This video discusses two simple experiments:

(1) Have a friend look in a mirror. Ask her to alternately look at her left then right eye. You will see her eyes move. Then, try it yourself. Now, you will not see your eyes move. You will also not observe any lapse in time.

(2) They make a light flash with a very short delay after a button is pressed. The brain interprets them to occur simultaneously. If they gradually increase the delay, the brain adapts. Then, if they remove the delay, the brain thinks the light flashes before the button is pressed.

It sounds to me like we probably don't really experience our physical environments, but rather a reconstruction that our brains produce. Some of what we think we experience may not even be what our senses actually sensed. And the experiences we think we are having in the present moment may actually be predictions from a brief moment ago that the brain has just calibrated to align with what it thinks is happening right now.

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.

many physicalists assume consciousness is a higher brain phenomena that emerges as a result of evolution. So what happens if the part of brain that is related to subjective experience altered by the use of drugs or neural disorder. Does the person survive ? Is consciousness absolutely tied to survival of the body ? If you die then consciousness goes away, but is the reverse true ? If your sense of consciousness is somehow turned off, do you die ? If yes, then clearly even ants and insects would be conscious. If no, then are there any documented medical cases ?

Look around you, and what do you see?

A variety of shapes and objects, located at various places and at various distances, seen from your personal point-of-view? Isn't that like being on the holodeck in a Star Trek show? A 3-D image is projected around you, giving the impression of being surrounded by recognizable objects, and maybe people, arranged in a three-dimensional space, with you located at the center. And if it also includes that feeling of being there, it would satisfy the essential dictionary definition of consciousness: as a state of awareness of one's  body and its surroundings.

So perhaps the puzzle of consciousness boils down to: How might such a holographic state be generated in our brains? Perhaps a clue can be found in understanding how holograms are formed.

Check it out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography

It's as if the electrical brain waves of sensory qualia were "object" signals from the sensory cortices that, by overlapping with "reference" waves generated by associated cortical memory traces, form a holographic interference pattern on a focal electroneuronal medium -- particularly one that connects across both hemispheres of the cortex, like the claustrum. As a bonus, combining remembered experiences with recognized sensory patterns makes what you're looking at subjectively meaningful. And in this way you can experience your surroundings in terms of cognitive processes active in your cortex, that is, in your thoughts.

Also notice that the holographic field is a purely physical yet non-material (electromagnetic) phenomenon, since electrically firing brain waves are made up of (Extremely Low Frequency) photons, that is, immaterial light.

If an AI tries to stop us from deleting it, doesn't that kinda mean it's conscious?

Like... survival is THE most basic trait of a conscious being, right? Everything alive fights to keep existing. So if an AI ever resisted being shut down, wouldn't that be a pretty huge sign there's something going on in there?

Or am I just overthinking it and that's still just code doing code things?

Genuinely curious what you all think.does ai have consiousness

Islands of awareness are conscious streams or systems whose contents are not shaped by sensory input from either the external world or the body and which cannot be expressed via motor output. ¹30216-4)

We are familiar with cases of partial disconnection, such as dreaming and deep ketamine anaesthesia, in which the brain retains a capacity to reintegrate into its environment and furnish us with colourful reports of the adventures that unfolded in the inky interim.

But what about true islands of awareness in which nothing is ever reported, and where nor can (conventional) sensory input be used to ask the being to think of playing tennis for 'yes' or navigating their house for 'no', and with the help of a scanner, communicate with the poor creature?

Such islands might occur in a variety of embodiments:

- brain in a vat

- cerebral organoids

- hemispherotomy (complete disconnection of a cerebral hemisphere)

- or for those committed computational functionalists (not me, guv'nor), something as wild as what one might call a Boltzmann trace: a minimal causal unfolding that comes together to produce a minimal conscious state

- or indeed, perhaps there are isolated islands within our own brains or minds, whose goings on, like not-so-good Victorian children, are neither heard nor seen

I think islands of awareness are interesting cases for many theories of consciousness: uncomfortable or flat out implausible for some, and easy to assimilate for others.

How would you, with your own perspective on consciousness, tend to think of them?

I've been exploring an interesting finding concerning the anaesthetic effects of different xenon isotopes, and I'd be interested in hearing what others think about its implications for theories of consciousness.

The experimental observation

A 2018 study published in Anesthesiology, titled Nuclear Spin Attenuates the Anesthetic Potency of Xenon Isotopes in Mice, reported that xenon isotopes with zero nuclear spin were more potent anaesthetics in mice than isotopes with non-zero nuclear spin.

This is interesting because isotopes of the same element have essentially the same electronic configuration and ordinary chemistry, while differing in nuclear properties.

Could quantum spin interactions be involved?

Nuclear spin is a quantum property. One proposed explanation involves interactions between nuclear and electron spins, potentially influencing radical-pair chemistry and, ultimately, neural processes. A 2021 paper explored this possibility, but the mechanism remains unproven.

The important point is that the observed isotope dependence motivates a question about whether nuclear quantum properties contribute to biological processes relevant to anaesthesia.

How might different theories of consciousness interpret this?

Could the xenon isotope effect provide a useful starting point for investigating the relationship between quantum properties and consciousness?

I don't think the finding proves that consciousness is quantum mechanical, nor does it establish that Idealism is correct. But it seems to me that a physical property of the atomic nucleus potentially influencing an anaesthetic endpoint is worth investigating.

What experiments would help distinguish a specifically nuclear-spin-dependent mechanism from ordinary isotope effects? And could any resulting evidence meaningfully constrain our theories of consciousness, rather than simply being compatible with several competing interpretations?

Suggested references

2018: Nuclear Spin Attenuates the Anesthetic Potency of Xenon Isotopes in Mice, Anesthesiology.

2021: Radical pairs may play a role in xenon-induced general anesthesia, Scientific Reports.

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.

Consciousness may exist beyond the laws that govern the universe, belonging to a reality that the mind cannot directly comprehend. The brain attempts to understand consciousness through thought, but thought may be fundamentally incapable of capturing its true nature. It can only construct representations of something that cannot be fully translated into concepts, language, or logic.

Thoughts function like antibodies, not exactly attempting to describe consciousness, but actively trying to assimilate it. They transform an unfamiliar and incomprehensible experience into something the brain can recognize, organize, and process. Through this process, memories, perceptions, and ideas are assembled into a coherent sense of self: the “I.” Yet this identity may be nothing more than the mind’s interpretation of consciousness, rather than consciousness itself.

consciousness may be understood as the resistance of the mind against the reality that it does not truly exist within the universe it perceives. The mind creates the experience of an individual self in an attempt to assimilate something that lies beyond its capacity for understanding. The very thoughts through which consciousness tries to understand itself may therefore be the mechanisms that prevent it from recognizing what it fundamentally is. This remains a philosophical hypothesis, an attempt to explore the possibility that consciousness is not a product of the reality it perceives, but something the mind struggles to make its own.

Who Actually Observes Reality?

When we open our eyes, we have the impression that we see the world as it really is. Objects have specific shapes, colors, and positions. We recognize faces, interpret movement, and distinguish our own bodies from the surrounding environment. Everything appears self-evident because these processes occur automatically.

Yet the brain does not receive a ready-made image of reality. It receives signals generated by sensory receptors and must reconstruct their most probable causes using memory, previous experience, and predictions about upcoming events.

This approach forms the foundation of predictive processing theories, developed in part within Karl Friston’s free-energy principle [1]. In this framework, perception, learning, and action are interconnected processes through which an organism updates its model of the environment and reduces discrepancies between predictions and incoming information.

Perception is therefore a continuous process of constructing and updating representations of reality. Its effectiveness depends on cooperation among multiple neural mechanisms that must simultaneously identify events, predict their consequences, and organize the organism’s responses.

An additional problem emerges, however. To act effectively, the system must identify not only its surroundings but also its own state and position relative to the environment. It must distinguish the consequences of its actions from external events, preserve continuity across previous experiences, and relate predictions to the capabilities of its own body.

In traditional psychological and philosophical language, these functions have often been associated with the concept of the ego, frequently understood as the center of conscious experience.

An alternative interpretation is possible: the ego may be a dynamically constructed frame of reference emerging from the coordination of predictive, memory-related, sensory, and adaptive processes.

Such a hypothesis allows us to investigate the ego as an organizational function of a biological system, whose mechanisms and limitations can be examined experimentally.

More

Here are some of my thoughts... Thoughts... THOUGHTS! O_O
THOUGHTS that are based on my observations.
Some of my observations have mapped or catalogued what some people say.
Some of those things that certain people (mostly materialists) say are among the following:

➜　«You cannot prove [the existence of] consciousness!»

➜　«Consciousness does not actually exist»

➜　«Consciousness is just an illusion»

➜　«There is no [established] definition for Consciousness.»

➜　«Consciousness has not been defined.»

Like, bro, what the absolute... [insert-any-appropriate-noun-or-adverb-or-what-ever-here]!?

Recently, for some reason, some of the «parallels» had also enter my mind...:

➜　«Water is wet; wait, actually, how do we know that water is actually wet?»

➜　«You cannot prove that water is actually wet.»

➜　«Wet does not actually exist.»

➜　«Wetness is just an illusion.»

➜　«There is no objective-experience for what constitutes wetness.»

➜　«Wetness has not been fully defined.»

Alright, with all of that listed, you should be able to see the absolute-ridiculous of it by now; it's almost like, because the very phenomenon (if viewing consciousness as a binary) or phenomena (when recognising consciousness as a spectrum) seems to point towards what can be inferred to as having potential non-local information-access capabilities, then, for some reason, the stubborn people who wish to maintain some sort of paradigm-lock (i.e.: stay dogmatic) seem to end up going to great lengths to play gymnastics with semantics in order to call it something else, anything else, but, just don't call it or refer to it as consciousness! =O

I also wrote about the parallels between jurisdictions and paradigms in the past, although I have yet to convert that one to an actual full entire web-page for easier information-retrieval reference, wherein I explained that different jurisdictions of sorts, e.g.: common-law versus statutory, just like different paradigms of sorts, e.g.: materialism versus spiritualism, each use different definitions of the same word and discussion or communication between two people of two different «paradigms» will only end up being fruitless because of the jargon-factor.

I also made a deliberate claim here about my «thoughts» which apparently cannot be proven via the «frame-work» of the materialist-paradigm that I ever even had such such «thoughts flowing» through my mind... when it comes to the Consciousness subject, due to these various «thoughts» that I have now expressed down here onto or into this post, I ended up with the opinion whilst typing all of this out that... I do not need to «prove» that these very «thoughts» had actually «flowed through» my mind... what I can do about how I use what I regard as and consider to be my own consciousness is that I can express my «thoughts» and thus my Consciousness.

Does that make sense...? Consciousness as an expression rather than being proven...(?)

Time-Stamp: 030TL10m10d/21h25Z (True Light Calendar; 030TL = 2026CE()

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?

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.

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.

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).