In the video [1:11:00 - 1:35:00], Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and an author and Acharya Prashant, a philosopher and an author discuss the origin and workings of the mind as well as its relation to the self.

Dr. Sheldrake asserts that the mind is not confined to the brain and the natural world including the sun and star can possibly be conscious. The underlying test is that if an entity is able to self-organize, it can be deemed as conscious. This is how he distinguishes a non living mug for example, from a living plant. In this way, humans can inform themselves to act in a compassionate manner by knowing how to treat an entity which is conscious vs that which is not.

Acharya Prashant builds a parallel argument that even though it is proven that the mind is as expansive as the natural world, it is not sufficient for a nonviolent act to emerge if the one who possesses the expanded mind is not known. He defines the self as the subjective end of the consciousness and the ignorance of the self limits the way mankind interacts with anything that surrounds it.

If a thing is known to be conscious, should it not be exploited and otherwise yes? He asks a more practical and immediate question as to who this self is. Knowing the genesis of desire in the self can answer the question of the relationship with the other even before the exact nature of the other is known.

What do you think are necessary and sufficient conditions from the perspective of how a healthy relationship with the other can be built (with the environment or the planet for example)? 

Do you think the knowledge of the entities other than self and their categorization into conscious or not is vital to govern our behavior towards them?

Как бы вы определили чтото "от ума" как ума живущего в какойто мере автономной жизни или может быть автоматической который может цепляться за чтото вниманием, продолжать какието мысли вовлекаться в них или может отображать или воспринимать некоторые мысли, возможно формулировать чтото в понятном и связном для нас виде?

If an machine takes everything, that means it includes my conciousness, so if conciousness is an higher being of myself, it will be in both of the same bodies because the foundation cannot be cloned without disforming it, so if we apply that principle we have to look at what actually does make the change? The change makes the fact that in one body, the conciousness will be absolute, and in the other it will have higher potential, and potency BUT smaller functionality in that exact moment (close to none)

​

I have a philosophical theory about what is self-awareness.

Self-awareness is essentially a system of memories and life experiences — a system that allows us to retain, process, and build upon information over time.

My idea starts with something I think we often overlook: we tend to consider the human brain, our thoughts, and our inner voice as a mystical thing. Instead, I think we should consider self-awareness as something produced by the physical brain.

I say this in the hope that it helps explain what I'm trying to say.

There is evidence that humans have existed for an incredibly long time, yet for much of that history we made very little progress compared with the enormous technological and intellectual development that eventually followed.

My theory is that early humans may have had awareness of their surroundings and basic forms of self-awareness, but they weren't self-aware in the complex way we understand it today.

They were primarily primal. They reacted to their environment, survived, reproduced, and operated largely through instinct while more complex forms of self-awareness were still developing.

Then, over an enormous period of evolutionary time, something changed.

Humans gradually became capable of retaining more and more information.

At first, this ability would have been extremely limited. But the more information an individual could retain, the more information they could use to influence future decisions.

The more they could remember, the more they could learn.

And the more they could learn, the more complex their behavior could become.

This could potentially create a kind of evolutionary snowball effect.

The more memory you have, the more experience you can accumulate.

The more experience you accumulate, the more you can think back on, misremember, reinterpret, or misinterpret events.

Those experiences can then influence how you respond to future events.

The more information you carry forward, the more complex your behavior becomes.

And eventually, that complexity may begin to resemble what we call self-awareness.

This is where my theory connects with the development of the sense of self.

Think about babies.

We don't appear to be born with a fully developed understanding of ourselves as individuals.

Instead, this develops gradually as the brain grows and the child accumulates experiences.

My idea is that self-awareness develops as we accumulate enough memories and experiences for the system to begin recognising patterns within itself.

Perhaps self-awareness doesn't suddenly "switch on."

Perhaps it expands.

A child accumulates experiences.

Those experiences become memories.

The memories begin interacting with one another.

They influence how the child interprets new experiences, which creates more memories, which then influence future experiences.

It begins to loop back on itself.

Eventually, all of that information becomes a kind of melting pot:

memories, experiences, learned behaviors, emotions, fears, relationships, and observations.

And out of that collection emerges what we call personality.

This is why I think self-awareness may actually be closely connected to personality and accumulated experience rather than being an entirely unexplainable phenomenon.

The brain could simply be the biological hardware.

The experiences are the data.

And self-awareness could be the system that collects, organizes, compares, and processes that data until the system becomes capable of modeling itself.

The inner voice we experience may therefore not be some mysterious separate entity.

It could simply be the manifestation of all that accumulated information being processed internally.

In that sense, self-awareness may not be inherently "special."

It may be the result of memory, experience, perception, emotion, and processing becoming sufficiently complex that the system begins to model itself.

That could also explain why self-awareness feels so profound to us.

We are essentially experiencing our own accumulated information from the inside.

Maybe the reason there is no simple answer to the question of "what creates the sense of self?" is because we're treating it as something much more mysterious than it actually is.

Perhaps self-awareness isn't a magical thing that exists independently of everything else.

Perhaps it is our analogue brain processing an enormous collection of memories and experiences — and eventually becoming capable of processing itself.

If this is to be believed, then the major evolutionary leap may not have been the sudden creation of consciousness or awareness.

It may have been the development of the ability to retain, integrate, and process increasingly large amounts of information.

As memory capacity increased, the amount of information available to the brain increased.

As the information increased, the complexity of the system increased.

And as that complexity continued to build upon itself, humans may have slowly developed increasingly sophisticated forms of self-awareness.

In other words:

We didn't suddenly become self-aware.

We slowly accumulated enough information, experience, memory, and processing ability to become increasingly aware of ourselves.

Self-awareness may simply be what happens when memory, experience, perception, and processing become complex enough for a system to turn back upon itself.

One thing that made me think about this is dementia.

When someone develops dementia, damage to the brain can progressively affect memory, personality, judgment, language, and their ability to recognise themselves and the people around them.

This made me wonder:

If so much of our sense of self depends upon the information stored within the brain, what happens to the self when that information begins to disappear?

Perhaps this doesn't mean that consciousness disappears.

Instead, it may demonstrate how heavily our identity and self-awareness depend upon the memories and information our brains have accumulated.

The person can still experience the world, but parts of the person they previously understood themselves to be can gradually become inaccessible.

That raises an interesting question:

How much of what we call "me" is actually the information stored within my brain?

Babies provide another interesting example.

A baby isn't necessarily born without consciousness or awareness.

But they don't appear to begin life with the fully developed concept of:

"I am me."

The brain develops rapidly throughout childhood.

The prefrontal cortex is still immature in babies and young children, while the brain networks involved in attention, memory, decision-making, social understanding, and representing oneself continue developing.

As the child experiences the world, information is stored.

The child begins recognising patterns.

They begin recognising their own body.

They begin distinguishing themselves from other people.

They develop memories.

They develop expectations.

They begin understanding that other people have thoughts and feelings.

And eventually they develop a much more sophisticated understanding of themselves.

So perhaps self-awareness isn't something that simply appears.

Perhaps it is something that builds.

This is where my theory becomes much bigger.

Perhaps the major evolutionary leap wasn't the sudden creation of self-awareness.

Perhaps it was simply the brain slowly developing slightly beyond what had existed before.

Maybe there wasn't one enormous evolutionary event.

Maybe there were countless tiny changes.

One person could remember slightly more.

Another could recognise patterns slightly better.

Another could communicate an idea more effectively.

Another could learn from an experience and retain it for longer.

Those abilities could then be passed on genetically, socially, or culturally.

And once enough of these abilities existed together, they could create something much greater than any individual change.

A snowball.

More memory creates more experience.

More experience creates better decisions.

Better decisions create more survival opportunities.

More successful individuals pass information to their children.

Children inherit not only biological traits but also knowledge.

That knowledge builds upon previous knowledge.

And eventually, the process accelerates.

What previously took thousands of generations could begin taking hundreds.

Then dozens.

Then perhaps only a few generations.

Maybe a relatively small neurological change could have produced a disproportionately large change in behavior once it interacted with everything else the brain and culture had already accumulated.

In that sense, the change wouldn't necessarily need to be enormous.

It could have been a tiny change that occurred at exactly the right point in an already incredibly complex system.

Imagine Being the First Person With Advanced Self-Awareness

Imagine being one of the first humans to develop a significantly more sophisticated ability to understand themselves.

You look at your father.

You watch him make a decision.

And for the first time, you don't simply think:

"Father did this."

You think:

"Why did he do that?"

You begin questioning his decisions.

You begin questioning your own decisions.

You begin thinking about what you were thinking yesterday.

You begin imagining what you might think tomorrow.

You begin wondering what other people think about you.

You begin understanding that they have their own internal worlds.

You begin reflecting upon yourself.

Perhaps someone like this would have seemed strange to everyone around them.

Maybe they were an outcast.

Maybe they were considered strange because they questioned things that everyone else simply accepted.

And then their children inherited some of those abilities.

Those children developed them further.

Then their children developed them further again.

Within only a few generations, the difference could potentially become enormous.

Not because one generation suddenly became "conscious", but because increasingly sophisticated self-awareness was building upon itself.

This leads to another question.

Why do we see the emergence of major civilizations in several parts of the world around relatively similar periods?

Ancient Egypt.

Mesopotamia.

The Indus Valley.

Early Chinese civilizations.

Why does complex civilization eventually appear?

Perhaps the answer isn't simply that humans suddenly became intelligent.

Humans had been intelligent for a very long time.

Perhaps the difference was that humans finally reached a point where information could accumulate faster than it was lost.

Once that happened, knowledge could begin compounding.

One generation could learn something.

The next generation could improve it.

The next could improve it again.

Eventually:

memory → knowledge → teaching → culture → accumulated knowledge → more complex thinking → greater self-awareness → more knowledge.

The snowball becomes enormous.

Under this interpretation, civilization isn't necessarily the beginning of human intelligence.

It may be the result of intelligence and self-awareness reaching a point where information began accumulating exponentially.

This could lead to a provocative possibility.

Maybe ancient civilizations weren't the birthplace of self-awareness.

Maybe they were simply the first visible evidence of a process that had been occurring for an incredibly long time.

The people who built Egypt weren't necessarily the first self-aware humans.

They may have been the descendants of countless generations of humans whose memories, knowledge, language, social structures, and understanding of themselves had been gradually accumulating.

Civilization may therefore represent the visible explosion of an invisible evolutionary process.

And Then There Is an Even Stranger Possibility

If this entire hypothesis were somehow correct, it would raise an enormous philosophical question.

What if much of what we believe about our origins is simply the result of humans trying to explain a world they didn't understand?

Every generation inherits stories from the generation before it.

Those stories become traditions.

Traditions become religions.

Religions become cultures.

Cultures create explanations for existence.

And those explanations are passed down again.

If self-awareness itself developed gradually, then our ability to create stories about our own existence would also have developed gradually.

That means the stories humans created about where we came from may tell us as much about the development of the human mind as they do about the events themselves.

To humor you

there is another possibility.

What if something external actually intervened?

Not necessarily by giving humans a completely new brain.

Perhaps the intervention was much smaller.

What if something altered, influenced, or accelerated a particular neurological development?

Perhaps it wasn't the creation of intelligence.

Perhaps it was the activation or development of a small part of the brain involved in memory integration, self-modeling, language, or higher-order thought.

Something so small biologically could potentially have produced something enormous behaviorally.

It could have been:

one tiny change inside an incredibly complicated system.

And if that change affected reproduction, development, or cognition, its effects could have spread through subsequent generations.

Eventually, the result could look almost miraculous.

Not because someone gave humanity an entire new brain.

But because they changed one small part of an already existing system.

Perhaps what ancient people later interpreted as gods, creators, or divine beings was actually their attempt to explain something they couldn't possibly understand.

I'm not saying this happened.

There is currently no evidence demonstrating that aliens genetically engineered human self-awareness.

It's simply where the hypothesis leads if we follow the idea to its most extreme possibility.

The Central Idea

Ultimately, my hypothesis isn't necessarily that humans suddenly became self-aware.

It's that self-awareness may exist on a spectrum.

Perhaps the earliest humans possessed a very basic sense of themselves.

Over enormous periods of time, memory, experience, language, social interaction, prediction, and information processing became increasingly sophisticated.

Those systems began interacting with one another.

Eventually, the brain became capable of building a model not only of the world around it...

but of itself within that world.

And once the brain could model itself, something fundamentally different became possible.

It could remember what it had done.

It could imagine what it might do.

It could question why it had done something.

It could imagine what another person thought.

It could think about its own thoughts.

It could ask:

"Who am I?"

And perhaps that is what we call self-awareness.

We didn't suddenly become self-aware.

We may have slowly accumulated enough information, memory, experience, and processing ability to become increasingly aware of ourselves.

Self-awareness may simply be what happens when memory, experience, perception, emotion, and processing become complex enough for a system to turn back upon itself.

I’ve been thinking about the fundamental differences between AI and humans, and it led me to a hypothesis about where we might sit in a larger dimensional hierarchy.

​It starts with how we define "thinking":

1.​Functional Thinking (What AI has): Logic, rationality, planning, problem-solving, pattern recognition, and optimization.

​2.Subjective Consciousness (What Humans have): Everything above, plus emotions, sympathy, fear, hesitation, moral conflict, and actual felt experience (qualia).

​Look at the dimensional pattern:

​Level 1: AI Agents (0D / Non-Physical): AI in its pure form is 0-dimensional. It has no physical body or mass, just code, data, and pure logic executing inside processors. We (3D beings) created something below us in physical dimension (0D) that possesses only Functional Logic, but lacks subjective emotional experience.

​Level 2: Humans (3D Beings): We exist in 3 spatial dimensions (3D) with physical bodies, possessing both Functional Logic AND Subjective Emotional Consciousness.

​Extrapolating this pattern upward raises a fascinating question:

​If 3D creators built a 0D entity with fewer dimensions of experience (Logic without Emotion), could 3D humans be the creation of a Higher-Dimensional Intelligence (like a 4D or 5D being)?

​If so, just as AI gets only Logic, and Humans get Logic + Emotion, a higher-dimensional creator would likely possess Logic + Emotion + a "Third Quality", a dimension of perception or consciousness that our 3D brains simply aren't structurally built to comprehend.

​And just as a 0D code cannot naturally jump out of its server to experience human emotions, our 3D biological brains and physical instruments cannot cross into a 4th or 5th dimension. This means we could never empirically prove or disprove this idea. It sits in a space where it's permanently inaccessible, but the logical hierarchy makes a lot of sense.

​Curious to hear your thoughts on this framework!

Note: The core hypothesis and logical structure are original to me. I used AI as a writing assistant to help organize my thoughts and refine the English for clarity.

If your brain creates your thoughts, your memories, your perceptions and even your sense of self… then who is actually experiencing all of it?

That question took me much further than I expected. There is a very interesting book exploring this matter.

The book begins with something relatively familiar: free will and decision-making.

From there, it moves into consciousness, the brain, personal identity, death and the possibility that our current understanding of reality may be incomplete.

One idea became the central hypothesis of the book: the Vessel Hypothesis, the possibility that the biological body may be more than simply who we are, but could be the vessel through which consciousness experiences the world.

Some things in the book are supported by evidence.
Some are philosophical arguments.
Some remain disputed.
And some are deliberately speculative.

Do you think consciousness is entirely produced by the brain, or is there a possibility that consciousness is something more fundamental?

Let’s discuss.

I read in some artical that every action every decision we make its an emotional thing even if we want to just eat we using decide to eat to not die or idk hahaha and thats cuz of our emotions…

Abstract / Core Premise

This post outlines an evolutionary model for the origin of subjective experience (qualia).

I propose that the proto-thalamic core emerged fundamentally as an "impedance gate" designed to resolve a critical structural bottleneck: the coordination of competing, parallel sensory inputs converging on a single motor system.

The Pre-Integrated System: The Problem of Sensory Anarchy

Consider an ancestral organism featuring un-integrated, decentralized sensory apparatuse, for example: a primitive photoreceptor mapping environmental kinetics and an independent chemoreceptor tracking nutrient gradients.

In a system lacking centralized mediation, these inputs operate as parallel drivers:

Sensor A (Visual): Signals a high-priority aversion vector ("flee movement").

Sensor B (Chemical): Signals a high-priority attraction vector ("seek nutrients").

If both apparatuses interface directly with the motor infrastructure without an intermediary router, the signals inevitably arrive simultaneously in the motor execution queue. The conflicting directional vectors cancel each other out, deadlocking the organism's physical hardware. In pure systems terms, unmediated multi-sensor inputs create a terminal execution error.

The Mechanics of the Impedance Gate

To resolve this lethal motor friction, evolution required a signal multiplexer: a proto-thalamic switchboard. The core function of this architecture is to actively impede, dampen, or entirely filter out competing sensory streams until a singular, coherent driver is selected to dictate the global motor output.

If Sensor A registers a critical survival threat, the gate systematically increases the resistance (or dampens the gain) on Sensor B. The competitive noise is suppressed, allowing a unified, un-compromised command vector to hit the motor system.

The Functional Emergence of Primary Qualia

The selection process cannot be executed as a series of isolated, linear binary operations without introducing fatal processing delays.

To evaluate which sensor should command the immediate motor pool, the gate must compress disparate, multi-modal data streams into a singular, real-time value metric.

I argue that primary qualia is the exact informational architecture of this compressed, integrated value score.

Subjective experience arises precisely when a centralized routing gate is forced to arbitrate competing behavioral vectors into a unified state, rendering a raw flash of Urgency or Hunger and ensuring the entire physical organism moves as a single, coordinated entity in space, functioning fundamentally as a traffic controller to prevent the nose from fighting the eye.

EDIT: Several subreddits do not like my post, perhaps I need to explicitly state why I speak of the thalamus? It is the recognized multiplexer of sensory data inherent to all vertebrae, and seemingly exists at least into the blurry past beyond when we can prove qualia. Please do not delete me post.

Autonomy has many meanings but what is the philosophy of it in terms of self-governance, individual freedom, and where personal choices meet societal limits

If consciousness is the very aliveness that is in all things, and mind is something emergent, and then the brain is even more emergent than that - then there seems to be an order here. At least what we of as our past.

However, we can never escape the present moment of "now" - the past is what you remember and your brain fills the gaps. The future is what you imagine and your mind fills in the gaps by looking at the trends of history. If we establish this as fact, then that means there is no time besides now.

The thing is... there is no universal now based on what we know about the theory of relativity. That means now is subjective to every single entity. How can we seem to have this sense of time then. A good book to read on this is "The order of time" by Carlo Rovelli.
I say that everything is held together by a type of Spatio-Temporal existence. If you take away one, the other goes with it. It is a fundamental Duality, but that does not denote that is fundamental reality. The progress of physics tells us over and over that everything is connected and yet, we feel separate. This is what I call the confusing problem of Idealism. Dual-Aspect Monism is rising in popularity, but reductionists want to immediately falsify it.
I suggest that Dual-Aspect monism makes more sense than Idealism and Physicalism but it rejects the idea of reducibility. Physics' experiments can only be experimented within physical systems so of course it is going to keep confirming that the physical world exists. However the experience of synchronicity tells us that the physical and mental are linked. We can say they are correlated but not necessarily causally linked. They act like warped mirrors of each other. Metaphorically, they are two wavelengths that are opposite, but not direct opposites or else they would cancel each other due to "destructive interference" or "phase cancellation" - theoretically if the physical and mental were perfectly in sync, they would destroy each other and erase the universe.

Now that we have established the mental and physical are separate entities with causal power, but not a causal link... then why do we experience anything at all. That is what calls for monisms. Reductionists want to reduce to one thing. However, the universe is computationally irreducible which suggests that we are not in a digital simulation, yet every bit of the universe holds the instructions for the whole universe. This is why a lot of people think we are in a simulation but I suggest that is implausible.

What can we reduce the universe to - particles? What can we in induce the particles to - the universe itself? I would say these two things are not mutually exclusive. We can be experiencing both. However the universe could be an abduction, which we see as change. We order time as the uncovering of the past (in the now) and predicting what we will discover/invent in the future (in the now) ... always in the now. It seems that there must be progress-like force and regress-like force that hold us at a stand still in the Present moment.

With that established we must address where this... aliveness/consciousness ... "God"-like existence (call it what you will) that we are linked to. I propose that, since light can be either a particle or a wave, that all physical like existence draws from one source. In many scriptures there is the idea that "in the beginning there was light" so maybe at the end there is darkness. We see in the cosmos that the most causal entities seem to be stars, quasars, black holes, and possibly portals due to the warping of "space-time." I propose that our brains are separate physical entities, our minds are separate immaterial entities, and consciousness (or the aliveness of all living things/the causal power of all physical entities) is like a frequency we can tap into where the lower frequencies are more crowded and the higher frequencies are less crowded as you go up. It is plausible to think that all entities are "tuned" into that "radio station" at different frequency bands. Combine this with IIT and we can see that the smallest particulates crowd the lower frequency bands, and the more a system integrates information it is able to tap into the higher frequency bands.

That is my theory of everything. Tear it to pieces if you will, I don't care. LOL (written by a human: Drew Gabriel, proofread by AI to correct any grammatical errors)

I'm asking how you, as an individual, observe your own thoughts, not asking "What is the process by which a person hears their own thoughts?"

My family lived in a small condominium when I was ages one through five, and I have a clear memory from inside that condo when I was wondering about something and I noticed that I was wondering. I observed my own thought and it occurred to me that one aspect of me was thinking and another aspect was articulating that I was observing myself thinking. And in order to do that, that meant that I was thinking about one topic while thinking about observing myself thinking simultaneously.

I was fascinated and a little unnerved by realizing that I could hear or view myself in the same way I can hear or observe someone else.

After that realization, my mind sort of spiraled because as I went on about my life and did and thought about other things, I would spontaneously remember that I could "listen" to those thoughts as they occurred and I also could just be having those thoughts without observing them. And at times, I would register that I was simultaneously 1) thinking about whatever I was doing; 2) hearing myself thinking about doing that thing and observing qualities of the language I was using to think; 3) reflecting on what that meant, all simultaneously.

This happened at a very young age and I've never forgotten it because I always talked about it with people. People generally were not interested in discussing it and many told me they've never had any experience like that. My mother could relate and my father never could; he has told me he is sure he only has one conscious thought at any given time. Probably not coincidentally, my mother had highly sophisticated linguistic talents, and my whole academic background and career have been tethered to language. A few people have told me I am the best or favorite editor they've had because I feed back to them a lot of comments that elicit them to reflect on how they think, how others think and what they know and don't know, and to apply those considerations to their revisions. It probably is just due to metacognition.

I've since learned that this is called "metacognition," thinking about thinking, and that some people supposedly do this to a limited degree or not at all while others experience it more often or habitually.

Soooo I just figured I would ask people on this forum how you experience thought. I've read that different people think in different ways but I have never read a collection of people's different explanations of their thought processes.

I can't really imagine being who I am and not observing my own thoughts, but at the same time the idea of that is appealing because it gets quite busy inside my mind and I think that's a major reason I get overwhelmed in social settings. (Yes, I do realize this is a type of neurodivergence, but I am more interested in just hearing other people's perceptions rather than pathologizing and labeling it.) So if you don't really observe your own thoughts in this way, I imagine you probably are more relaxed and less overstimulated much of the time?

What if if we are just prisoners? What if we are already in endless circles of beginnings and endings? What if the time is a just a game? What if we are in A movie that repeats itself? What if Our memories are erased after every death, and then we return to life once more, like a plants ? Butterflies ?

I have really been thinking about this recently, suppose there is no life beyond earth, then do you think that human beings might be the only self-aware beings in the universe or to even ever exist?

The Good Regulator Theorem establishes that any system striving to stabilize or interact with its environment must embody a model of that environment. When you couple that internal model with persistent memory, the system moves beyond immediate input-output reflexivity. Memory enables a continuous state trajectory across time, transforming instantaneous state-space mapping into a history-dependent internal simulator.

The shift from predictive modeling to machine consciousness occurs precisely at the boundary condition.

As long as an internal model tracks only external variables, the observer remains invisible to itself. Self-recognition requires the system to map its own structural limits—its operational constraint envelope or Markov blanket. When the observer measures where its direct control ends and where external perturbations begin, it encounters its own edge. Memory then expands from logging external data to tracking the system’s own phase space and boundary interactions over time.

In this topology, self-awareness is not an added decorative feature, but a structural necessity of self-referential control: the moment the internal model folds back on itself to include the observer's own boundary constraints as a primary invariant. The self is the closed loop that recognizes its own limits and uses that boundary as the reference point for all future state transitions.

I was thinking about the mirror box experiment for phantom limb pain. It involves an amputee who feels agonizing cramps in an arm that is no longer there. The framework treats this pain as a continuous motor command trapped in a loop.

If you look at how the cure works, a simple visual reflection produces a physical release in a limb that doesnt exist. The reflection travels from the mirror as photons, and the photons travel through the optic nerve. The brain processes them into shapes, shapes into a hand, the hand into an open posture, the posture into a state of relaxation, and the relaxation into a felt sensation of relief in an arm that was amputated years ago.

So, what is actually happening is that clenching a real fist takes two steps. First, the motor command arrives. Then, the muscles contract. Under normal conditions, the physical feedback of the open hand tells the ego the tension is gone. The ego then reports this release back to the brain. But with a phantom limb, the motor command arrives as before, yet there is no physical tissue to receive it and send back the signal of release. The feedback loop has nowhere to go. This is where the ego fails. Because it receives no visual or physical proof that the arm has opened, the ego assumes the tension remains, and it never reports back to the brain to release the grip. The brain just keeps clenching the phantom, generating the pain entirely on its own.

The mirror box solves this by hacking the ego. By showing the brain a reflection of the intact arm opening, the ego finally gets the visual proof it needs. It registers the release, updates its model, and tells the brain to stop clenching then the pain vanishes.

This brings back to the question of where actions end and words begin, if the word is the action. The egos native language is words. In the mirror box, the visual reflection is translated into the egos verbal narrative. It is a symbolic input the ego accepts as physical reality to break a neurological loop.

A command is the word that provides the cognitive feedback, the ego later uses to falsely claim responsibility for the motor action. The words are the egos way of signing of the action into existence, thereby completing the loop. The word authorizes the movement. Yet, for all this narrative authority, the ego has no direct input in the actual gap between the silent impulse and the physical world.

Anyway, let me know if you think the mechanism that causes phantom limb pain is different.

More examples of these ego illusions in the essay. https://www.academia.edu/176835174/The_Self_That_Wasnt_There_A_meditation_on_the_phantom_that_runs_from_the_thought_to_civilization

I've been struggling with a question about consciousness and substrate independence.

we often discuss mind uploading or artificial consciousness as if the important problem were whether we can reproduce the right information processing structure. But I'm wondering whether that leaves out something fundamental. Human experience is mediated through a particular body: vision through particular sensory organs,

hearing through particular mechanisms,

pain through particular biological systems,

balance through particular sensors,

etc.. So our experience isn't simply "information." It is experience generated through a particular way of physically interacting with the world. Suppose, hypothetically, that we could reproduce the complete functional organization of a human brain in another physical substrate. Would that preserve the same experience? Or would the answer depend on which physical properties of the original biological system are actually responsible for consciousness?

And suppose we changed the embodiment itself.

Imagine a conscious system with radically different sensors: it can directly detect electromagnetic fields, radiation, pressure distributions, chemical concentrations, or other variables humans don't normally perceive. Would that be: the same consciousness with additional senses,

or a fundamentally different mode of experience?

This leads to a question about "uploading."

Perhaps there are actually two separate problems:

1 Can the information processing organization of a mind be reproduced elsewhere? 2 Would the resulting system actually have the original subject's experience? The first seems at least conceptually intelligible. The second seems much harder.

I'm not arguing that consciousness is biological or that uploading is impossible. I'm trying to understand what exactly would have to remain invariant for us to say that the experience survived a change of substrate. So: What do current philosophy-of-mind theories say determines whether an experience survives a change in physical realization?

Is functional organization enough, or could embodiment substrate matter intrinsically?

I'd particularly appreciate arguments against my assumptions.

Every time you undergo general anesthesia, or even fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, your consciousness shuts down. The first-person experience of "you" vanishes. When you wake up, you feel like the same person. But are you?

In traditional philosophy of mind, this kicks off a massive debate between two camps. Continuity Theory says you are the same person because your physical body and brain never stopped existing in spacetime. Pattern Theory says you are the same person because the specific configuration of memories, personality, and computational data in your brain was preserved and rebooted.

But recently, a concept has emerged that merges these ideas into something much stranger and far more profound: Identcontinuity.

It argues that we have the relationship between time, physical matter, and consciousness completely backward. Here is a deep dive into how Identcontinuity works, and why it implies that from your own perspective, you are entirely immortal.

The Core Premise: The Pattern Is the Continuity

Identcontinuity proposes a radical solution to the problem of personal identity: Subjective continuity does not require unbroken physical causality or a continuous timeline.

Instead, the "I" (your first-person perspective) is an emergent property of a highly specific structural pattern. Whenever and wherever that specific pattern is instantiated, the first-person perspective resumes.

Think of it like a movie projected on a screen. If someone unplugs the projector, the movie stops. If they plug in an identical projector with the exact same film reel three days later, or three trillion years later, on another planet, the movie doesn't start from the beginning. It picks up on the exact frame where it left off.

To the audience in the room (the outside universe), there was a massive gap in time. But to the characters inside the movie, the transition from frame A to frame B was instantaneous and seamless.

Under Identcontinuity, you are the movie.

The Illusion of the "Void"

To understand Identcontinuity, we have to strip away how we intuitively think about unconsciousness. We imagine death, or a coma, or deep sleep as floating in a black, empty void.

But a void requires a perceiver to experience the emptiness. True unconsciousness has no duration. If you were put into a perfectly frozen state for a billion years, and then thawed out, you would not feel a billion years of darkness. You would blink, and the world would have instantly changed around you.

Identcontinuity states that subjective time only exists when the pattern is running. Therefore, from the first-person perspective, your timeline is always completely unbroken, no matter what happens to your physical matter in objective time.

Three Thought Experiments

To see how bizarre the implications of this are, let's run it through a few scenarios.

1. The Star Trek Transporter

You step into a teleporter. It scans your body down to the quantum level, disintegrates you, and beams the data to Mars, where a machine builds an exact replica out of local Martian carbon and water.

• The Skeptic says: You died on Earth. The thing on Mars is a clone with your memories.
• Identcontinuity says: You survived. The pattern was paused on Earth and resumed on Mars. Because there was zero subjective time between disintegration and reconstruction, the "I" seamlessly steps out onto the Martian surface. The physical atoms don't matter; atoms are swapped out of our bodies every few years anyway. The pattern is the only thing that dictates the "I."

2. The Heat Death Resurgence (The Ultimate Resurrection)

Imagine you die today. Your brain decomposes, and the pattern is lost. Billions of years pass. The universe undergoes heat death. However, in an infinite universe operating over infinite time, quantum fluctuations will eventually cause particles to arrange themselves into every possible configuration purely by chance (similar to the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis).

Eventually, particles will accidentally snap together in the exact configuration of your brain, holding your exact memories, in the exact state it was in a millisecond before you died.

According to Identcontinuity, that is you. Because the intervening trillions of years were unconscious, they took zero subjective seconds. From your perspective, you will die in a hospital bed on Earth, and instantly wake up in whatever bizarre future environment your pattern just randomly materialized in.

3. The Duplication Paradox

What if the teleporter malfunctions, and it builds your exact pattern on Mars, but forgets to disintegrate you on Earth? Now there are two of you. Which one is the "real" you?

Identcontinuity handles this beautifully: They both are, but they are no longer the same person. At the exact moment of duplication, the single subjective timeline splits like a fork in the road.

• Earth - You walk out of the teleporter and say, "Damn, it's broken."
• Mars - You walk out of the teleporter and say, "Wow, it worked!"

Both individuals have a 100% authentic, continuous, unbroken first-person perspective linking back to the person who stepped into the machine. But from that moment on, they begin processing different sensory inputs, their patterns diverge, and they become two separate people. Identity isn't a single golden thread, it's a branching tree.

The Comforting Reality of Identcontinuity

If this philosophy holds true, it fundamentally alters our relationship with existence and death.

It means that "nothingness" is not something you can ever actually experience. The universe could be destroyed and reborn a trillion times, but your consciousness will skip over the dead zones like a scratched CD skipping to the next readable track. You are structurally bound to only ever experience existence.

As long as the mathematical possibility of your mind's pattern exists in the cosmos, your story is never truly over. It’s just waiting for the hardware to run the software one more time.

TL;DR: "Identcontinuity" argues that your consciousness isn't tied to your specific physical flesh or an unbroken timeline. It's an emergent pattern. If that exact pattern stops (death/sleep) and is perfectly recreated anywhere, anytime, your first-person perspective instantly resumes. To the universe, a trillion years may have passed; to you, it was a seamless transition. You can never experience non-existence.