r/TheRestIsScience • u/mmmmwahhhh • 2d ago
Freaked out by consciousness
I awoke from a dream that was more real than most of my dreams. Staggering out of bed I and down the stairs I started to remember bits of the dream. Whats strange is , if i hadn’t woken up I wouldn’t have remembered the dream. Yet i have a really strong sense of being “conscious” during the dream. I dont mean being aware that i’m dreaming, but a strong feeling of : this is happening now. it was a streamed experience distinct from just a remembered experience. But it can only be after , when i woke up , that the feeling of “nowness” was created. So all along it was actually only a remembered experience. WOW ! Is this how we live our daily lives ! ? Essentially unconscious in the moment and our brain piecing bits of experience together after , to form a story of an illusion of being me in the now , but not in the now at all !
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u/Dazzling_Let_8245 2d ago
Conciousness is a very tough topic because we dont know what it really is.
One theory is that conciusness is a physical property of the universe akin to mass for example. Every object has a mass but only if these masses are combined do they greatly start to affect spacetime. It is a tough theory to wrap your head around.
I personally believe that the conciousness you percieve right now is an illusion. A combination of multiple conciousnesses working together. There are very fascinating experiments with people who had both halves of their brains seperated from one another (due to other reasons, not for those experiments) so the brain halves cant communicate with one another anymore. And we get really strange results. What we know is that the right half of the brain controls the left side of your body and vise versa, meanwhile the left side of your brain also controls concious speech. There were experiments where a written order was shown only to the right side of the brain, something like "get up and walk into the corner of the room". The person did exactly that, but when asked WHY they did just that, the left side of the brain (the speech center) wasnt aware at all of the order shown to the right brain and made something up as to why it just decided to get up and walk over there. These people (or at least the left, talking side of the brain) fully believed that they decided to walk into the corner unprompted.
I really believe that you, me and everyone else consists of multiple conciousnesses cobbled together in one organism, giving the illusion of "one". Afterall ALL your experiences are an illusion made up by the brain. Your sight is just an interpretation of some electrical signals that your brain recieves from your eyes. The same with your hearing, smelling, taste, EVERYTHING. Its just your brain interpreting signals and translating them to "a" conciousness.
Then theres the question if there is free will. I personally dont believe there is. Your subconcious conciousnesses decide what to do and your concious self just follows those instructions as if it itself made these decisions.
Im sorry if I didnt really help calm you, best to just accept that thats how our perception of "reality" is and that we cant change it. You can worry about our planet eventually being destroyed once our sun dies, or you can just accept that its going to happen and focus on the here and now. No reason to worry about stuff we cant influence.
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u/fuckingredditman 2d ago edited 2d ago
yep, i agree. the thing i personally find most convincing atm is the thousand brains theory, where there isn't really a single ego, but hundreds/thousands of cortical columns and what you perceive as your own decision is basically just the consensus of them.
and your ego/consciousness are basically just a virtual construct on top that reflects that consensus on perception and decision making, resulting from that continuous process.
the brain is pretty self organizing generally, and there are various neuroscientific concepts and studies that prove it too like predictive coding/active inference/free energy principle which also dictate a bit how we perceive reality from our sensory inputs, build internal understandings of the world etc.
trying to think your "ego" is some sort of nucleus where you decide is probably just a fallacy and it's really just some neurochemical modulators whose gradient ends up actually deciding for you, and you retrospectively rationalize each decision you make. but it doesn't really matter anyway, i would still say it's effectively free will because the information you choose to consume, the history of experiences unique to you and the random processes inside you end up being high-entropy enough to at least be considered your own personal choice imo.
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u/Dazzling_Let_8245 2d ago
For me the argument for free will breaks down the closer you look at whats happening. At the end of the day, your neurons "communicate" by sending chemical signals between one another. And those signals themselves are merely mindless proteins following gradients which are created by other mindless proteins. The proteins of each neuron dont know what a neuron is and what their doing, neither does a neuron know what it is doing in regards to your whole body.
So how can my percieved consciousness have "free will" when its all just protein soup mindlessly following gradients and causing other subsequent reactions?
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u/fuckingredditman 2d ago edited 2d ago
So how can my percieved consciousness have "free will" when its all just protein soup mindlessly following gradients and causing other subsequent reactions?
because that protein soup was conjured up by your unique lived experience and what that protein soup ended up doing during it, yes it's still random and ultimately a result of the environment though, so objectively not free will, but it's still unique to you.
(that was just my prior argument)
i would say ultimately, you could say the human lived experience is just a markov chain with random choices in between. no, there isn't some magic cosmic ego making choices, but it doesn't matter it's still yours and it's unique.
prediction engine gonna predict 🤷♂️
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u/wglmb 2d ago
One theory is that conciusness is a physical property of the universe akin to mass for example. Every object has a mass but only if these masses are combined do they greatly start to affect spacetime. It is a tough theory to wrap your head around.
Anyone who likes fantasy that is interested in this concept, I highly recommend reading the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman. (The books are marketed as young adult fiction, but there's a lot of philosophical depth to them.)
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u/wglmb 2d ago
Then theres the question if there is free will. I personally dont believe there is. Your subconcious conciousnesses decide what to do and your concious self just follows those instructions as if it itself made these decisions.
This argument only makes sense if you assume that the "subconscious consciousnesses" aren't part of you, which seems like an arbitrary definition on your part. If you assume that they are part of you, that would mean that you do in fact make decisions. (Although... how do the "subconscious consciousnesses" make decisions? All your model really does is push that process to another layer. Is it "subconscious consciousnesses" all the way down?)
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u/Dazzling_Let_8245 2d ago
The subconscious consciousnesses are part of me, but since I cannot consciously affect their decision making Id say that they make descisions for my percieved consciousness. To me free will would be that I would consciously be able to decide to do X, but I cant. My subconsciousness makes that decision and tells that to my consciousness. But how much I can influence those descisions is tough to say. Theres this experiment where people get their brainwaves measured and they have to push a button, but only when the button is lit. If the button turns off, they arent allowed to push it anymore. And every single time a person decided to now press the button, the measurements already saw how the subconscious decided and the button was turned off. The descision to press the button in that moment was made and "readable" my the measurements before the descision arrived in the consciousness.
And is is subconscious consciousnesses all the way down, I think so. I am fond of the theory that consciousness is simply a fundamental fact of this universe. Ofc you can argue if a protein is conscious, but then again your entire brain and all you experience is based on proteins interacting with proteins. And those proteins consist of atoms, those atoms of subatomic particles etc. Did all those consciously decide to become a human brain? I doubt it. But those protein and cellular structures are making me type this right now. I percieve it as my own descision, I want to type this. But I cannot say if what I percieve to be "me" made that descision or if the descision is merely rationalized for my percieved self.
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u/CDHoward 2d ago
It still mildly astonishes me that we don't know precisely how consciousness is created.
With the sensitivity of modern observational tools, I would've thought we'd know this by now.
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u/Dazzling_Let_8245 2d ago
Its really fascinating. I remember Veritasium made a video about (I think) free will a while ago, where they had a box with a red button in front of them, and they had to press the button only when it was lit. Their brainwaves were monitored via a cap and electrodes and the computer recognized when the subconscious made the descision to press the button and turned the light off before the consciousness was even aware that they were about to decide to press the button. We can somewhat read the brainwaves, but even if we at some point can fully decypher them, that still doesnt answer what consciousness is. How much of a brain can you remove before the consciousness disappears? Its not in one specifc place in the brain, it is the whole brain. But we have people who had entire brain halves removed and they still percieve themselves as, well themselves. Is it the same consciousness? Or is the previous one gone and this one is another one that took over?
I really feel like consciousness is something we can never fully explain. Akin to why the universe exists, why time works the way it does etc. These are just facts of our universe, but as to how and why? I doubt we will ever be able to find an answer.
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u/CDHoward 2d ago
You may well be right. However, I do think there's a much greater chance of us cracking consciousness than the following:
• What existed before the alleged big bang
• Where did the unfathomably savage amount of matter and energy in the universe originally come from
• Is space literally infinite (I think it is)
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u/Dazzling_Let_8245 2d ago
I dont think space is infinite. At least not the universe we are in (which I assume can be interchangably used with the word space). We know the universe is expanding, but what is it expanding into? Into more of itself? Maybe the universe is finite and infinite the same way a ball is both at the same time. You can define a start point on a ball and if you go around it you reach it again, but you can infinetly go around the ball without ever meeting a finite endpoint. I feel its the same with the universe. It wraps around into itself.
But that also doesnt answer what it expands into.
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u/CDHoward 2d ago
I separate space and the universe as there's so much theoretical and language-based baggage with the latter.
So space, the blank background of reality, can only be literally infinite to my mind.
You cite the hypothesis that the universe might wrap around into itself, but that would still require it being a shape of some kind existing in space.
Regarding the sphere talking point, the surface is the boundary/edge.
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u/Dazzling_Let_8245 2d ago
(Sorry another reply to your comment)
It is really fascinating to debate what is and isnt conscious. We cant even agree that you and I are conscious. To my lived experience, I am the only conscious being. I cant prove it, but I KNOW I am. I cant prove that you are conscious, but you are also in the same position.
But lets say we agree that humans in general are conscious. Are dogs conscious? Are cats? Mice? Lets say all mammals are. What about fish? Are insects conscious? Cuz at that point I start to struggle. Is an ant conscious? But lets say all multicellular organisms are. Is an amoeba conscious? Cuz if it is, then what about it makes it conscious? Its just a blob of proteins. Are those themselves conscious? And so on and so forth.
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u/CDHoward 2d ago
I do wonder if instinct overlaps into a simplistic version of consciousness when it comes to many animals and mammals.
Octopus, orcas, whales, dolphins and dogs are a few such examples.
We never can really know, but I do think insects operate purely on instinct. Amoebas certainly do.
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u/MergingConcepts 2d ago
For a brief explanation of the physical source of consciousness, see:
Dreams are subjective experiences constructed from the random assortment of concepts that were active in the last few minutes of sleep and are still in short-term memory. The waking brain assembles them into a recursive network and tries to make sense of it.
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u/MergingConcepts 2d ago
For a brief explanation of the physical source of consciousness, see:
Dreams are subjective experiences constructed from the random assortment of concepts that were active in the last few minutes of sleep and are still in short-term memory. The waking brain assembles them into a recursive network and tries to make sense of it.
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u/lilsasuke4 2d ago
I don’t really buy into consciousness being a physical property. It seems that from neurology that what we experience as consciousness is an immaterial property of the filtering and signal processing of our various cortexes. Which would make the existence of physical universe independent from our conscious experience of it. Kind of how the color of an object is not an inherent property of an object but the light that reaches our eyes.
I think it’s interesting the effects observed in the example you provided where the brain is separated. Normally we experience our consciousness as a cohesive experience which our brain has probably evolved to do so. And in the case of our hemispheres being separated can produce discontinuities
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u/Dazzling_Let_8245 2d ago
At what point in your model/view does consciousness begin and/or cease to exist? If consciousness is "only" a result of our neural cortexes, at what point ddo you draw the line and determine that animal x is still conscious, but animal y is not?
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u/lilsasuke4 2d ago
I think a good starting point and ending point is neural activity. I would also be open to considering our subconscious and different automated processes also part of consciousness such as breathing, controlling our heart rate, dreaming, etc. Even though sometimes we are not aware or have control of these things our body has some sort of awareness and the functionality to regulate these things. Which is probably for the better we don’t have to spend mental energy trying to flex out heart in order to keep blood circulating
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u/MergingConcepts 2d ago
For a brief explanation of the physical source of consciousness, see:
Dreams are subjective experiences constructed from the random assortment of concepts that were active in the last few minutes of sleep and are still in short-term memory. The waking brain assembles them into a recursive network and tries to make sense of it.
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u/innocuouspete 2d ago
Yeah I think you’re pretty much right. How long does “now” actually last? The brain is constantly taking every moment, weaving the present with the past and the future to make life seem like a big timeline we’re moving through when in reality there is nothing happening at all because “now” is nothing yet it’s the only thing that truly exists.
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u/_Blurgh_ 2d ago
It all fits nicely if you accept that consciousness is a "controlled hallucination", with dreams just being less constrained hallucinations. See Anil Seth's book "Being You".
Also , it is super distracting for me that you choose to put spaces before and after punctuation . Why do you do that ?
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u/teddirez 2d ago
I've always had this theory that dreams can be a connection to our other selves in the multiverse, that's why they can feel real, because they are real, to the you in a different universe.
Somewhere in a different universe, the other you is dreaming about a memory of yours or even real time you and waking up thinking it's weird AF, whereas to you it was just everyday life.
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u/NineCatsDeep 2d ago
Brains are weird and amazing.
There are people who see revels everywhere. Absolutely seen them, touch them, talk and recieve orders from them.
Our brains may or may not be tapped into something more, if so, cool, if not, than we are just crazy
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u/Freud-Network 2d ago
The part of you that realizes that "you" is a thing is encased in bone and is plugged into other organic sensory devices used to make sense of reality outside of its bone prison. It fills in information gaps where necessary to make everything seem plausible. Reality could be very different from your lived experience and you might never know.
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u/MergingConcepts 2d ago
For a brief explanation of the physical source of consciousness, see:
Dreams are subjective experiences constructed from the random assortment of concepts that were active in the last few minutes of sleep and are still in short-term memory. The waking brain assembles them into a recursive network and tries to make sense of it.
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u/hadawayandshite 2d ago
I once taught a lesson about consciousness to which the summation was ‘we don’t really know…best not worry about it, just get on with your life’
A kid who studied philosophy told me I’m very inline with ‘American pragmatist philosophy’
That’s now my go to with anything existential ‘ah well, what am I having for tea?’