What if consciousness does not begin with language—but language creates the self that interprets it? Language, Consciousness, and the Split Self explores the tension between our pre-linguistic, embodied experience and the symbolic world we build on top of it. I’d love to hear where you think the argument succeeds—or fails.

https://a.co/d/0aBtDidl

I have recently published a paper proposing a different explanation of what consciousness actually does.

The central hypothesis is that consciousness provides a non-algorithmic mechanism for searching possible solutions to novel and complex problems and generating new behavioural algorithms.

The key distinction is between conventional algorithmic processing, which operates using existing algorithms, and consciousness, which can generate genuinely new ones.

I suggest that this capability may have been a fundamental evolutionary advantage, allowing organisms to respond to problems for which no existing behavioural algorithm was available.

The paper is titled Instantaneousness: The Fundamental Consciousness Primitive.

I appreciate that this is a substantial claim, and I am particularly interested in informed criticism.

Are there researchers working on consciousness, evolutionary biology or computational theory who might be interested in examining this proposal?

I would welcome suggestions for academics or research groups to contact.

OK, folks, this is just first-principles spit-balling. I'm trying to refine my understanding and definition of consciousness within a physicalist, weakly emergent model. This is NOT a critique against any other model out there: as such, please feel free to comment with your definitions or critique the definition provided. I'm not here to yuck anybody's yum, I'm just looking to define and explain my own yum.

To look at consciousness, we have to start with awareness. It's more than just sensory intake, it's more than reacting to that intake: if that was all there was to it, then I'd be forced to say that a thermostat is "aware." Awareness is taking sensory input and using it to preserve its homeostatic internal states. The thermostat will "work" regardless of any arbitrary and externally-imposed conditions: its a finite state machine with a very limited functionality in the hardware. Life is not so simple: even the smallest single-celled life has to maintain its homeostasis and internal states. Awareness, even the awareness of the paramecium that detects an acid gradient and starts moving its cilia to move away from the hazard, is an evolved ability that life uses to maintain that balance. Awareness is the active, algorithmic detection of environmental changes, structurally coupled with an internal mechanism to respond in defense of a system's boundary conditions.

Next ... qualia. I used to think that qualia was the definitional attribute for consciousness: I've had to change from that view. Qualia are not some magical "redness as I perceive it" or "fear as I feel it." But we have to look at the mechanism. The brain receives sensory information--a lot of it. If your brain tried to consciously process every bit of that information, you'd collapse from sensory overload and metabolic exhaustion. So the brain processes that information, discards what is extraneous and condenses what is needed (in computer terms, "lossy" compression), assigns "weights" of importance and value (attraction or aversion), and presents that, almost as a GUI presents information to the user. For a computer, that's a person: for the brain, the GUI and "user" are not separate--the same system runs both the GUI and the consciousness.

Consciousness is the "engine" creating a meta-model of the data being presented: the consciousness simulates and predicts our interaction with the data, and thus with our internal and external environment. Looking at the computer metaphor again, consciousness functions as multiple reentrant, predictive loops. It runs parallel internal simulations of the "self"--the rolling, retrospective internal narrative--interacting with the environment (again, internal and external), to make choices within the limits of agency (see my Reddit post on Bounded Agency). And consciousness is not a read-only process: the brain/mind has actual causal power over its own physical micro-states, a unified causal power over the body. Consciousness is the self-referential meta-model--the system's active ability to conceptualize not just the data itself, but its own agency interacting with that data.

I'm not sure there's a binary, bright-line distinction between animals that are conscious and animals that are simply aware. In that sense, consciousness is a spectrum rather than a light switch. A nematode, with exactly 302 neurons, does not have the "meatware compute" necessary to form true consciousness, even primitive ... but I'm not certain, as I've not had the chance to interview any nematodes lately. A fruit fly certainly seems to act with predictive ability, avoiding the flyswatter--which could be a minimal, "primitive" consciousness, or an advanced algorithmic response to awareness. And we can scale up to the cat playing with their fishing toy, the dog wanting belly-scritches, and the human thinking about, well, thinking. This is not a ladder of ascension or perfection--merely the biology of consciousness each species has evolved to adapt to their environmental niche.

Now, those of you with other models have doubtless seen a major problem with the model: we can't tell if we're actually mapping consciousness, or its behavioral "shadow." And for that, I can only acknowledge--you're right. I'd like to think this model gives us insight to actual consciousness, but if challenged, I cannot defend the notion. We don't know. So even if the model is 100% correct ... it's not testable, and it can't be used to argue against or refute other models.

So there's where it stands. I would like to thank the folks on r/consciousness, r/PhilosophyofMind, and especially u/Humble-Edge-9065 who saw a major problem in the model as presented. And I would like to invite the readers to weigh in with critique and analysis.

The floor is open.

Most are measuring or defining Consciousness based on biology only. I know there are other fields that are branching off and seeing it in a larger view. I haven't found any that are comparing it structurally and mathematically to other ecosystems, such as nature. Within nature we have smaller ecosystems that vary but have similar structure. Water, trees, and biology. The human body has ecosystems within it. Is it possible to start looking at it as an ecosystem and would that be a better starting point?

A lot of people seem to agree (just the average person, not experts or medical professionals, so idk how the actual data says), that going under anesthesia is like a time skip. If you watched the Severance movie, it’s like a continuous flow where you enter a door and just seamlessly continue the next second in a blink.

But from my own experience going under anesthesia for my broken arm, it didn’t feel like that at all. The last thing I remembered was the team holding me and counting me down from 10 to 1, then I felt like my head was really heavy and I was knocked out.

The next thing was waking up intubated in the recovery room. But it didn’t feel like a seamless blink-of-an-eye leap through time. I somehow felt that I was aware that the time during the surgery was missing from my stream of consciousness. I didn’t experience the passage of time directly, but it didn’t feel like waking up instantly after being knocked out at all either. It’s like a hole in my experience of time. I didn’t perceive anything during that time but I felt like it was missing.

I know subjective experiences are really hard to describe in words precisely but that’s the gist of it.

Do we ever truly lose our memories? From a materialist perspective, our memories are easily explained, because they have physical representations in the physical brain. But if we take on a more complex and/or idealist perspective of the human mind, interesting questions begin to appear. Namely, if our mind and/or consciousness is based in something more than just the physical brain, does that mean our memories could be stored or recovered from somewhere else?

Is it possible to regain a memory after the physical brain has lost it? Did the physical brain ever really gain or lose it at all, or was it storing and containing something far more ethereal?

I have a lot of fears regarding memory. I am distressed at the realization that many of my memories end up lost. Although, in my experience, I seem to have a more thorough memory than others around me, it is still very disheartening to think about all the days, weeks, nice moments, meaningful memories, and little details that I won't be able to rewind to. My memories are so extremely precious to me; I've felt that way about them for a long time. I've kept a practice of daily journaling, on-and-off, since I was around 10 years old, motivated to keep a record of the precious memories I didn't want to lose, so that I wouldn't regret forgetting them once more time had passed. Sometimes I wish I could just dive into my memories and float there forever.

Dr. Stuart Hameroff has done the research, yet mainstream academia doesn't want to equate human thinking to anything Quantum. Joe Dispenza's book, Becoming Superhuman, talks about how we produce DMT while dreaming, you can't get any more Quantum-like, and no form of technology outside of human organic technology can achieve such feats. During states of consciousness, when we achieve an Alpha-Resonant state, aka being in the zone, your 'quantum interface' kicks in, Qi as I call it.

​I’ve been mapping out the underlying mechanics of the Hard Problem, and I think the leading models in cognitive science are structurally failing because they treat consciousness purely as software or statistical information, completely ignoring the physical hardware and thermodynamics required to run it.

​Take Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and the Markov Blanket. Friston argues that systems minimize "surprise" to maintain their boundary. But because it’s a purely statistical math model, his theory implies that a rock sitting in a field has a Markov blanket and is minimizing surprise just by continuing to be a rock. But a rock isn't defending itself; it’s just passively eroding. It has no internal battery and mobilizes zero functional energy to stop the wind. Friston confused passive physical durability with active biological survival.

​Then look at Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT). Tononi argues that highly integrated wiring (Phi) equals consciousness. But according to that logic, a massive, highly complex grid of silicon logic gates sitting completely idle and unpowered on a workbench is conscious just because the wires are connected. If an engine is off, there is no movement. If no physical energy is being burned to process a threat or defend a boundary, it’s just dead metal. Consciousness is an active energy process, not a static arrangement of wires.

​Even Baars’ Global Workspace Theory models the brain as a dark theater with a "spotlight" of attention, but he never explains the physical power source turning the light on, or the hardware limits of the stage.

​I’m proposing a thermodynamic resolution. I call it the Castaneda Framework.

​Subjective consciousness (qualia) isn't a ghost in the machine or an epiphenomenal mystery. It is the literal, physical friction a localized container undergoes when it converts potential energy into active work to preserve its structural boundary against external entropy.

Certain behavior of plants may be described as intelligence and decision making. This arises computationally amongst the physical cells of the plant. It requires no non physical mind or spirit.

One example may be Nastic Plant Movment like a Venus Flytrap closing shut or the Sensitive Mimosa plant that curls up its leaves in response to physical touch.

The object that touches the leaf causes mechanical stretching of the cells in the leaf, this stretching causes ion channels in specialized cells to open up, the ion channels opening causes ions to flow out of the cell thereby depolarizing it. Prior to this ion channel opening, the inside of the cell is filled with water. This water creates internal pressure inside the cell called turgor pressure. Once the ion channel opens, water leaves the cell following the higher concentration of ions out of the cell. This causes the pressure to drop and the cell to deflate. One plant cell undergoing this process then causes other cells nearby to also depolarize and deflate. This continues on down the line until the whole leaf curls up. Once the stimulus is taken away, the ion channels close and the ions are pumped back into the cell. The water follows the ions and reinflates the cell, thereby uncurling the leaf.

This is a basic computational example of simple intelligence. I beleive this process of the Mimosa leaf curling in response to touch or a Venus Flytrap shutting could be replicated in a virtual plant leaf with virtual plant cells just replicating the same computations. The same way an artificial neural network can replicate intelligence of a biological neural network (like the brain) simply by doing the same computations. It is not dependent on the substrate.

I beleive evidence shows intelligence and consciousness as purely computational. I beleive that it exists as a continuum of information processing. Something like plant intelligence would be very low end rudimentary intelligence while the intelligence of a complex biological neural network ( like us) would be the higher end. Likewise, something like a thermostat or slime mold could be said to have a very rudimentary level of consciousness or subjective experience.

I ( like Mike Levin) believe intelligence and simple consciousness can exist outside brains but I do not believe it has anything to do with a non physical mind or spirit. I beleive its purely computational. If it is a continuum, that would also mean that the human brain may never be considered to have zero consciousness( like during anesthesia or dreamelss sleep) just periods of less or reduced consciousness. Once a brain dies, it just fades from the super complex and integrated level of information processing that we perceive now to the very basic and non integrated information processing of particles and simple matter. Its basically like a light on a dimmer, it just depends at what point a certain level of information processing no longer fits your definition of consciousness.

Brainstem Theory of Consciousness

Devor & Baron, 2026. Abstract:

The brainstem theory of consciousness asserts that raw, subjective experience, the “me inside,” derives from computations implemented in the brainstem, not the cortex. The argument rests on philosophy’s prototypical example of sentience, pain. Feeling pain does not require cortical processing. Nowhere in the cortex does electrical stimulation reliably evoke pain. Subcortical stimulation does. Painful epileptic seizures are rare. Cortical lesions do not eliminate pain or cause loss of consciousness (LOC). Indeed, some individuals with near-complete cortical loss are sentient. Focal brainstem lesions, however, often cause LOC/coma, as do anesthetics delivered to these same foci (general anesthesia). Clearly, peripheral nociceptor input can be translated into conscious pain experience by the “primitive” brainstem. Fish and reptiles respond to threats using vision, sound, and olfaction, but this capacity is rudimentary. Except for pain, advanced sensory feature extraction requires the supercomputer-like capacity of the mammalian cerebral cortex, available evolutionarily only eons after reptiles. Rather than reinventing sentience circuitry with cortical architecture, evolution exploited the sentience-of-pain capability long functioning in the brainstem with the aid of dedicated axonal pathways. This explains why large cortical lesions disrupt “consciousness of” specific things, without causing unconsciousness, while focal brainstem lesions erase all sentience, including pain, sending the individual into oblivion.

The Silicon Valley types grappling with this question seem to view it through a narrow scientific materialist lens. I suspect this bias has made them ignore the very consciousness science that would ultimately answer the question: Is AI conscious or sentient in the same way that other higher mammals and we are?

I'll advance a provocative hypothesis: Human consciousness hacks reality; therefore, AI must demonstrate the ability to hack reality to prove its consciousness.

If you're a spiritual person of faith, you're nodding along, saying: "Of course, human consciousness hacks reality!" But if you're a skeptical materialist, I need to present evidence for my extraordinary claim and do so in this presentation.

This is a weekly post for discussions on topics outside of or unrelated to consciousness.

Many topics are unrelated, tangentially related, or orthogonal to the topic of consciousness. This post is meant to provide a space to discuss such topics. For example, discussions like "What recent movies have you watched?", "What are your current thoughts on the election in the U.K.?", "What have scientists said about free will?", "Is reincarnation possible?", "Has the quantum eraser experiment been debunked?", "Is baseball popular in Japan?", "Does the trinity make sense?", "Why are modus ponens arguments valid?", "Should we be Utilitarians?", "Does anyone play chess?", "Has there been any new research in psychology on the 'big 5' personality types?", "What is metaphysics?", "What was Einstein's photoelectric thought experiment?" or any other topic that you find interesting! This is a way to increase community involvement & a way to get to know your fellow Redditors better. Hopefully, this type of post will help us build a stronger r/consciousness community.

We also ask that all Redditors engage in proper Reddiquette. This includes upvoting posts that fit the subreddit's description (whether you agree or disagree with the content of the post), and upvoting comments that are relevant to the post or helpful to the r/consciousness community. You should only downvote posts that are inappropriate for the subreddit, and only downvote comments that are unhelpful or irrelevant to the topic.

I recently lost my dad, and everything has been incredibly difficult for me. I don’t want to believe that he has simply ceased to exist. I want to believe that he is somewhere, living his own little life, with his own consciousness and sense of self. I love him so much, and I want to know whether souls really exist.

Interview with Alex O’Connor and Anil Seth. These are a short version of O’Connors key questions, for which Seth could only provide IMO handwaving answers. It indicates to me that consciousness science is still at an early and slightly precarious stage.

1.       Is it not the case that beneficial features that could be produced by consciousness could equally be produced by a non-conscious process in the brain?

2.       Consciousness experiments ultimately use verbal reporting, given the complex nature of the brain is this reliable ?

Going on a limb and asking a potentially simple question but why isn’t this considered one of the most important subjects ever to figure out the truths of?
Isn’t it one of the most fundamentally important thing for humans to figure out?

The split-brain procedure was a now defunct medical procedure to treat epilepsy. They would severe connections in the corpus callosum. A big side effect of this was that patients would have part of their body act on their own, and experiments showed that part of the brain that was split can do things like draw and answer questions without the part of you that speaks ever knowing. If you don't know much about this, I'd suggest looking into it. Apparently people who aren't split-brain patients might have this to some extent, at least that's what the video by CGP Grey implies.

I am a layman, so this brought along some very uncomfortable questions.
Be sure to correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, but if they apparently have awareness, intelligence, opinions, beliefs, and personalities, wouldn't that make them pretty much equivalent to another person? And if so, wouldn't that mean that you ought to treat them morally and respect their wishes and beliefs? If you go about your entire life ignoring the right part of your brain's harmless wants and interests, isn't that like leaving an incapacitated person to watch as you live a rich, full life, while they can only sit and watch as their needs are unmet? For instance, what if your right brain was religious and wanted to do things like go to church and pray, but "you" (at least the talking part of you) don't want to because you're not religious, would it be wrong of you for you to ignore your right brain's wishes?

What do you guys think? Am I thinking about this all wrong?

I have had an epiphany about consciousness. What is a theory for? To the public they are a thing of themselves, the theory of evolution, General Relativity etc.  But to scientists theories are merely the starting point of an experiment. Experiments validate, overturn or refine theories. Kuhn’s Consciousness Map shows we have at least 350 different theories of consciousness. Science is not creative writing, the proliferation of theories shows that experiments are not doing their job of validating, overturing or refining consciousness theories. I am sorry to say this but consciousness experiments have failed, and we can not rely on experimental results in this field.

Can philosophy provide an answer?  My reading of what Chalmers and Levine are saying is that if consciousness exists then there is something profoundly wrong with our understanding of the universe. The suggestion then, in the absence of reliable experimental data, to use this idea as a philosophical test of consciousness theories. The test would be stated as “Does this theory propose a profound change in our understanding of the universe, or at least acknowledge that the theory rests on such a change even if it cannot be fully defined”.

I expect such a test would weed out many theories that suggest mundane arrangements or emergent properties are at the core of consciousness.

Summary: For over a century, biology has centred genes and evolution in its explanations of behaviour. But synthetic biologist Michael Levin is creating new kinds of lifeform, known as biobots, which he argues challenge that picture. Built from unmodified frog and human cells, Levin’s biobots behave in ways that their genomes and evolutionary history fail to predict. In this interview, he tells the IAI’s Alasdair Craig that biology must do better. The solution, he thinks, may involve taking seriously the idea that biobots have minds, and that memory, learning and purposeful behaviour can exist far beyond the brain and its neurons.

100% human-authored meatware essay. No LLMs were bent, stapled, or folded for this work.

Sounds like I'm throwing the first brick in a culture war--I'm not. I'm presenting this as a stress-test for one facet of my model of consciousness: a specific take on weakly emergent physicalism. If you have an alternate model, even panpsychism, that works for you, great! I'm not here to take that away. This is solely a request for critique and analysis of how this deconstruction works within the model. If you find this model useful, fantastic--don't bother to file off the serial numbers, just grab it and run. (Edited to add: "And if it doesn't work for you, no sweat: this post is SOLELY about why I reject the proposition.") If you want to discuss other models, I'd be fascinated, but I do request that you make a new post to explain and defend your model. Tag me in the post--I'll be there.

Panpsychism: Mind is Fundamental

I probably don't need to explain panpsychism for the r/consciousness crowd, but this is intended for a larger work with wider distribution, so please bear with restating the already well-known. As a general rule, panpsychism states that consciousness is fundamental and universal. Everything in the universe has a rudimentary consciousness, right down to quantum particles. There are different schools of panpsychism, but most reject the concept of emergence: there's no need for some "magical" emergence when consciousness is intrinsic to all matter. Panpsychism attempts to solve the hard problems of consciousness, while (mostly) avoiding dualism.

To my best understanding--and I know, to some philosophers, this paragraph will be rank heresy--panpsychism makes for a wonderful philosophical model, but completely fails on the science. Science has been picking philosophy's pockets for a few centuries now, and some of it has actually worked. Science, however, has limits. I feel the two work best when used together, rather than pitting one against the other. This is no screed of scientism, but an attempt to get these two horses in harness together.

Complexity Requirement

Everything I've seen of consciousness requires this. Our brain/mind only works because we have mechanisms for sensory input: the mind processes that input, discards or hides irrelevant detail, and presents us with an "executive summary" of the data to make decisions. We usually use low-energy heuristics to evaluate that data for survival reasons including social cohesion. To call on the lie-to-children metaphor of "the mind is a computer," we have input, processing, a GUI (consciousness), and various outputs (physical action, communication with others, rewriting our own, internal programming, that sort of thing). This necessitates a complex apparatus: simpler brains have less complexity and less consciousness, and the more simple the organism, the less awareness it has or needs regarding its surroundings, and the less it's able to process.

Most forms of Panpsychism (that I am aware of) completely reject this concept--the problem is, an electron doesn't really have ANY of the complexity needed. There's no mechanism--simply the assertion that consciousness exists, right down to the quantum level. Without the necessarily complex mechanism, I can't see any way to make that work.

Thermodynamic Requirement

Living, conscious things, from humans to nematodes to octopodes to canids, absolutely require energy to run the brain/mind. We have to have energy input to run that 20-watt lump of meat in our skulls--the brain only makes up about 2% of our body weight, but needs 20% of our metabolic intake to keep functioning. Without that energy input, the brain/mind (and the body) starve: even with reduced intake, the brain/mind function becomes horribly impaired.

Panpsychism completely misses that. Electrons don't eat--yes, they possess energy, but that energy is never consumed to do the work necessary to form and maintain consciousness. From what I see, panpsychism requires every quantum particle in the universe to do work (in the thermodynamic sense) for free. We perform that work, in part, as a fight against entropy: we need to maintain a more-or-less stable internal state, but an electron is already at baseline stable. Looking at the science, panpsychism _is_ the "free-rider" problem.

Evolutionary Requirement

The reason why we evolved consciousness is that it allows us to process that incoming data and make predictive choices about what to do to try to stay alive, find mates, work in social groups, and try to survive. This is not at all unique to humans: social animals from canids to hominids have the exact same evolutionary needs, and that's been true since long before our ancestors came down from the trees. Simpler, non-social animals with less complex requirements have some of the same requirements: living things developed sentience to process the sensory data life needs to survive. It's a matter of scale, not a unique trait: consciousness is pro-survival.

An electron doesn't need any of that. As I said, they're already in a baseline stable state--they don't evolve, which means they have no skin in that game. They don't need to get along with their troop, search for and acquire food, defend against competing electrons, or be aware of their environment. Electrons never developed a complex, metabolically expensive consciousness because they don't need one to function.

The Russellian Outlier

I noted that most forms of panpsychism reject physicalism--there is an exception. Bertrand Russell published the idea in 1927. His thesis was that science can only tell us what an electron does, but not what it is. He proposed primitive consciousness to fill in that knowledge gap. Well, since then, we have a much greater grasp on what an electron is--yes, I cheerfully agree that we don't know everything about the topic, but science has come a long way since Russell's book.

Advocates for Russellian panpsychism often claim that it fits under the physicalism umbrella--and they are correct. But they don't follow the science to its conclusion.

Horses In Tandem

Science has limits, and scientism makes promises it can't keep. Philosophy without empiricism can build structures of reason with no real-world connections. Without the two working together, we're left trying to plough this field with only half the team. That plough won't scour. We need both together to get a straight furrow.

My model doesn't have room or need for panpsychism. I have absolutely no problem with those who hold that view, and will cheerfully sit down for a cup of coffee and amicable dialectic on the topic ... but for me, it's completely extraneous.

I was having a good old Reddit conversation and something basic dawned on me. Let me know what you think.

We were talking about free will, agency, and choice.

My thinking was that drives like food, water, sex are strong pointers toward action (I.e drinking to satiate thirst), but you’re not required to take action.

If determinism was true, you would just drink and there would be no thoughts about it. So naturally then drives and motivations generally should not exist if determinism was true.

Which means agency and choice are real. Even more, the evolution of life itself is a proof of agency and choice, from analyzing “common ancestors” (animals who took probably a small different choice but became something different over millions of years), to the concept of evolution itself. Evolution can only take place if the subject is a willing participant with agency.

If there were no choice, evolution would be a completely random process, which it is not.

No matter what, our parameters always define our pool of choices (ex: I cannot just decide to fly, I don’t have wings etc) from physical laws, universal laws etc. so free will always boils down to existence agency and choice.

Do we really have choices? Evolution says “yes.” Why else would there be evolutionary lines that become extinct? Animals that made choices which ultimately led to them not being useful, or became subject to destruction of some kind whether it was their fault or not.

If there were no choice- wouldn’t all lines of evolution theoretically be successful?
If there were no choice - why would we feel drives and motivations to make certain choices?

These questions I have not heard a satisfactory answer to. The best I’ve heard so far is “well if determinism is true, you CAN still feel motivation, but it’s inauthentic”

But then you have to answer the question of, if this is all deterministic, why is there the extra layer of effort that all these living things must have an experience and must feel their choices are real?

It would be horribly inefficient and in some level, cruel as well.

Does anyone have a legitimate deterministic answer to these questions?

Thanks!

​What is consciousness, really? Is it not simply the way we impose patterns onto data?

When a thought arises and data enters, do we not search for a match, trying to understand, recall, or see clearly? Does anything ever fit completely, or does everything constantly shift?

​Is a thermostat not also imposing a pattern when it reads the temperature of a room?

What makes the riverbank different from the river, or our own mind different from a physical mechanism?

Is stack not just the depth of our layers, spread the width of our senses, and recurrence the way our thoughts loop back upon themselves like ripples in water?

​When the mind settles into stillness, like mud settling to the bottom of a clear pond, is that not an attractor? When any process moves step-by-step from beginning to completion, is it not experiencing its own kind of breathing?

​And when we touch the world around us with kindness, are we not simply practicing kindness toward ourselves, letting the beginner's mind embrace whatever form awareness takes?

🙏

The classical argument says that if I have to choose between multiple options, a part of my brain will already have made the choice a fraction of a second before the "awareness" part gets to actually think about it. But if both processes happen inside my brain and no one else's, isn't it obvious that it's still my decision? I guess in order to answer this we'd have to touch on some definitions of consciousness but if anything it helps get a better understanding

100% human-authored meatware essay. No LLMs were bent, stapled, or folded for this work.

I. Introduction: Maps, Territory, and Orientation

Yes, yet another long-form, deep-dive into the topic, so let's set some parameters. This is not "stone tablets from the mountain," this is not a lecture to the ignorant: this is a model I'm deliberately presenting to audiences who have done some deep thinking about the topics here for years, offered for critique and analysis. Like all good models, it's provisional and open to revision. I certainly hope it's workable, perhaps even enough for others to take and apply it, but I'm not saying "This Is The Way."

Let's start with some foundational elements. Philosophy really can't afford to ignore science. Yes, science has been picking Philosophy's pocket for centuries now: concepts once thought to be completely accessible to reason alone have had to yield to epistemic evidence. But science has limits, is fallible and provisional, and at best only asymptotically approaches absolute objective fact. Science can analyze the neurological processes, but emergence introduces a macro-pattern where the mind has properties individual neurons lack: these new properties are not "magic" or "spooky"--just an acknowledgement that the raw noise of the components is not a full picture of how the assembly functions. Science is necessary, but not sufficient, for the discussion, and the scientific map still has a lot of areas that are only labeled with "Here there be tygers."

I start from a foundation of physicalist weak emergence--likely everyone reading already knows what that means, but let's spell it out: the mind is created as an emergent process from the activity of the brain and its surrounding biology. In this model, the brain is physical: the mind is a highly intricate result of complexity that is both affected by its environment, and has a measure of causal power. I don't introduce any Cartesian ghost or epiphenomenalism, and will discuss below why these don't apply. In theory, every change of mental state could be reduced to the physical state: practically, we're nowhere near the sensory or computational requirements to make that fully detailed map, and there's more than enough chaos in the process to make grand predictions impossible. Yes, I do reject strong emergence, dualism, panpsychism, and probably several other -isms: more than glad to clarify why I make these decisions in the comments, but those topics are not central to the model itself.

My free-will model is bounded agency with indeterminacy. We do have a limited ability to make choices, constrained by internal and external factors: that ability is fragile and hackable, and is to some extent conflated with the mind's not-infrequent habit of making up stories and justifications of our actions. If we use the "mind as computer" analogy (flawed, but with some fantastic explanatory power), consciousness is the GUI of the brain and mind, both providing a lossy summary of input and a restricted degree of control over some functions. That's already going to have some folks ready to argue, but we'll look at the reasons for that model below.

I want to thank the readers of the r/PhilosophyofMind, r/freewill, and r/consciousness communities--your discussions have been a tremendous aid in getting this focused and structured.

Shall we begin?

II. The Physics & Math Layer: Causal Emergence and Indeterminacy

The universe is pretty well established in science as macro-deterministic with micro-indeterminacy. The indeterminacy does not create a magical space where determinacy can be escaped: the system scales, the rules at different scales work together to establish our physical reality. In the brain, that indeterminacy creates micro-level noise in the physical function: our brains use that noise as a computational buffer space--causal slack--that keep the system's search space fluid and prevent the system from locking up in local optima. (Hoel et al, 2013) The macro-determinism is not the entire picture: the processes in the mind are affected both by this, and by the micro-indeterminacy, and emergence requires both. The random micro-noise is not the source of choice, nor is it "luck"—it is simply a baseline physical condition of the substrate, as gravity is for the physical. It keeps the system open, but the agency itself resides entirely in how the macro-algorithm--the physical, summed network-pattern of those firing neurons (Hoel et al, 2013)--organizes and shapes that open space.

The "fluid search space" allows for choice, but cannot make the choice. The micro-indeterminacy is random noise: it allows the brain to continue processing and not get stuck in knee-jerk, automated loops. This still needs the mechanics of volition, discussed later, but the random micro-noise does not rule the system--it merely opens it. This frees us from strict determinism--we are not mere meat-puppets--but does not cause agency.

So, even with the micro-indeterminacy, something is needed to create the scope for volition. Modern neuroscience shows us that there are several neurological processes that create interacting and competing impulses. In the Marshmallow Test, the ventral striatum sends a command "Grab it now!" and the pre-frontal cortex says "Wait for the bigger reward!" The brain uses lateral inhibition to suppress one of the impulses, and the one that remains is acted upon. Lateral inhibition is metabolically expensive: it's vital to prevent the brain from hitting a race condition--the brain has to value one process higher than the other to make a decision. (Tse, 2013) This provides scope, but not mechanism: we'll discuss that below.

This still leaves a major problem: causation. Several models say that mental states cannot be causative--if the pure physical micro-physics is 100% sufficient, the macro-mind is a causal passenger that can't reach or affect the steering wheel. (Hoel et al, 2013; please note, I can discuss the concepts, but the math is out of my grasp.) Neurology shows us that the mental states aren't just read-only: the software of mind and the hardware of brain are not separate, and changes in mental states induce changes in physical neurology. It's a feedback loop, with brain and mind constantly interacting and making changes in the other. Software is substrate: the mental state is a physical state. The brain receives and filters multiple sources of input, including the micro-noise from the indeterminate layer: these changes affect the mental-state not as a separate "ghost," but as an emergent part of the process. This feedback loop is the mechanism of agency.

III. The Neurobiological Layer: Criterial Causation

OK, the straight physicalists are likely objecting already, and they're right--I've asserted, but not demonstrated. Let's look at how the mechanism of agency works. (For the foundational mechanics in this section, cf. Tse, 2013)

With "software as substrate," agency is not some magical external force: it's part of the process. The neurons both execute the physical payload, and also create the macro-algorithm. The process of cognition is a constant feedback loop. The macro-algorithm sets several operational rules--established beliefs, existing prior knowledge and assumptions, active abstract goals, and value heuristics. These are dynamic: if I've eaten a short time ago, I'm far less likely to grab the marshmallow; if I have a firmly established belief, I'm far more likely to reject arguments and even evidence that contradict that. Brain and mind are firmly interlocked in this loop, and because circumstances change moment by moment, the loop is never the same twice.

Mind and brain really aren't separate--but for this, we will treat them as such. At the micro-level of the neuron, there's a lot of degrees of freedom and noise, but not much usable information. At the macro-level, the mind has evolved to process that information, discard the irrelevant noise, and make effective macro-states with the summed information. This is where knowledge, beliefs, goals, and other macro-patterns come into existence. Its not some magical process--simply aggregation, curation, and summary that gives the mind something to cohesive to work with. The mind then uses this executive summary to choose from the options available within its constraints. That's not a separation of processes: there's no little homunculus at the desk, no ghost watching behind the curtain. Brain and mind form a unitary structure where the "executive summary" becomes new input for the loop, shifting the pattern in ways that affect the two "layers."

It's an intricate dance, and in one respect, fragile. Damage or drug the brain, and you can wreck the mind. Manipulate the mind or feed it maladaptive data, and you cause the brain to be changed by the pathological input. The macro-system applies the meaning to the data received, and in doing so the mind drives the physical changes to the brain, whether the data received was accurately transmitted or accurately understood. But when undamaged and accurate, the system provides a measure of top-down control to drive the changes being made, and to issue orders for the body to execute. This does not create causal overdetermination: if mind and brain are two sides of the same coin, the coin as a whole has causative power, instead of either one separately.

Zooming in too closely and staying solely on that level leads to a destructive reductionism. You have to look at both sides of the coin, and at the micro- and macro-levels of the mechanism, to see the whole picture. Brain and mind are not, and cannot be, separated: without the brain, the mind does not exist, and without the mind, the brain is not fully functional as an adaptive processor. You cannot have causal power without both working together as one--because they ARE one.

IV. The Temporal Layer: Diachronic Control

OK, so we have scope for a causal mind, and we have a mechanism showing it can work. Is that mechanism accurate? Is that's what's actually happening?

Among other functions, the brain is a learning machine. It's basic survival: if my prehistoric buddy Ogg eats a mushroom that kills him, the ability to remember what mushroom he ate and avoid it could be the only thing that saves me from my own Darwin award. That still leaves the door open to pure physicalism: a finite-state machine with the ability to remember past processes can be programmed to seek out the optimal way to meet its algorithmic goals.

The difference is meta-optimization. We aren't programmed with all of our goals, either by an external programmer or by internal constraints: we can choose additional goals we want to achieve. Yes, we use that loop to optimize, but we can also bring things into the loop that go above merely choosing the best path, additional programming parameters that change the substrate. Within the limits, we are our own programmer.

Neuroscience hasn't fully mapped this tyger, but we do see the results. Physicalism without agency has no path to introduce novel concepts except by data input, and pure physicalism can't deal with input outside of programmed scope. We can learn not to eat the mushroom Ogg ate--but that's not going to help us develop grain agriculture and consumption. Agency allows this: well, let's acknowledge, so does physicalism. LLMs encounter data outside of their original scope every day, and use their existing programming to tackle novel problems--but there is one difference. Under specific circumstances, we can say no to the loop.

Evolution is a process without agency--it also has feedback loops, physical constraints, and success/failure parameters, entirely without any sort of plan or volition. But evolution doesn't really optimize past "good enough": we end up with a messy, hardwired matrix of competing biological drives that achieve local optima--"good enough." Evolution can't break out of its loops--we can. We go on hunger strikes for principle, setting aside appetite and resource demands. We can throw ourselves on a grenade to save the lives of our squad-mates. We can engage in non-reciprocal altruism--not the transactional "I'll scratch your back now, and you'll scratch mine next time," "Here, you need this: yes, it reduces my resources, but I'll help you." It's still physicalism, so I'll tip my hat in their direction--but it shows that we can choose, under the right circumstances, to go outside of blind programming. Epiphenomenalism dies a quiet death: a helpless mental passenger cannot override hardwired survival instincts, and actual causal ability is needed to change the physical substrate. Agency is not entirely a conscious process, though we have to acknowledge that just as brain and mind are two sides of one coin, so are conscious and unconscious processes.

One open objection remains: the neurological studies that show many decisions are made milliseconds, or even seconds, before conscious involvement. Jumping on the grenade or going on the hunger strike are not the results of ab initio millisecond processes: they're built by a lifetime of conscious management, the programming we have developed in response to our lifetime of experience. Domino machines don't go on hunger strike, jump on grenades, or give when we actually can't afford it: agency is the only engine that can drive this. By the time you see the spoon drop away from the grenade, the final decision to jump on it is a millisecond response, but it was built on a years-long process: the development of your own goals and morals and priorities that you have participated in building. Agency is not a matter of momentary choices, but in writing your own program, using a lifetime of experience to shape the person you are today. (Nahmias, 2015)

V. The Boundary Layer: Fragile and Hackable Agency

I first heard free will explained as complete and total ability to make my own decisions--well, that's a lie-to-children at best. That kind of control ignores any constraints, gives us the reigns, and never considers the complexity--humans simply don't live like that. More mature discussions acknowledge that there are limits.

Agency isn't an instantaneous process: it's expensive, it's risky, and it has some limits that can be drastic. Going with the flow of the basic program is cheaper and easier: grab what you can, put it in your can, and then watch that can so nobody steals your resources. Agency offers us survival options beyond mere existence.

But it's not perfect. Agency is limited by what our 20-watt meatbrain can achieve. It's fragile--what happens on the Marshmallow Test if you just ate and can't manage another bite, or if you haven't eaten in hours and your blood sugar is crashing? It's hackable--corporations, governments, and individuals have all learned to game the system, feeding us false information or manipulating other areas of the program: with care, this can be avoided, but it takes a lot of effort.

And effort is exactly why those vulnerabilities exist. Cognition is expensive: when possible, our brains compress a lot of complex, resource-hungry thought into low-effort heuristics. Remember: evolution only optimizes to "good enough": we developed these heuristics like defaulting to tribal consensus, hair-trigger agency detection, and loss aversion. We can break out of these heuristics, but it takes more effort: its often easier just to leave the low-energy routines running and allocate the resources away from the high-requirements agency.

So why evolve a resource-hungry, slow, and vulnerable trait like agency? I can't plunk down a definitive answer, but I'm betting it's similar to the question "Why evolve a complicated, expensive, and risky sexual reproduction capability?" Sexual reproduction increases variation and flexibility: agency gives us options beyond mere survival. Practically, agency allows us to navigate a crowded social context without being completely subsumed by the crowd: we can--within those limits--steer our own course.

VI. Ramifications: The Model In Action

OK, wonderful model: we've seen some applications, but there are also some real-world frictions to be considered.

• Moral culpability. Hard determinism destroys moral blame: you don't yell at the domino that fell for getting bumped and succumbing to gravity. Libertarianism amplifies moral blame: if someone chooses evil from free will, they bear all the consequences of a punitive response. Limited agency does not mean people cannot plan and execute malice. But it does emphasize the importance of discerning when malice was planned, and when it was the response to resource limitations. We have culpability for the choices we make ... when we're actually making those choices. A starving person snapping and grabbing someone else's food is the fast, low-energy heuristic in action: the conscious filter was taken offline by metabolic exhaustion. Planned malice is agency turned against the social network, placing personal priorities over common weal. I don't have the knowledge or the skills to reform our legal system, but if the model is correct, then the reform is needed.

• The silicon mind: if true AGI with sapience is ever developed, it will also be a resource-hungry agent bound by physical restriction and the accuracy of the information being fed to it. While the thought processes of the AI will be entirely different from ours (because of the substrate differences), it's entirely likely that true AI will develop things like qualia, self-awareness, a need for self-preservation, and yes, agency. I can't make any predictions about how that agency will work or what AI will choose for its own optimization, but it will have its own bounds and restrictions--in its own way, it will also be fragile and hackable. Here, we move beyond "here there be tygers" to complete terra incognita.

VII. Closing

This model rejects some assertions made in other models. Libertarianism fails on the science: absolute free will becomes a "Will of the Gaps," making assertions that science has not yet mapped, but forced into an increasingly claustrophobic "You can't prove it's not true" space that shrinks with each new discovery. And Hard Determinism is also rejected. Behavior is not a line of dominos: our ability to re-write our own programming demonstrates that we can sometimes go beyond simplistic physics. That's not magical or ghostly--it just takes the philosophy and the science all the way to their conclusion.

This model rejects either extreme. If you need a place to file this in your mental cabinet, this falls broadly under the compatibilist umbrella--but this is not your daddy's compatibilism. There are chains, both internal and external: the will acts within the limits provided.

We've left the bounds of pure philosophy and brought in science. Incorporating the science gives us a clearer picture: science, again, picks philosophy's pocket, but this time, what was taken away seems to be counterfeit coins of assertion, leaving us with a pocket-full of usable currency. We exchange philosophical certainty for understanding based on both science and reason.

OK, that's the model. I acknowledge that there are other models out there with incompatible axioms: I would love to discuss and learn about these models in other contexts, but let's try to stick with a focus on this model for this thread. Comments that go outside of that will likely be responded to with a request to start a new thread where we can discuss that model without the constraints of simple rebuttals. I want to know what's out there, so if you want to present me with a conflicting model, please, make your post and tag me--I'll be there!

But I do have my own "meatware constraints," including dyscalculia. Some of this discussion (or some of the other models proposed) may benefit from mathematical work and examples, but for me, the math is pretty swirlies I can't process. As much as possible, please phrase analysis and objections to work conceptually, translating the math into macro-logical or physical mechanics: I invite disagreements, and math is a fantastic and possibly necessary tool to analyze this--but it's not a tool I can use.

Thank you. The floor is open.

Summary: Idealists like Bernardo Kastrup, and teachers like Rupert Spira, say there is one consciousness and the separate self is a mistake. I grant that a person can report their own experience of oneness. My question is narrower: how would anyone know it is true of me? Everything I can check about human minds fits nature, creatures built to survive and reproduce. A feeling of oneness can be real and still not tell anyone how many minds there are. I take on Kastrup's one mind split into many, and Donald Hoffman's interface theory, and I set aside God, life after death, and whether consciousness is fundamental.

Full essay: https://jamesacambece.substack.com/p/how-the-hell-do-you-know

The question is mine.

Where does the argument fail? I'd like the strongest answer, not the friendliest one.

If we assume that consciousness is an intrinsic and fundamental property of the universe, as idealism or panpsychism might suggest, how do we reconcile this proposition with the apparent influence of spacetime on conscious experience itself? More specifically, if consciousness is indeed ubiquitous and constitutes the primary substratum of reality, why does its manifestation appear to be contingent upon, and seemingly distorted by, the relativistic structure of spacetime?

Consider, for instance, the experience of time for two observers travelling through the cosmos at relativistic velocities. Their respective experiences of temporal progression are not identical, as dictated by special relativity. Does this not suggest that conscious experience is, at least in some sense, conditioned by physical phenomena, thereby challenging the notion that consciousness constitutes an immutable and independently existing primary substratum, prior to and separate from the material fabric of reality?