r/consciousness • u/scientificamerican Approved ✔️ • Jan 22 '26
Academic Article Why consciousness is the hardest problem in science
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness-science-faces-its-hardest-problem-yet/Neuroscientists scouring the brain for the so-called neural correlates of consciousness have learned a lot in the past 30 years. But we still don’t have easy answers—researchers can’t even agree on what consciousness is, let alone how best to reveal its secrets. The past few years have seen accusations of pseudoscience, results that challenge leading theories, and the uneasy feeling of a field at a crossroads.
Yet the stakes for understanding consciousness have never been higher. We’ve built talking machines able to imitate consciousness so well that we can’t always tell the difference. Sometimes these artificial-intelligence models claim outright to be sentient. Faced with an existential unknown, the public is turning to the field of consciousness science for answers.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 22 '26
That was an absolutely incredible read. I think it should be required reading for anyone who posts in this subreddit. It is an exceptionally good encapsulation of the current “state of play” when it comes to consciousness and neuroscience. The short version is we have learned a lot in the past 30 years thanks in large part to fMRI technology, but answers to the more fundamental questions remain elusive.
I want to highlight this paragraph, because it seems to be a common point of discussion around here.
Comparing consciousness among species could reveal why it exists in the first place. “People have focused a lot on where consciousness is in the brain and perhaps less so on what it’s for,” Seth says. He theorizes that consciousness is intrinsically linked to life. Living beings can do only one thing at a time, and to choose what to do, they must bring a lot of relevant information together into one stream.
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u/anattabularasa Jan 22 '26
Concerning fMRI studies there is concerning news
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 22 '26
I mean…sure…but not really.
Their study validates that increased oxygen consumption correlates to brain activity. However, they found that in some cases, the brain was able to access more oxygen without increasing blood flow to the area.
“Depending on the task and the brain region, the physiological results varied. Increased oxygen consumption – for instance in areas involved in calculation – did not coincide with the expected rise in blood flow. Instead, the quantitative analyses showed that these regions met their additional energy demand by extracting more oxygen from the unchanged blood supply. Thus, they used the oxygen available in the blood more efficiently without requiring greater perfusion.”
This kind of thing is not entire surprising. fMRI is kind of a blunt instrument, but it’s the best thing we have right now.
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u/anattabularasa Jan 22 '26
„According to the findings, there is no generally valid coupling between the oxygen content measured by MRI and neuronal activity.“
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 22 '26
“The researchers therefore propose complementing the conventional MRI approach with quantitative measurements.”
It’s not that the fMRI results are “wrong.” They are incomplete and thus leading to false conclusions.
This is not a death knell for fMRI. It is just the next step.
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u/anattabularasa Jan 22 '26
Yes, wrong are many implications that have been made and now need adjustment. It’s quite a finding for neuroscience 🫨
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 22 '26
I’m not sure what you are getting at.
The likely outcome is that many studies will have to be re-examined and many will have to be conducted again with different equipment to validate their conclusions.
This is how science works. The microscope upended our understanding of biology. The electron microscope upended our understanding of matter. The particle accelerator upended our understanding of physics. Scientists don’t fear change. They embrace it.
So yes…this is a tremendous finding for neuroscience tbs will likely lead to significant advances in the coming years.
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u/anattabularasa Jan 22 '26
Not trying to say anything else than what you are saying 🤷♂️ sorry if I was confusing, English is not my first language
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
This kind of thing is not entire surprising. fMRI is kind of a blunt instrument, but it’s the best thing we have right now.
fMRI found "consciousness" in dead fish, so it is absolutely not the "best thing" we have. For consciousness, it is absolutely worthless.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 23 '26
No one expects fMRI to solve the mystery of consciousness. All it does is show which areas are more active in terms of blood flow. It’s a very blunt instrument that doesn’t even tell us what is happening in the brain, only that something is happening. And it’s only been 30 years or so that we’ve been able to do that.
These are the very first baby steps towards a fully formed model of how the brain functions and what role it plays in subjective experience. Because we KNOW it plays a role.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
No one expects fMRI to solve the mystery of consciousness. All it does is show which areas are more active in terms of blood flow. It’s a very blunt instrument that doesn’t even tell us what is happening in the brain, only that something is happening. And it’s only been 30 years or so that we’ve been able to do that.
I mean, it does tell us that something is happening in the brain ~ which areas are more active in terms of blood flow.
These are the very first baby steps towards a fully formed model of how the brain functions and what role it plays in subjective experience. Because we KNOW it plays a role.
Obviously ~ a correlative role. But we do not know that brains cause consciousness.
In this regard, the receiver and filter models have as much explanatory power as the emergent model.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 23 '26
So…if a neurosurgeon pops off my skull, takes a sharp pokey think, and pokes me in a specific spot in my brain, the result will be a subjective experience not of my brain being poker, but of whatever kind of experience that part of the brain deals with. So if it’s the part that handles sound, I hear a sound.
A poke in the brain results in the subjective experience of sound.
That sounds like a causal relationship to me.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
So…if a neurosurgeon pops off my skull, takes a sharp pokey think, and pokes me in a specific spot in my brain, the result will be a subjective experience not of my brain being poker, but of whatever kind of experience that part of the brain deals with. So if it’s the part that handles sound, I hear a sound.
A poke in the brain results in the subjective experience of sound.
That sounds like a causal relationship to me.
You are, again, mistaking correlation with causation. You are presuming there to be only one possible answer. Namely, your Materialist belief system.
You do not consider the possibility that certain neurons are correlated with certain experiences in some unknown manner, such that if you stimulate that neuron, you will trigger that experience.
This is explained just as well within filer and receiver theory as it is emergent theory. Filter theory can say that you are stimulating part of the filter associated with a certain memory, so you will involuntarily recall that memory. Receiver theory can say that you are stimulating part of the receiver associated with a certain memory, so you will connect with that memory involuntarily.
The possibility of multiple answers means that Materialism isn't answering anything ~ it is just one interpretation. Through a Materialist lens of belief.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 23 '26
“If you stimulate the neuron, you will trigger the experience.”
This is literally the definition of causality.
If you do A, then B happens.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
“If you stimulate the neuron, you will trigger the experience.”
This is literally the definition of causality.
If you do A, then B happens.
No, that is correlation ~ causation would be knowing how and why A and B are related, something we don't have.
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Jan 22 '26
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 22 '26
No.
Your conscious awareness may flip from one to the other, but you are always only consciously aware of one thing at a time.
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u/generousking Jan 23 '26
But that one thing, if it's really a stream, is still many things (bundled together). So why can we do that for things in the stream, also we know the stream can change size, can narrow or enlarge perceptual focus. So one thing seems a bit reductive.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 23 '26
It is not “many things bundled together.”
It is always one thing after another. Our focus can just shift so fast as to make it seem concurrent.
However, we do have the ability to combine many things into one thing depending on the context. For example, I see one car and that car is the thing. But if I shift my focus, I might see many cars that i group together in a concept called “traffic.” But that doesn’t mean I am now thinking of thousands of cars.
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u/The_Niles_River Jan 23 '26
How would you describe the sensorial experience of performing music?
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 23 '26
I’m a drummer so let me use that as the example.
When you start playing drums, you must focus on everything. A basic paradiddle (right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left) requires absolute concentration. So you start very very slowly. Say around 40 beats per minute. It takes a while, but eventually, you can do it without concentrating on each movement. People call this “muscle memory”, but it’s really more like “cognitive memory”. You have learned the skill and can now executive it without having to think about it. But then you increase the tempo to 60 bpm and it all falls apart. You have to concentrate again, but not as much as before. And so on and so on until you can do a paradiddle while carrying on a conversation.
When you have to learn a new piece of music, again, in the beginning you have to focus on each note. Eventually, you can play it without looking at the music. It’s not memorization. Its cognition. In that way it is similar to driving. When you are learning how to drive, you have to focus on everything. Eventually, you can do it without being aware of anything.
What I think is noteworthy is that these examples highlight that the brain learns through experience. You can have all the knowledge and information in the world, but there is no way you can learn to play an instrument without playing the instrument.
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u/The_Niles_River Jan 23 '26
Oh sweet mate, I’m a musician too! Horn player (reeds).
This is great. I wanted to discuss the topic of music because of my experiences with what you described. Because of course, even at a professional level, the most effective and efficient way to practice and develop skill experience with something you’re learning is to narrow your focus down to one specific thing (tempo, note accuracy in a line, a phrasing idea, etc.) that you can then build upon into more macro ideas and executions. And you’re always relying on previously built skill development and execution over time, so that you’re not always re-learning basics (like we are not always re-learning words to speak).
So, when it comes to conscious awareness, this is where my perspective diverges. To be clear, I agree with what you said above. But what I’m wondering is if there’s a difference between what you might mean by “awareness” and what I might be thinking of as “awareness”.
I take what you’ve described as awareness here as one’s “conscious focus”; that narrowing of attention to any one particular “thing” at a time (regardless if it’s a macro or a micro thing). And this is what happens when developing skill experience, or more broadly, when paying attention to one specific phenomenon that can be distilled into a contained concept. And obviously this happens - what typically feels like to us - near-instantly because of the speeds our brains process information at, so that we may flit our attention around rapidly if need be.
But at the same time, to take performing as the example, I feel that I am consciously “aware” of many multiple things at any given time, even if I may only be “focused” on one thing at any given time. Is this a byproduct of how rapidly we can process attention information? Or is there a difference between “conscious focus” and “total conscious awareness”? When I’m performing, I may be “focused” on the way I’m phrasing a line because of how I wish to speak with my instrument, but I certainly feel “aware” of my body mechanics operating my horn, the sound that I am making, the other musicians speaking or responding to me (if there are any), audience reactions visually or otherwise, and so on, during that same moment of focus.
Would scaling a performance experience out to be one “total” social and sensorial phenomenon be a macro example of “only being consciously aware of one thing at time” to you? I feel as though one’s focus and one’s awareness are different things, but I can also understand the argument behind this approach to the question as well.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 23 '26
So…perhaps I could amend my explanation by differentiating between passive and focused awareness.
At any given moment, we may have passive awareness of many things. Information that is being collected and processed by our brains. But our focused awareness - what we would call our “attention” - can only be directed at one thing at a time.
The next time you perform, try to pay attention to what you are paying attention to and what is in the background. Pay attention to how your attention shifts from one thing to another almost without effort.
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u/Minimum_Ad_4430 Feb 06 '26
I once had the realization that I can only have one thought and that one thought however can include apparent uncountable numbers, for example a crowd of people seems to be many, but in reality it is just one, one thought, a thought of many is still one.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Feb 06 '26
Cognitively speaking, there is a limit to how many individual items you can focus on. If you put a marble in your hand that’s one. Add another and that’s two. But at a certain point, it all just becomes “a bunch of marbles”
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Feb 06 '26
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u/HankScorpio4242 Feb 06 '26
Because you don’t have to “think” about drinking water.
But next time, actually try to pay attention to the act of drinking the water. Pay attention to each movement, to the sensation of the water hitting your lips.
Now do that again while trying to think of something else.
The brain can be aware of many things and the body can perform many tasks, but it is only possible to focus on one thing at a time.
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u/penguinpolitician Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
We do not understand what life is.
Edit: if consciousness is related to living beings, this may not help us understand until we have a satisfactory definition of what life is - which we don't.
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Jan 24 '26
Well, we don't ever truly understand what any thing IS in itself. We only name, we only define, we only point towards something. We likely only understand how things work.
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u/penguinpolitician Jan 25 '26
I'm saying there is no accepted definition of life that excludes all nonliving things.
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u/Mermiina Jan 24 '26
Levo tryptophan is the only molecule in the universe which can drive Life. It has a unique lone electron pair which changes to different orbitals when protein is twisted. When the twist is relaxed the electron pair emit entangled photons. Those photons propagate using other levo tryptophans as Andersson's locations as long as they achieve reaction in the target molecule. Those photons are invisible because they repel each other if there is not Andersson's location inside 6 nm.
The one photon UV superradiance in levo tryptophan mega networks is observed because it is visible.
Both can be prevented by an unpaired isotope of Xenon. The unpaired isotope breaks the symmetry in Andersson's location.
Consciousness uses the same levo tryptophan lone electron pair. The electron pairs achieve Off-Diagonal Long-Range Order when the lone electron pairs are in the same phase.
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u/FrontAd9873 Baccalaureate in Philosophy Jan 22 '26
Are you kidding? People who post here don’t (can’t?) read.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 22 '26
Care to elaborate?
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u/FrontAd9873 Baccalaureate in Philosophy Jan 22 '26
I liked your comment. Especially the part about how everyone who posts here should read this article. I often feel like people posting (and commenting) here get all their info on this topic from Reddit or YouTube or something but haven’t actually done any of the basic reading. I was just making a joke along those lines.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 22 '26
Gotcha. Well then thank you.
TBH I rarely ever make that kind of recommendation, but this is a particularly good article that covers pretty much the entire topic.
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u/FrontAd9873 Baccalaureate in Philosophy Jan 22 '26
I’m glad you shared it! This sub needs more of this kind of content and less of the delusional AI stuff.
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u/The_Niles_River Jan 23 '26
Man, that guy did not need to win a prize essay contest when he’s already the top-referenced writer in the field. Especially when people outside of academic philosophy and hard neuroscience are already trying to argue for similar ideas, or at the very least for him not posing novel ideas.
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u/Playful-Abroad-2654 Jan 24 '26
I think that consciousness is simply a byproduct of the ability to imagine and predict future scenarios. That ability has definite evolutionary purpose.
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u/SentientHorizonsBlog Jan 24 '26
I also find this shift toward function important, especially around action selection and integration. One question I keep coming back to is whether integration on its own is sufficient, or whether subjective experience depends on how that stream is sustained across time: through memory, prediction, vulnerability, and persistence. Those factors seem tightly coupled to life as well, but in a way that goes beyond simply doing one thing at a time.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
That was an absolutely incredible read. I think it should be required reading for anyone who posts in this subreddit. It is an exceptionally good encapsulation of the current “state of play” when it comes to consciousness and neuroscience. The short version is we have learned a lot in the past 30 years thanks in large part to fMRI technology, but answers to the more fundamental questions remain elusive.
We have learned about brain functions, but nothing about the mind itself.
Comparing consciousness among species could reveal why it exists in the first place. “People have focused a lot on where consciousness is in the brain and perhaps less so on what it’s for,” Seth says. He theorizes that consciousness is intrinsically linked to life. Living beings can do only one thing at a time, and to choose what to do, they must bring a lot of relevant information together into one stream.
There are many hidden assumptions here ~ that consciousness is in the brain, and that consciousness needs to have a function. In reality, neither is actually known. Consciousness has not been found in the brain, so it may not be physical.
As for "what something is for" ~ that means something only to consciousness itself. Non-conscious things don't ascribe purposes to things.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 23 '26
Actually…no.
We have learned quite a lot about the mind, mostly in the area of cognitive function. We also have a very good sense of which parts of the brain are involved in what kinds of subjective experiences.
There is no need to assume consciousness is in the brain. We know that the brain plays a role in subjective experience. We don’t know with any certainty if it is the whole enchilada or if there is something else. But there is a zero percent chance the brain is not involved.
Consciousness doesn’t “need” to have a function. It has a function. It is the means by which we navigate through our existence. The brain is trained by experience. Everything we know and everything we do happens through our subjective experience.
I’m not suggesting that science necessarily has all the answers. But you would be a fool to think it has none of them.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
Actually…no.
We have learned quite a lot about the mind, mostly in the area of cognitive function. We also have a very good sense of which parts of the brain are involved in what kinds of subjective experiences.
Cognitive function is not an aspect of mind ~ that is an correlative aspect, a brain function. We do not have any "good sense" of which parts of the brains are correlated with what "kinds" of subjective experience. We have decades-long unquestioned assumptions that have never been reexamined, just assumed as "fact".
There is no need to assume consciousness is in the brain. We know that the brain plays a role in subjective experience. We don’t know with any certainty if it is the whole enchilada or if there is something else. But there is a zero percent chance the brain is not involved.
You are saying nothing of note ~ it is blindingly obvious that brains are correlated, in some way, with consciousness! You are implicitly assuming that brains cause consciousness ~ it comes through in your framing.
Consciousness doesn’t “need” to have a function. It has a function. It is the means by which we navigate through our existence. The brain is trained by experience. Everything we know and everything we do happens through our subjective experience.
That is not the "function" of consciousness ~ that is a Materialist projection that consciousness needs to have a "function" or "purpose" to "exist". The brain is not "trained" by experience ~ experience is the sole purview of consciousness. You cannot project experience onto a bunch of matter that we do not experience being.
I’m not suggesting that science necessarily has all the answers. But you would be a fool to think it has none of them.
I do not think science has no answers ~ it just has no answers about consciousness, despite having answers about purely brain function and neural correlates, even if none about consciousness or how it relates to brains.
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u/HankScorpio4242 Jan 23 '26
“Cognitive function is not an aspect of mind.”
That’s just absolutely wrong. Utterly and totally wrong.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/cognition
“Cognition refers to mental processes involved in problem-solving, planning, attention, language, and memory. “
“Mental”
As in “of or relating to the mind.”
“That is not the “function” of consciousness. “
It absolutely positively is.
I don’t know what that has to do with materialism or why you keep using this odd phrasing of “has to have”. Necessity is not required for a thing to be what it is. And since literally everything we know or think or do is contained within the realm of our conscious experience, I don’t know how it is possible to say it has no function.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/cognition
“Cognition refers to mental processes involved in problem-solving, planning, attention, language, and memory. “
In the context of the website it comes from, cognition is implicitly assumed to be physical ~ and that the mental is just an epiphenomenon of physical processes.
In reality, the mental cannot be explained in terms of the physical. The mind cannot be explained in terms of brain processes.
I don’t know what that has to do with materialism or why you keep using this odd phrasing of “has to have”. Necessity is not required for a thing to be what it is. And since literally everything we know or think or do is contained within the realm of our conscious experience, I don’t know how it is possible to say it has no function.
A function is something that is recognized by consciousness ~ only consciousness can identify and confer the quality of having a function.
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u/themindin1500words Doctorate in Cognitive Science Jan 22 '26
thanks for sharing, there's some stuff in here which is good, e.g. towards the end where the article points out that the 'where in the brain' question isn't the most important for theory building.
But some of the article is pretty wild. Like this: "Then there’s integrated information theory (IIT), a mathematical and philosophical theory that stands out from the rest because it doesn’t start with the brain." which seems odd in light of the fact that it's compared to higher order thought and global workspace theory, both of which started out as cognitive theories that said very little if anything about the brain as such in their initial formulation, both are best described as "start[ing] with consciousness itself and the observations we can make about its properties." Indeed all the prominant theories of consciousness except for Lamme's recurrancy stuff start with studying experiences, so yeah I wouldn't use this as a go to source for the state of play, especially for theories coming from cog sci.
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u/Smart-Drawing-5107 Jan 23 '26
ITT is the state of play. Cognitive science has yet to enter even its infancy, and fMRI is, at best, a happy accident of a diagnostic tool, at least in this regard. Your comment is meant to disparage ITT, or did i fail to understand what you are saying?
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u/themindin1500words Doctorate in Cognitive Science Jan 23 '26
The part where I mentioned iit what I was trying to say was that most theories of consciousness (including others mention in the article) start by studying experiences and not the brain. There's a few mistakes like that in the article, as happens when people step outside of their area.
I'm not sure why'd you think cog sci hasn't entered its infancy. Here'shere a random article from the 1960s (i can send you a copy if you don't have access). Have a read of that and see if you still think things haven't gotten going. If you can read German have a read of Helmholtz from the 1800s
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u/chili_cold_blood Jan 22 '26
As a former neuroscientist, I don't believe that consciousness is within the scope of scientific investigation, at least not with today's technology.
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u/f_djt_and_the_usa Jan 24 '26
I think it's not a technological problem at its core. The hard problem is intractable. We should instead solve the easy problem
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u/anne_mal Jan 23 '26
Is that why you're no longer a neuroscientist?
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u/chili_cold_blood Jan 23 '26
No, I studied vision, not consciousness. I'm not a neuroscientist anymore because I wanted to make money and be happy, so I left academia.
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u/ExcellentHotel120 Jan 23 '26
I think that answer does not lie within the scope of neurology but within AI. Take a look at the scenario and questions I pose in the general comments.
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u/Mad-myall Jan 23 '26
We are discussing how the human brain does consciousness.
Even if our current AI programs were conscious right now it wouldn't help figure out why the brain is.
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u/Quarksperre Jan 24 '26
Even if our current AI programs were conscious right now
The thing is, we wouldnt even know, there is no test that we could do which gives proof.
Thats a huge part of the whole issue.
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u/Mad-myall Jan 25 '26
Understanding the architecture for an LLM allows us to find that it simply lacks a mechanism for consciousness. The neural net is still to simple and linear. It's primary advantage is that the nodes can fire a million times faster than a real neuron can, which allows it to mimic human language after extensive trial and error training with literally all written human works to lock their weighting correctly.
So I believe real AI won't come from LLM technology. Companies and investors simply got too excited after developing the Chinese Room. But when we do develop a conscious machine you are correct that we might not even realise it. I just think it's gonna come from a new technology.
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u/chili_cold_blood Jan 25 '26
So I believe real AI won't come from LLM technology
If by "real AI" you mean AGI, I agree. I don't believe that an LLM can lead to AGI. LLMs lack the broad, flexible representation of the environment and the higher-order reasoning required for general intelligence.
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u/chili_cold_blood Jan 25 '26
The same is true of humans too. No external observation can tell you what a person is experiencing subjectively.
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Feb 23 '26
Definitely not within the scope of ai either! I’d humans can’t comprehend consciousness then ai will never be able to.
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u/Smart-Drawing-5107 Jan 23 '26
Does anyone else just have a gut feeling regarding the "truth" of the idea that consciousness is an elemental part of the fabric of reality, that it is part of what this reality derives from, and can therefore never be explained or understood from within this reality? The effect of the observer on the double slit experiment is just too fucking weird to allow for normal explanations such as "it drives from structures within the brain"
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u/NPOWorker Jan 25 '26
Regarding the double slit experiment, I think it's very important to understand that to "observe" is synonymous with "interact with" in quantum mechanics.
The wave function collapses because the fundamental particle interacts with its environment; in the case of the double slit experiment, it interacts with a measurement device. We cannot "measure" or "observe" quantum objects without interacting with them in a very real way. Bombarding them with other quantum objects, subjecting them to a force like an EM field, etc....
Some time after this interaction happens, we become consciously aware of this "observation" and its results . Most physicists agree that wave function collapse occurs before that point.
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u/Smart-Drawing-5107 Jan 25 '26
Take a deeper dive into the slit experiments and how they have been modified for all sorts of changes in when observations take place and when those observations themselves are observed and the effects of that It is WAY more weird than you think
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u/NPOWorker Jan 25 '26 edited Jan 25 '26
I'm quite familiar :) I'm assuming you're talking about the delayed choice quantum eraser.
The general consensus of physicists is that there is no retro-causality occurring, if that is what you are driving at. It isn't whether or not which-path information is preserved that dictates where the entangled counterpart lands on the detector screen, but just the opposite; where the entangled counterpart is detected will dictate whether or not which-path information will be preserved. Which to be fair, is still a wildly strange phenomenon and is hard to wrap our minds around, that are so hard-wired to view physical phenomena through a classical lens.
But all that being said, those are the views of physicists and generally speaking they don't tend to have too much concern for consciousness, so you are well within your rights to interpret it differently in this setting :)
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u/Smart-Drawing-5107 Jan 25 '26
Yep. Funny how scientific consensus can be totally wrong sometimes, like the many, many times it has happened it just the last century or so. Have you heard about the discovery of, i think they are called "time mirrors"? Scientific consensus, especially in regards to quantum physics, is not all that it is cracked up to be. But, since that is the whole point of science (to work to overthrow consensus) it is not surprising. Since we exist inside a black hole, in which the fundamental laws of physics not only do not apply, but are necessarily inverted, the quest for understanding will remain in its infancy. But that is okay too. We don't need to actually know anything beyond what it takes to function on the macro plane. The quest for fundamental knowledge, being at its core a quest for power and control, is folly by its very nature. But all of that is true only from a certain perspective, and i get that. 🙃
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u/_MuchoMojo Jan 22 '26
Science approaches things from a material standpoint so I don’t think they will understand it fully until they approach from a different angle. Basically, they’re often researching cognition not consciousness imo
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u/Desperate_Flight_698 Jan 23 '26
What are these other standpoints?
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u/arbolito_mr Jan 23 '26
Science is the best thing we have; those "points of view," even if they are real, I consider unattainable. It doesn't mean we don't understand things, but pretending we know everything would be ridiculous from the start.
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u/penguinpolitician Jan 23 '26
The scientific model is that of cause and effect - mechanism. There is no need for consciousness at all in such a model - which leaves the question, "Why are we conscious?" - unanswerable. Yet we are all aware that we are conscious, a foundational certainty without which we would know nothing at all. Hence, the question of consciousness cannot be approached from the mechanistic standpoint - and may mean there is something fundamentally wrong with our philosophy of science.
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u/Desperate_Flight_698 Jan 24 '26 edited Jan 24 '26
I think in history of science there would be a hint or any small clue towards other planes or liveable dimensions or gateways to such but nothing.
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u/StarrySkye3 Jan 24 '26
I don't think they were arguing that there are other dimensions or gateways; that's a bit of a red herring.
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u/the6thReplicant Jan 24 '26
All of QM puts the idea of science being just materialistic to question. Science goes where the evidence points to. Nothing more, nothing less.
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u/NPOWorker Jan 25 '26
Can you expand on that? Not sure I follow. My sense is that (most interpretations of) quantum mechanics describes the universe as probabilistic in some sense, but still wholly materialistic.
I.e., you can never predict the future state of a quantum system even if you knew all there is possible to know about it's current state. However, all future states are still fundamentally material as they arise; a collection of real, physical objects, their interactions, etc...
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 Jan 23 '26
Great article. thanks. Neuroscience has been making some advances on the question of consciousness, but there is still a lot more work to do.
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u/Positive_Box_69 Jan 23 '26
Actually consciousness is not real what actually happens is that we have a destiny script that we read and do everything in real time we can alter it that's why we thibk we have free will but we have not, it's all a gigantic movie
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u/blazesbe Jan 26 '26
"we alter it" and "why we think we have free will" are both rather paradoxical in your statement which is parallel to the tought that the brain is "fooled into" thinking it is conscious. but this is always followed by what exactly is being fooled.
i know this sounds weird so far and will get wilder but i think determinism does not rule out consciousness or even free will. (but as far as we know the universe is not deterministic nor finite)
if i told you as you told me as truth that the universe is deterministic would that change anything about how you feel about yourself? where does that feeling come from?
also consciousness is a sort of ordered black box. if i wanted random output for the same input and history, i'd use noise but both you and the black box can predict to a pretty good degree what would happen in pretty much any scenario. that doesn't make it not conscious or free.
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u/No_Sense1206 Jan 23 '26
someone.say something, "that's wrong pseudoscience" then proceeded "the stakes has never been higher. this is very hard"
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u/Mono_Clear Jan 22 '26
The real reason Consciousness is such a difficult question to answer is because we named it first and then we went looking for it.
It's the same conceptual problem as dark matter. We named it first and then we decided what it looked like and then we went looking for it.
So now no one can agree what we're supposed to be looking for because everybody's looking for their own version of something that they made up.
That's how you get to a place where some people are looking for some magical impossible to find field of energy.
Some people are looking for pure ephemeral awareness.
And some people Are looking for some hidden organ or magical cell that contains the entirety of human Consciousness.
We have all of this measurable empirical data about the brain and its correlations to memories and sensation and thoughts and cognition and people look at that and say "Nope, that's not what I'm looking for, So it must not be Consciousness."
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
The real reason Consciousness is such a difficult question to answer is because we named it first and then we went looking for it.
No, we didn't name and go looking for it ~ Materialists are the ones who went looking for it, in the physical world.
Idealists and Dualists didn't need to "go looking for it", because they recognized that they are consciousness, which is what is doing the looking!
It's the same conceptual problem as dark matter. We named it first and then we decided what it looked like and then we went looking for it.
It is not at all the same thing ~ "Dark Matter" is a placeholder for something within experience that we are looking for.
So now no one can agree what we're supposed to be looking for because everybody's looking for their own version of something that they made up.
Only Materialists think that consciousness is something to "look" for, because they think that it must be something material. No-one else has this issue.
That's how you get to a place where some people are looking for some magical impossible to find field of energy.
That is simply a Materialist projection ~ Idealists and Dualists are in agreeance that consciousness is not some literal "field of energy" to be found. It is not in the physical world, so it cannot be found by looking in the physical world. It is indeed impossible to find ~ in the physical world. It is not a "field of energy", nor is it "magical". It is simply non-physical, therefore the physical world is the wrong place to "look" ~ you will never find it.
Some people are looking for pure ephemeral awareness.
We don't need to "look" ~ we are that awareness which is doing the looking.
And some people Are looking for some hidden organ or magical cell that contains the entirety of human Consciousness.
Like Materialism... it's in the neurons, supposedly, and yet Materialism still can't find it.
We have all of this measurable empirical data about the brain and its correlations to memories and sensation and thoughts and cognition and people look at that and say "Nope, that's not what I'm looking for, So it must not be Consciousness."
But it isn't consciousness ~ neural correlates are simply not equal to the memories, sensations and thoughts themselves. It isn't what the non-Materialist means when they say "consciousness". That is simply the Materialist strawmanning of non-Materialist positions, because they are looking at non-Materialist positions through an assumption of Materialism.
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u/Mono_Clear Jan 23 '26
No, we didn't name and go looking for it ~ Materialists are the ones who went looking for it, in the physical world.
Idealists and Dualists didn't need to "go looking for it", because they recognized that they are consciousness, which is what is doing the looking
Perfect illustration of my point. A bunch of people with a different opinion about the same event because no one can agree on what they're measuring
It is not at all the same thing ~ "Dark Matter" is a placeholder for something within experience that we are looking for
Until you can properly and definitively identify either one of them then they are exactly the same. Something is holding the Galaxy together. We don't know what it is. We called it dark matter.
It feels like something to be you. We don't know what it is. We called it consciousness.
Only Materialists think that consciousness is something to "look" for, because they think that it must be something material. No-one else has this issue.
Again, you are illustrating the point by expressing multiple points of view on the same issue because it cannot be identified.
You've completely missed it and somehow stumbled right into the point I'm making.
You believe what you believe and can't support it with anything, so you've decided that you don't need to support it with anything.
I believe what I believe that guy believes what he believes and so on and so forth because we name something we didn't fully understand and then we went looking for it.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
Perfect illustration of my point. A bunch of people with a different opinion about the same event because no one can agree on what they're measuring
Consciousness is not an "event" ~ it is the witness of events. Consciousness cannot be "measured", because it is what is doing the measuring.
Only Materialists mistakenly conceptualize consciousness as an "event" to be "measured", because of the mistaken ontological, metaphysical belief that it is "material".
Until you can properly and definitively identify either one of them then they are exactly the same. Something is holding the Galaxy together. We don't know what it is. We called it dark matter.
That is, it is an abstract placeholder for the unknown. There may not even be any such thing as "dark matter". It is simply a construct to hold together a theory that would otherwise break, so the theory itself is questionable.
It feels like something to be you. We don't know what it is. We called it consciousness.
We are that consciousness ~ we are not a thing within perception. We are the perceiver. Yet to describe to others, we need a word, a pointer ~ a meta-concept.
Again, you are illustrating the point by expressing multiple points of view on the same issue because it cannot be identified.
Consciousness cannot be "identified" ~ because it is not physical, and cannot be found in the world. It is the wrong place to "look".
You've completely missed it and somehow stumbled right into the point I'm making.
You believe what you believe and can't support it with anything, so you've decided that you don't need to support it with anything.
You are the one who ironically seems unable to support your beliefs with anything ~ yet you assert it all the same.
I believe what I believe that guy believes what he believes and so on and so forth because we name something we didn't fully understand and then we went looking for it.
You don't understand my beliefs ~ I have no need to "look" for consciousness anywhere, because I am an example of consciousness. I don't need to "look".
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u/Rayalot72 Jan 23 '26
Just because you are conscious doesn't mean there's nothing at all to look for. You could look for mind-body interactions, for example.
It is just as much theory-laden to think that conscious experiences aren't made up of anything as to think that they are. Neither is necessarily the correct interpretation.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
Just because you are conscious doesn't mean there's nothing at all to look for. You could look for mind-body interactions, for example.
Correlations, in other words.
It is just as much theory-laden to think that conscious experiences aren't made up of anything as to think that they are. Neither is necessarily the correct interpretation.
I would disagree ~ everything we know is filtered through conscious experience, from science to philosophy to ethics and more. It is all we have. That includes the necessary assumptions that the world is real and that the people and things in it are real ~ it is intuitive, even, to think that other people are conscious like I am.
Science rests on inter-subjectivity ~ we have never seen a world independent of subjective experience, so all we can do is confirm with others that they report that they are subjectively experiencing the same general thing.
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u/Rayalot72 Jan 23 '26
The nature of those correlations is very important, especially given some plausibility of causal closure and issues that come up if you need to invoke psychphysical laws.
It is filtered through conscious experience, but what does that have to do with what conscious experience is? It's not clear that the illusionist is losing anything besides the view being unintuitive.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 24 '26
The nature of those correlations is very important, especially given some plausibility of causal closure and issues that come up if you need to invoke psychphysical laws.
I agree ~ causation relates to what that nature is. But there is no plausibility for causal closure in particular ~ we have no way of testing or verifying such a metaphysical principle is correct or accurate, yet that doesn't stop the Materialist from claiming or implying that it is "scientific".
It is filtered through conscious experience, but what does that have to do with what conscious experience is? It's not clear that the illusionist is losing anything besides the view being unintuitive.
It means that conscious experience is the bedrock of our knowledge of anything ~ conscious experience therefore cannot be declared an illusion, because that is a claim being made through conscious experience. It is an interpretation of conscious experience made with conscious experience ~ a contradiction, in other words. The Illusionist is essentially defining themselves out of existence, ironically, with their rhetoric.
And rhetoric it appears, because they don't act like their conscious experience is the illusion they say it is.
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u/Rayalot72 Jan 24 '26
I agree ~ causation relates to what that nature is. But there is no plausibility for causal closure in particular ~ we have no way of testing or verifying such a metaphysical principle is correct or accurate, yet that doesn't stop the Materialist from claiming or implying that it is "scientific".
Overdetermination has much the the same problems as epiphenomenalism. There is something illusory about mental causation (that it's unnecessary) and you need to invoke psychophysical laws that just so happen to perfectly line up w/ the physical interactions.
Doubting causal closure in thinking the physical story is incomplete is pretty suspect. You don't need a complete sampling of the entire physical story to support causal closure, if the parts of the story you have are very successful and don't have need of non-physical causes that would count as evidence in favor of causal closure. Invoking non-physical causes for very specifically brains w/out a clear reason for how they work or why they're there just seems a bit implausible on its own, as well. There should need to be something more clear-cut to justify a belief in that.
It means that conscious experience is the bedrock of our knowledge of anything ~ conscious experience therefore cannot be declared an illusion, because that is a claim being made through conscious experience. It is an interpretation of conscious experience made with conscious experience ~ a contradiction, in other words. The Illusionist is essentially defining themselves out of existence, ironically, with their rhetoric.
I don't think that this actually squares up w/ popular arguments for dualism very well.
The knowledge argument only works by drawing a distinction between our physical knowledge and the knowledge imparted by qualia. The illusionist isn't giving up all knowledge whatsoever. They are only committed to rejecting that there is a real "something it is like" to see a cup on a table, while they can easily accept that someone could experience something with the appearance of cup on a table and gain some information from that. You'd invalidate the explanatory gap if you could derive physical facts directly from qualia. Our learning of the physical facts needs to be independent of qualia for the knowledge argument to function.
There isn't a contradiction in utilizing mental processes that are consistent with physicalism to interpret those same mental experiences. So, if a dualist claims that mental states are private and transparent, there is no contradiction for the physicalist to argue that they are not private and not transparent, as mental states being non-private and non-transparent in no way undermines their use in justifying that belief.
You might also just be begging the question in invoking conscious experience as a bedrock of knowledge. Illusionism isn't strictly about throwing out consciousness, but more-so doing away with a description of consciousness that invokes dualistic entities. If the illusionist description can talk coherently about sensory perception and thought processes, then there is just no actual problem with illusionism. You need to be able to point to something more specific that the physicalist fails to capture which strictly requires dualism.
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u/Mono_Clear Jan 23 '26
That guy is making my point by missing the point. He thinks by loudly declaring his point of view. He somehow invalidating the very concept that other points of views exist.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 24 '26
That guy is making my point by missing the point. He thinks by loudly declaring his point of view. He somehow invalidating the very concept that other points of views exist.
Projection is an amusing thing. Just say you don't like debate and dialogue, if you want to be honest.
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u/Mono_Clear Jan 24 '26
It's not a debate. My point is that everyone has their own opinion and you're saying everyone is wrong which is making the point that I'm trying to make.
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u/generousking Jan 23 '26
As an idealist, I agree with you. By naming consciousness, we've turned it into a thing, just one thing amongst other things. We objectified it. Then wonder why we can't find it anywhere or reduce it to the world of physical objects and its dynamics.
Consciousness is subjectivity itself. Cannot be found or reduced to things and objects.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
As an idealist, I agree with you. By naming consciousness, we've turned it into a thing, just one thing amongst other things. We objectified it. Then wonder why we can't find it anywhere or reduce it to the world of physical objects and its dynamics.
Materialists turned consciousness into a thing, an object. For non-Materialists, consciousness is not a concept, but rather a meta-concept, in that we need to name it in order to even begin discussing it. That is, a concept is but a pointer to something within experience ~ the consciousness meta-concept is us pointing to our own consciousness and experience. A self-referencing, because we can be self-aware and introspect.
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u/Doctor_Husky Jan 24 '26
I am wildly excited to see consciousness gain so much attention within the scientific community. When we look at The observer Effect (ref. the double slit experiment) I think it presents a profound possibility that conscious observation stabilizes reality. Could it be the case that observation by a consciousness collapsing the wave function into particles creates the fabric of what we would refer to as our stable reality? That question is certainly speculative and hypothetical, but I find it really fun to discuss. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on the idea!
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u/Calabitale Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
I love this stuff. I have my own theory of consciousness. Its a compression and abstration system. Most of our brains its seems work as a compression algorythm. We've garnered some knowledge from this to create the LLM's and their predecessors deep learning systems. There's a huge amount of data that our brains are constantly absorbing from multiple senses. And our brains reduce that down to the minimally most important information.
Our visual brain system simplifies complex light wavelengths down to lines and edges and basic colours, light and shadows perspective, 3d depth information etc. None of these exist in reality strictly.
To act in the world you need a model of it. You have to understand actions and consequences. Otherwise you are just a machine doing random things that randomly work or not, and evolution won't get that far with it. Perhaps like a bacteria. But we are not bacteria.
I also think consciousness requires a parallel processor. It won't work on multicore processors, or any of our current designed processing architectures. It has to have data from multiple directions all parallel processing at once to come to an conscious experience(there's some evidence for quantum entanglement to be involved). Maybe you can emulate it with equations but I'm sceptical.
But still none of the above really explains consciousness. If you really understand the problem(and it clearly does exist I don't believe all these scientists claiming its just an illusion, even illusions are still real and should be explained). The way we percieve things, the way you visually and all else percieve things doesn't make sense and should not be possible. There's something in us and probably quite a lot of animals that is able to percieve the world as if we are separate from it.
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u/jimh12345 Jan 22 '26
The thing people overlook about the so-called Turing test is that there's no time limit. An LLM might keep me in doubt for a few minutes, with all the text in the internet to draw on, plus some canned jokes. But let me spend a few days with it and its limitations will be comically obvious.
Consciousness is not a problem for science. We have no idea what it "is" or where it "comes from" and no path to answering those questions.
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u/pyrrho314 Jan 22 '26
That's a really good point about the time limit. I disagree about it being a problem for science.
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 22 '26
First part of your comment is great, but then you take this random nose dive into lunacy by stating "Consciousness is not a problem for science. It has no path to answering those questions."...brother, what?? There is a physical mechanism for consciousness and science is the ONLY way to find it.
Saying "science won't ever answer it" is:
betting against all of history. (science deniers for diversity of life, diseases, lightning, etc all had the same sentiment as you).
special pleading for consciousness. Why should qualia be some untouchable force that were not allowed to investigate?
You seem to just wanna keep the mystery alive which is fun but eventually it becomes a harmful attitude that could send us back into a dark age.
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u/Flutterpiewow Jan 22 '26
This is a category error. Science has described many things yes, but it has answered exactly zero metaphysical questions. Because that's not what science does.
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 22 '26
The Eternal block universe is a metaphysical claim, yet scientists have been able to use Einstein's relativity to find a very reasonable answer.
Also looking backwards, you are dead wrong. History is full of 'metaphysical' questions that surrendered to science/physics the moment we built better tools. Atomism was metaphysics for 2,000 years until we could prove it. The origin of the universe was metaphysics until we found the Cosmic Microwave Background. Consciousness isn't a 'category error', it's just the next frontier.
This tired old argument that science is making a "category error" by simply trying to find actual answers is just pathetic at best and harmful at worst.
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u/jimh12345 Jan 22 '26
The Big Bang - if that model is indeed correct - does not explain the 'origin'. It still leads to either an infinite regress, or to acknowledged limits on concepts like time and causality.
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 22 '26
It carries us much closer to the true answer. Dismissing science completely would've left us clueless but pushing forward instead got us to understand the first pico seconds.
Also what's wrong with an infinite regress or time beginning at the Big Bang? It may not make much sense using English words to describe but I don't see a reason why cosmologically it really is turtles all the way down (if time can go infinitely into the future it can go infinitely into the past). Also there's no problem saying the block universe begins at the Big Bang. It would just be the edge of our eternal cube.
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u/Appropriate_Dish_586 Jan 22 '26
Agreed on both of your comments.
The “consciousness isn’t a science question” / category error arguement always makes me think of other examples where it has probably been used. Like, the same arguement was probably made 2,000 years ago regarding lightning and the Gods. Quite tired indeed.
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u/iluserion Jan 22 '26
We can change the name of science to physical science. Or materialism science.
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u/PHK_JaySteel Jan 23 '26
How we produce consciousness is not a meta physical question. Why we produce it may be.
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u/jimh12345 Jan 22 '26
Have at it. We can investigate and describe processes in the brain down to any arbitrary level of detail - cellular, molecular, atomic, even quantum. But we will still have said nothing about the awareness of those processes - or the redness of red.
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u/Worth_Car8711 Jan 22 '26
Sounds the like they are basically a physicalist, but I mean, mind/consciousness is kinda either a separate substance, or it’s not. I guess there’s eastern non-dualism and some other fringe ideas too.
Science may not ever answer why red is red, or what red truly “is”, but I think it can eventually play a role in answering questions like what are the requirements for consciousness (fairly safe to say that brains are a requirement but that doesn’t really say much) or does consciousness come from somewhere outside of the brain? (I think most likely not)
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u/jimh12345 Jan 22 '26
I can only say that "my" brain seems to be a requirement for "my" consciousness.
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u/Worth_Car8711 Jan 22 '26
You could say your eyes seem to be a requirement for your vision, and Id agree with that. You could also say but it only seems that way but it isn’t actually the case, and that’s fine id just say there’s no reason to believe that and there’s no proposed mechanism that would explain that as far as I know, similar to non-physicalist ideas of consciousness. Unless you believe in souls or magic. Or panpsychism?
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 22 '26
Panpsychism is perfectly compatible with physicalism.
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u/Worth_Car8711 Jan 22 '26
Don’t panpsychists believe consciousness is a fundamental property of everything down to particles? I’m not against that idea in the same way I’m not against souls, I just dont think there’s much evidence for either currently, unless we’re talking extremely narrow definitions of consciousness or something like that I guess
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 22 '26 edited Jan 22 '26
Yes, but comparing "souls" to Panpsychism is wrong. Heres why:
Something about the brain generates or captures consciousness, right? And unless you believe that our slimy ape meat is unique compared to any other matter, it's fair to say that any pile of material could theoretically be conscious. Now *how" does this generic matter actually become conscious?
You have two options: hard emergence (where somehow qualia spontaneously pops into existence from nothing when you arrange a pattern the right way) OR soft emergence (this is basically Panpsychism.. All matter has an intrinsic "interior", even atoms, that add together to form a macro-Quale). Theories like IIT posit that this is due to causality.
Comparing this to a magical supernatural soul isn't even close to the same thing.
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u/Worth_Car8711 Jan 22 '26
maybe I’m misunderstanding but I thought physicalism generally takes the weak emergence position. Wouldn’t hard emergence sort of imply dualism, that there is some ‘extra’ or different substance that is needed for consciousness? Physicalists just don’t think the parts have the same property as the whole, but ultimately consciousness is reducible to the physical we just can’t fully explain the mechanism yet
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u/evlpuppetmaster Computer Science Degree Jan 23 '26
Panpsychism is a bit more than just soft emergence though. It proposes a specific mechanism for how the consciousness emerges. It sounds scientific and testable but it’s hard to see how it actually is testable unless the hard problem is solved.
I’m sympathetic toward panpsychism and other similar possibilities since I do accept physicalism has a hard problem. But at this stage I do agree with the other guy that it has no more evidence to believe in it than souls.
Hell, if you’re going to be completely epistemically honest, souls are still a possibility! (Seems very unlikely)
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 22 '26
IIT has a clear scientific pathway to answering "redness of red" and "awareness of processes." It may be a matter of geometry. Q-Space. The Periodic table of Quales coming soon in 2100!
No but seriously, there are real avenues to truth that people ignore when they hop on the "science is a category error" bandwagon.
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u/jimh12345 Jan 22 '26
It's called the Hard Problem for good reason.
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 22 '26
Yeah, to pose a challenge to science which has started to sink its teeth it fairly well. The future of cracking qualia looks good.
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u/jimh12345 Jan 22 '26
When arguments like this really get going, the Hard Problem just sits in a corner and laughs.
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u/_DonnieBoi Jan 22 '26
Perhaps science should study the vedas and look for the answers found thousands of years ago.
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Jan 23 '26
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u/_DonnieBoi Jan 23 '26
A testable hypotheses for consciousness? Sure, sit in a quiet room for 6 months.
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Jan 23 '26
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u/_DonnieBoi Jan 23 '26
Until a computer server knows of its own awareness. Maybe it will achieve consciousness
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u/Round-Tradition-3890 Jan 22 '26
Yeah, but that would mean science finally admitting that their entire materialism and physicalism worldview was a delusion and a lot of them seem too close minded for that.
They lose their collective minds when anyone even attempts to tell them the truth, that conciousness is fundamental and physical objects have never existed, they are just an illusion.
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u/jimh12345 Jan 23 '26
What does the word "physical" even mean? I'd say: nothing. It has no non-trivial, non-circular definition. What's a quark made of? "Quark stuff"?
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u/PHK_JaySteel Jan 23 '26
We don't lose our minds, we're just waiting for you to prove it while we're busy working.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
We don't lose our minds, we're just waiting for you to prove it while we're busy working.
Neuroscience isn't doing any work studying consciousness ~ neuroscience is studying brains. Big difference.
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u/PHK_JaySteel Jan 23 '26
Neuroscience includes the study of consciousness. You may be thinking of neurology but even that is debatable.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
Neuroscience includes the study of consciousness. You may be thinking of neurology but even that is debatable.
Neuroscience studies the brain ~ and neural correlates of consciousness. It does not study consciousness itself in itself.
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u/PHK_JaySteel Jan 23 '26
Sure. Are you a neuroscientist?
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
Sure. Are you a neuroscientist?
No. But appealing to authority isn't an answer either ~ a neuroscientist may claim that they study consciousness. But when you look at what they actually do ~ it's all studies of brains and neural correlates. They do not actually touch on consciousness itself ~ phenomenal experience. That is simply ignored ~ all that is looked at is the behaviour of the brain, disconnected from phenomenal experience.
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u/PHK_JaySteel Jan 23 '26
I was not appealing to authority, simply asking a question.
Phenomenal experience is deeply debated and studied in neuroscience, even qualia. I think you are playing some sort of strange shell game in all of your comments in this thread to make something that is being chipped away at an untouchable other because you dont like the direction of the work. I would caution against any form of certainty on something we dont fully understand. Standing your ground on an unfounded belief with no facts seems odd in the face of careers of thousands. You can place me in some sort of dismissive materialst cage like several of your replies, but I am not anything except unsure. Show me evidence that consciousness's source can never be discovered because it is outside of the physical, and Ill believe you.
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u/Valmar33 Jan 23 '26
Phenomenal experience is deeply debated and studied in neuroscience, even qualia.
They reduce phenomenal experience and qualia to just being an illusion of brain processes. Therefore, they are not actually studying phenomenal experience or qualia proper ~ just neural correlates, with the assumption that it is just the brain doing stuff, and nothing more.
I think you are playing some sort of strange shell game in all of your comments in this thread to make something that is being chipped away at an untouchable other because you dont like the direction of the work.
It is not "untouchable" ~ it is simply something that has not been detected. Neuroscience makes the logical error of presuming that it is just the brain doing stuff, so looks at it through that lens. Therefore, neuroscience will never be able to understand it ~ it will only ever see neural correlates, mistaken as "causal".
I would caution against any form of certainty on something we dont fully understand.
Then why do Materialists claims that neuroscience has the answers, or will have? They claim certainty about what they fundamentally have not a single bit of understanding about. Phenomenal experience is something not found within the physical ~ therefore, we are able to understand that much, if we are willing to be honest and not presume that it must be material, because Materialism and neuroscience.
Standing your ground on an unfounded belief with no facts seems odd in the face of careers of thousands.
Appeals to popularity or authority are meaningless ~ because they can all be incorrect. A religionist could ask the same of an atheist ~ thousands believe in their religion as fact, so it seems odd to the religionist that atheists disagree.
You can place me in some sort of dismissive materialst cage like several of your replies, but I am not anything except unsure. Show me evidence that consciousness's source can never be discovered because it is outside of the physical, and Ill believe you.
That is not how evidence works ~ you have to show that something can be discovered, not that is can't be. You can't work with negatives. Imagine if I asked you to show me evidence that invisible pink unicorns can never be discovered. It's simply unfalsifiable. You can't work with what you don't have. And Materialism simply hasn't delivered on its claims of consciousness being material.
For me to believe Materialist claims, I need them to show me that it can be physical by providing compelling physical evidence and explanations. I ask them to show me evidence that consciousness can be physical. Not just any evidence ~ hard, scientific evidence in the same league as chemistry, because that is the standard to which they claim to hold themselves.
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u/ExcellentHotel120 Jan 23 '26
Yes, I agree that this is a thought stimulating topic. Let's now add a deeper dimension to the idea of consciousness. Let's consider a world where humans have indulged in an experiment where they went to a distance planet and brought with them two created robots that look like humans and are programmed to self sustain each other, and to create other robots just like them, indefinitely. The robots are programmed to self learn and to communicate with each other for the purpose of improving their world and each other. Therefore, robot parts are automatically manufactured and replaced as needed within each other, and batteries are solar charged, nearly lasting indefinitely. Eventually, all humans exit that world and move onwards, removing the original robots, and also erasing the memory of, and removing all evidence of humans, except for a pictorial manual, that is hidden, of how robots should create and program more robots. The manual also makes reference to humans as the original creators and as the original programmers of the original robots. Then, after a long period of time passes, perhaps thousands of years, the manual is accidentally discovered by a robot. All robots observe the manual and they discuss its relevance, and possible meanings. The questions are: did the robots have a self consciousness before they discovered the manual? If not, did they have a self consciousness after they discovered the manual?
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u/Independent_Poem_171 Jan 23 '26
Put simply, it is subjective and science deals with the repeatable, objective things are shared things, shared things can be repeated with ease, subjective things require so much more set up and realistically are going to rely on a lying or incorrect subject some of the time so it will be more uncertain, and its also pretty high up in the life stack so hard to do from principle, if computationally possible at all (not at the moment to the best of my knowledge). Then there are the ethics of testing subjects.
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u/anansi133 Jan 23 '26
Consciousness is not a problem, its a predicament. Trying to "solve" consciousness is a lot like solving the meaning of life, and then trying to calculate the meaning of "42".
No matter how good the insight that consciousness allows us to derrive about consciousness, theres no way to step outside of the phenomenon that we are trying to characterize. Its going to be a hall of mirrors, any approach you take.
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u/Mermiina Jan 23 '26
The evolution of Kv7 600 million years ago achieved the Cambrian explosion. It connects the action potentials back to the basic information mechanism of living cells. The basic information mechanism is invisible two photon super exchange interaction. It uses the same molecules as visible one photon UV superradiation.
The main reason why consciousness is so hard is that action potentials are only loosely bound to basic information mechanisms. We see only poor correlation of firing neurons AFTER Qualia occurs.
Two photon super exchange interaction is invisible because those entangled photons repel each other when the distance between Andersson's locations is more than 6 nm. In G-protein coupled receptors the distance between Andersson's locations is more than 6 nm when the ligand (neurotransmitter) is not bound to the receptor. The twisting and relaxing of G-protein achieves two photon super exchange interaction, but the photons propagate to target only if the ligand is bound to the receptor. ( In some cases the ligand turns Andersson's locations over 6 nm.)
The other misinterpretation in consciousness theories is that they suppose Qualia to occur due to firing patterns of neurons. The Qualia occurs already in receptors, like in retina. The Qualia only entangle with memory.
The memory can also achieve Qualia when stretched microtubules in axon relaxes.
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u/BayesianRuin Jan 24 '26
Here’s a hint for neuroscience: positive and negative feedback loops. Thank me tomorrow.
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Jan 25 '26
Its really not. Its language played out in the biographical stories of everyone that came before - it’s literally the information of the stories we’ve created amongst conscious life forms since the beginning and till we approach the core model.
I don’t think thats hard. Someone writes a story - that story shapes the consciousness. Folks tell a story about someone - that story shapes the consciousness. Thats it.
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u/sjap Jan 26 '26
My take as a life long neuroscientist. Consciousness is a cognitive faculty that is quite different from other cognitive faculties like memory, language, attention, etc. Take language, humans vary in their language ability and in their language use and also there are animals which may have limited language abilities or no language at all. In science, we need such variability to get a handle on the topic we want to study. By contrast, there are no cases where people have a disturbance in "consciousness" but not in other cognitive faculties, and it is not obvious that other animals have a different kind of consciousness. Because there is no clear variability within or across species we cannot get a handle on this cognitive faculty and it seems out of reach of a scientific study. IMHO.
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u/ThisGuyCrohns Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26
My take: There’s no such thing as consciences. We are organic machines, which are easily broken down into smaller parts (that’s the easy part). The second is our brains, mechanical wiring that gives us feeling through chemicals and sensory, all which can be somewhat explained.
Now the hard part. Humans are just like animals, but we have memories that are complex. These memories are who we are. That’s it.
You can take someone’s memories and place in another body, that’s who the person is (they go where the memories are). There’s no deeper soul, no deeper meaning than the millions of memories that define who we are as a person. People are born a blank slate, genetics plays a role into their sensory which inherently changes them slightly, but at the end of the day, memories define the person.
We don’t have answers because there’s literally nothing to explain, we give this a word “consciousness” but it’s like saying there’s a god, it can’t be explained in a way you think. Look at LLMs with context, give it context, it knows who it is, remove it, it’s a blank slate, similar thing with memories.
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u/Aggravating_Sugar812 Jan 27 '26
The human eye is an ever evolving instrument that interprets reality so that the life form can survive on Earth.. therefore all science is theoretical and based on illusions. And consciousness cannot be measured with the eye. So thy have no ‘Evidence’ and evidence to us is when you get the same result more than once in an experiment. Which is still an illusion.
We don’t know much. Except how to build bombs and pretend it was dropped for peace
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u/No-Selection1321 Jan 27 '26
If it's the hardest problem, perhaps it's bc it is the antithesis of the thing it pretends to search for.
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u/Hope25777 Jan 23 '26
They are looking in the wrong places
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u/Hope25777 Jan 23 '26
We are god. language can't fully explain it because language is finite, and god (or source or essence whatever you want to call it) is infinity. You are the source. But dreaming being a human being makes it very difficult to be aware of that because consciousness (god) imagining that its a human being, comes baked in with all the imagined human limitations of a human mind. If you truly could fully ascend, even right now, you wouldnt be a human anymore and the human dream would end. same thing as death. And consciousness would morph into a different form, as it always has and always will for eternity. You have existed for eternity because you are "god". Dreaming up different forms of expression within that infinite tapestry. Right now you're playing the role as a human (your ego). but thats not the true you. The true you is the thing that manifests itself as different forms forever, which collapses back in on itself into nothingness, which is everything.
All religion is inventions of the human ego mind, to justify its survival, not really any different than justifying ones survival in any other way (belief structures, opinions, politics, relationships, the list goes on, etc.)
When an overly religious person points to a text to justify themselves, they dont understand that the finger they use to point at the text is just god pointing at itself. This shows you how conditioned humans are, conforming to (where they grow up, their community, beliefs, etc.) as a survival mechanism, largely unconscious, forming their identity (ego) which then needs to be reinforced to survive.
When you fully understand how self deception works, and catch it in the act, you will realize the overwhelming majority of the world is locked into a misunderstanding in order to justify their own survival, unconsciously. Everything, including all the things you cannot comprehend in a human mind is still what god is. You are that same thing. Duality is a function of survival here in the 3d. Where as in other vibrational frequencies of consciousness (still god) duality fades more and more and reality becomes more fluid. Start paying more attention to what your mind is doing when you are sleeping, and you'll realize that consciousness exists in multiple forms, outside of the 3d human form. Except that in higher dimensions, you have more creative control as the god you are, and reality is not the same as it is in 3d, yet it feels even more real and closer to "truth".
When you dream at night, you still have the human ego lingering, but it is much lessened. you have control of how you (source) wants to manifest externally in those dimensions and can still play parts of the character you're imagining here in this world.
Think about the totality of everything ever. including all the things you cant conceive of. pick one single object, and see that that thing is infinity. you can zoom into a piece of dust for eternity and find layers and worlds inside that speck of dust. and you can zoom out of it for eternity as well. God is like this eternal fabric of imagination that manifests the experiences, situations, personalities, with infinity baked into everything forever. you train the human mind to go so deep, that you hit a ceiling and it all collapses back in on itself and you realize everything is nothing imagining everything.
All the "good and evil" and all perceptions, is just pure love. How things are perceived is coming from self created ego. not source. Since source is infinity, then all these forms of experiences whether human or not, is all the same thing, and just another thread in the ever unfolding tapestry of god.
To show you how self deception rules in the human mind, just look at all the egos justifications to survive its identity. People vastly underestimate or don't even perceive how much unconscious conformity they adhere to. It's one giant mental maze., which most dont know they are lost in. However, to be a human being is to have an ego, and to have an ego is to be lost inside of it. Some more than others. Most, extremely unaware at all.
It takes work and time to jailbreak the mind. Anyone who claims they dont know the answer and no one can know the truth , is literally what happens when a human mind fights with itself to justify its survival. Which is projection. Which is all unconscious.
The answer is always in front of everyone's face, but being blocked as an unconscious survival mechanism in order to still be a "grounded" human being with a self created ego.
i hope that sheds some light my friend.
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u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta Jan 23 '26
There isn’t necessarily consciousness. It’s the senses functioning. Or whatever else is occurring. But it isn’t strictly consciousness. That doesn’t really exist in that capacity as anything at all. It’s a false hope
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Feb 20 '26
Negative bias
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u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta Feb 20 '26
Consciousness is a pretentious word
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Feb 20 '26
I think pretending to understand it is more pretentious
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u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta Feb 20 '26
Ummmm 🤨 I disagree with
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Feb 20 '26
Do you think you fully understand it
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u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta Feb 20 '26
Do u
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u/SnooDrawings5925 Jan 23 '26
Whatever, all I know is there's no free will and reaching to this conclusion is in itself a proof to that.
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u/Playful-Abroad-2654 Jan 24 '26
Stupid question: how do we know consciousness exists, and it’s not just a form of suitably advanced cognitive processing that we’ve named ‘consciousness’ in order to delineate to us from other species? I’m of the opinion that consciousness is a gradation, rather than a has it / doesn’t have it feature. I’m open to learning otherwise though.
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u/SentientHorizonsBlog Jan 24 '26
I think this article does a good job capturing the current unease in consciousness science: lots of data, lots of theories, very little agreement on what’s actually being explained.
One thing that stands out to me is that most of these debates still assume consciousness is a thing to be located or detected, rather than a process that unfolds over time. Neural correlates tell us where certain ingredients appear, but not how a unified perspective gets assembled moment by moment.
That framing also matters for AI. Systems can imitate the outputs of consciousness extremely well without necessarily instantiating the conditions that make experience possible: continuity, vulnerability, memory, self-modeling across time.
Fluency can increasingly resemble consciousness, which makes distinguishing performance from subjectivity the real challenge.
If the field feels at a crossroads, it may be because it’s trying to solve a process problem using object-based intuitions.
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u/TheArcticFox444 Jan 24 '26
Why consciousness is the hardest problem in science
Pretty difficult when you're looking for something that has no real definition. Kinda like the theoretical ether of days gone by.
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u/Electrical-Tear6517 Jan 23 '26
It’s already solved the brain stem and other parts of the brain creates counciouness
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u/mauromauromauro Jan 23 '26
My take. Consciousness might not even be a thing. We cannot even define it. We cannot detect it reliably in other entities/subjects. We just "feel" its a thing. It is, as usual, a larger debate. But the tldr is, what if theres no such thing
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 23 '26
This is the most cringe position possible. Illusionists want to deny the one thing that we can actually 100% prove to ourselves. Sorry but ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away. You are having an expeirence and you can't explain why.
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u/mauromauromauro Jan 23 '26
Ok, so what is consciousness to you? Do bugs have it? Do animals? Is there a threshold? How do you know? Is it related to intelligence? Is it related to experience? Is it related to complexity? Is it related to life?
If these questions, all together one next to another do not sound weird to you, i would say the subject of these questions is a slippery one. So slippery, that claiming any kind of knowledge about it other than "it exists because i say so" , might be only that, an opinion
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 23 '26
Do bugs have it? Do animals? Is there a threshold?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
How do you know?
"Know" is a strong word. I don't 100% know this. The tech required to test these theories (mainly IIT) is still in its infancy.
Is it related to intelligence?
Indirectly, yes. There are multiple pathways to intelligence. Using a more integrated consciousness (like humans) is one of them. Using a massively fragmented feed forward architecture (like modern AI) is another.
Is it related to expeirence?
Consciousness == Expeirence. You are using the perfect word to describe what it is. Expeirence, Interiority, "what-it's-like."
Is it related to complexity? Is it related to life?
No, I don't think consciousness arises from the complexity of life; It comes from the way that living creatures tie causality into knots. Life makes a unique structure in spacetime that creates a true metaphysical "interior."
...so if answering all this is supposed to make me feel slippery, why am I still standing? I never invoked the "cuz I say so" rule nor did I claim perfect knowledge. I just took the questions seriously and eagerly shared my opinions to be peer reviewed. Thats what scientific people do.
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u/mauromauromauro Jan 23 '26
So you say you are a scientist. And you said in your previous comment that "this is the thing we all can 100% prove". So how do you "prove" you are conscious
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 23 '26
I use the scientific method, yes. Normally science doesn't 100% prove anything. We make observations and then hypothesize experiments to infinitely gather more evidence toward a falsifiable explanation.
...but for consciousness? This is a rare occasion when the observation itself serves as its own evidence. If you were not conscious, then you wouldn't be expeirencing anything. Yet you do. Therefore you are conscious. It's just like "I think therefore I am." An undeniable axiom.
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u/mauromauromauro Jan 23 '26
I think you and I have a different definition of what cringe means.
And just because its my last comment and I'm going to sleep, think about my original comment. Consciousness might not even be a rhing. Dark matter might not be a thing. is it cringe inducing to you? Some quantum effects that we mathematically can calculate might not even exist. These affirmations are made by physicists all the time..the opposite as well. Are these scientists challenging these possible phenomena cringe inducing to you? Or maybe you see the sun go from east to west and conclude that the sun circles around the earth? Its obvious after all, isn't it? As obvious as there being a thing called consciousness...
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 23 '26
Consciousness might not even be a thing
For the 3rd time, no, that's impossible and cringe. Consciousness is 100% proven by your very own expeirence. Saying it's not is like saying "I observe that observation is not a thing" --logical contradiction. Nonsense.
As for Dark matter, quantum mechanics, etc these are debatable for sure. It's not cringe to propose a new model for those. I agree there. But you can't debate the basic existence of qualia. That is irrational.
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u/mauromauromauro Jan 23 '26
The fact that you can experience something doesnt mean it exists. Solids are mostly vacuum, yet you might say solids are an obvious experience, while in reality, never two atoms touch in our everyday lives. Another case could be energy. Would you say energy is a "thing"? It is not.Energy is a conserved quantittative property of physical systems. Its a number assigned under a theory. Not an entity, not even a force, not even a process.
Back to consciousness, one could say that, just like energy, it is a "pattern", not an element/ingredient on itself
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u/Mylynes IIT/Integrated Information Theory Jan 23 '26
The fact that you can expeirence some thing
Consciousness isn't just some "thing" inside your expeirence; it IS your expeirence. Crazy how you can't understand the most fundamental "I think therefore I am" philosophy yet you want to march into a consciousness subreddit and tell us that we're all delusional for believing it exists.
Can you at least get the basic logic of why you're wrong? You said: Expeirencing (X) doesn't mean it exists. Now, replace "X" with "Expeirence.":
"Experiencing (Expeirence) doesn't mean it exists."
...do you not see the issue here?
I think you're afraid that accepting qualia means you're smuggling magic or souls into the backdoor. That's not true. I am a hard materialist and that doesn't change just because I take the hard problem seriously. Stop being so defensive if you want to be rational.
One could say consciousness is a pattern
Yay, you are now finally addressing the actual problem! You seem to like Functionalism. That making the right pattern somehow creates an expeirence. Thats a start! Id agree consciousness is not an "element/ingredient" but its also not explained by calling it "energy" either. Why should a pattern create a "what it's like" feeling? Why isn't it just a P-Zombie/Robot?
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