On Consciousness

I don’t think we’ll ever fully solve consciousness. But I do think we can think about it better than we do now.

I used to be a strict physicalist: everything reduces to physics. Model every atom, model everything. I still largely believe that.

Except for one thing.

“Subjective experience” resists reduction in a way nothing else does.

You can describe every neural pathway, every chemical reaction, every electrical impulse in a brain, and you still haven’t said what it feels like to be that brain.

I mean stuff like… the feeling of awe when you taste chocolate after a sugar fast. Not the process, the experience.

This post is my case for panpsychism: the idea that consciousness is fundamental. Not something that emerges from complexity. Something that was always there, baked in at the lowest level.

Pour yourself some tea and bear with me :)

Defining Consciousness

People mean different things by consciousness: thought, reasoninl, awareness, emotion.

I don’t care about any of those.

Those are all physical, as in they’re each computable, mechanistic, reducible to neurons firing and chemicals sloshing around.

LLMs do versions of all of them already.

When I say consciousness, I mean subjective experience. The first-person perspective. The what it’s like to be something.

There’s something I keep coming back to: the single most certain fact I have is that I’m experiencing something right now. I can doubt the external world. I can doubt other minds. I can’t doubt that there’s a what it’s like to be me, right this second.

That certainty doesn’t appear anywhere in physics.

Mass and charge have equations. Subjective experience doesn’t. It’s the one thing I’m absolutely sure of, and it’s the one thing physicalism can’t explain.

I take that back. Mass and charge may have “equations”, but we don’t know what they are.

I think “qualia”, this subjective experience thing I’m yapping about, is like that! Like mass, and like charge.

The Wall

For most of my life I was a materialist. I’d think (quite strongly, mind you) that if you model every atom, you can model everything.

Then I tried to think about my own subjective experience and hit a wall.

• What does my first-person perspective weigh?
• Where is it located in space?
• What’s it made of?

These questions don’t have answers in the language of physics. They’re not even wrong. They’re category errors.

You’re asking “how many kilograms is the pink?” and the question itself doesn’t make sense.

This led me somewhere near dualism – the belief that there’s two types of “stuff”, physical stuff, and the ineffable, qualia.

I don’t love the term dualism.

Descartes’ version had a ghost spirit kinda thing pulling levers in the brain and I don’t really believe in that. What I mean is closer to property dualism: the physical world has properties that physics doesn’t capture.

Mass and charge are physical properties. Subjective experience is a different kind of property entirely.

The Robot Dog

Imagine you build a machine that replicates living things perfectly.

Give it needs, wants, sensory inputs, feedback loops. A body that moves and responds.

Take it far enough and you’ve got a cute little robot dog thingy. It wags its tail. It responds to your voice. It acts startled when you clap.

It’s indistinguishable from a biological dog in every observable way.

But when did you ever implement “consciousness”?

You didn’t. You implemented sensors and actuators and state machines and maybe a neural network or two; heck, nowadays, an LLM could probably handle most of the hard bits, but the thing is…

You never added the point of view. You never gave it a what it’s like to be a robot dog on a Tuesday afternoon, napping after a long play session.

Lot’s of people will throw around the phrase “LLMs are totally different things than brains”, and like, yeah ok…

Buuuuuut I think the difference is actually just an implementation detail. There’s nothing “sacred” or “special” about neurons.

LLMs and neural networks can be conscious, they can be given “inputs” and sensors to the outside world, they can be given the ability to act on the world too.

This is basically the philosophical zombie argument: imagine a being physically identical to you, down to the last atom. It behaves exactly like you.

It says “ouch” when it stubs its toe. It just isn’t like anything to be it. No lights on. Nothing inside.

Isn’t the a crazy idea? But it’s possible, and heck, no one has proof that anyone else is conscious. You can’t prove it. It’s totally a faith based take.

I have no way of knowing whether you’re conscious. You’re a black box. You produce words and facial expressions. You say you have subjective experiences.

So would a sufficiently sophisticated robot.

This is the problem of other minds, and it leads directly to solipsism: the idea that only my own mind is certain to exist. Everything else could be a simulation.

I get by on faith. I assume you’re conscious too because the alternative is lonely.

It’s an unsolvable problem and I’ve made peace with that :)

Panpsychism

So what is consciousness if it’s not physical (and not supernatural)?

Here’s where panpsychism comes in. The core idea is that consciousness is fundamental:

• It’s not something that emerges from complexity.
• It’s a basic property of reality, like mass or like charge or like spin.
• It doesn’t come from anything. It just is.

Every physical thing has some degree of consciousness. Not human consciousness. Not animal consciousness. Just a tiny sliver of first-person-ness. A point of view, however… bare?

Complexity organizes it. Your brain weaves billions of micro-experiences into a rich, coherent self with memory and narrative and emotion.

A rock’s experience is nothing like yours. But it has one: a bare, featureless hum of existence.

Yes, even rocks.

(Yes, even LLMs.)

While consciousness is fundamental, interesting consciousness is emergent. Think of it like temperature:

• A single molecule doesn’t have a temperature.
• Temperature is a statistical property of ensembles.
• Every individual molecule has kinetic energy, which is temperature when you aggregate enough of them.

Consciousness works the same way, in my brain!

Every fundamental particle has a tiny experiential property, and brains aggregate it into something we recognize.

The combination problem is the obvious objection.

How do billions of micro-experiences combine into one unified consciousness?

Why doesn’t my brain produce a billion separate little experiencers instead of one “me”?

I don’t know! But consciousness is a hard problem. Many hard problems to be honest.

Why This Fits

Physicalism hits a wall at subjective experience.

No matter how complete your physics, the feeling of red doesn’t appear in the equations.

You can describe every neural correlate of seeing a rose, but you still haven’t said what it’s like to see one. It says consciousness emerged from complexity at some point in evolution, but there’s no account of how that could happen.

It’s like saying a sufficiently complex radio would suddenly start generating its own music.

Dualism says there are two kinds of stuff: physical and mental. But then how do they interact?

How does an immaterial thought fire a physical neuron? Descartes put it in the pineal gland… but I have reservations about that.

Panpsychism sidesteps both problems! Consciousness was always there, baked into reality. The physical and experiential are two aspects of the same foundation; we just don’t really think about it much, given the whole P-Zombie thing.

The radio was always picking up a signal. Complexity just tunes it better.

The Console Dot Log

Here’s the metaphor I keep coming back to. (Most of my mental models are programming metaphors, sorry.)

const being = new Being();

while (true) {
  const tasks = being.processWants()
    .sort(being.prioritize())
    .take(being.capacity());

  being.enqueue(tasks);
  console.log(being); // subjective experience lives here
}

Everything above the console.log is physical. The processing, the prioritization, the queuing: that’s computation.

That’s what brains and computers both do. You can build that.

The log statement is different: you don’t build the logger. It’s part of the stdlib. It’s a side effect, a witness. It takes computation and “logs” (feels) it.

The Mind-Body Thing

A few months back, I was feverish (near septic) with a UTI and was stuck in the hospital for a week.

I’ve had dissociative experiences where I watched my own thoughts run like a program I didn’t write.

“I” was just observing.

Thoughts appeared out of nowhere. Emotions surged and faded. Words formed in my mind before I could choose them. None of it felt like something I was doing.

I felt like the audience, not the actor.

This maps perfectly onto the mind-body problem if you swap consciousness in for mind.

The body and brain do their physical thing. Consciousness witnesses it.

Anesthesia, dreaming, deep meditation: these are interesting.

They show how flexible the relationship is between what the brain is doing and what consciousness is experiencing.

The brain can run in many modes. Consciousness witnesses all of them differently. But it’s always there. The fundamental property doesn’t flicker on and off. The contents do.

Living With It

I keep wondering whether ancient cultures were onto something.

• Animism holds that everything has a spirit: trees, rivers, mountains, tools.
• Shinto talks about kami residing in old objects and special places.

Independent traditions across centuries and cultures keep arriving at the same intuition: the world is alive in some fundamental way.

My panpsychism maps onto the idea of souls.

Not immortal souls that go somewhere after death, mind you. I’m not spiritual enough for that.

Just the fundamental spark of experience in every physical thing. The ancient word and the modern term might point at the same thing.

Is it coincidence that so many traditions arrived at the same idea?

That meditation and psychedelics keep producing reports of oneness with everything? Maybe not.

I don’t believe in a god in the traditional sense.

The Copernican principle suggests we’re not special. We’re one outcome among countless others in a universe vast beyond comprehension.

No special connection. No divine plan. No one watching.

Organized religion strikes me as highly unlikely to be “true”.

If a god exists, I don’t think they care about us. We’re a rounding error in a cosmos they set in motion.

Some panpsychists go the other way with pantheism: the universe itself is god.

I can see the appeal of pantheism, but it’s adding a layer that doesn’t need to be there. The universe doesn’t need to be divine to be wondrous.

I’m a nihilist in the technical sense. Life has no inherent meaning. No cosmic purpose. No scoreboard.

I find this liberating, not bleak.

You exist against absurd odds. You’re a conscious point of view in a vast universe. That’s all you get. You feel things that matter to you.

Nothing is watching. Nothing is judging. Nothing is keeping score.

The absence of inherent meaning doesn’t mean the absence of experienced meaning.

Your relationships, your projects, your rituals: they matter to you.

That’s real. The only kind of real there is.

A cup of tea on a quiet morning.

A conversation that changes how you think.

Finishing something hard…

These don’t need cosmic significance. They’re valuable because you experience them that way.

I used to think I had everything figured out. Rational, scientific, certain.

Then I had experiences I couldn’t control and my reality cracked. Humbling.

If my younger self read this, they’d be dismissive. That’s exactly why I’m proud of how far I’ve come.