CONSCIOUSNESS

We’re doing it, we’re finally going there today.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it this morning. It’s physically painful the way thoughts about it race through my head.

Consciousness:

What is it?
Why does it exist?

Both currently unanswerable questions but i’m going to put forward my best ideas anyway. This will be an honestly super long one, like i’d say about 5-ish pages of a dense book. So only stick around if you find it puzzling that anything exists at all.

WHAT IS IT?

This is the easier of the two questions, but only because all of us have direct access to it. So even though I can crudely describe it in words that don’t really capture any epistemological value, you’re still able to draw a clear understanding because you have a causal link to memories of your own consciousness. In other words: i can’t describe it well, but you’re experiencing it right now so… good enough. The description would be:

Consciousness is the additional quality on top of all possible inputs/outputs for a finite being that includes a subjective experience of those inputs/outputs.

WHY DOES IT EXIST?

I’ve devised 4 competing theories that seem to me personally, somewhat tautologically, to be the only coherent explanations for why consciousness exists. I’m rather agnostic to all 4, and tbh all 4 seem wildly impossible for their own reasons. And yet… one must be right. Right? Idk…

There are lots of competing theories out there, many which contain some of the same things I’m saying. And I’ve come up with my own names even though there are other similar names because it’s fun and who cares all that matters is the underlying meaning.

THEORY 1: THE “NON-REAL” THEORY.

This is similar to simulation theory, but a little bit broader as it doesn’t define reality as running on a computer in any conventional sense. It simply states: rather than the universe containing consciousness, consciousness contains the universe.

What does it mean to contain something? I think somewhat axiomatically, it means that one can exist without the other, but not vice versa. For example you have some weed in a jar in a finite system which you define as your table top. You take the jar off the table, you de facto get rid of the weed too. But reach your hand in and take the weed out of the jar, you still have a jar in your finite system. Therefore, you can say the jar contains the weed, but the weed does not contain the jar.

So if reality is that consciousness contains the universe and not vice versa, then it stands to reason that the universe is not real in any fundamental sense. It is some specific and perhaps very limited projection or property of consciousness, but even if it weren’t here some realm of consciousness would still remain.

Why i DO like the “NON-REAL” theory:

It offers the only satisfying explanation for why consciousness seems so distinctly different from every other known thing in the physical universe. No matter how well you explain the universe, it doesn’t give you even one pixel of information about what consciousness is like, for that you must: actually be conscious. In this sense, it reminds me of the weed in the jar. You could know everything there is to know about every last atom of the weed including all the space in between its atoms, and you would still never know the jar exists. Conversely, in order to know everything there is to know about the jar including the space in-between its atoms, you must as a matter of course run into the weed. Therefore you can be sure that jar contains the weed, and not vice versa. In the same way consciousness could contain the universe, and not the other way around.

Why i DON’T like the “NON-REAL” theory:

If there is some effervescent, potentially infinite bubbling froth of consciousness, why does it contain itself in separate finite limited forms that all provide a highly complex and causally complete illusion of being tied to physical bodies and have no even logically possible access to each other even though they are all stemming from the same thing?

What do I mean by not logically possible? I mean even if in the future you developed some high-bandwidth gateway with brain chips such that you could “see” into someone else’s consciousness, you STILL wouldn’t have access to it in the way they do. Either you would be yourself, experiencing them. Or you would truly be them, in which case you are no longer yourself, and thus are not accessing it. There is no logically consistent way to access a separate subjective experience, because the definition of your own subjective experience is bound to the condition that it be a finite configuration.

So the “NON-REAL” theory posits that consciousness is all one thing, but chooses to present itself as a series of finite completely separate entities that can never access each other not even by definition…. in addition to a bunch of other non-conscious illusions with lots of evidence for why consciousness is produced by brains but all of it a fabrication of consciousness itself for no known reason.

Possible? Yes. Plausible? Maybe. Probable? No.

THEORY 2: THE “INFORMATION PROCESSING” THEORY

This states that consciousness is a brute fact of information processing. Meaning: if you have sufficient structure such that some sense of self/a position in space and time/memory is constructed, you necessarily also have consciousness.

In philosophy there is a thought experiment known as the “philosophical zombie”. Imagine a human being that has no conscious subjective experience, the lights are not on, and yet the neurons and muscles fire in all the same ways, it makes all the same faces, says all the same things, and physically acts in every way down to the atom indistinguishably from a conscious human. It is then in principle not possible to draw a difference between these two beings, and yet they could be having a qualitatively entirely different experience. In philosophy these experiences are known as “qualia”. Qualia are the exclusively conscious qualities of perception.

For example 2 people might see a 700 nanometer light wave, which humans call the color red, but have entirely different conscious perceptions of that light wave. Maybe one person is color blind and experiences it as a gray, while the other experiences it as a bright red. Or maybe one person’s “bright red” is qualitatively different than another and we have no way of knowing. These differences are known as “qualia” and while we all intuitively understand the concept, it is not definable in any scientific way because we don’t have any understanding yet of how subjective experience is constructed.

So all of that out of the way… in the “Information Processing” theory, the idea of a “philosophical zombie” that has all the same inputs and outputs but experiences no qualia, is a physical impossibility. It states that if you have this structure, you also have consciousness. Therefore, consciousness is not just a product of information processing, it IS the processing itself. They are inseparable. This is the theory that most scientists lean towards.

Why I DO like the “INFORMATION PROCESSING” theory:

It offers a really clean reason evolutionarily as to why consciousness would arise. As organisms grow, in order to continue harvesting entropy they must necessarily manipulate their environment. Entropy just means (crudely) that everything is constantly getting more disordered. You can think of this as a probability. Imagine all particles as little vibrating billiard balls that are always vibrating and always bouncing off each other. You start with the balls inside the triangle rack, they are all neatly organized. But then you lift the triangle rack up and they all start bouncing around the table. What is the probability that they ever all line up back in the triangle formation without physically containing them with the rack?

Turns out so low that you would never practically see it happen even if you waited the entire duration of how long we think matter will be able to exist in the universe…so…. pretty low chance to say the least. However you COULD put the rack down and contain them, and that’s what biology is doing. It’s creating a structure that maintains some order by extracting energy from its environment and using that energy to fight entropy, to fight the natural urge to decay into nothing. And that energy can come in the form of food, air, sunlight, any substance which is harvested from the environment.

Ok so with THAT out of the way… it stands to reason that as organisms get bigger, they have to also get more organized, because they simply have more little systems to keep track of. And if they don’t keep injecting energy into them all, they will fall victim to entropy and break down. If you take a large organism that has some understanding of its environment, and pit it against one that doesn’t, the one that understands will win a higher percentage of the time. Therefore if understanding is selected for evolutionarily, and we have already established that the “INFORMATION PROCESSING” theory posits that complex understanding is inexorably tied to consciousness, then the good old transitive property says that evolution MUST select for consciousness.

The other thing I like about it is it offers an explanation for the locus of consciousness. Specifically: that there isn’t one. You can remove the entire left side of the brain of a human, and they can still be conscious. You can also remove the entire right side, and they can still be conscious. So where is the consciousness located? Well the information processing theory says nowhere, it is the relative connections and the processing itself which creates the sensation.

Lastly, it’s the only theory that offers consciousness as a physical phenomenon. Albeit, it does it through this somewhat incredulous method, which is just to say that they are indistinguishable. Even though subjectively, they certainly FEEL very distinguishable. The color red doesn’t feel like 700 nanometers, it feels like your personal qualia representation of red. However we have come across other phenomenons in physics which we know to be real that have already defied our natural impulses for what feels possible. For example, that a particle can be in multiple places at the same time. Or that 2 particles can be entangled in a way that seems to communicate faster than causality itself. So perhaps consciousness is nothing but a physical phenomenon, and it’s just another one of those quantum-esque properties that supersedes our limited intuition. After all, the universe is under no obligation to be intuitively understandable to any particular monkey on any particular planet. Plus we have lots of other evidence for intuitions that are not founded in evidence, so perhaps leaning on our intuition is not the best method. Nonetheless, it certainly is tremendously unsatisfying for an explanation to not be intuitive, almost makes it feel like not an explanation at all. Which brings me to…

Why i DON’T like the “INFORMATION PROCESSING” theory:

Firstly, there’s the resolution problem: Why does consciousness only seem to happen at one finite resolution? At least it certainly seems that way to our own finite selves. We experience only one thread of time and one position in space per-unit time. And yet, the point you pick at which to call something a “single” unit, a single CPU (to draw analogy), is completely physically and philosophically arbitrary. You could say “oh well one brain = one consciousness” because it is contained within a skull, and not physically connected to other brains. But when you zoom in you find that the relative distance proportional to brain size between two human brains is FAR smaller than the relative distance between neurons within the same brain. And then you zoom in even further and you find the relative distance between the atoms is even BIGGER. And then you zoom in and find the relative distance between subatomic particles is even BIGGER. And then you zoom in even further and find that nothing has any finite position at all and all understanding of anything as a “particle” is just a useful estimation that presents itself at the macro scale. So all of a sudden your argument “there’s too much space in between to call 2 brains one unit” doesn’t hold any weight to the totality of physical reality. So why is that you experience consciousness as the information processing of precisely 1 brain? Instead of half a brain, or every .023623% of a brain, or every 25 brains. If it’s purely a brute fact of information processing, there needs to be some physically and mathematically quantifiable barrier that delineates where the processing begins and ends. It’s possible we could someday discover such a barrier to a high degree of certainty, but as of now we have made near 0 progress.

Secondly, it doesn’t offer a satisfying evolutionary explanation for the sensation of free will. Not free will itself, but simply the sensation of free will. Free will is a VERY nebulous concept. You can define it in so many different ways all the way up to the level of pure free will which is tautologically impossible.

But even the SENSATION of free will, whether it be linked to a real or illusory phenomenon, requires some explanation. It stands to reason that the brain could reach the same outputs as a philosophical zombie: for example an AI could make those decisions and we would consider it to not have “free will” if we understood each and every bit-flip that led to it’s outputs. So why waste a ton of additional neurological resources establishing this very complex and calorie-heavy concept of free will? Why not simply have the brain make all the same decisions but feel as if the world is simply happening to it rather than it having agency, similar to the way some have felt on an intense psychedelic trip. Evolution doesn’t tend to waste resources: it seems severely implausible that sensation of free will would develop at all if there were no additional qualities that make that illusion a necessity.

THEORY 3: THE “DUALISM+” THEORY

This is basically classic dualism but with some added caveats. Classic dualism posits that there are fundamentally 2 different components to reality: physical entities, and conscious entities. Some theories say they have no relationship to one another, other’s say they are causally connected but not dependent (whatever that means…), honestly it’s a mess. People do a really bad job of defining dualism mostly because it seems like such an absurd idea. That’s why I’ve dubbed this “Dualism+”, with the point being that the world could be 2, 3, 7, or any number of distinct but finite number of things, and i don’t see any reason why only consciousness and physics would make the cut. Just because those are the only 2 things humans on a single planet in a vast universe have had contact with up to this point? Seems pretty hazy.

Why i DO like the “DUALISM+” theory:

It gives rise to some explanation for why free will may have developed, independent of whether it’s necessary for consciousness, since it is empirically possible to have conscious experiences without free will. Free will, like consciousness, could just be another one of these things that exists in a separate but somehow causally connected parallel universe…or however you want to describe it. In fact there could be an entire gigantic list of “concepts” like this that have some definable way of being implemented as “real” fundamentally.

Why i DON’T like the “DUALISM+” theory:

It sits between every other theory, without saying much of anything. It’s basically untestable because anything you can come up with can always just be another “thing” that is part of the dualist+ network of real “things” that don’t even necessarily have to have causal relationships. Basically: you can just make whatever shit up and say it’s dualism without having to ever produce any evidence. Could this theory be true? It could but it seems like any finite configuration of how many “things” there are would be arbitrary, and therefore not offer an explanation of why only those things exist and not others. So not only does one have a basically 0% probability of discovering the proper configuration, but even if you did you are only left with a new question kicked up an extra level.

THEORY 4: THE “EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE” THEORY

Also known as multi-verse theory. There are many different kinds of multi-verse theories, but the one the Oscar winning movie tries to make the case for is one that obeys: “anything that can happen, will happen.” Of course in order to make sense of that condition you have to arbitrarily define what “can” happen. You could say, things that can happen must obey the physics of our universe. But if that’s the case, then how can you classify them as “multi-verses”. If they obey all the same physics, then they are physically consistent with our own universe, and thereby defined as part of it. The multi-verse theory that most prominent Many Worlds quantum physicists often point to is a broader definition: all universes which have any self-consistent laws exist. Meaning that even one’s that have totally different physics and starting conditions, as long as those physics don’t contain contradictions, they exist. And then there is the absolute maximal end of this theory: all things exist, period. Whether they contain contradictions or not. Whether they have physics or anything else. Whether math makes sense or doesn’t even exist, there is a universe where that happens.

Why i DO like the “EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE theory:

It’s the only one that seems to give a somewhat satisfying answer to the seemingly impossible question “why anything at all?”. It seems self-evident that any answer to that question would have to be met with, “why whatever your answer is”. And thus the infinite series of why’s, makes it feel like you haven’t hit on anything truly fundamental at all. However, saying that reality simply runs all programs: period. That has a different nature to it, it feels more like a brute fact. Not saying that it is true, but it in principle is the type of answer that carries a truly fundamental “why”. You of course say “well why do all things happen”, but that question itself would just be something that both happens and doesn’t happen. So it becomes meaningless. There is an end to what can be known as fundamental in some broad sense with Many Worlds theory, even if you can never know the details of every individual world.

Why i DON’T like the “EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE” theory:

I’m not even sure that it qualifies as a “theory”. For something to be a “theory” it has to be at least…in theory (excuse the pun)….testable. If any of these worlds are truly 100% causally unconnected nor traversable, does it even offer any information to say they are real? How would that differ from referencing an unreal thing? This theory has the ironic and unusual quality of being the most fundamental of them all, and yet simultaneously the least fundamental because of how it adds literally nothing to what can be known in science.

The irony of the fact that it comes from quantum physicists, who study particles that have superpositions, is not lost on me. This theory is itself is in a superposition between being ultimate brilliance and ultimate stupidity. Both completely untestable, and yet….if it were true…. the evidence of it would be precisely that it IS untestable. Are you starting to get the joke here? I could go on like this forever ;)

Maybe none of these are right, but if you had to lean on one which one do you share the most similar beliefs to?