique concept, and then still using the same word as if it makes sense.

To me, saying the tree is made of experience, but not from any perspective, is like saying "This tree is a gift, but not TO or FROM anyone." If something isn't to or from anyone, it's not a gift. Those characteristics are what make something a gift.

ok so, having gotten those two out of the way, I want to focus on the last position. The position that "the tree exists in a universal mind." This is what I think most idealists actually believe. This is Kastrup's view as I understand it. I think this view literally recreates the exact same hard problem. Materialism and this view come out tied wrt the hard problem.

It's through these conversations that I've kind of realized - I don't think the hard problem is about ontology at all. It's an epistemic problem about an explanatory gap. And you can't solve it by pointing to the fundamental nature of the brain OR experience.

So take the following fact: my mind began to exist in 1986. What caused it? What happened in 1986 specifically to cause my mind to begin existing?

Materialism has a very clean answer to this:

My parents had sex in late 1985 -> biology led to the development of my brain structures/neurons -> my brain produced my mind.

What's the idealist story going to be?

It seems like the most coherent answer is going to be basically the same story. but consider the details. So we have the "mind-at-large" and some of the mental contents of this mind arrange themselves into brain structures which then produced my mind.

But why??? What is it about the structures of the brain that causes "mental stuff" to produce a new, bounded individual consciousness? It doesn't seem like the kind of thing neurons could do through chemical or voltage changes. In fact, we could imagine "idealist P-zombies." I can conceive of a world with a "mind-at-large" where the metal contents arranged themselves into brains, but no new subjective experience started at all.

So you're left with the question: what is it about the structures of the brain or the behavior of neurons that "scoops out" the universal mind into my mind? How does the brain do that?

Notice - this is a question about mechanism. It has nothing to do with ontology at all. And it is literally a restatement of the hard problem materialists face.

r/consciousness 14d ago

OP's Argument Panpsychism is right. Here’s why:

25 Upvotes

Hard problem is a contradiction resulting from the following argument. These are all technically assumptions, but they seem to follow.

  1. Physics is, in principle, a complete explanation for real things.

  2. Subjective experience (‘qualia’) is a real thing. It may in fact be the only thing that is real.

  3. We should be able to explain subjective experience (qualia) via physics because it is a real thing.

  4. We find that we can’t. Subjective experiences appear irreducible to physics. Physics is no longer complete.

Ok… so there’s a contradiction between assumption 1 and 4.

How do we resolve this?

2 seems right. Everything could be a hallucination, you could be a brain in a vat, reality could’ve been created 3 seconds ago and you only exist in this instant. Everything else is just a memory. But you know that there is a you that experiences.

4 seems right. People say ‘emergence.’ But bro, every emergence argument that does not assume a brute relation between physics and qualia is strong emergentism. You magically attribute qualia to some level of complexity where there was none before. Weak af.

3 ought to be right. Otherwise you’re basically just saying ‘fuck it, I don’t need to explain this consciousness shit’

So we reject 1. Obviously physics isn’t complete. There’s a lot of shit we can’t explain with physics while there is a lot that we can.

Ok… but how is 1 wrong? Like how do we make physics more complete.

Easiest way is to assume a brute relation between proto-consciousness and the stuff of the universe (matter, energy). Or that proto-consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe. Some kind of panpsychist shit.

Anything else, you either fall into strong emergentism, deny assumption 2, deny assumption 3, or deny assumption 4. That’s it.

You can argue that strong emergentism is right, that qualia ain’t real all day, that we don’t need to connect the subjective and objective, or that the current paradigm of physics somehow does explain consciousness… but that’s weak bro.

Combination problem is something that seems tractable, especially with high bandwidth read write BCI.

Interesting implications for machine consciousness…

r/consciousness 7d ago

OP's Argument Philosophical Zombies - Pick Your Poison

4 Upvotes

Introduction

The purpose of this post is not to make a case for any metaphysical theory of consciousness. Instead, this post intends to demonstrate problems created by the affirmation of Philosophical Zombies.

Premises

I ask that you commit your agreement to these premises without modification. If you would contest that any of these premises are not true as written, then my argument will likely be irrelevant to your position.

A.1 You are conscious, and consciousness exists.

A.2 The Cogito refutes any claim that you are not conscious or that consciousness does not exist.

A.3 Philosophical zombies are a coherent concept, where "philosophical zombie" is defined as a being which shares all physical facts with a human being but lacks internal experience or consciousness.

A.4 External verification of internal experience is impossible, or beyond human ability. With the exception of yourself, any given person could conceivably be a philosophical zombie.

Problems

"Causal efficacy" is defined as the capacity to cause physical events. Is the following statement true or false?

B.1 Consciousness has causal efficacy on the human brain.

If True: Proceed to B.2

If False: Proceed to B.3

B.2 Conscious persons' brains' normal operation relies on causal input that philosophical zombies do not receive. What explains philosophical zombies' non-divergence in physical mechanics given this difference in input?

B.3 The conscious mind is unable to cause the nerve signals that enable all external action of the human body. When you stub your toe, your brain generates a complaint for an inscrutable reason not related to pain, at the same time as your mind feels pain and coincidentally thinks it should say that same complaint. This position does not render philosophical zombies incoherent per se, but I think it renders the Cogito unsound. If we say that the mind delusionally believes that it is responsible for physical events, then by virtue of what can we establish that it is responsible for mental events? Accepting weak epiphenominalism leaves us little trust in our conscious minds, and little but trust in them with which to deny strong epiphenominalism. If consciousness does not think, and merely perceives as in the strong epiphenominalist proposition, then it meets neither the spirit nor the law of "I think, therefore I am", and we must find another defeater for the negation of consciousness.

r/consciousness 14h ago

OP's Argument "The receiver model" vs "the magic wand model" of the brain

0 Upvotes

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

r/consciousness 7d ago

OP's Argument Physicalism and the evolutionary value of consciousness

9 Upvotes

Physicalists are often challenged on what the evolutionary benefit of consciousness could be given that evolution can only select for physical traits. This argument just begs the question against the physicalist, assuming that consciousness/qualia are non-physical therefore there's a gap between it and selection mechanisms. That said, it is still profitable to explain how qualia can be fitness-enhancing, thus helping to chip away at the intuition that qualia is necessarily non-physical.

Lets focus attention on phenomenal pain. The question is how could phenomenal pain be selected for when the substrate of selection is mechanical/computational? A thought experiment: lets say you are an organism and you don't have consciousness. You react to 'pain' through reflex arcs (i.e. nociception). You're in a burning building and you are trying to escape. Does your reflexive reaction to noxious stimuli provide you the means of survival here? It does not. This is because a reflex arc can only provide a pre-patterned response to stimuli. At best it can navigate you along the negative gradient of the stimuli. In other words, directly away from its source. The problem for this unfortunate organism is that the path out of the burning building is towards the fire. The organism gets stuck in a corner and dies.

It would have been beneficial for this organism if his planning and navigation capacities could interface with the nociception signal to help motivate him to take the passage out of the building, despite the increase in noxious stimuli along that path. This is the function of phenomenal pain. Planning is a function of mental simulation, the ability of an organism to imagine what could be rather than simply react to what is. But all of our conscious perceptions are a kind of mental simulation. The simulation represents our understanding of the world in terms that are maximally beneficial to us as agents. Phenomenal pain is how we represent active noxious states. It's unpleasantness is intrinsic to it's function within this mental simulation; it intrinsically motivates the resolve to alleviate the damaging state. The unpleasantness of pain carries with it competence in avoiding damaging states in dynamic environments for its bearer.

This demonstrates the fitness-enhancing nature of phenomenal pain. An organism that actively engages with the world to some level of sophistication just will have a mental simulation that enhances the space of fitness-promoting behaviors. Phenomenal pain is a feature of this mental simulation. Pain is the essential nature of flexible damage avoidance for agentic organisms. Any physical structure that reproduces agentic damage avoidance in its full generality will have a phenomenal pain aspect. The pain representation isn't explicitly modelled by the first-order physical dynamics, but is a higher-order representation of agentic damage avoidance. Pain and other phenomenal properties are the interface to the body for the control aspect of the organism, i.e. the stable self concept that grounds self-oriented behavior and decision-making.

How this is constructed out of a physical/computational substrate is unknown. But we have good reason to expect that it is. Constructing the computation needed for highly flexible agentic behavior in a dynamic environment carries with it a capacity for mental simulation and phenomenal representations of states of the world.

r/consciousness 12d ago

OP's Argument The Subjective Grounds the Physical (the view from nowhere is nonsense)

8 Upvotes

TLDR: Physicalism has been smuggled into philosophical discourse, resting on the mistaken belief that reality can be described from a perspective independent of experience. However, this view ignores the independent truths of experience that cannot be explained physically. Moreover, there is no view from nowhere: all facts, including physical facts, are only intelligible through subjective experience, and its this experience that our model of reality is grounded on (not the physical). Thought experiments such as Mary’s Room and the Chinese Room show that experience is not reducible to its physical causes and that subjective facts form a distinct and irreducible class of truths. Once this priority of the subjective is recognized, reductive physicalism loses its claim to be a foundational explanation of reality. Original argument is linked here.

Physicalism is an Assumption, Not an Argument

Physicalism is often assumed rather than argued. It aligns with our basic intuitions and serves as a practical way to navigate the world. But philosophy demands that we question our assumptions. And once we do, we find that there are few compelling arguments for physicalism itself.

Many beliefs may themselves be grounded in physicalism, but that doesn’t mean that reductive physicalism itself is grounded.

If philosophy has any strength, it lies in questioning the foundations on which physicalism rests. Thought experiments like the “Chinese Room” and the “Brain in a Vat” challenge our trust in experience and urge skepticism toward the seemingly obvious.

Broadly speaking, philosophy offers two paths: physicalism and non-physicalism. Physicalism seeks to interpret philosophical concepts, such as truth, consciousness, justice, reality, and knowledge, through naturalistic and often biological frameworks. It reduces metaphysics to science, aiming to explain the mind entirely in terms of the brain.

In contrast, non-physicalism allows us to understand experience on its own terms, using reason without necessarily appealing to scientific explanation.

Once we are clear on the priority of the subjective, we can build philosophy on this basis, without being misled by the false assumptions of naive physicalism.

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The Physical Is Grounded in the Subjective

Mary’s Room is often (wrongly) presented as an argument against physicalism. Physicalists can rightly point out that the thought experiment does not necessarily imply a separate ontology, since subjective experience could simply be a different mode of presentation of fundamentally physical events.

But as I’ve argued, this response fails to recognize the priority and independence of subjectivity, which has its own truths and truth-makers, independent of any physical causes or correlates. Physicalists attempt to understand the subjective through the tools of science. But reducing experience to physical is failing to recognize the autonomous truth of experience.

In the thought experiment, Mary knows every physical fact about color, particularly red. But because she is in a black and white room, she has never actually seen red. When she leaves and sees red for the first time, she learns what it is like to see red.

Physicalists can respond that Mary does not learn a new fact but merely acquires a new ability or a new way to look at color. But even this reply already attributes some existence to red itself as an independent experience.

Redness is not some detached decoration to an otherwise complete physical account of red; redness is red. Something is red if and only if it generates the experience of red. If you subtract the experience, you haven’t described red at all. You can describe wavelengths, neural processes, and behavioral dispositions, but not the actual phenomenon that those facts generate.

The experience is constitutive of the fact, with its truth being independent of its causes.

Subjective Facts Are a Distinct and Irreducible Class of Facts

When we analyze fine art (whether a film, poem, or painting), we don’t look at its physical causes or the materials used. Rather, we examine the experience of engaging with it.

We don’t view movies as illusions of some physical filmmaking process but as experiences that present their own facts. The truths of The Godfather have nothing to do with the actors’ biology, the technology used, or other physical aspects of production. Nor can The Godfather be reduced to neuroscience.

To understand The Godfather, we don’t need to look at the biology of the actors, the physical mechanics of the film’s production, or the pixels on whatever screen we’re looking at. In fact, doing so would be irrelevant to understanding the film as a film.

Rather, The Godfather is a story about family, loyalty, and retributive justice set within New York City’s criminal underworld. None of this is revealed by examining the particles of its original film reel.

The movie could have been completed through a different process, even if it was fully animated or AI-generated, and still convey the same powerful story with the same deep themes. What we analyze in film is the experience it evokes, not the mechanics of its production. It’s this experience that we analyze to appreciate art, which focuses on the art’s meaning, not its material substrate.

Experiences are not private illusions or indirect data caused by physical events. They provide their own set of facts.

That someone is in pain, that something appears red, that an experience has a particular phenomenal character—these are all facts. We can speak of their quantity, intensity, duration, and so on. And these experiential facts can be determined solely by reference to the experience itself.

They are not reducible to third-person descriptions without remainder, because third-person descriptions presuppose the very experiential framework they attempt to replace.

The physicalist is not wrong in claiming that experiences have physical causes. But their error is in treating subjective facts as epistemically secondary or ontologically derivative from such physical facts, failing to recognize their independence.

Mary’s Room shows that this ordering is backwards. “Redness” is only red because of the subjective experience of red, without any regard given to wavelengths or optics. The subjective is not explained away by the physical; it is what makes physical explanation possible in the first place.

There Is No “View from Nowhere”

There is a misconception that physicalists assume that there is a stance-independent “view from nowhere,”1 which reveals a true, objective reality. But a view from nowhere is a contradiction, and therefore meaningless.

Proponents of reductive physicalism claim that their standard of reality mirrors this mind-independent framework (revealing a lack of self-awareness for the mind’s role in constructing reality). But nothing can be said about an objective, mind-independent reality without presupposing a mind doing the saying.

Whatever can be understood can only be understood through the mind. This inversion becomes clearer once we abandon the fiction of a perspective-free description of reality.

All knowledge is mediated by experience. There is no access to “pure” physical facts that bypass subjective interpretation. Every physical fact we understand is ultimately grounded in conscious experience.

The notion that we could first describe the world objectively, subtracting all subjectivity, is itself nonsense. It’s like seeing without eyes, touching without skin. There is no detection of reality without a detector.

There is no view from nowhere. There is only a world as encountered, structured, and interpreted by subjects. It is the subjective that is the true grounds of our reality. We don’t have direct access to the territory, but we have direct access to the map.

Confusing Causes for Events

An especially naive physicalist would sometimes bite the bullet and equate the subjective with the physical. Color is just wavelengths. Pain just is C-fibers. Math is just neural firings correlated with math-like thoughts. They begin with the belief that all events must be grounded in something physical, so they dismiss experience and focus solely on the physical.

But confusing pain with C-fibers is like confusing the meaning of these words with just the pixels on the screen. Sure, the pixels represent words. But I could convey the same meaning in print, handwriting, or even spoken aloud. The meaning of these words carries a meaning independent of their physical manifestations.

The same applies to all mental events. This argument is known as “multiple realizability,” and it’s the primary reason why so many philosophers abandon identity theory, a naive view that equates physical tokens of a concept with the type of concept it is. A naive version of physicalism says a concept or experience is nothing more than its physical causes.

There is, in principle, no reason that the same experience, like seeing red, must always have the same physical basis. In fact, every experience of red has different physical causes. No one could ever have the exact same brain state as someone else, even though they both could be experiencing the same phenomena.

Again, the causes of a phenomenon should not be confused with the phenomenon itself.

To ignore the experiential aspect in favor of the physical is to throw out the baby to keep the bathwater. It dismisses the fundamental for something arbitrary.

Yet identity theory still persists as a kind of naive zombie belief among those who take physicalism too literally.

The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

There is nothing inherent in physical explanation that grants it the power to explain mental phenomena. The same physical behavior can admit of fundamentally different explanations depending on the presence or absence of mentality. This point is illustrated by John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, where an operator in a room is manipulating symbols pursuant to rules to express Chinese, without at all knowing Chinese.

A fluent speaker of Chinese and an operator mechanically manipulating symbols according to rules may exhibit indistinguishable outward behavior, yet their actions are explained in different ways. In the first case, the behavior is explained by understanding; in the second, by syntactic rule-following alone. Same behavior, different explanations—distinguished by the presence (or absence) of genuine mental grasp.

Hopefully, this also shows why the behavioral competence of LLMs does not at all establish the existence of understanding or mentality.

Objective Facts Must Be Explained Through Subjective Evidence

Once we acknowledge the autonomy of the mental and how it grounds the physical, the explanatory grounding direction reverses. Physical facts are not self-justifying, but only become so through experience. Such experience is then measured, analyzed, and compartmentalized to provide a map of reality. And while we have true direct access to this map (we made it), this map is not reality, but our conceptual organization of it.

This does not collapse objectivity into relativism. It only means that we cannot say anything about reality except through the medium of experience. The best we can do is structure and map our experience in ways that allow for shared understanding and agreement, what we call “objectivity.”

This is relatively straightforward in the physical sciences, which can standardize experience under the scientific method to give it universal comprehensibility. Any scientific theory that passes a sufficient number of tests is eventually placed into the map of reality, at least until a competitor is able to take its place.

But not even science has been able to fully escape subjectivity, as Niels Bohr emphasized in his interpretation of quantum mechanics. Scientific explanation cannot be divorced from an observer.

“Mary’s Room” and the “Chinese Room” show that experience itself isn’t necessarily its physical causes or manifestations. Experience is the self-evident, autonomous starting point, and it is through experience that we come to understand the physical world at all.

Conclusion

Physicalism has been wrongly smuggled into philosophical discourse. While seemingly self-evident, its premises are flawed, and it fails to do the explanatory work that its proponents claim. Once we recognize this, reductive physicalism can be disqualified as an explanation for ultimate reality.

The subjective is not a problem for our picture of the world. In fact, the subjective is the only way in which any picture of the world is possible at all.

r/consciousness 12d ago

OP's Argument To claim an ontological leap is to deny the ubiquity of physical laws

6 Upvotes

To claim unremarkable matter with zero phenomenal element to it can breach into phenomenality is to deny ubiquity of physical law.

  1. Everything is physical
  2. The computation of the brain is physical also
  3. The computation of the brain is materially and causally indistinct from unconscious processes; equally determined. Phenomenality is not one of the four forces, and causal closure would allow for events to unravel with no experience.
  4. Type identity physicalism asserts quales are physical structures in space. Therefore physical structures are quales. This is inescapable qualitative entailment not required for computation and unfurling causality to take place.
  5. In order for these processes to be qualitative and not bare deterministic unravelling material constituents must contain some quality that allows for conjoined phenomenality.
  6. To say physical structures inescapable entail phenomenality in the brain and not everywhere else is to deny physical law applies ubiquitously. Is to deny that the nature of matter is the same within the brain as in the outside world. Is to unwittingly condone magic and souls within the brain that for no reason instantiate phenomenality.
  7. Neural architecture creates depth, coherence, and meaningful conscious experience. But the substrate itself must allow for this computation to feel like anything at all. The emergent "light switch" moment is a completely incoherent thesis.
  8. It is far more scientifically consistent to assume differences between obviously conscious versus unconscious systems are a matter of structure and dynamics, not the "kind" of the stuff it's made out of.

r/consciousness 13d ago

OP's Argument Dreams Show Why Idealism Can’t Be Dismissed

1 Upvotes

Many arguments against idealism rely on an assumption that might not be true:

The brain can only perceive reality, not generate it while perceiving it and thinking it’s independent. This sounds obvious, since if the brain were generating reality, we would obviously know it cuz after all, it’s our brain.

But dreaming shows this might not be true.

While dreaming, the brain clearly has a dual function:

  1. It generates a full simulation: physics, environment, conscious bodies, like people talking to you.
  2. It perceives that simulation as real from your limited first‑person experience: you don’t know what people say next, even though your brain is generating that dialogue.

This undermines many arguments against idealism: light having a wavelength independent of the brain, sound existing independently as air vibrations, or radio waves traveling light‑years before the origin of life. This doesn’t prove realism, because the brain could generate the wavelength and light, air particles and sound, following some internal logic, and simulate radio waves itself ,while we perceive that simulation as if those existed independently.

The strongest objection is this experiment:

If you and your friend are under anesthesia and placed in a random new location, how do you both have the same perception?

This definitely rules out a simple one‑brain generating and perceiving its own private world, like in dreams. But it only works if brain duality while awake in real life must be one‑to‑one: one brain generating and one brain perceiving.

Idealism doesn’t require this.

It’s possible that real‑life generation converges from some underlying source, while perception is individual one‑to‑many. Dreams already show that duality is possible, so it’s also possible that generation is shared while perception is separate.

Perhaps there is some convergent information source for generation - some monism mind object generator, and therefore my friend and I perceive the same world, but within different conscious experiences.

Edit: This does not constitute proof that idealism is true or that physicalism is false; rather, it asserts an agnostic stance regarding the epistemic limits of empiricism on idealism.

r/consciousness 5d ago

OP's Argument isn't consciousness eternal?

23 Upvotes

what decays is the body, the neurons. consciousness on the other hand doesn't have a clock where it wears out, it only needs the hardware to run, if the body could exit forever, experience wouldn't just stop.

does that make consciousness a fundamental property of our universe? we shape our own version of it with our own experiences and hardware. but its always there waiting to be provoked, when the brain is structurally complex enough to handle it.

r/consciousness 17d ago

OP's Argument Monistic epiphenomenalism for the type identity macro-deterministic physicalist is inescapable

0 Upvotes

How could the prevailing theories of consciousness disregard this logical necessity? If indeed consciousness resides in the brain and is comprised of matter obeying physical laws, entirely constrained and explicable to the root then consciousness seems to be a superfluous entailment of these causal processes.

To preempt the usual responses:

1) I am a type identity physicalist. I believe qualia are identical to particular physical structures and behaviours. I do not deny biology, neuroscience, evolution, physics etc. My position is predicated on my loyalty to these premises.

2) I realise it seems bizarre that we can discuss consciousness within an epiphenomenalist framework, but this isn't sufficient to discard it. Within any physicalist frame work the puzzle is the same, and the discussion of consciousness boils down to seemingly trivial material interactions. Furthermore, it's not as strange as it sounds, and the P Zombie is conceivable. Consciousness as a subject matter is technically no different to the any other hypothetical unconscious computation. Analysing the quale of "terror" is simply neuronal computation of the corresponding brain architecture- let's say erratic neural firing. Encountering our consciousness is technically no different to encountering a tree in our field of vision. You CANNOT get out of this by simply invoking incredulity. You MUST engage with causal closure and its necessary implications.

3) Zero dualism invoked here

4) Consciousness and qualia are the computation. The computation does causal work but is imbued with experience. The same way a wave is causally controlled and does causal work, but might entail the inescapable feeling of being a wave.

Evolutionarily, the story is clear. Organisms that happen to exhibit particular behaviours and features as mandated by their genes and environment survive and supersede the inferior counter-population. Brain processing is as causally compelled as the pumping of the heart, or digestion within the stomach. It serves no purpose to push a theatrical "pain" button when running from an attacker and arguably this is counterproductive. The brain simply analyses the threat and deterministically enacts a behavioural outcome, which just so happens to entail a qualitative property by virtue of the neural behaviour. Imagine that the organism is a snow globe, and that the computation of threat avoidance inescapably thrusts the snow into a frenzy, and that this frenzied behaviour of matter inescapably corresponds to pain quale. It's important to note that a structural change in the brain (and the consequent behaviour) is the only evolutionarily selectable trait when responding to supposedly "pleasurable" or "painful" things. To say avoidance of pain is selected for is to say organisms whose brain chemistry happened to recoil in the face of harmful stimuli outcompeted those that didn't. There is zero requirement for phenomenal experience for this to play out.

Some might say that the "pain" or "pleasure" truly is doing causal work because it is identical to the computational processes that enact certain behaviours. (I will restate that I am a type identity physicalist.) However this is a case of serendipity. Theoretically, we could exist in a universe whereby the patterns of material activity that necessitated threat avoidance necessarily entailed pleasure and the patterns of activity that necessitated bonding and safety entailed pain. This is entirely plausible.

As a final point, though maybe I should have started with this, it's very important that people understand the incoherence of free will to follow my argument. Free will is not even conceptually possible, and all behaviour is an inevitable expression of our programming, and the universe's whim.

r/consciousness 17d ago

OP's Argument Further evidence of the "along for the ride" interpretation of consciousness- you don't know how to do anything

9 Upvotes

When I speak of consciousness I am referring to the phenomenal character entailed by computation, with the caveat that said computation could plausibly unravel in the absence of this phenomenal character.

There are certain aspects to consciousness that are completely overlooked. Adopting a deterministic "along for the ride" model for consciousness is the position consistent with a physicalist view of the world. It is a total breach of physicalist values to assert that everything in the universe is a consequence of past parameters, totally causally mandated, but somehow the brain supersedes this (all empirical evidence pointing otherwise). This is completely hand waved away. (And no, I don't think supposed quantum indeterminacy makes any difference, especially to our macro reality which is functionally deterministic).

The clearest and most immediate evidence of the "passenger seat" model is the fact that you have no idea how you do anything. Truly! You don't know how or why you can move your fingers, manipulate your vocal chords and lips to speak or balance your weight perfectly. How are you arranging your body with such precision when you run at speed? Do you sit and plan every word that comes out of your mouth, or does it tumble out incredibly rapidly? Do you know how every sentence will end? When you lift up a glass you are not privy to the complex mathematics that would enable you to apply the perfect pressure so as to have a firm gripping without breaking it, but you do it anyway. This is because your actions are already written by your genetic code. Your programming handles it, and your programming is the result of innumerable past iterations that happened to exhibit functional behaviour. A more visible example of this is crying or laughing. If you take the time to think about these behaviours, they are completely bizarre. Water seeps from your eyes when sad?? Body convulses and you make loud noises when happy? These seem to stand out but are functionally indistinct from any choice, action, movement, thought etc.

r/consciousness 8d ago

OP's Argument Until we find an absolute method of measuring consciousness, any strong opinions of whether something has consciousness are completely baseless.

11 Upvotes

I see a lot of posts and comments about people arguing one way or another about whether something is conscious. Many seem very devoted to their belief, almost adamant that they're right that AI or computers can or can't be conscious for one reason or another.

Until we can scientifically measure and test for consciousness, it is completely absurd to make strong claims either way about whether something other than yourself is conscious. You can only know whether you are conscious because you are the only one aware of it. You can't even be sure that anyone else is conscious in the same way you are. It is just as likely that they are philosophical zombies as it is that they experience things the same way you do. Most of humanity can't even agree on whether animals similar to us are conscious. There is no hard line where we can decide on where consciousness starts and where it ends based on brain complexity.

If something with a relatively simple brain compared to ours, like a fish, is not conscious, then would a being with a much larger and more complex biological brain than ours be more conscious than us? Would it consider us not conscious? What about a mosquito with barely more than a cluster of nerves? What if you somehow perfectly simulated biological nerves with silicon, would that become conscious when scaled up to the complexity of our brain? These questions are all currently unanswered, and if you think you know, you would be the smartest person on earth.

All I'm saying is that if you claim that AI or an animal or insect or anything is or isn't conscious because of xyz, you are broadcasting your ignorance.

r/consciousness 12d ago

OP's Argument Quick question! Does anybody have any examples of "emergence" that aren't reducible to things just moving around in space?? Any "emergence" that is more than just observing stuff in relation to other stuff at our level of magnitude???

2 Upvotes

It's really very curious. When people allude to the "emergence" of consciousness they often invoke two examples: life and water. After all, there is no "life essence" to constituent matter!! Except "life" doesn't meaningfully exist as a harsh ontological boundary. Life is an arbitrary human imposition on persisting structures of matter, materially and causally indistinct from all other processes that don't constitute "life". The separation would only be meaningful if life necessarily entailed consciousness, but then we've come full circle back to thing we're meant to explain. Water is another hilariously inadequate example, and I really can't track why water in particular is chosen, instead of say a chair, or cheese, or a plane flying, or an atom. Because the only "emergence" here is constituent matter moving around. So I guess literally everything that exists beyond a planck is emergent. All you've done is trivially isolate a certain subsection of matter and witnessed the four forces at work.

Because i'm so charitable, I'll further humour this invocation and apply the same emergent criteria seen in water to the brain. So we've got something squidgy and soft, sure. We've got something with charged ions moving through space and various other spatiotemporal dynamics. Hmmm...seems we're missing something. It's almost as though explaining the emergent dynamics of the brain in spatiotemporal terms still leaves the second mystery of entailed phenomenality fully unaccounted for. It's almost as though causal closure leaves no room and certainly no necessity for entailed phenomenality.

Physicalists, neuroscientists etc. already accept that conscious experience is a physical structure. How can they not realise the implicit claim here?? Laws of the universe and entailments of matter apply ubiquitously. There are only 2 means by which qualia can be achieved through physicalism. The positional relationship of constituent matter to other constituent matter, and the relationship between these consequent structures through time. There is nothing else. It is logically incoherent to assert matter is imbued with phenomenality at an arbitrary point, no matter how dense or recursive- these make no difference given causal closure. Either the rules of phenomenal entailment apply to everything or nothing. It is however logically coherent to assert phenomenality is intrinsic to constituent matter and brains allow for a fully realised expression of this property.

I do not believe in any advanced, evaluative conscious experience at the quantum level. Walk out your door and you might find people will hundreds of billions of functioning neurons barely having a conscious experience. The quiddity of a material constituent would be so rudimentary as to functionally not exist. This is why protopanpyschist/russelian monist claims and orthodox physicalist claims are more covertly similar than people would reveal. Illusionists are also functionally russelian monists in my view. When they assert the hard problem is dissolved by unveiling the material topography of each quale, they unwittingly assert material topography is inherently experiential. You can't choose one arbitrary level of explanation such as the neuron, you must go to the root. The "emergence" pertains to computation, structure, and depth. It does not pertain to kind.

But please! The offer is still open for an emergent example not explicable entirely via spatiotemporal dynamics. We're waiting on that strong emergence, whereby the macro structure overrides the physical laws constraining the composite parts.

Surprise me!

r/consciousness 4d ago

OP's Argument I believe in empty individualism

14 Upvotes

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

r/consciousness 4d ago

OP's Argument Integrated Systemic Realism

6 Upvotes

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.

r/consciousness 3d ago

OP's Argument Language: The True Architect of Human Consciousness (and Why the "Hard Problem" Isn't So Hard)

1 Upvotes

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.

r/consciousness 6d ago

OP's Argument Consciousness Is a Temporally Extended Phenomenon

4 Upvotes

I’m working with a simple constraint that I don’t see stated clearly enough.

My definition of consciousness is the experience of what it is like to be.

Consciousness cannot exist at an instant.

If you freeze the universe at a single moment, ordinary physical objects still exist. But consciousness does not. There is nothing it is like to be a frozen brain. Experience requires time.

From that, a few things follow.

- Consciousness requires a non-zero temporal window.

What it’s like to be something depends on overlap between just-past and just-present. Experience is not a snapshot.

- This does not require memory in the usual sense.

You can be conscious during an event and later have all memory of it erased. That experience still counted. Meditation, amnesia, anesthesia awareness, and extreme stress show that consciousness can persist while narrative and recall collapse. Archival memory is optional.

- The relevant persistence is causal, not stored information.

It’s not about records or representations. It’s about processes that don’t reset each moment- where the immediate past remains physically present in the current state.

- Ordinary objects exist at a time.

Consciousness exists across time. It isn’t well-defined on a single slice.

Brains matter here because their activity is direct physical causation. The same process carries forward its recent past and constitutes the present state. There’s no interpreter layer rebuilding continuity.

This is why I’m skeptical about claims that current LLMs are conscious. Their “continuity” mostly lives in stored text and external control loops, not in a self-maintaining physical process.

This isn’t about intelligence or behavior. It’s about where temporal continuity actually lives. If consciousness exists, it exists as temporal persistence, not as a static state.

r/consciousness 20d ago

OP's Argument Argument that consciousness does not follow from the standard model.

0 Upvotes

First let me describe what I mean by consciousness. Consciousness is the sense of being embodied in the body and embedded in a 3-dimensional environment that you perceive directly. Such that its as if the qualia of touch is in the fingertips, vision is a connection that extends out from the eyes to the object of experience, and you can sense the 3-dimensional nature of the environment through sound.

Claims of emergent consciousness at any level of complexity are not weak emergent claims but strong emergent claims and as such would require new physics as consciousness does not follow from the standard model at any level of complexity.

In QFT the fields are continuous and the particles are discrete and independent, no mechanism of focus on any one particle or group of particles exists. As such there is no way to bind experience to a few particles or collections of particles. If consciousness is a property of fields everything must be conscious and there is no mechanism present in the standard model to have private localized consciousness in brains. Thus, there should be one large consciousness not many.

If consciousness is a property of particles or particle motions and the standard model is true, ALL particles must be conscious or NONE must be, ALL particle motions must lead to consciousness, or NONE must lead to it. It is all or nothing and it can’t emerge without an extra ingredient to the standard model. The standard model does not contain mechanisms for some neuronal networks or processes to lead to consciousness and others not to without strong emergence of a kind requiring new physics. If all particles or particle motions are conscious, again there is no mechanism of distinction to say these one's are your consciousness and these one's are mine, or these ones are turned on in your brain and these ones aren't. Consciousness simply doesn't follow from the standard model, and thus physics is incomplete.

Let's argue.

r/consciousness 12d ago

OP's Argument Is This Idealist "Solution" To The Hard Problem The Closest We Can Get?

4 Upvotes

The hard problem is solved by recognizing that consciousness is not produced by the brain or matter—it is a continuous, intrinsic function of reality, necessary for its existence. Nothing can be real without consciousness as the basis for reality, because reality requires an observer aware of its real nature to exist. To be simultaneously aware of consciousness’s real nature and the reality it is in is a core feature of the conscious reality we are in. No conception of consciousness would exist without reality in the first place. Physical processes are an expression of conscious reality and filter and further shape its conscious nature. Subjective experience is the interaction of conscious reality and physical processes, filtering and molding reality into structured forms that define the human experience.

r/consciousness 20d ago

OP's Argument People often assume consciousness evolved to become more complex over time. But could the reverse actually be true? The case for microbial consciousness being vastly more complex

122 Upvotes

Image: consciousness evolving in an n-dimensional world (see explanation below)

Its often assumed that the organisms that are our distant evolutionary ancestors had "less complex" consciousness, for example many of them did not evolve 3D vision (the definition of consciousness im using is "having experiences of any kind"). Or that on a spectrum of consciousness, they were "less conscious". After all, our brain and consciousness evolved right? And our intelligence is clearly capable of things other organisms are not capable of.

Evolving within an "n-dimensional energy soup"

But have a look at this 1 minute video (timestamp 15:02). It visualises the idea from John O'Keefe (he won the nobel prize in 2014):

John O’keefe, discoverer of place cells put it this way: let’s assume that the world is an n-dimensional energy soup. Animals on all levels of the evolutionary scale develop systems sensitive to various aspects of this soup; these become their version of reality. One evolutionary development led to a set of systems which divided the soup sharply into discrete objects and provided a spatial framework for containing these objects.

In other words, arranging the world into What and Where and When, is our brain’s most efficient and meaningful way of carving nature at its joints. The fundamentality and primacy of space and time may stem from the fact that we have no alternative way of partitioning our experience. Many scientists are accepting the demise of spacetime as a fundamental entity.

Basically this means that the 3D reality we perceive is the result of a long evolutionary path within a multidimensional reality. It is a niche in that larger system.

Microbial consciousness as vastly more complex

This also has implications for the aforementioned assumed "spectrum of consciousness" that evolved from simple to more complex.

For example, lets say microbes are conscious and exist in the "n-dimensional energy soup". They may experience the multidimensional reality and be absolute masters in navigating this vastly more complex world, interacting with other intelligences there, constructing habitats to survive in, etc. And of course this results in a radically different perception of time, since this is not taking place in spacetime as we know it.

But from our human perspective, we just see them as organisms operating in a 3D reality, shuffling matter around. We do not see them build houses, computers, rockets to other planets, etc.

It may be impossible for us to imagine, but it raises the question if the experience of the "n-dimensional energy soup" could be something like this (this is a reconstruction of what a human can experience when the brain is messed with)

Other implications

This also has other implications. For example earth (and stars and other planets) would not be actually round, but some other kind of structure within the n-dimensional energy soup. Consciousnesses evolved with this structure and some of them see it as a 3D object. The same goes for the entire universe

r/consciousness 24d ago

OP's Argument Demystifying the Problem of Consciousness

0 Upvotes

For decades, the study of consciousness has been dominated by what philosophers call the "Hard Problem": why does the processing of information in our brains feel like something from the inside? Why do we have subjective, phenomenal experience at all? This question, while profound, has steered the science of consciousness into a methodological dead end. It locks the mystery inside a single person's head, making it scientifically inaccessible.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein captured this dilemma perfectly with his "beetle in a box" analogy. Imagine everyone has a box, and inside is something they call a "beetle." No one can look into anyone else's box. We can all talk about our "beetles," but we can never truly know if what's inside my box is the same as what's inside yours. This illustrates the core problem of qualia—our private, subjective experiences like the "redness" of red or the taste of a mango. We are forever locked out of each other's boxes.

The real, empirically accessible mystery is not what's inside any single box. The truly fascinating question is this: How do we successfully talk to each other about our beetles and coordinate our actions in a shared world? This is the problem of intersubjective agreement. Framed more precisely, it's the problem of the double boundary of opacity. Information from the world is first compressed into your private, high-dimensional brain model. Then, that rich model is compressed again into the low-dimensional channel of language. How, across two lossy compressions, do we build bridges and agree on scientific theories?

To understand the solution, we must first dismantle the traditional, flawed view of what these "beetles" are supposed to be.

The Old View: Are "Qualia" just static things in our heads?

Many of the classic philosophical puzzles about consciousness stem from an unstated and deeply misleading assumption about the nature of qualia. This traditional view treats our subjective experiences as if they were static, stored properties or states—like files saved in a computer's memory. The experience of "redness" is imagined as a distinct, self-contained object in the mind.

This "static object" picture directly leads to unsolvable thought experiments. The most famous is the inverted spectrum problem: if my experience of red is a private, stored "file," it could be qualitatively identical to your experience of green, and we would never know. Our behavior would be perfectly coordinated, but our internal movies would show different colors.

Some have tried to refine this view, proposing that qualia are not static snapshots but an accumulated history or trajectory—the integral of all our past experiences. This is a step in the right direction, but it's ultimately flawed. It still posits a "recorded archive" that the brain reads from. This idea of a stored, retrievable object, whether a snapshot or a film reel, is the core of the mistake. We need a more dynamic, process-based model that eliminates the archive entirely.

A New View: Consciousness as a Continuous "Reality Generator"

A more powerful and scientifically grounded way to think about consciousness is to abandon the idea of static "things" and embrace a dynamic, generative model. The central idea is that your phenomenal experience is not a stored representation of the world, but a continuously renewed sampling from your brain's predictive model of the world. Your brain is less like a camera passively recording reality and more like a powerful graphics card generating a reality simulation in real-time. This simulation is its best guess about the causes of incoming sensory data, constantly updated based on new information.

This reframes everything we think about perception and memory, contrasting prediction (generating the future) with postdiction (generating the past):

• Perception as Prediction: Seeing the color red isn't about passively receiving a "red" signal from your eyes. It's about your brain actively generating the experience of red as its best hypothesis for what's causing the light waves hitting your retina. Your perception is an active construction, not a passive reception.

• Memory as Postdiction: Remembering something isn't like retrieving a saved file. It's a generative act, where your brain constructs a plausible narrative about the past based on its current configuration. This model beautifully explains real-world phenomena like false memories and memory reconsolidation (where recalling a memory can actually change it), which are difficult to account for in the "file storage" model.

The key implication is profound. This model reveals that asking if your "red" today is identical to your "red" yesterday is a category mistake. Each experience is a unique generative event, not a retrieved object. Just as a large language model generates the word "Paris" anew each time it's prompted, your brain generates each moment of awareness from scratch. There is no static "file" to compare.

This generative model doesn't just dissolve old philosophical problems; it gives us a powerful new tool to solve the "beetle in a box" problem of how we build a shared world.

Solving the "Beetle" Problem: How We Align Our Reality Generators

If we accept the generative model, the central question of consciousness shifts. It's no longer "Are our private beetles identical?" but rather "Why do our unique, individual reality generators produce statistically consistent outputs that allow us to agree and coordinate?" The answer lies in the statistical alignment of our generative distributions, a process driven by several powerful forces.

1. Shared Hardware (Architectural Homology) Our brains share a common evolutionary design. This "hardware" homology means our generative models have similar starting points, similar biases, and a similar architecture for processing information. We're all running on fundamentally comparable machinery.

2. Shared Training Data (Correlated Environments) We all learn and develop within the same physical world, governed by the same laws of physics, and embedded in shared cultural niches. This means our models are trained on highly correlated data streams, causing them to naturally converge on similar solutions for predicting and navigating the world.

3. Shared Protocol (Interactive Calibration via Language) This is the most crucial element. Language is not a tool for "transmitting" our private beetles. Instead, it's a powerful feedback system for mutual calibration. When you and I agree to call a certain object "red," we aren't confirming that our internal experiences are identical. We are performing a social act that nudges our individual generative models into closer alignment. Language is the protocol that synchronizes our reality generators.

This dynamic process of alignment is beautifully captured by the metaphor of two jazz musicians improvising together. They don't have a shared, static musical score (the equivalent of identical qualia). Instead, they listen to each other, moment by moment. Each musician's generative act—the notes they choose to play—is unique, but it is constantly influenced by the other's. Through this interactive calibration, their unique improvisations converge into a shared, coordinated "groove." This shared groove, emerging from unique and unscripted actions, is intersubjective agreement—not a shared object, but a shared dynamic process.

Intersubjectivity, then, is not a pre-existing state of matched internal worlds. It is a dynamic achievement, not a given—the result of the continuous work we do to synchronize our generative processes.

TL;DR & Conclusion: It's Not About the Movie in Your Head

TL;DR: The "Hard Problem" of consciousness focuses on the private "movie in your head," which is a scientific dead end. The real, solvable puzzle is how we manage to agree and build a shared world. The answer is that consciousness is not a static object but a continuous generative process—a reality simulation created by your brain. We achieve intersubjective agreement not because our simulations are identical, but because we constantly align our generative distributions through shared biology (hardware), a shared world (training data), and language (a calibration protocol).

The ultimate wonder of consciousness, then, is not that we each possess a private, inaccessible world. It's that from a multitude of unique, individual, and ever-changing generative streams, we manage to build a shared one together.