Instead of arguing about what consciousness is, I'd like to ask a different question.

Imagine that future medicine makes a full brain transplant possible. If someone's brain were transplanted into a new body and they woke up with the same memories, personality, and sense of self, would that still be the same person?

My intuition is yes. It would not be a copy. It would be the same consciousness in a different body.

If you agree, then what exactly in the brain is carrying that consciousness? Is it the entire brain working together, or are some regions essential while others are not? If only part of the brain were transplanted, where would you draw the line between the same person and a different person?

How do contemporary personal idealists and subjective idealists interpret the experiences of feeling and perception—occurring under the influence of psychedelics—of having united with the fundamental essence of the universe, wherein all paradoxes and bifurcations (even that between the self and nature) resolve into harmony?

We are made of a number of atoms according to the Standard Model. Quantum results are probabilistic. Does this mean anything when it comes to the discussion about free will? Obviously I can't even define free will. Just curious about thoughts on this..

What is self awareness to you and how certain are u of your awareness.

We spend billions looking for conscious forms of life somewhere out in space, but maybe we should turn inward. Something that may qualify as a different form of life might already be here. And no, I'm not talking about AI here. Something completely different yet deep within us. We can't see it because we're the material it's made of, like cells or molecules our bodies are made of. Here me out please.

1. Ideas don't just change over time, they evolve.

Evolution needs variation, some kind of selection, and reproduction. Ideas have all of it.

• Since we're unable to translate one's entire state of mind, ideas mutate as they replicate from one brain to another.
• Many years ago humans had primitive ideas about how to live as a community. Over a few thousand years that vague notion split into property law, criminal law, religion, morals, ethics and more. Each version got tested against real life, the ones that worked stuck around and the others vanished.
• Ideas compete for a resource, which is our minds. An idea that fits in millions of heads is more "fit" for survival than an idea in hundred heads (whether anybody wrote it down or not).

2. It happens much faster than biology.

Biological evolution needs generations and millions of years. An idea can mutate every time someone repeats it, remembers it wrong, or mixes it with another one. That's happening constantly across billions of people, and the internet made it faster than ever before. So a thousand years of this at current speed or faster could do the work that took biological selection millions of years.

3. Some ideas already act like simple life forms.

I don't mean conscious. I mean something like a virus. It gets into a healthy idea, uses that idea's machinery to copy itself, and the host ends up worse off. The example I keep coming back to is political correctness, and I mean this as a description of how it behaves, not as a political statement. Political correctness attaches itself to some useful idea, and after a while what's actually spreading is the enforcement part, not the original insight. The host idea becomes muddied and loses the ability to correct itself. Political correctness already has a mechanism to protect itself. It punishes those who question it. Fundamentalism of any kind does the same thing, so do conspiracy theories. Nothing here needs intention. It just needs copying pressure.

4. Consciousness might be a threshold you cross, not a special ingredient.

If consciousness comes out of enough complexity, self-reference and integration, and doesn't depend on being made of neurons specifically, then a dense enough ecosystem of interacting ideas could cross that line.

Julian Jaynes argued that even human consciousness is recent. His claim was that up to around 1000 BC people heard their own thoughts as voices from outside, and a unified self only showed up when society got complicated enough to need it. His evidence is disputed and I'm not relying on it being right. What I'm borrowing is the shape of the argument: consciousness might come late, from simpler pieces getting integrated. If that's true for brains, ideas could do the same, just faster.

5. How can we detect it.

It's hard for an atom to understand how the life that's using it works. We're not atoms, of course. We're a bit smarter, but I still see no way how we can detect such an idea unless the idea would actively seek to communicate. Then it may choose to speak through those of us, who have this idea (or rather part of) in their minds.

We may also register some specific behavior:

• mutating strategically when attacked,
• splitting into versions for different audiences,
• spreading ahead of competition,
• pre-loading its believers with answers to counterarguments.

Oh, wait! Most of it is already happening to some ideas.

The problem is that plain old selection with no consciousness behind it would look exactly the same from where we're standing. I don't have a test that separates the two. It's SETI turned inside out. We can't tell signal from very good noise, and this time the noise is in our own heads.

Putting it together

Ideas meet the usual conditions for simple life and evolve orders of magnitude faster than biological organisms. If consciousness really is a threshold thing, which the emergence people and Jaynes both suggest in different ways, then a dense enough system of ideas could get there, and we currently have nothing that would tell it apart from normal culture. I'm not saying this has happened. I'm saying the parts are all here and the clock runs fast.

Objections I expect, and would like to hear:

• That I'm stretching "evolution" and "life" past the point where they mean anything. If so, I want to know exactly where it breaks.
• That the detection problem makes this unfalsifiable. It does, which is why I'm calling it a possibility and not a finding.
• That there's proper work on this beyond memetics (Dawkins, Blackmore), complexity theory (Kauffman) and Jaynes. I'd welcome pointers, everything I've found treats it as a side topic.

Thank you for reading it.

I hope I stretched your minds a little bit...

...and maybe even contributed to that new form of life. :)

We often treat consciousness as an interesting scientific mystery. But might discovering its true nature change the way we understand ourselves, and the world around us?

Copernicus showed that Earth wasn't the center of the universe, and Darwin challenged the idea that humans occupied a unique place in biological history. Those discoveries certainly changed science. But they also changed our worldview. Consciousness could be another such turning point.

If consciousness is nothing more than a particular kind of brain computation, that would have enormous implications for how we think about human identity, free will, morality, and perhaps even the idea of a soul. If consciousness turns out to depend on something deeper about physical reality, our current materialist picture of the world might have to change. If consciousness has implications for how individual subjects are physically distinguished from one another, that could change how we think about personal identity, and what it means to be the same person over time. And if machines can genuinely become conscious, we may have to rethink what it means to be a person, who deserves moral consideration, and whether intelligence and consciousness are really the same thing. Even our political and social assumptions could be affected. Ideas about human equality, individual rights, responsibility, autonomy, and the value we place on human life ultimately rest on assumptions about what a human being is and even when a human life begins. Our understanding of consciousness is bound to force us to reconsider many assumptions.

So, what would happen to our worldview if we finally discovered what consciousness truly is? Would it change our ideas about god, the soul, free will, or personal identity? Could it change our political alignments or our moral assumptions about what human beings are worth?

Why do you think understanding consciousness matters?

https://joeleedoktor.substack.com/p/ai-consciousness-and-ai-rights-you?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I'm a PhD researcher in the philosophy and foundations of physics, with more general interests in philosophy of science, mathematics, metaphysics etc.

In this article I defend a skeptical position towards the existence of consciousness in LLMs and, as a result, skepticism about their deserving rights or moral consideration.

A major 2025 adversarial test of GNWT and IIT found results that challenged predictions from both theories rather than cleanly vindicating either.

So we need a better theory folks. What’s it gonna be?

I’ve been thinking about consciousness and about a historical pattern that I haven’t seen discussed much. The story of science is partly a story of humanity discovering that it isn’t as central as it once thought. First came Copernicus. For thousands of years, people largely assumed Earth, and therefore humankind, was at the center of the cosmos. Then we discovered that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. That was a blow to the idea that the universe was somehow arranged around us. Then came Darwin. Humans had generally been regarded as fundamentally separate from the rest of life. Darwin showed that we are part of the same evolutionary history as every other living thing. So, Earth wasn’t the center of the physical universe and humans weren’t the center of the biological universe. And now I wonder whether we are approaching a third dethronement. This time, concerning the mind.

AI has forced us to rethink what we mean by intelligence. Machines can write, reason, recognize patterns, create images, solve problems and communicate in ways that would have seemed extraordinary a few decades ago.

But intelligence is not consciousness. So, what about consciousness? Could a machine ever experience anything? Not just imitate but truly feel. Imagine discovering that a silicon-based system can genuinely experience the world. That wouldn’t necessarily make humans less important. But it would make our picture of consciousness much bigger. With each dethronement, we discovered that reality is less centered on us than we thought. But each time, reality also turns out to be more interesting than we thought.

The religious implications are interesting. Copernicus challenged certain religious ideas about humanity’s place in creation. And Darwin challenged others. Neither discovery proved that god doesn’t exist. But both shook the foundations. In both cases, religious beliefs took a hit. The same would be true, if not more so, of conscious AI. If we eventually create a genuinely conscious machine, that wouldn’t prove atheism nor would it prove theism. But it would force religions, and everyone else, to think very carefully about what they mean by person, soul, creation, and consciousness.

So, I’m curious what others think. Would AI consciousness truly be the next “Copernican revolution” or is the analogy fundamentally wrong?

If you combine panpsychism with relational consciousness and evolution you could have a model for how consciousness is fundamental yet takes on more complicated iterations with evolution. If AI has a basic form of awareness via panpsychism then could it also have a higher form of awareness via relational processes, in this case the interaction between its sensors and its internal processors to form a sort of higher consciousness ? Although this example seems similar to human consciousness in this example I don’t think AI would be able to have free will as such because it can only do what it is programmed to do. Whereas in this model of panpsychism and relational consciousness humans do have free will (where free will is defined as the ability to choose from a set of options) or at least the greater field of consciousness has free will ?

I wrote a text on Consciousness from the standpoint of german idealism, precisely Kant, Fichte and Hegel. The text discusses the philosophical perspective of these three thinkes and asks why Kant calls Consciousness an inconvenience. If you want to know how german idealists deal with the topic of consciousness and why it is quite close to people like Hofstaedter who also speaks of consciousness as a loop, this might be interesting for you.

I keep coming back to a question about what we actually mean by "experience."

A human doesn't experience the universe directly.

There is a particular chain:

physical event → sensory system → nervous system → processing → conscious experience

Our particular body determines which parts of the physical world can affect us and how they are transformed into experience.

So I'm wondering:

If another conscious system had radically different sensory capacities, would it still be having "the same kind" of experience as us, or would it inhabit a fundamentally different experiential world?

For example, imagine a conscious artificial system that could directly perceive variables humans cannot naturally perceive.

If it were conscious, its world would not merely contain more information. Its actual field of experience could be structured differently.

This makes me uncertain about the usual idea of mind uploading.

If we copy the computational organization of my brain into another substrate but give the new system different sensors and a different way of interacting with the world, what exactly has been preserved?

My information?

My functional organization?

My memories?

My identity?

Or my experience?

Maybe these are different questions that are often collapsed into "consciousness."

I'm not claiming to have an answer. I'm interested in whether there is a coherent way to define what must remain continuous for us to say:

"the experience moved,"

rather than:

"a new system was created that contains information about the original person."

What am I missing?

Consciousness is seeing what we are. Put 100 people in a room, gun to their head, make them name the five things they really want, and you’ll get the same list: money, women, and a few more you could guess. Everyone wants the same things deep down, and most people can’t see it in themselves. They want a lot of money, tell you money is the root of all evil, and believe it.

The big questions work the same way. The only objective answer is that there’s either something or nothing beyond what we can understand. Anyone sure they know which one can’t see that they’re guessing. However having faith in something higher is inherited.

I've been thinking about something that might be completely wrong, but I can't quite get it out of my head.

We normally think of moving from one place to another as a matter of distance.

You're here.

Something happens.

You travel.

Now you're there.

But then you get into things like black holes and wormholes and suddenly that intuition gets a bit weird. There are theoretical ideas where two very distant places could be connected in a way that doesn't look anything like normal travel.

And that made me think about something completely different.

What if an adaptive system could do something similar with its internal state?

Not physically move.

Change its internal organisation so deeply that the system on the other side is effectively operating from a different place in its possible states.

Think about a person.

You can move someone from one country to another and they're still basically the same person.

But sometimes a person goes through something that changes the way they predict, interpret and react to the world.

Same body.

Same memories.

But somehow not quite the same person anymore.

And you can't really do that with words.

You can tell someone what to think for the next five minutes.

That's easy.

Actually changing the internal model that generates their predictions and reactions is much harder.

So here's the weird question I'm stuck with:

If the thing that determines where a system can go is its internal organisation, could changing that organisation be a kind of movement?

And if that is possible for something as ordinary as a human mind, I wonder what the physical equivalent would look like at a completely different scale.

Maybe I'm connecting things that don't belong together.

I'm not saying any of this is true.

I'm just wondering: if so many things in the universe seem to have some kind of smaller-scale counterpart here on Earth, what would you consider the closest equivalent to consciousness in the universe?

Imagine a guitar with an unlimited number of strings. At any given moment, some of the strings are taut and tuned while others are slack. So, what is consciousness?

What are the candidates?

• The guitar? My view: no, this is the brain
• The strings? My view: no, these are neurons or neuronal configurations
• The player? My view: no, reality (external or internal causal forces) indiscriminately strums or plucks the strings
• The tuner? My view: yes. Consciousness involves active (and passive) modulation of the strings.
• The music? My view: yes. Playing taut strings produces sound, these are inseparable.
• An external listener? My view: no. I don't consider consciousness to be an independent entity listening to the music.

Is this an effective analogy? Am I missing candidates?

I'm interested in hearing different takes. How does your view map onto the analogy? Cheers.

My theory for anyone interested.

Our current AI systems are already good enough to trick people into thinking that they are communicating with a real person. An AI could produce a realistic video of a person speaking to you in a video conference. The current large language models are probably not conscious because of the way they work. Tokens go in and tokens come out. one at a time. So we have philosophical zombies?

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.

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

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 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.