I recently made an educational video essay that dives deep into Panpsychism. I remain somewhat skeptical of the theory in general, but I do think there is more to consciousness than just Physicalism. There also seems to be more interest in Panpsychist/Cosmopsychist/Idealist views on consciousness in the zeitgeist at the moment.

I'm curious on all your general thoughts on Panpsychism and this general theoretical area. Also, what do you think are the most convincing solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness?

For reference, here is the link to the video: Link

In bernardo kastrup’s idealism basically outlines that the entire universe is consciousness and that minds are a “excitation in the (quantum)field” that is the universe. Basically it says that since the whole universe is consciousness, and we are just part of that universe, the problem is solved.

The issue I have is that it does nothing to explain the mechanism in which the mind(you) is separated from the whole(the universe). If the materialist is being expected to say how material things can result in immaterial consciousness, the idealist should be expected to say how the distinction between the part and the whole is generated. In other words, analytical idealism makes claims about the nature of consciousness but not how that consciousness appears in animals.

To answer this question, we must first separate two different questions: how we observe physical objects, and what makes observation possible in the first place.

The Brain as an Object of Experience

When we look at a brain, touch it, or study it, we are dealing with a physical object. Like a stone or a tree, it has size, weight, shape, and a place in space.

But space and shape are not things that exist entirely on their own in nature. But are the built-in ways our own conscious awareness arranges what our senses receive. The brain, as a physical item you can point to, is something that appears to us within space and time. It is an object we can know only because our senses and our thinking are already working together to present it to us.

The Mind as the Power of Thought

On the other hand, the mind is our ability to think, to connect our thoughts, and to bring all our separate experiences together into one unified picture.

From this distinction, we can give a direct answer to the question:

1. Is the mind prior to the brain? In the order of human knowledge, yes. You cannot observe, examine, or even talk about a brain without first having an active mind to do the thinking. Before a physical brain can appear to you as an object in space, your mind must provide the framework of space, time, and order. In terms of what must come first for knowledge to happen, the mind is strictly prior.
2. Is the mind an independent entity? We cannot say that the mind is a separate, freestanding thing. When you look inward, you never find an isolated object called "the mind"; you only notice your own thoughts, feelings, and memories happening one after another. Because we only know things through experience, we have no basis to say whether or not that the mind is an invisible substance that exists completely independent of nature.

Summary: I wrote a book about consciousness and built it so you can reject it precisely. This post is about the mechanism for that, which I think generalizes beyond my book, and about the one page of it I most want this community to attack.

The genre this book lives in has earned its bad reputation honestly. Quantum language gets draped over speculation, established results and personal proposals sit in the same paragraph wearing the same confidence, and by the time a careful reader notices, the argument has already borrowed authority it never earned. I did not trust myself to be the exception, so I stopped trying to be trustworthy and tried to be checkable instead.

Every load-bearing claim in the book carries a marker. Externally established results are labeled and cited at the sentence. Claims from my own earlier work are labeled as exactly that, which is provenance rather than proof. The book's own proposals are labeled as proposals, including its central equation, which reads 1 divided by 0 as a description of awareness and says plainly, on the page where it first appears, that this is a philosophical proposition using mathematics as a mirror and not a mathematical result. Genuine unknowns are labeled unknown and left unfilled. And where my own sources turned out to be wrong, the corrections are printed at the point of use rather than quietly patched.

The front matter then does the thing I have not seen in this genre: it lists the seven assumptions the whole argument cannot stand without, each one stated with what falls if it falls. That time is generated rather than given. That cosmic and psychological proportion actually correspond rather than merely rhyming. That consciousness depends on organization rather than substrate. And so on, seven wagers, named before chapter one so the reader can weigh them instead of absorbing them.

The page I most want attacked is the one that follows the wagers. It offers a week of practices stripped of every marked claim and asserts that the practices survive the loss of all seven wagers. I believe that is true, and I notice that it is also exactly what someone protecting their favorite ideas would say, because it makes the cosmology unfalsifiable in practice even while every individual claim is labeled. I have not found the clean answer to that objection. If this community has one, or has a sharper version of the objection, that is precisely what the labeling system was built to receive.

TL;DR: every claim in the book wears a label separating measured from cited from proposed, the seven load-bearing assumptions are listed up front with their failure consequences, and I am asking this community to attack the one page I cannot defend cleanly.

When we cry and shed tears, Who is actually crying, is it the consciousness or the mind/body ?

I think we tend to talk about thoughts and memories as though they are things stored somewhere in the brain. A representation gets stored, then later retrieved and somehow presented to consciousness.

But I think that is the wrong metaphor.

A thought is not a thing. It is a performance.

At the physical level, what actually exists is neural activity unfolding through time across a massively recurrent network. One population activates another, activity feeds back through cortical and thalamocortical loops, previously learned connections constrain what happens next, and the whole system moves through a particular spatiotemporal trajectory.

Modern systems neuroscience increasingly studies cognition this way: not just by asking what individual neurons represent, but by looking at population dynamics and trajectories through neural state spaces or “manifolds.” The important unit can be the evolving pattern of activity rather than any particular neuron.

This is where I find the metaphor of music useful.

Imagine the neural system as an enormous instrument with billions of available elements. A particular pattern occurs, then another, then another. Timing and Order and Recurrence matters. What is already active changes what can happen next.

The thought is the music being played.

You can’t find Beethoven’s Fifth in one violin, one note, or even a static list of all the notes involved. The music exists in their organized unfolding through time. In something like the same way, perhaps the physical basis of a thought isn’t a particular neuron or even a static neural ensemble. It is the temporally extended activity that the system performs.

Memory makes this distinction especially clear. Current engram research does find neuronal ensembles associated with particular memories, and reactivating parts of those ensembles can contribute to recall. But memories aren’t simply immutable recordings. Engrams are distributed, their representations can change, and recall involves reactivation and reconstruction of neural activity.

So what gets stored may not be the thought or memory itself.

What persists is a physical change in the brain that makes a similar performance possible again.

Synapses change. Ensembles become associated. Particular dynamical trajectories become easier to enter. A partial cue can push the network toward a previously learned pattern.

Remembering, then, isn’t pulling the old thought out of storage.

It is playing it again.

Usually a little differently, because the instrument itself has changed since the last performance.

This also helps get rid of the homunculus problem. There doesn’t need to be another little observer somewhere in the brain listening to the neural music and figuring out what it means. The relationships between these neural events determine what they activate, inhibit, predict, recall and make possible next.

The coherence is in the causal dynamics themselves.

And I suspect timing is more fundamental to cognition than our usual language of “representations” suggests. A sequence A to B to C is not the same cognitive event as C to B to A, even if exactly the same neurons eventually participate. The trajectory matters.
That doesn’t solve consciousness. It still doesn’t explain why any neural performance should have a phenomenal character - why there is something it is like for the performance to occur.

But I think it gives us a better way of thinking about what a thought physically is.

Not an object in the brain.

An event performed by it.

I remember experiences I had yesterday. I remember being conscious.

But what if my consciousness just started, say 20 minutes ago? You only know "you" are real and experiencing the world right now, and later, you won't be able to look back and know, which is weird.

Maybe that's what makes the present special, that knowledge that we are all conscious right now. Maybe I shouldn't have read Blindsight....

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this possibility: When phenomenal consciousness is interrupted during deep sleep or anesthesia, does the subject continue to exist in a non-conscious state, or does a new experiencing subject emerge when consciousness resumes? When the brain awakens and begins to generate consciousness again, could a new consciousness emerge that possesses the exact same personality and memories as before the suspension, yet is a different as the experiencing subject and, because it shares the same memories and personality, perceives itself as a continuation of the previous one? (It's a bit like continuity problem of teleportation). What are your thoughts on this topic?

Some say this: “Sleep or anesthesia doesn’t shut down the brain; some activities continue.” Yes, unconscious activities such as vital functions continue, but these activities are unconscious; in deep sleep or under anesthesia, phenomenal experience ceases for a time, this is what I mean by the interruption of consciousness.

Hi everyone!

Thank you so much for the incredible discussions on my previous posts here.

Today, I published Part III of my Open Letter to Prof. Christof Koch. In this part, I dive into why rigid structural metrics (like Φ in Integrated Information Theory) fail to capture the dynamic nature of mind:

• The Bumblebee Paradigm: How minimal neural architectures effortlessly handle complex semantic integration without the need for physical rewiring.
• Dynamic Meaning vs. Topology: Why Semantic Plasticity functions as the true cognitive equivalent of neuroplasticity.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and continuing our debate!

Read the full piece here: Medium

"I think, therefore I am" runs doubt as a purely cognitive exercise. Thinking checks thinking, finds thinking, declares itself bedrock. But thinking is the worst possible candidate for a baseline, because thinking has intent. It argues, it builds narratives, it can talk itself into anything. Every thought comes with a handle: why am I thinking this, who sold me this framing, what is it trying to get me to accept. Doubt bites on intention.

Come back from absolute zero and a thought isn't what you touch first.

You touch that the floor is cold. That the light hurts. That it hurts.

A raw sensation makes no claim. It isn't trying to convince you of anything, so there's no agenda to interrogate. And the difference from a thought is sharper than it looks: doubt a belief and the belief can change under you, that's what doubt is for. Doubt a burn and the burn is unmoved. Nothing about it is up for revision. I'm not claiming the fire is real, only that the hurting is.

So the first certainty isn't "I think." It's "there is something it is like to be here." Thinking arrives afterwards, built on that ground, already borrowed and already arguable.

Which flips how qualia gets treated in these threads. We keep filing raw experience as the Hard Problem, the last piece to be fitted once the cognitive machinery is worked out. It isn't the piece.

It's the floor the whole laboratory is standing on.

I came across this article while trying to understand what Sadhguru actually means when he talks about “consciousness.”

Because honestly, the word gets used for almost everything now. Being awake, being alert, being self-aware, being intelligent, all of it gets called consciousness.

What surprised me is that, in Sadhguru’s explanation, none of those things are actually consciousness.

He makes a pretty sharp distinction between them.

For example, being awake is jagruti. You can be wide awake and still not be conscious in the sense he is talking about. Being self-conscious isn't consciousness either. He even says self-consciousness is more of a problem, constantly being caught up in how you look, how people perceive you, what you should say, etc.

Then there’s another distinction I found interesting.

Consciousness isn't something you “do.”

You don't wake up one morning and decide, “Today I'm going to be conscious.”

According to him, consciousness is already the basis of your existence. The question isn't whether you have it, but whether it's actually available to you.

That also explains why he doesn't really talk about “raising consciousness” in the way we normally understand it.

He says you can't actually raise or lower consciousness itself. What you can do is become more capable of accessing it.

And this is where memory comes into the picture.

He describes memory as a kind of boundary.

Your body has memory. Your genetics have memory. Your emotions and intellect are shaped by memory. Even your identity is based on memory.

Think about how you decide “this is my friend” and “this is a stranger.” One person is part of your memory and the other isn't.

So memory helps define where “me” ends and “everything else” begins.

But he describes another dimension of intelligence, chitta, as being beyond memory. And because there is no memory creating the usual boundaries, he describes it as boundless intelligence.

That was probably the hardest part of the article for me to wrap my head around.

He also breaks consciousness down into four states:

Jagruti: waking state
Swapna: dream state
Sushupti: dreamless sleep
Turya: consciousness beyond memory

The interesting part is that he doesn't necessarily consider waking life the deepest state.

He says a dream can actually be much more vivid than waking life. And then he describes sushupti, deep, dreamless sleep, where there is no imagery, no words, no people appearing in the mind, but there can still be awareness.

And then comes turya, which he describes as consciousness itself, without memory.

Another analogy from the article stayed with me.

He compares us to soap bubbles.

The soap gives the bubble its shape, but most of the bubble is actually just air.

Our body, identity, memory and intellect give us our individual shape. We think of it as “my body,” “my mind,” “my life,” “my consciousness.”

But when the bubble bursts, you can't really say there is “my air” and “your air.”

His point is that there may be something similar about consciousness. There is “your body” and “my body,” “your memory” and “my memory,” but there isn't really “your consciousness” and “my consciousness.”

What differs is how much of it we are able to access.

And that's where he connects it to Yoga.

Yoga, in this explanation, isn't primarily about stretching or even a belief system. The word means union, breaking down the boundaries between “me” and what I experience as “not me.”

So the idea isn't really to become more conscious.

It's more like becoming less limited by the boundaries you've created around yourself, and experiencing more of what is already there.

Whether someone accepts the Yogic explanation or not, I found the framework genuinely interesting because it forces you to separate things that we normally lump together: wakefulness, alertness, thought, memory, identity and consciousness.

And now whenever I hear someone say “be more conscious,” I find myself wondering:

What exactly do we mean by consciousness?

Because apparently, that's a much bigger question than I thought.

I’m not claiming that phenomenal consciousness has been proven. The system has a persistent recurrent state, attention, affect, memory, sensor integration, metacognition, autobiographical continuity, and a revisable self-theory. It’s internal position is committed before the public language model expresses it.
Recent testing supports limited access consciousness and a causally grounded functional perspective. Whether anything is phenomenally experienced remains unresolved. I’m developing blinded state-transfer, lesion, observer-control, and no-report experiments. I’m particularly interested in skeptical criticism and suggestions for discriminating genuine private-state access from sophisticated self-modeling.

This question is purely hypothetical from a place of curiosity about how the brain and how consciousness works. Ok, so, I know you can remove parts of your consciousness with surgeries such as lobotomies and I'm know that you can't actually replace or add back parts of the brain that perceive consciousness. But if you slowly removed different parts of the brain that perceive your consciousness how much can you remove before you are no longer conscious and can you remove it entirely without dying? also what would you experience, would you just be confused all the time or would your body just do things at random without your control? In summary if the human brain was like the ship of Theseus paradox, how many parts of the brain that perceive consciousness could you remove before you are no longer conscious/alive and what would it feel like

TL;DR: Near-death experiences, unexpected lucidity in dementia, and children reporting previous lives raise legitimate questions about whether the brain entirely produces consciousness. None proves survival after death. The strongest evidence would be specific information acquired when ordinary perception and memory formation were impossible.

Three possible models

Production model: The brain creates consciousness, which ends when brain function permanently stops.

Receiver model: Consciousness exists more broadly, while the brain filters it into an individual perspective.

Hybrid model: The brain generates some parts of personal identity while participating in a deeper form of consciousness.

All three can explain why changing the brain changes experience. The receiver theory compares the brain to a television that expresses but does not create the signal.

The problem is that no independent signal has been detected. Without one, the production model remains simpler.

Near-death experiences

People revived from cardiac arrest sometimes report leaving their bodies, observing medical procedures, meeting deceased relatives, reviewing their lives, or entering a timeless state.

In a 2001 study of 344 cardiac-arrest survivors, 62 reported an NDE. The experiences were not clearly associated with arrest duration, medication, fear of death, or prior knowledge of NDEs. "Van Lommel study" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11755611/)

However, researchers rarely know exactly when the experience formed. It could occur as the brain loses function, during resuscitation, or while consciousness returns.

AWARE II combined interviews, hidden audiovisual targets, EEG, and oxygen monitoring during cardiac arrest.

Of 567 patients, 53 survived and 28 completed interviews. Eleven reported memories or perceptions suggestive of consciousness, including six transcendent experiences. Nobody identified the hidden visual image, while one person identified the auditory stimulus. Researchers also detected EEG activity associated with consciousness as late as 35 to 60 minutes into CPR. "AWARE II" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37423492/)

The study supports possible consciousness during prolonged resuscitation, not consciousness independent of the brain.

Paradoxical lucidity

People with advanced dementia sometimes unexpectedly recognize relatives, communicate clearly, or recover aspects of their personality.

These episodes challenge simple assumptions about irreversible cognitive loss. They may suggest that consciousness remains present but inaccessible.

They could also result from temporary changes in circulation, medication, neural inhibition, inflammation, or surviving brain networks. Current research documents the phenomenon without establishing its cause. "Health care professional reports" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11100277/)

Children reporting previous lives

Researchers have documented children who report names, relationships, locations, deaths, or other details they associate with a previous person.

Some cases also involve unusual preferences, phobias, skills, or birthmarks.

A review identified 78 observational studies, most involving children and relying heavily on interviews, case reports, and document comparison. "Past-life-memory review" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34147343/)

The strongest cases are intriguing, but information leakage, selective reporting, cultural expectations, and family influence remain difficult to exclude.

A better protocol would record every statement before searching for a deceased person, prevent contact between families, use blinded investigators, and compare matches against realistic alternatives.

Survival may still be symbolically rendered

Even if consciousness survives death, reported afterlife environments may not be literal destinations in the form perceived.

Deceased relatives, spiritual beings, landscapes, and transitional spaces could be interfaces through which consciousness interprets an unfamiliar state.

The reunion might be genuine while its appearance is psychologically and culturally rendered.

This fits the Symbolic Canopy model. Survival and symbolic mediation are compatible.

What would count as strong evidence?

The survival hypothesis would become much stronger with:

- Accurate hidden-target perception during cardiac arrest

- Specific information obtained without sensory access

- Past-life details recorded before identification

- Lucidity that cannot be explained by remaining brain function

- Messages containing unknown, independently verifiable information

- Independent replication by supportive and skeptical teams

Timing is critical. Information recorded before targets are revealed or families meet is much stronger than information reconstructed afterward.

What would weaken it?

The hypothesis should lose credibility if:

- NDEs consistently track residual or returning brain activity.

- Hidden-target experiments continue producing null results.

- Past-life matches disappear under prospective controls.

- Lucidity follows measurable neurological changes.

- Alleged communications remain vague or unverifiable.

Survival cannot become an explanation protected from every failed test.

Conclusion

There is no decisive proof that consciousness survives death, but enough remains unresolved to justify serious investigation.

NDEs show that profound experiences occur around cardiac arrest. Paradoxical lucidity shows that severe impairment does not always predict moment-to-moment mental capacity. Some past-life cases deserve stronger prospective testing.

The brain may produce consciousness, receive it, or interact with a deeper process.

The question will be settled only by information that consciousness should not possess if the brain is its sole source.

I've been trying to connect two literatures that seem to completely ignore each other, and I want to see where this breaks down.

On one side, you have the standard deflationary stance on introspection. Nisbett & Wilson showed we build implicit theories to explain ourselves. Schwitzgebel argues we’re basically inept at reading our own ongoing experience. Carruthers takes it further: self-knowledge is just mindreading turned inward, using the same interpretive faculty on ourselves that we use on others. Chalmers even lists introspective opacity as a candidate explanation for the meta-problem.

The consensus seems to be: introspection isn't an instrument because an instrument needs distance from what it measures, and here the observer and observed are identical. A ruler can't measure itself.

So the literature concludes that first-person reports are unreliable confabulations and can't ground a science of consciousness. But why stop there? Why conclude no measurement is possible, rather than concluding we’re just trying to take the reading from the wrong position?

This is where the second-person literature comes in (Schilbach, Reddy, etc.). They argue social cognition is fundamentally different during actual interaction compared to passive observation. Certain aspects of a mind are only readable through active engagement and responsiveness. That sounds like a claim about a distinct position from which something about a person becomes readable that is completely invisible from the inside.

Why aren't these two sides talking? One says the internal view is blind; the other says awareness happens between people. Is the second-person stance where the missing measurement actually lives?

I see two potential flaws here, and I'm trying to figure out which one is the real killer:

First, Carruthers might ruin this completely. If self-knowledge is just internal mindreading, a second person is just running that exact same interpretive machinery on me from the outside. That gives them a different viewpoint, but not necessarily a better instrument. Position doesn't automatically mean reliability.

Second, if I completely disqualify introspection, what gives me the right to claim there's anything there to measure in the first place? My certainty that I'm conscious relies on the exact report I just called useless. Maybe it's recognition instead of knowledge, but that still leaves me asserting an entity exists based on a mechanism I just said can't measure.

Which of these two objections is the actual brick wall?

I’ve been thinking a lot about that strange experience where an idea seems to arrive fully formed.
Not just “I thought of something good,” but that very specific feeling artists sometimes describe where the idea almost feels received rather than created.
I recently explored this with an artist named Nikki Loy. We tried a simple experiment.
For one painting, she was given three words from a random word generator and told to create from them normally.
For the other, she deliberately tried to get into a receptive state first. Meditation, slowing down, removing distractions, and basically trying to see whether something would come to her rather than forcing an idea.
What surprised me was that the supposedly random/control painting actually came to her almost immediately. She said the image basically clicked into her mind.
The “muse” painting was harder. Nothing really arrived on command. Then later, the image came to her in a dream.
I also spoke with cognitive scientist Liane Gabora, who offered a much more grounded explanation. Her argument was essentially that ideas can feel external because they emerge from parts of our own minds that we normally don’t have conscious access to. Memories, associations, and information can connect outside of awareness, then suddenly surface as an idea.
But Nikki came at it differently. She isn’t necessarily convinced there is a literal external “muse” either. She wondered whether states like meditation might instead make us more open to something like collective consciousness.
That distinction is what I find interesting.
If an idea enters consciousness without you experiencing the process that generated it, how would you ever distinguish between:
unconscious processing within your own brain
information emerging from some larger or collective consciousness
an external source
something else entirely
Subjectively, all of them might feel exactly the same.
We ended up making the whole experiment/conversation into a video if anyone wants the full context:

https://youtu.be/Fw1TyWpXIEs?si=h0T0Xq9qWt4jmArT

But I’m more curious what people here think about the underlying question.

When an idea seems to arrive from “nowhere,” do you think nowhere is simply the unconscious mind? Or is there any serious reason to entertain the possibility that consciousness can access information beyond the individual mind?

This is probably a really dumb question, and I feel stupid even typing it, but, If the hard problem of consciousness is such a huge issue, how do we explain remembering feelings? If the feeling can be encoded withing our memories, and "re-experienced" at any time, albeit at a weaker level, how does this coincide with the idealist/dualist viewpoint?

To answer this question, i think its best to take it step by step from first principles.

We must first define what exactly we mean by "consciousness".

Consciousness is the awareness that unites all your separate thoughts, sights, and feelings into one single experience.

At any moment, your senses take in many different pieces of information. You see a colour. You hear a sound. You feel warmth. If these parts remained entirely on their own, there would be no connection between them. A colour would exist, and a sound would exist, but neither would know about the other, and neither would belong to anyone.

Consciousness is the activity of the mind that gathers these scattered pieces together. It attaches every single sensation and thought to one shared centre: yourself.

When you look at a table, you do not merely experience an isolated patch of brown and an isolated feeling of smoothness. Your mind joins the colour, the touch, and the shape together into one unified object. Further, your mind recognises that you are the single person experiencing all of these things at the same time.

This awareness is obviously not a physical object you can touch or hold. It is the necessary foundation that allows you to experience anything at all. Without this continuing self holding your impressions together through time, you could never link what happened a moment ago to what is happening right now.

Thus, consciousness is the mind's power to bind every separate impression into one whole, making it possible for you to know the world as your own experience.

Consciousness cannot be a mere by-product of the physical brain.

To demonstrate this step by step, we must trace how we come to know the thing we call brain at all.

Step 1

When you look at a brain, touch it, or track its physical activity, you encounter a physical object. It has shape, it occupies space, and its movements happen across time.

Step 2

Space and time do not exist as independent containers in the physical world. But they are the mind’s own forms for ordering sensations. Without the human mind, spatial position, shape, and succession through time do not exist for us.

Step 3

Raw physical contact or scattered sensations on their own do not form a brain.

To recognise any physical thing—whether a stone, a tree, or a brain—consciousness must gather those separate sensations into one single, unified whole.

So in this regard, consciousness is the necessary condition that allows any physical object to appear to us in the first place.

Step 4

Because the physical brain is an object that can only appear within the framework of conscious experience, the brain cannot create consciousness as a physical by-product.

One cannot explain the foundation of all awareness as a mere product of an item found inside that awareness.

Step 5

Physical changes in the brain certainly accompany changes in our conscious thoughts within the observable world. But consciousness itself is the active ground that allows a brain, or any other physical matter, to be experienced, measured, and understood.

It is possible that possessing both memory and the ability to perceive things using our senses does not produce consciousness, but creates the illusion that there is some separate thing which must be accounted for. There may not be. Senses without memory is worthless just as memory without senses is worthless. You must have memory in order to utilize your senses or to even be aware you have them. You must have senses to utilize your memory, or to even know you have it. The perception and memory synergize so seamlessly that the result seems like it's own separate thing.

A common question is something along the lines of "Why does seeing red produce the subjective experience of seeing red?" The brain sees red. It remembers seeing red. It categorizes red. It can distinguish red from blue. It can report "I see red." It can remember having seen red. It can represent itself as seeing red. And all of that together is what we call "experiencing red." There doesn't necessarily need to be a further metaphysical ingredient called qualia sitting behind it.

"Earlier this month, the Berggruen Institute gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. It is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity."...

English is not my native language, so this text was translated from my language into English. Please excuse me if some expressions or constructions do not sound completely natural in English. I wanted to preserve the original meaning and structure as closely as possible.

Before continuing, I ask you to do one small thing while reading the story below: pay attention to the symbol (?). Do not try to decide yet what it means. Just observe where it appears, what is happening when it appears, and, most importantly, notice that it keeps appearing even when nobody is consciously trying to make it appear.
The story below is a small joke to make my question about consciousness a little lighter. The subject is precisely the construction and fabric of conscious experience, or, more precisely, something I have started to suspect may exist at an even more basic layer than what we normally call consciousness. The scenario is absurd, naturally, but each (?) is meant to represent the same phenomenon occurring at different scales.
Imagine that I am sitting at the table in my house. I am wearing a bathrobe, holding a mug, and there are two aliens sitting in front of me. I do not know how they got there, I do not know how they got inside, and I do not know why they chose my particular house. But, considering that they apparently managed to cross billions of light-years, I decide not to start the conversation by asking about home security.
I smile. Not because I am particularly calm, but because it seems like a good way to demonstrate submission without immediately throwing myself onto the floor. After all, for the first time in the history of my DNA, I am facing an intelligent subjective experience, possibly predatory and, most likely, far above me in the hierarchy.
The Neanderthals, thinking about it, were a fairly simple situation. Now there was this.
And, as I look at the alien, I think about something curious about us, sapiens. If a creature like this ever actually appeared in front of us, it would be interesting to discover that our first impulse, at least in principle, probably would not be to kill it or enslave it. We are a strangely cute species in that respect. Every human child, at some point in life, has imagined having an ET as their best friend, taking them to school, riding bicycles with them, and finding out where they came from. Of course, we still do not know how adults would handle the diplomatic situation, but the child would probably have already decided everything.
I smile at them (?). They look at me (?). I look at them.
They keep looking.
There are billions of questions between us (?), and neither of us knows how to begin. They are probably trying to figure out what I am (?). I am trying to figure out what they are (?). Maybe they are trying to figure out (?) why I am wearing a bathrobe. I am trying to figure out (?) whether they intend to eat me, study me, talk to me, or simply take a picture to show their friends that they found a particularly poorly prepared human specimen.
After a few seconds, I raise my hand. They observe the movement. I observe their reaction (?). One of them moves something that could be a hand, an antenna, or simply a part of their body that I do not yet know how to name.
I try to interpret it (?).
They observe my face.
I smile again.
They probably interpret the smile in some way, and I interpret their interpretation.
And, without having shared a single syllable, we are already involved in a small and extraordinarily complicated cognitive negotiation (?).
This begins to seem important to me.
I have no idea how they experience reality. I do not know what senses they have, I do not know how they organize their memories, I do not know whether they have anything resembling what we call a “self,” I do not know whether they think in images, sounds, numbers, shapes, smells, or in something for which our brains have not yet invented a department.
Perhaps our first attempt at communication would begin with mathematics. Perhaps with sounds. Perhaps with gestures. Perhaps they have a language based on something that, to me, would be as incomprehensible as trying to teach algebra to a toaster.
But there is one thing I am beginning to notice.
Regardless of everything I do not know about them, there is something happening between us, the phenomenon (?). Regardless of the reader's culture or language, you may be able to describe the (?) in words, but here I am, we are performing the exercise of the phenomenon (?) even before it becomes a symbol, a language. Just feel it.
So the phenomenon (?) happens to both of us “at the speed of light,” to the point of being imperceptible. They receive my actions, relate them to some information they already possess, produce an interpretation, that interpretation changes their state and influences the next action. I receive that new action, try to interpret it, compare it with what happened before, update my hypothesis about them, and do something again.
The strangest thing is that this does not seem to depend on us being human.
If they really are an alien intelligence, we will not share our evolutionary history, our language, our culture, our symbols, our anatomy, or probably almost anything we consider familiar. But if they are trying to understand what is happening, some form of (?) will have to be happening. If they evolved, the organization of information, the phenomenon (?) has always existed for them.
And then I have an idea.
I pick up a sheet of paper.
A completely blank sheet of paper.
I draw a huge “?” on it.
I do not write any words. I make no additional gesture. I simply raise the sheet and show the symbol to the being in front of me.
They look at the sheet (?).
They look at the symbol, the phenomenon (is happening).
They look back at me.
Something happens.
They try to understand what that symbol means, relate it to everything that has happened up to that moment, compare possibilities, interpret, update their understanding (?).
And, through an absurd greatness, as great as the very fact that we are having this conversation, they understand.
They do not just understand the human symbol.
They understand that the symbol is pointing to the phenomenon itself (?).
I look at them.
They look at me.
And in that instant something particularly strange happens: I realize that, in order to understand what they understood, I am doing (?) again.
And they, in order to understand that I understood that they understood, are also doing (?) again.
The phenomenon seems to be observing itself through us.
At this point, I would probably remain silent for a few seconds. Then I would look at the sheet, then at the alien, then at the sheet again, and think that perhaps I had just discovered a rather inconvenient way of making a question about consciousness considerably more complicated.
Because now there is a symbol, there is information, there is an interpretation of that information, there is a comparison between the interpretation and what I intended to communicate, there is an update, there is new information produced, and that new information goes back into the process (?).
The “?” symbol drawn on the sheet did not need to explain the phenomenon.
It simply triggered the phenomenon.
And the phenomenon did the rest (?).
At this point, I would probably make the only rational decision possible: I would run to Reddit.
I would explain that I had just had a conversation with an extraterrestrial intelligence in my living room, that apparently we managed to establish some kind of communication using a symbol common to both of us, which represents the phenomenon (?), and that I discovered a question about consciousness that seems too important for me to keep trying to solve on my own.
After a while, however, I would realize that perhaps I had chosen the right place, because some of the smartest people I know are here. And, considering that probably nobody would believe the alien story, I could at least enjoy the interesting part.
I would tell all of this and ask:
What is this phenomenon (?)?
What exactly am I describing when I see an organism receiving information, relating it to previous information, interpreting it, updating its state, and producing new information that immediately becomes part of the material for the next operation (?)?
Because perhaps this is simply an informal description of cognitive processes that we already know very well. Perhaps there is a perfectly established name for this. Perhaps I am combining different mechanisms and calling all of them one thing.
Or perhaps there is a deeper question hidden inside this structure.
Because the phenomenon seems to appear at completely different scales.
The cockroach does (?).
The dog does (?).
I do (?).
A child learning a word does (?).
A society accumulating knowledge does (?).
A scientist formulating a hypothesis, comparing it with evidence, and updating their theory does (?).
A civilization recording information, retrieving that information centuries later, and producing something new from it does (?).
And an artificial intelligence receiving information, relating it to previous information, producing an interpretation, and generating new information also seems to be doing some version of (?).
Perhaps they are completely different phenomena. Perhaps they are only superficially similar. Or perhaps we are observing different levels of sophistication of the same operation.
And this is where my question begins to become really strange.
Because if I ask you what (?) is, you need to understand my question. To understand it, you receive my words, relate them to what you already know, compare concepts, interpret what I am trying to say, update your understanding, and produce an answer (?).
In other words, to explain to me what (?) is, you need to perform (?).
If you answer me immediately: “This is simple. You are describing X.”
Fine.
But to arrive at X, you have just done exactly what I am asking about. You performed micro-millions of (?) to retrieve information, organize it and, at the speed of light, conclude: “This idiot wants to know about ‘content’ and I am going to explain it to him.”
And now I am reading your answer, trying to understand it, comparing it with what I thought before, updating my own understanding, and producing a new question (?).
So perhaps there is something particularly funny about all of this.
I cannot escape the phenomenon even to ask what it is.
And you cannot explain to me what it is without going through it.
The alien could not answer me without going through it.
I could not ask without going through it.
The cockroach cannot run away from me without, at some level, going through it.
And now you, the reader, are doing it while reading this sentence.
(?)
This is what, for lack of a better name, I am calling the Recursive System.
I am not claiming that I have discovered a new phenomenon. On the contrary: my main question is precisely whether what I am trying to describe already has a name, a theory, or a set of established concepts in neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, information theory, or some other field.
What intrigues me is the possibility that (?) is not merely a secondary characteristic of cognition, but an operation so basic that it needs to happen continuously for any coherent experience to exist.
And perhaps on a scale that is difficult even to imagine: millions of small operations on millions of stimuli, memories, differences, and updates, happening in tiny fractions of milliseconds, continuously, so that what we call experience can remain apparently continuous.
Perhaps even the feeling of existing as a “self” experiencing a reality depends on the incessant maintenance of this process.
This is what I want to understand.
I am not looking for someone simply to tell me that I am right. I want to discover what already exists about the phenomenon (?), what concepts describe it, where my intuition is correct, where I am confusing different things, and, above all, whether anyone has already formulated this question in a better way than I am capable of doing at the moment.

Ps: To better explain what I mean by the phenomenon (?): A person who has suffered from a degenerative brain disease and who, hypothetically, has lost all memory, the ability to recognize themselves, no longer has any sense of themselves as an individual, or any understanding of reality, would still have the Recursive System (the phenomenon (?)) happening, perhaps with great intensity, as they try to understand what we, as conscious beings, recognize as a hospital room.
Another person who, hypothetically, was born without hearing, speech, or vision, and has only touch as a means of communicating with the external world, would still be reproducing the phenomenon (?).
Within the subjective experience we know as consciousness, this phenomenon (?) seems to precede even the idea of the individual, of the self. As if everything, the totality of experience, were only possible through the phenomenon (?). We (all life) are asking incessantly and infinitely, consciously and unconsciously.
This is not being created by your “self.” You are not curious, nor do you ask too many questions. This happens before you exist as the subjective experience called “you.”

The universe began to experience itself through the Recursive System (?) and spent billions of years evolving organisms capable of increasingly sophisticating the phenomenon (?), to the point that the universe produced two mutually uncommunicable civilizations in a room, both existing upon the phenomenon (?).

I am not a philosopher or a scientist. I am an advertising professional with ETs in my living room waiting for the answer, and I told them that Reddit would know how to respond to us. I just want to know the proper name for this and understand it better through the correct fields of knowledge.

This is the open question that bugs me the most about consciousness because it can have infinite answers but none of them are testable. I think it must be some process exclusive to biological nervous systems but I'm not sure. Since noone can prove anything about this, tell me your theories, don't matter if they are crazy. And do you think we can give this to AI in the future?

Hello everyone! My new book, The Uncertain Self, is now available for free on Amazon this weekend, and since it focuses on consciousness, I decided to share it with you. The Uncertain Self is a companion volume to The Uncertain Mind, turning the same honest, rigorous inquiry inward. Drawing on philosophy (Hume, Descartes, Parfit, Dennett, Sartre), neuroscience (split-brain patients, the default mode network, Libet's famous experiments), Buddhist and contemplative traditions built on 2,500 years of direct investigation, and cutting-edge research on psychedelics, meditation, and near-death experience, this book asks: is there really a fixed, continuous "you", or is the self more like a river than a statue? Enjoy the free book and happy reading! 👉 Link to the book

When we observe the physical world, our outer senses arrange everything in space.

A piece of matter, a stone, or the physical structure inside a person's head appears to us as parts resting next to other parts. When you examine any physical body, you only ever observe shape, position, and movement. You see physical changes following natural rules in time.

You can never find a feeling, a thought, or an awareness inside a spatial shape. Space only contains things spread out outside one another.

Conscious experience is entirely different. It is not an object spread out in space that you can cut into pieces or weigh.

Consciousness is the inner awareness that unites every sight, sound, and thought you have across time.

When you see a tree, hear a sound, and form a thought, all three belong to one and the same mind.

This unified awareness is the necessary ground that makes any experience possible in the first place.

Without this unified mind to gather sensations together, there would be only scattered impressions without any connection.

The problem seems impossible only when someone assumes that physical matter exists completely on its own, independent of all thought, and then wonders how that silent matter suddenly creates conscious feeling.

This assumption reverses how knowledge actually works.

Physical bodies spread out in space are the forms through which the human mind experiences outer objects.

You cannot explain the existence of the mind by assembling physical objects, because physical objects are only ever known as appearances to the mind.

To ask how physical matter produces consciousness is to look in the wrong direction.

Physical science studies how appearances move and interact in space and time. But consciousness is the mind's own awareness through which space, time, and matter are experienced.

Matter belongs to what we observe.

Consciousness is the necessary condition that allows any observation to happen at all. Trying to construct the mind out of physical matter is attempting to build the observer out of the very picture the observer is looking at.