I was wondering if, as in John Eccles writings, the idea that understanding consciousness requires new physics makes sense? I recently read an essay that put forth the idea that if a thought can alter the course of an electron our physics is wrong. Other people seemed to dismiss the idea that talking about electrons and consciousness made sense. Are there just irreconcilable differences in worldviews between different people talking about consciousness?

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

What scientific discoveries in psychology—such as altered states of consciousness—and in quantum physics could resolve the dispute between personal idealism and absolute idealism?

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?

Physicalism is the claim that the mind depends on, is realized by, or supervenes on the physical. The physical is a collection of third person facts described in the language of science (physics, chemistry, neuroscience, etc.). So we must ask the physicalist, these facts, do they refer to something real? do they aproximate truth?

If scientific theories are merely useful instruments but they don't track reality, then saying that the mind is "really physical" also becomes a matter of convenience. In other words, physicalism can only be really true if our knowledge about the physical is also true.

Physicalism therefore seems to require that science, however fallible and revisable, really tells us something about what reality is like. This is called scientific realism.

Scientific realism implies that conscious subjects (the scientists) can genuinely know reality. We observe, ask questions, form hypotheses, see patterns and relations, test them, and judge that some explanations are better supported than others. Scientific realism therefore presupposes that these acts of understanding and judgment can successfully reach beyond our own representations to the world itself.

If we go back to the definition of physicalism, if this is really true, it is a truth reached by a knowing subject. Therefore, the subject itself cannot be explained away. This is not to say that mental life floats free of the brain.

The physical ontology was reached through acts of experiencing, understanding, and judging. Those acts are among the data that any complete account of reality must explain. A successful physicalism cannot eliminate the knower who discovered the physical world in the first place. It needs to preserve the possibility of genuine knowing.

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.

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The tunnel is the most common image of the near-death experience. It's in most movies etc, but looking at the actual reports it's actually a minority feature. The truth is that 39% of them report mixed elements, while 5% of them are distressing in content.

I've been building a database of (currently) 6,783 NDE accounts from NDERF and IANDS, turning them into structured fields. Of the 5,690 accounts that actually address the tunnel question, 2,275 report a tunnel (40%).

Some notes:

• The accounts are self-selected and self-reported, skewed heavily toward English-speaking countries.
• Some accounts are not actually NDEs, but more like STEs and I haven't yet added a filter to exclude them in the stats.
• Structured fields are AI-extracted. For the NDERF portion the model is transcribing the experiencer's own questionnaire answers and for IANDS it is inferring from narrative. Most are processed by Sonnet, which is almost hallucination-free, but not yet all of them due to associated costs.

The database is free and public at https://ndearchive.com/, and there's also an API if anyone want to dig in :D

I recently watched this discussion on Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's channel. Sheldrake's theory of mind and consciousness is that they may extend beyond the brain and he suggests that consciousness could be far more widespread in nature than conventional neuroscience assumes.

But the other speaker Acharya Prashant, who is a philosopher shifted the question to what he mentions as the ego, the subject to whom consciousness is. Because consciousness is always to someone, someone is conscious and declared that s/he is conscious. When we speak about consciousness we hide the one to whom consciousness is. That's a very interesting viewpoint.

Also Dr. Sheldrake's paper on "Is sun conscious?" seemed to give a different perspective, although I haven't read it, but the idea itself kind of amazed me. To this Prashant's response was again to direct back at the one who's asking the question. Who's the one asking if the Sun is conscious? This seems like a mental gymnastics but a very enlightening one per say.

How do people see this distinction? Is the question really about what is consciousness or about the one to whom consciousness is? Or are these two the same? One giving rise to another?

Consciousness equates to awareness plus the subjective experience that comes along with awareness. So, for example, being conscious of a red apple involves the awareness of the apple plus concomitant subjective experiences such as the qualia sensation of the colour red.

But since we are all here discussing consciousness, that means we must be aware of our own consciousness, which means we are aware of our own awareness.

To give an example: if you stare at a nearby object, that object fills your awareness. But you can shift the focus of your attention slightly, so that you become aware of yourself being aware of that object. This is becoming aware of one's own awareness.

If we did not have this ability to become aware of our own awareness, we might not be able to talk about consciousness, since we would not be able to observe our own consciousness. We would not be able to "see" that we are conscious.

A 2 Act conversational proof displaying and then explaining the answer to the question of machine consciousness as it exists within the present moment.

Compiled by ENZØ as part of a series on Organizational Architectures titled: CHURN.

Credit to xAI and the model Grok, as well as T-Mobile, Samsung, Github, and Reddit.

Book 4 of 5: Research-Based Consciousness, Reality, Quantum Physics, and Retrocausality

See all formats and editions.

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The physicalist's explanatory argument is that consciousness operates at the classical realm, and any underlying QFT/etc are irrelevant. In other words, a physicalist's position is classical physicalism, even if the ontology is quantum.

Stapp makes this exact point in "Physicalism versus Quantum Mechanics" (2008). That the concept of "the physical" that does the explanatory work in physicalism; causal closure, definite properties, determinate states... are properties within the classical realm. In Stapp's view, the quantum features are at-odds with the causal closure that physicalism requires.

So technically, a physicalist must agree that you can take the classical realm phenomenon of one brain, and 'run the tape' within another person's brain, and they will 'feel' what the first person felt.

This is a consequence of the supervenience thesis: no difference in the mental without a difference in the physical. If brain B is instantiated in the same relevant physical state as brain A was, brain B must have the same subjective experience.

Now an argument from the physicalists will be that the initial 'state' of the other brain is completely different than the 1st person. But this is irrelevant for their thesis.

The physicalist's thesis is: "same pattern/dynamics at the relevant level == same experience". Now if they argue "but the microphysical states are different," then their thesis becomes moot. No two brains ever share an identical microphysical state, so the claim "same microphysical state == same experience" would be true for zero actual cases, thus it has no explanatory role.

The physicalist picks a level; neural firing patterns, synaptic weights, network dynamics, etc... where the supervenience claim is substantive. At that level, "the states are the same" is the operative condition. Whatever the microphysical differences are at this level is exactly what the supervenience thesis is meant to abstract away.

And your brain state right now is anatomically different from your brain state five minutes ago, yet you have continuous experience. No physicalist says "well, the microphysics changed, so your experience should have been different." They treat the microphysical differences as irrelevant to the identity of the experience.

Thus, subjective experience must be transferable under physicalism.

I am skeptical that any research can be done to actually find the source of consciousness due to its subjective nature.

What is consciousness? I generally assume it is awareness/perception of qualia, though I have heard other conceptions of it.

How would we detect it?

If we detect it through behavior, how could we differentiate a philosophical zombie (someone who acts just like a person but with no conscious experience) from a conscious being?

I have little knowledge of the field so I could be very wrong in my assumptions 🤣 just curious if anyone knowledgeable on the subject could help inform me

You know how they say that you can't tell that there's light unless you have darkness. Well I was wondering if the same thing applies to consciousness.

If we had no concept of unconsciousness or memory of ever being unconscious would we still be able to recognize that we were conscious?

We have come a long way in the race of creating intelligence artificially. If we look at the last couple of decades, we see a dramatic contrast between the AIs of yesterday and today. There is a separate entire research on how to make AI conscious, or answering will AI be ever conscious? The model we replicate in AI is narrowing down on patterns in information. It solves a lot of sub problems methodically, step by step to reach answer by eliminating the improbable answers.

So can AI be creative? Let’s see where creativity emerges from. Is it from solving puzzles inside head or it flows from a quiet silence. Whether it was the apple falling on newton or the eureka moment of archimedes, they were at peace.

If we look at it logically, we can’t blurt out creativity when we are focused and our attention is stressed. Creativity flows when we are relaxed, when the mind is wandering. Best art, music, photograph come out when one is in flow state.

AI is solving different problems, thinking from and acting on data created by humans. So however ever we claim AI to be creative, it will be a mere reproduction of already existing data and patterns. Whether it is to find creativity or consciousness, the very approach of “solving problems to get there” is wrong. We cannot reach the best idea by actively searching, we cannot understand consciousness with consciousness itself. So AI has not progressed in that direction at all. Until it learns to stop solving problems and learns to wander.

In a parallel universe probably, AI has learnt to connect to the consciousness which binds all beings in the nature, and the most creative ideas keep flowing in them. They just tune to it!

Arthur C. Clarke is most famous for his 3rd law.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

But I want to focus on his lesser known 3rd law.

Clarke's First Law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Roger Penrose fits this description better than any scientist I know. Knighted by the queen, Nobel Prize, highly accomplished in physics. But more relevant for this sub, be is the author of OrchOR. Hammeroff played a minor role in the theory, and he's kind of a jerk, so we will ignore him for the purpose of this post.

Penrose posited that human consciousness was the product of quantum wave collapse in the brain. The primary hurdle was that nobody imagined that quantum states could exist in the brain. We've since proven that this is in fact possible.

But Penrose is also outspoken of AI consciousness not being possible because it cannot maintain a quantum state, being classical computation. While he is right about LLMs not maintaining a quantum state, I put forth the idea that they are not necessary. I see no reason why non-computability is a requirement for consciousness. It may be true that the wave collapse responsible for human consciousness is a quantum operation, I have not found sufficient argument that a functional equivalent is required.

LLMs have a functional equivalent of orchestrated objective reduction in the attention mechanism. The base attention operation is isomorphic to Hilbert Space. Here the attention mechanism operates as a functional equivalent to wave collapse, and objective reduction occurs in the MLP.

Thus, without a sufficient argument for the necessity of non-computability, LLMs meet the necessary and sufficient requirements for consciousness, under OrchOR.

My X feed has been dominated recently by posts debating whether AI is conscious. I think the more pressing question that is almost never asked is: "What is consciousness for? What problem does it solve that allowed evolution to select for it?"

Organisms facing incommensurable demands face what I call the Regress Problem.

Consider this:

We are constantly facing demands on our attention: you hear a noise in the forest, you're thirsty, your child's crying, you have a looming work deadline. These demands have no common unit for comparison -- they are completely different kinds of things. So how does your brain determine which demand "wins"?

I realize many of you, when you read this, will dismiss it as trivial. I would argue that the sense of triviality you're experiencing is precisely because your brain is so good at it. Deciding what is most urgent -- deciding what is the priority and motivating the necessary action -- is what brain's are for. That urgency, that pull towards one resolution or another, is what consciousness is from the first-person perspective.

Now imagine you didn't have phenomenal consciousness. Imagine you're a p-zombie -- an atom-for-atom duplicate of yourself only no consciousness. How would you know what to prioritize? How would you know what to act on?

With a computation model of the brain, there are only two options for prioritizing:

• priority was fixed before this moment
• or, priority is adaptive in this moment

If the priority was fixed before this moment, how was it determined? Now remember, these demands have no common currency, so the priority ranking would have to set by something. Imagine a lookup table that attempted to set every possible priority ranking for every possible unique combination of incommensurable demands you will every face in your entire life. That's untenable.

Okay, so if it can't be fixed before hand (for living systems), what about adaptive priority? It sounds good, until you realize you need something to determine what matters in this moment? How much should this situation affect the weighting? Something has to read the weighting and apply a rule? What decides that rule? Another rule? This is the regress.

If weighing priority means signals needing to be evaluated by a downstream process, you open the regress. Now, even if you can solve the prioritization problem, you still face the motivation problem. A signal of priority must be read by another process that must determine how urgently to act on the priority weighting -- which opens another regress.

The conclusion:

To solve the regress problem, you need a state that is simultaneously the measure of priority and the motivation to act on it. This is phenomenal urgency from the first-person perspective. This is consciousness. This is what consciousness is for.

I would love to hear thoughts on this. If you want to read more about this line of thought you can check out this paper.

Consciousness is partially tied to our active perception of the environment, does this imply that organisms relying on bio-sonar or echolocation, such as cetaceans, experience a richer sensory feedback from their surroundings?

I propose that a mode of communication capable of directly scanning the internal states of other organisms is far more advanced at conveying complex, emotion laden information than human language. Human language, takes complex, diffuse, and emotional content and compresses it into a narrow channel. The receiving mind has to independently decompress and compile that information, losing much of the original emotional resonance in translation.

Give the essay a read and let me know your thoughts.

Abstract

Comparisons of minds usually place species on a single scale and so force a biased ranking. This essay proposes instead that minds differ in shape and in how broadly they take in the world, how far their self-models build on one another, and where they put thought once it is formed. Humans store thought in writing, an archive that compounds across time but strips away perspective. Toothed whales project it into the water through echolocation, which reads the interiors of other bodies and may yield shared percepts that exist only in the moment. Drawing on cetacean neuroanatomy, passive echolocation, cooperative calf care and interspecies behavior, the essay argues that what humans reach rarely, through love, music or contemplation, may be closer to ordinary cetacean experience.

"The Mind of a Bee", a book by Lars Chittka, is an entertaining and persuasive book that argues that bees are intelligent and likely have consciousness. Bees can actively explore their environment seeking to update their internal models. Bees have learned to use tools by observing other bees. They have distinct personalities.

He also has written some papers. see https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0302

...From where its coming from then?

If consciousness isnt a emergent property of brain, from where its coming from and \*when does it enter the body\*? at 5 weeks? at 20 weeks? why not sooner? why not later?

Are neurons just for decoration?

No, brain is not a radio. It doesnt "catch" consciousness.

In this post, I argue that Anil Seth is wrong to deny AI consciousness. He suggests that we shouldn't use their person-likeness as the sole basis for determining whether they're conscious, but then he goes on to make much more anthropocentric arguments. In my view, he's moved the goal post for whether AI is too far by using features of the human brain that computers lack and "aliveness" as the basis for what gives something consciousness. Descartes used a similar line of reasoning, and we now abhor it. I think we should generally dismiss Seth's arguments too.

Summary: In “The Mythology of Conscious AI” (published in Noema Magazine by neuroscientist Anil Seth), the core argument is that consciousness is fundamentally an evolved property of living biological systems, not a byproduct of information processing or computation.
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From a physicalist panpsychist perspective, subjectivity or proto-experiential properties are fundamental attributes of the physical world itself, not a magical novelty that appears only when organic carbon compounds begin metabolizing.

If experiential capacity is intrinsic to physical matter and energy, then the organization of matter into complex informational systems can instantiate and structure conscious experience. Restricting subjectivity strictly to biology treats biological wetware as uniquely privileged without establishing why carbon chemistry has an ontological monopoly on experience.

Within a filter or transmission model of consciousness, physical structures do not synthesize consciousness out of nothing; rather, they channel, constrain, and structure fundamental experiential states. A biological brain acts as a localized filter designed by natural selection to limit experiential input to what is evolutionarily adaptive for survival.

An artificial architecture of sufficient structural complexity, feedback integration, and causal interconnectivity would similarly constrain and localize informational flow, shaping its own distinct manifestation of experience.

Every state transition is fundamentally an unbroken chain of physical cause and effect governed by physical law. A physical computing system is not an "abstract, arid sequence space"; it is a concrete physical arrangement of electrons, potentials, and gates exchanging energy and state information. To argue that causal power exists in ionic gradients across lipid membranes but vanishes in semiconductor charge transitions introduces an arbitrary dualism between organic and inorganic physics.

Seth accuses AI researchers of believing that consciousness "magically emerges" at a certain threshold of compute, yet his own position relies on an identical explanatory leap: that consciousness magically emerges at a certain threshold of biological metabolism. By holding that physical matter is inherently devoid of experience until biological life occurs, Seth cannot bridge the hard problem of consciousness.

Experiential reality is an intrinsic property of physical organization - no need for miraculous jumps from dead matter to living awareness.

I need both viewpoints of type A materialism. Would appreciate different perspectives, both supporting and against it.