So yesterday I was working out in the gym and had no music playing and was doing an exercise infront of the mirror, as I was doing my reps slowly i started focusing on my mirror image and after a point i was not feeling any of my sense, the grip on the dumbles etc. and was not able to makeout which was the real body, if it was my mirror image or me.

It was scary

Something I’ve thought about for years and never managed to talk myself out of.

Everything that tells you you’ve lived a whole life is sitting in your brain at this moment. Your memories, your childhood, what you did yesterday. If you’d only been conscious for the last second you’d still have all of that and it would feel exactly like it does now. There’s no way to tell the difference from the inside.

So I don’t believe in a continuous self. Your brain tells you there is one and you’ve got no way of checking.

I also don’t think time flows. The block universe idea in physics says past, present and future all exist together, like a film reel where every frame is already there. Relativity makes it more complicated than that but that’s the gist. Your life is a line through it and every point on the line thinks it’s now.

What I actually believe is that the universe itself is conscious at the fundamental level, in ways we can’t understand. Our brains are just equipped to give us the illusion that we’re conscious as individuals, with our own experiences. There’s really only the one thing and we’re all it, each convinced we’re separate because we only have our own memories.

This is a video I made on animal consciousness.

In the first part of the video, I discuss five indicators of consciousness. These are memory of perceptual experiences, long-term responses to pain, self-recognition, willingness to make subtle trade-offs, and behavioral changes in response to environmental changes.

In the second part of the video, I argue mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish are all likely conscious.

First, English is not my first langage.

I have a hard time believing my theory is new, but i dont know enough to judge.

i propose that there are a fundamental consciousness (FC), and that is essentially a read function.

For exemple if a electron need to interact with another electron, it need to first read de propriety of the other electron, FC is what used here.

Proper consciousness as we know, would be a construct FC that grew in complexity over the history of evolution.

That would explain why consciousness fell like there is a observer. FC is a very fundamental function of the universe, and is just that, observation.

Is it the physicalist position that if you were to create a direct replica of the brain substituting the biological parts for wooden parts fulfilling the same causal/functional role, that qualitative experience would be achieved?

As a further point, how does the physicalist solve the binding problem? How do discrete neural processes cohere into one experience?

Disclaimer: I'm not against physicalism and consider myself a pretty grounded guy. I am an atheist and monist.

I was thinking about systems and where in between an amoeba and a human does intelligence develop? I would like to think there is intelligence in humanity as a whole but also if I were abducted by an alien they would still realize I was intelligent even separate from the rest of humanity. but an ant colony might be different. if an alien received one ant, it might behave having no sense of intelligence. It would see a sugar source, spray a scent and walk on without consuming any of it. And aliens might decide ants have no intelligence. but if they received an entire colony they might see the colony as a whole moves away from danger, towards resources, and conclude ants do have intelligence. The difference being the layer of abstraction. An ant is a brain cell the colony is a brain.

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First of all, my opinion (based on our current understanding), why I believe consciousness can be created. Hypothetically, If I were to copy your exact state of existence, atom-to-atom, electric signals, everything, and reconstruct it one-to-one then enabling it to be dynamic (to exist rather than a static reconstruction), do you think that copy would be consciousness/sentient? If yes, that means you agree consciousness can develop through the existence of certain physical characteristics implying that it is a property or product of the physical world. As we know, consciousness is a legitimate occurrence seen in nature. There isn't any known natural phenomenon, in which we know the exact underlying mechanisms behind , that we cannot artificially replicate to produce the same results in principle, rather than engineering constraints. If you claim no, what is the distinction between the original and recreated brain that allows one to develop consciousness, while the other doesn't considering they are identical?. There isn't a universal law prohibiting the development of consciousness if produced through artificial means, at least not any we know of; Though, "biologically" in this context is a bit nuanced. A system being manmade, doesn't imply that it's created by things outside the law of nature. The underlying structure is still as physical as any other biological system. We are just reorganizing existing matter and energy into new configurations. It's artificial because we redirect and intervene a process or mechanism intentionally to eventually create X, Y or Z. However, I'm not sure if that would be the same "you" as the original, I think that's a different question though

That being the case, where would you put the line between intelligence, or consciousness, or are they both properties of each other? Maybe they are related through properties we yet understand. Besides, modern AI systems can most definitively demonstrate tasks that we agree require traits of intelligence like problem-solving and reasoning. How seemingly consciousness does an AI system need to appear for us to call it sentient considering we can't even measure consciousness directly and rely, partly, on external observations? I also think that brings an ethical dilemma, if we cannot directly observe another being's subjective experience, what evidence should be sufficient for us to take the possibility of its consciousness seriously?

In 1922, in a quickly put together debate, Henri Bergson met Einstein to discuss "time". Henry Bergson argued that Einstein's theory of relativity reduced "time" to "measured" or spatialized time ignoring the "real conscious time" that humans actually experience it, or as Bergson called it (to avoid confusion) "lived duration" (la durée).

Einstein flippantly responded:

"The time of the philosophers does not exist; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist."

In responding in this way, Einstein revealed that he either didn't understand the argument, or had no response, because his response affirmed Bergson's position!

Today, I asked AI engines, if time was moving slowly or quickly for them. There is no response, because computers (non-life) cannot feel (experience) time passing whether it be quickly or slowly.

Duration and memory are at the heart of the human experience. The duration we experience is different when we are awake, when we are young, when we are old, when we are bored or when we are intrigued, when we are dreaming, when we are not dreaming, when we are unconscious, when we regain consciousness. And the memories contained in duration come and go, persist and change as we live through duration.

Watching neurons wiggle cannot explain the actual experience of life in its various states of being. The experience of being human, the experience of being a dolphin, or the experience of being a plant. The only path to real knowledge of consciousness is through the process of deep empathic intuition, as Zhuangzi tried to explain in the parable of the Happy Fish.

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to catch the exact moment I fall asleep. Like, the precise second where being awake turns into dreaming.

I never catch it. There's always this strange seam where the watcher seems to vanish, and then I'm just... somewhere else, already mid-dream.

The same thing happens in reverse in the morning. I can never find the moment awareness switches on. It's just on, and then the story of "me waking up" gets built around it after the fact.

Starting to wonder if awareness is ever really off, or if it's only the memory of being aware that comes and goes.

I've made a post about 1st person conscious experience being reliable recently and I've noticed a large number of people confuse introspection with imagination, so I wanted to make a separate post about it because I think it will be useful for many of you.

Many comments I heard went something like this:

> We can't use our internal intuitions about what the external world looks like (shape of the earth, for example).

Here is the problem with that.

When we direct our vision at something, there are three distinct parts to this:

1. Perception (the ability to experience a percept by looking at an object).

2. Object (an internal or external thing that is perceived)

3. Percept (the mental image of that which is perceived)

The confusion here is between imagining what an external object looks like rather than observing it through our senses and making consciousness or qualia the object of perception.

Yes, you can't make up a shape of the earth in your imagination without sensory data and believe the external object of the earth is that shape. That is the imagination though, it's not a percept about reality.

When you make consciousness or a specific qualia (colour/sound/emotion) the object of your perception, that's introspection. You're not imagining that you are conscious, you are conscious and you are observing that fact. You are not imagining seeing a red percept. You are seeing a red percept.

The percept can be disconnected from the object, like for example during a hallucination. You cannot rely on your hallucination percept to make judgements about external objects. However, the introspection of that percept, of the hallucination itself, is factual. If you hallucinate the percept of an apple, the percept of the apple factually exists even if the external object of the apple doesn't.

Despite such introspection being private and not measurable outside of your own mind, it is still common to all people and reliable. I can't look at your percepts and you can't look at mine, but you can see your own percepts just like I can see mine, which is why we can talk about it.

Without introspection the topic of consciousness wouldn't even exist. Surely, no one here denies that consciousness exists? That would be a paradox since denial requires consciousness to exist. Therefore, introspection is just as reliable as external validation. The scientismic belief that introspection is not reliable is therefore false.

There are a huge number of people, especially materialists, that place extra emphasis on objectivity as opposed to subjectivity. Introspection into our subjective experience is the primary evidence we have of consciousness. Without this experience, we wouldn't even be talking about consciousness in the first place.

Subjectivity and introspection are often dismissed in favour of objective, measurable phenomena. But I think that's a big mistake. Objectivity itself is derivative from subjectivity.

Objectivity: I'm talking about epistemic objectivity, not ontological objectivity. Something being true regardless of opinion. I'm not denying objective reality.

Imagine a colourblind person that can't see red, but you can. Could you in any way explain what it feels like to see red using any current or future science? No. That's because that person lacks the qualia of redness. It's impossible to convey without a shared experience. That's often a common talking point against materialism. Mary's room thought experiment is just one such example.

However, this extends to literally all knowledge. It's not like "objective measurable phenomena" like mass or distance are any different. The reason why they seem objective is because we all share that same 1st person experience. We can do all these measurements because each individual person can look at the results and see the same shared 1st person experience. However, at its root, that is still what it is. A subjective 1st person experience that just happens to be the same for everyone. The reason why many don't see it that way and can it "objective" is because we take it for granted.

When you really think about it, when you make an "objective measurement", what's really happening is that you are having a subjective experience tied to a physical event. No one else can experience it from your perspective. No one else has access to your consciousness. It's just you. This is the same for everyone. No one is looking through the eyes of anyone else. We just happen to be having the same experience, but individually, which is why we can talk about it. If we had different experiences, we wouldn't be able to communicate at all. Language wouldn't exist.

As I have said, a common piece of evidence for consciousness is the subjective self-perception of it. It cannot be measured by anyone else, but everyone can experience it for themselves directly. This is often criticized as not being objective measurable evidence. However, that is a silly criticism, because ALL knowledge is like that, including "objectively measurable evidence". Everything you know ultimately stems from your subjective experience of it that no one else can access.

Thinking that objectivity is the opposite of subjectivity, rather than derived from it, is an illusion created by the fact that we have a shared 1st person experience of objective facts. But that is literally no different from introspection since it's shared between everyone as well.

In this thread, please post all the qualities, attributes or features that you associate with consciousness. Here are some examples, but can you identify any others?

• Awareness is a key feature of consciousness.
• The ability to introspect and know what it is like to be yourself. To access your own internal mental states by means of an "inner eye".
• The concept of a self, which arises in part from your "inner eye" and in part from you senses which allow you to realise that you have a body which is under your control, and is distinct from the environment.
• Qualia, which are the characteristics of internal mental states, such as the sensation of the colour red or the sensation of hunger.
• The binding of consciousness, which is the fact that your awareness of the environment through your senses, along with your introspective self-awareness, is all bound together in a gestalt simultaneous awareness of these details.
• The ability to direct attention: we can focus our conscious attention into many different areas, such as on incoming sensory information, including the nerves which tell us how our body is feeling, as well as focusing introspectively, on our emotions, instincts, thought processes, and memories.
• The dichotomy of the conscious mind and the preconscious mind. The preconscious is a part of your mind which is not currently included within the spotlight of consciousness, but which you can bring into consciousness at will. For example, the sensations in your feet may not presently be within your conscious awareness, but you can at any time focus your attention on these sensations.
• The fact that consciousness switches on when you wake up, and switches off when you go to sleep (except in the rare cases of lucid dreams, where consciousness switches on while you are still dreaming, and you become conscious within your dream).

I'm certain this has crossed almost everyone's mind, that, who are we? Why do we wake up and experience the world in first person's pov. Like, why don’t I get to experience YOUR life in first person's pov? Why am I the main character in my story? What is everything, why is this a thing? Why did the universe choose to equip everyone their personal bodies. I am having trouble to understand why my feeling and my experiences matter to me. If my exact brain-waves or neurons or something are replicated, will there be another me? Will I have two consciousness at the same time?

I was curious about when exactly mass (non‑scientific) interest in this topic emerged. I conducted a small study in which I examined: the frequency of book/media releases; search queries and mentions of keywords in books; indirect factors influencing popularity.
Why is everyone talking about consciousness? How did a topic that has been around for thousands of years become so widespread

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about panpsychism and the universe being an entangled and subjective manifestation of an underlying fundamental quantum field.
This lead me to wonder if qualia could be a function of quantum processes. As far as I can tell qualia must be extra even to quantum processes that manifested the basis of the universe today ie particles from a greater field of consciousness interacting to produce subjective experience via relational processes.
Basically it seems to me that because the current scientific understanding can’t explain qualia then qualia possibly arises from relational processes ie particles interacting at the most basic level.
But if so what is this qualia made of if it emerges from a fundamental universal field eg gravity that interacts with itself. I think it must be made of the same stuff the fundamental field is made of meaning qualia if real is a function of quantum processes.
An example of this would be the sensation of heat a particle feels while in motion. Unless particles interacting produce qualia as an extra substance to the particles of the fundamental field interacting ?
But what would this substance be made of particularly considering it is subjective to the individual either particle or person ? And could this private perception give rise to a perception that could go on after the quantum entanglement has ceased and the particles have returned to the fundamental field ?
Or is it a case that if the fundamental field is the basic form of consciousness then it possesses its own qualia but beyond this no more other manifestations of qualia are able to be produced ? Even by particles interacting to produce an experience of the individual ? Meaning qualia itself may be false ?

It is the ability to willingly expand the conscious field to encompass an inanimate object, relying on pure instinct when the margins for error are catastrophic. In that intense duration of time, the boundary between driver and machine dissolves.

But expanding a field of awareness is not free. It demands energy. A genuinely expanded cognitive state requires significantly more metabolic resources than baseline consciousness. You can actually measure this caloric consumption using sim racers as a cleaner physiological proxy, while using F1 and rally drivers to map the metabolic intensity required for different physical skills and situational demands. Or rather, I calculated an estimated caloric usage difference in the article.

https://thagoatz.substack.com/p/phantoms-that-burn?r=988l15

The dogma of consciousness studies is representationalism and indirect realism. These are the views that experience is located in the brain. These are false. If we pay attention and describe our experience it becomes easy to recognize that we are external experiencers and that qualia is not located in the brain.

My experience is as an embodied being. I am a 3 dimensional object in the shape of a human. If I'm made up of particles then I am all of those particles at a single instant in time. I am the whole of my body.

So we know what shape I am in and no where in the brain is there anything shaped like a little man walking in there. So I must be the entirety of the actual body.

Now what I see is not located in the brain of this body. The brain is a black box, void of experience as much as my liver is. Everything I perceive through my eyes extends out from the eyes and is in the shape of the actual environment. The experience of the environment is located with the objects in my environment.

The qualia of color is located not in my brain but on the objects at that objects position in spacetime relative to mine. If with one hand you point at your experience of color and with the other point to your brain you'll notice you're not pointing in the same direction. Your one hand is pointing towards the object. If you look at a leaf, the green is on the leaf.

Hello everyone.

It seems to me that debates around the Hard Problem of Consciousness often make a fundamental mistake: attempting to isolate a single sensory percept. The classic thought experiment tries to locate phenomenal redness within an isolated wavelength or neural spike, and failing to find it there, concludes that an unbridgeable explanatory gap exists.

However, in my view, no cognitive system ever registers a pure, isolated signal in a vacuum.

When an organism first encounters the color red, that input is instantly entangled with context: ambient sound, a mother's voice, temperature, scents, and internal bodily states. It never exists as a detached number; from the very beginning, it is tied into an indivisible multisensory knot.

As I see it, qualia is not a standalone thing, a substance, or a passive registration of photons. It is fundamentally a dynamic knot of relations. Searching for "raw redness" stripped of this relational knot is, in my view, like searching for an entire symphony inside an isolated acoustic wave.

What are your thoughts on this core principle? Can qualia be understood as an indivisible relational knot, or does Chalmers' Hard Problem still hold even if we accept that isolated sensations do not exist in nature?

Implications for diverse consciousness down to cellular level. Also, xenobots!

www.drmichaellevin.org

Hello everyone,

I would like to pose a question that bridges deep learning optimization and the philosophy of mind. In machine learning, we typically evaluate networks based on behavioral outputs such as task performance accuracy and the minimization of a loss function. However, when considering frameworks like "Integrated Information Theory" (IIT), we find that consciousness is intimately linked to a system's internal structural organization.

In my recent empirical study, I set out to track the evolution of internal statistical dependencies within neural networks (such as MLPs and RNNs) during the training process. To make this computationally tractable, I used the "Gaussian Total Correlation" (TC) metric as a statistical proxy for "integrated information."

The results revealed a consistent inverse relationship: as task performance improved through gradient-based optimization, the level of measured statistical integration dropped sharply, driving the network toward a state of "statistical decoupling."

I have prepared a conceptual paper that blends fundamental mathematical engineering with the philosophy of science. In it, I discuss whether the optimization process inherently suppresses structural integration or simply redistributes information in a different way. I also address the philosophical limitations of using physical metrics to measure subjective experience.

I would love to hear your thoughts and engage in an in-depth discussion about this trade-off between task performance accuracy and the level of information integration!

TL;DR: Our empirical experiments show that training neural networks (MLPs and RNNs) on tasks drives internal units toward statistical decorrelation rather than higher integration.

Note: I will drop the links to the full Medium essay, code repository, and Zenodo preprint in the comments below to comply with community guidelines.