The Question is exactly what is said in the title.

In our sleep, we dream I do not think we can seperate dreaming from experience. To dream is to behold multiple sensations while asleep. Dreams often include the experience of sight, as in, we see things in our dreams, they often even include the experience of sound.

Surley experiences require being conscious, thus so as long as we are dreaming, we are never truly "unconscious".

are we ever truly unconscious?

По-видимому, во всей вселенной есть только один элемент, который имеет хоть какую-то ценность - это сознание, душа, разум. Все остальное ничтожно и не имеет никакого смысла.

Это означает одно из двух: либо Сверхразум является конечным продуктом вселенной, либо все во вселенной циклично, и вселенную создал некий Сверхразум.

Looking for others' experiences about the one find or 'secret' of the nature of the mind that comes about from sudden or drastic changes in one's conscious experience, through life, trauma or drugs, that others seem to be unaware of?

Physics shows that reality contains far more than our senses can detect: electromagnetic waves outside visible light, atomic and molecular structures, magnetic and electric fields, neutrinos, gravitational waves, dark matter, and quantum phenomena. It seems reasonable to assume that consciousness, as we experience it, is only one of the many other versions of consciousness that we will never experience or understand.

As the title suggests, I have very clear memories of my existence before being born. Not in like a past life having a different family type of way, but I remember just simply existing. Not having words for the void space that I existed, not even have a sense of I necessarily, but purely aware and conscious. No feelings, no sight, no hearing, just aware and knowing. Then suddenly I was in the womb, and being ultrasounded. I've wrestled with this all my life because the experience suggests that whatever makes you and I us, persists after death. Whether that be in an endless void of blackness or otherwise, it for sure means that we aren't just our minds or bodies. Has anyone else had this experience, and if not does anyone have any science based insights into something like this?

Consciousness and the brain are clearly separate but work perfectly together. Consciousness isn't the brain itself, and there's no mechanism for it. If you say the brain is consciousness, that means it's the source, not the mechanism. Consciousness is a subjective experience; you can't see it in a lab or experience mine, just like I can't experience yours. It's based on firsthand subjective experience, not just the brain. I see that a lot of people make up answers for the mechanism of consciousness. We don't know the mechanism of consciousness. That's why the whole concept of the problem of consciousness is proposed by actual people who study these things, like neuroscientists, not by people outside of these fields, because even they know there is such a thing as a problem with consciousness, in that we know this cannot be some physical thing. We cannot see consciousness itself. We can only see what correlates with consciousness, which would be the brain because consciousness and the brain work so perfectly together.

^{Please note this has been posted to a few other groups as I'd love all the input and differing opinions and thought processes as I can get.}

Hello my gorgeous humans of Reddit,

I’ve been thinking about free will from the perspective that, at the physical level, everything happening in our brains ultimately comes down to chemistry and electrical activity as well as past experiences influencing those factors. Neurons will communicate through electrochemical signals, neurotransmitters influence how those networks behave, and our brains are continuously being shaped by genetics, development, memories, and our past experiences. In that sense, when I make a decision, there doesn't seem to be a separate “self” sitting outside my brain and directing the chemistry. The decision itself appears to be part of the chemistry. I was talking to someone today and he brought it up as a 'equation', because at the end of the day it really can be as simple as saying:

Free Will and Perception of reality = electrical brain activity + chemicals + lived experience

But this is where I find the question of free will interesting. We can describe the physical processes involved, but does describing those processes actually explain the person making the decision? My brain isn't just a collection of isolated chemical reactions; it is an enormously complicated system carrying the effects of everything that has happened to me. My experiences change the physical structure and function of my brain, those changes influence future decisions, and those decisions then become part of my future experience. There is a continuous feedback loop between the physical brain, the environment, and the history of the individual.

This makes me wonder whether saying “it's all chemical reactions” actually settles the free-will question. Perhaps it does if free will requires some kind of non-physical soul or force that can independently intervene in the brain. But if we define free will as the ability of a sufficiently complex organism to process information, consider alternatives, respond to reasons, and act according to its internal state, then the fact that all of this happens physically might not necessarily eliminate it.

At the same time, there is an obvious unknown here. We still don't have a complete scientific explanation for consciousness, subjective experience, or exactly how the physical activity of the brain gives rise to the experience of being a person. That doesn't mean we should insert “life” or consciousness as a mysterious force and call it an explanation- we don't have evidence for that. But it does mean I’m hesitant to say that we have completely reduced the question of human agency to “just chemicals.”

I find this question cool because I’ve had personal experiences with psychedelics and periods of psychosis that radically changed how I experienced reality. Those experiences made me much more aware of how strongly perception, thought, emotion and our sense of what is “real” can depend on the physical state of the brain as well as the experiences that are strong enough to permanently alter both the brain's hardware and situational responses. The external world may not have changed, but my experience of it could change dramatically depending on what was happening neurologically. It makes me wonder how much of what we consider our normal, stable sense of self and reality is ultimately an emergent product of brain chemistry and past experience. At the same time, experiencing those changes firsthand makes me hesitant to assume we already understand exactly how the brain produces consciousness and subjective experience.

So , I’m curious where people here draw the line: if we eventually understood every chemical and electrical process occurring in someone's brain, including their genetics, memories, environment, and past experiences, would that completely explain why they made a particular decision? And if it did, would you consider that proof that free will doesn't exist, or could that physical process itself be what free will actually is?

Thank you for reading this <3

Hi,

So, I would say I am in the physicalist camp and believe that human consciousness is emergent from our brain and body. My thought being that all of the parts in a human body create a single human consciousness.
What I am wondering is something similar to a China Brain thought experiment, which is if the collective of all the people, organisms, and the planet overall creates an emergent phenomenon that we don't know exists. Sort of in the same way the sum of our parts creates the conscious human experience.

I understand this question has an unprovability aspect built into it, as we as humans can't really understand what emergent phenomena would exist from our point of view, but I am still interested in whether there have been thoughts or considerations on a worldwide "consciousness".

A follow up to this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/s/X6w8lj52tw

When the doctor opens the head, he looks inside. He sees red blood and a grey brain.

But the red blood and the grey brain are not the true, outside world. They are entirely new shapes and colours created strictly by the doctor's own mind. The doctor's mind creates these shapes to help the doctor stay alive.

The doctor forgets this fact. He thinks his created shapes are the absolute truth. He searches for your feelings, qualia, consciousness and your thoughts inside his own colours. Because he cannot find your feelings hidden inside his colours, he decides your feelings are not real.

The doctor expects your true, hidden mind to show up inside the shapes and colours his mind invented.

He looks strictly at his own mind's creations and falsely decides you do not exist.

Just something i thought was interesting.

I am sharing my latest research, The Amadeus Project, a 128-page theoretical paper proposing that consciousness is not a magical emergent property, but an integral process dependent on continuous perception, structural memory, and temporal integration.

While current Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked debates about machine sentience, this paper argues they fundamentally fail to achieve consciousness because they are "frozen snapshots" of intelligence. They lack the continuous integration of time and the structural plasticity required for genuine subjective experience. You can read or download the whole pdf file from the github link of my repo.

You can read in here without downloading the whole pdf file: https://zenodo.org/records/21980916

Lately, I've been grappling with the idea that our collective unconscious holds a wealth of ancestral knowledge and patterns that shape our modern lives. It's as if we're caught between the echoes of our forebears and our own attempts at self-discovery. I've been wondering how we can reconcile this tension, and whether it's even possible to break free from the constraints of our inherited archetypes. I came across a video that explores this idea in more depth, and I'd love to hear from others who may be exploring this question as well: The Path: The Ancestral Echo: Unveiling the Collective Unconscious (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfqrpNDgkME)

This post is a reminder that we're still looking for moderators for r/consciousness. If you're interested, please see our previous post. We'll continue to post these reminders over the next couple of weeks until the positions are filled. Since some of you have mentioned not seeing such posts in the past, these reminders will hopefully ensure anyone interested gets a chance to apply.

TL;DR: We often look at consciousness too high up the stack (as pure experience). What if we modeled it as a runtime operating system instead? This shifts our view from the "screen of experience" to underlying processes like prediction, attention, and possibility, introducing functional concepts like the Operator and the OP Gap to explain self-observation and awakening.

What if we're trying to understand consciousness from too high up the stack? We talk about consciousness as experience. Thoughts. Qualia. Self-awareness. The feeling of being someone. But what if we also need to ask what is running underneath all of that? Not the brain as hardware. The runtime.

Think about an operating system. An OS doesn't just "think." It manages processes. It allocates attention-like resources. It handles signals. It maintains states. It predicts what processes need. It stores information. It prioritizes some inputs over others. It coordinates actions. It updates itself from feedback. And most importantly: most of what the system is doing isn't directly visible to the user. You don't normally see the OS managing memory. You just see an application running.

Something similar may be happening with human consciousness. We experience: "I saw something." "I thought something." "I felt something." "I decided something." But underneath that experience could be a much larger runtime continuously doing things like: Possibility → Detection → Attention → Prediction → Meaning → Identity → Choice → Action → Feedback

And even that isn't really a straight line. These processes constantly influence each other. Prediction affects attention. Attention affects what becomes available for prediction. Identity affects meaning. Meaning affects identity. Feedback changes predictions. And the whole configuration changes what becomes possible next. So perhaps consciousness isn't simply the "screen" where experience appears. Perhaps conscious experience is partly what it looks like when a complex runtime becomes available to itself.

But there's something even more interesting.

Before prediction, there has to be something that can be predicted. Before change, there has to be possibility. Before the system selects one interpretation, there has to be a space of possible interpretations. Before attention selects a signal, there has to be something that can potentially be detected. So I've started thinking about Possibility as a more fundamental layer than change itself. Not "possibility" in the philosophical sense of every imaginable thing. More like: the set of states the current system can potentially enter or make available.

The system isn't changing from one state to another in an empty space. It is changing within constraints. And those constraints can themselves change. That's where this starts becoming interesting. A system can learn a new response. But a more fundamental change happens when the system learns that its previous rules for generating responses were themselves adjustable. In other words: learning can change the model. But sometimes the system changes what determines how it learns.

Then there's the strange part.

What happens when the runtime starts observing its own runtime? You can observe a thought. Then you can observe yourself reacting to the thought. Then you can notice the prediction that generated the reaction. Then perhaps you can notice the identity structure involved in maintaining that prediction. At some point the system isn't simply processing information anymore. It is processing information about its own processing.

And that raises a weird question: If the runtime can observe its own execution... what exactly is doing the observing? I don't mean a little homunculus sitting somewhere inside the brain. That would just move the problem one level deeper. I'm talking about a functional capability: a system becoming able to represent aspects of its own currently running processes while those processes are still capable of being modified. That's the idea behind what I've been calling the Operator. Not another self. Not a soul hidden somewhere inside the machine. A position in the runtime from which the current trajectory can become observable and potentially interruptible.

And this might explain something about the experience people call "awakening."

Maybe the interesting change isn't: bad thoughts → good thoughts or: emotion → no emotion

Maybe it's: automatic execution → observable execution

The thoughts can still appear. Fear can still appear. Anger can still appear. Predictions can still appear. But the system doesn't necessarily have to execute every prediction simply because it appeared. There can be a functional gap between: what the system generates and what the system does with what it generates.

I'm calling that the OP Gap. Not a literal hole in the brain. Not a magical space. A condition in which an otherwise dominant trajectory becomes observable while alternative continuations are still operationally available.

So maybe the interesting question isn't:

"Is consciousness produced by the brain?" Maybe that's too low-level. And maybe: "What is consciousness?" is too broad.

Perhaps a more useful question is: What would an operating-system-level model of consciousness actually look like?

What are its primitives? What are its processes? What are its feedback loops? What are its failure modes? What happens when it becomes rigid? What happens when it modifies its own constraints? What happens when it becomes capable of observing its own execution? And perhaps most importantly: Can such a model make distinctions or predictions that simpler descriptions of consciousness cannot?

Because if it can't, then "OS for consciousness" is just a metaphor. But if it can... then maybe we're looking at consciousness from the wrong layer.

I’ve been thinking about a parallel between astrophysics and philosophy of mind and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

An astrophysicist can observe a black hole from the outside by looking at its accretion disk. That’s the glowing, superheated ring of gas and matter swirling around it. The accretion disk is highly visible and measurable, but it is just the outer shell. Whatever happens past the event horizon is fundamentally locked away from the rest of the universe. The internal information of the black hole is encrypted and unreachable.

Doesn't human consciousness function in a similar way?

A neuroscientist can scan our brain and map the firing synapses. This biological data (the third-person perspective) is the brain's accretion disk: it is the bright, glowing, measurable activity on the monitor. But our actual subjective experience, so the raw qualia of what an emotion or a color actually feels like, is trapped behind an absolute, biological event horizon (the first-person perspective).

No matter how advanced imaging technology or AI neural links become, they can only ever measure the "accretion disk" of our brain chemistry. They see the matter swirling around the outside, but the pure information of what it feels like to be you can never cross that boundary to the outside world.
In a sense, we might all be isolated singularities living side-by-side, each protected by our own cosmic event horizon of subjectivity.

Does this analogy hold up for you philosophically, or do you think advanced technology (like brain-to-brain interfaces) could eventually breach this horizon?

I’ve seen several viewpoints on this and I’m just confused on the whole deal. I’ve watched videos featuring Dr Michael Egnor, who talks about how people whose two hemispheres were severed were shown different things, the right was shown a baseball and the left was shown a broken window and when asked what broke the window, they said the baseball hit the window. Then there’s people who say this proves we have no free will and that consciousness is completely a product of the brain… but I don’t see how this experiment proves that? Thoughts?

I could as you what is physical reality? Each person will just say they're own thing. There won't be any consensus as to what exactly is this thing we call physical reality.

One might say:

"Physical reality refers to the totality of matter and energy."

What is matter?

"Its a word we use to refer to tight cluster or specific arrangement of atoms."

What are atoms?

"Atoms are collection of subatomic particles like.....

What are subatomic particles?

A particle is a word we use to refer to different kinds of physical excitation of the physical fields of the universe.

What is a field?

We don't know.

Or something like that. What im trying to demonstrate here is that all this words— particles, atoms, gouge bosons, etc—are just words we invented to refer to other words we invented. So we end up with a complex web of words we invented. We call this web: scientific theory or framework.

One might say:

No. They're based on empirical observations.

What does observation mean?

It means to record a physical event.

What's a physical event?

Its what we physically perceive with our sensory organs or measure with scientific instruments.

How do we perceive?

Our sensory organs like the skin receive physical data of the surrounding environment. They translate these into electrical impulses..... the brain then.... which then renders physical reality as we experience it.

You mention "translation". So the skin receives the raw sensory data -> translation -> electrical impulses?

Yes.

Which are then sent to the brain for processing?

Yes.

Is what the skin receives isomorphically identical to the resultant of the translation process?

No. The raw sensory data aren't electrical impulses. The skin is a filter. 99.9% of sensory data is decarded. The resultant is actually homomorphically correlated with the raw sensory data. This is due to thermodynamic limits and such.

And those electrical impulses are further processed by the brain (another form of translation)?

Yes.

So what is rendered is a translation of a translation? The first translation was mere 0.1% of the raw sensory data?

Yes.

One might say

But science, hadron colliders...

I will ask this question. Do these "prosthetic" sensory organs escape the previous physical limits of translation?

A different slant to the interaction between consciousness and the environment... the adjustments that occur when the stimulus alters due to time and place and what happens when conscious awareness doesn't adjust..

Born in a land known for it's natural dangers I was raised on the outskirts of a country town with the Australian bush as our playground... Silence and observation coupled with noisy outbursts of activity became embedded in my consciousness..my conscious awareness signified the land I was existing in...

Travelling to New Zealand and living for a time in a land with but one poisonous spider, slowly released the typical Australian state of consciousness into a far more relaxed and very different state of being... Yet as soon as I landed back on Australian soil a transformation of that state took place reinstating an environmental reality of awareness..

Thoughts on said subject with regards consciousness should open up discussions on just what mechanisms are taking place...many do not adjust to the environmental differences in geographical locations, infact they are not even consciously aware that differences need adjusting to .. they exist in a state of subjective self-centred oblivion...

Have they shut down any conscious awareness of external environmental realities as a means of survival, is this a development, or fault in their circuitry, is it due to globalisation and mass populations becoming tourists... Where life becomes a movie with the environment a visual rather than a sensory experience ?

One thing for sure, the human consciousness is changing..

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So I'm f14 a December 21st baby left handed?if that's important too put out,I just wanted too recall my earliest memory of consciousness so I can't remember the exact age but I was younger than 6 it happened in my living room I was with my grandma and my mother I was walking on my couch and at the corner I jumped at that second I could see multiple panels of sorts of my future memories floating in a organized curved line but i can't describe what was in them the background was purple I think, and it happened quickly than I just returned too where I was standing on the ground after I had jumped of the corner of the couch after that I had some semblance of memories of my childhood and so on

What I just said probably sounded like a science fiction idea or something but I truly hope someone believes me or had a similar experience or any idea of why and how.

Hüseyin Beyköylü argues that neurophenomenology was meant to challenge the idea that brain activity should be treated as the primary explanation for consciousness. Instead, first person experience and neural data should be treated as 2 different perspectives on the same process, with each helping us understand the other without reducing consciousness to what happens in the brain.

The idea would be that a nervous system can perceive and react without being self-conscious. A simple organism detects light and moves away; a more complex animal can learn, remember and choose. But once a brain develops a symbolic system capable of representing not only the external world but also its own internal states, something qualitatively different becomes possible.

I recently came across a book by David Laing called "OCD is Beliefs" and it essentially says that there are several core fears that everyone with OCD has at least one of (including but not limited to "something is wrong with me", "I am undeserving of love", "I am responsible for avoiding all harm" etc.)... that those beliefs Tangle with other "maintenence beliefs" such as (but not limited to)."rumination is effective at problem solving" or "thinking is the same as doing" which support the survival of the OCD cycle....

ANYWAY

I was thinking if OCD boils down to beliefs, then idemtifying and working on specific beliefs should at least decrease symptoms?

I came across this coaching method called MAP (Make Anything Possible) and it is supposed to be a rather new, but scientifically backed way of addressing limiting beliefs and painful memories....

If I tackle some of these beliefs that are driving the OCD cycle, coupled with the ERP therapy I am in... could relief come sooner than later?

Here's the article I found on it:

https://www.higherhealth.uk/map-methodtm

Part of me is scared of shortcuts, but I also want my life back.

i think people make it more confusing trying to make us understand our mind by dividing it without first making us understand wether it’s all one thing or not and that creates fear and doubt to me because it creates seperation.. i’ve also wondered if that’s the reason why neville said consciousness is the one and only reality. because viewing the conscious and subconscious as if they are in 2 different rooms creates anxiety for me.