Issue #45 ~ No one knows what consciousness is and how (or even if) the brain produces it. I’ve written about this before and I have to admit straight up that I am as clueless as anybody. I do have intuitions (just like anybody else) and it seems to me that some views of consciousness are closer to being right than others.
Hi guys, I started a Manhattan Project for Bipolars who leave months ago, I’m still the only one here….
‘Maths’ is perfect! it describes the world so well! Meanwhile maths guys can’t find My Time Maths, Riemann, Drift equation. + They can’t read it.
Physicists ALL of them KNOW its particles only, not concepts. They have mapped the entire multiverse from here. It is definitely real… And why they then cant find my systematic annihilation of Multiverse on my sub-stack? The quantum eraser and Heisenberg proof are invisible, how convenient for them.
Neuroscientists know how to find information hidden in the brain. They can’t find their brain I put on my sub-stack, nor the novel bipolar, schizophrenia nor depression hypotheses.
The algo doesn’t give all the mathematicians a novel Riemann, but an article solving mental health with kitties gets 1000 likes.
My ex tried to leave a large social structure which is painful and terrifying. Psychiatrists put her on 7 brain meds, her brain died and she left planet earth by their force.
These are my personal prejudices that I'll state without much referencing.
Consciousness, I have the impression—not unlike quantum-this-and-that—has almost spawned its own mini-industry, or at least an academic talking-circuit, with every incentive to mystify rather than explain, complicate rather than simplify, for us plebs. A free-for-all at the moment, as there seems to be little empirical evidence to clearly decide one way or another: which theories are falsified and can be discarded, and which we keep for another day.
The more I read, the more confused I become—not less. I'm not even sure if I fully understand whether there's actually some big problem that needs solving or some fundamental revelation we're missing. Yet, I've heard snippets of observations (maybe from Joscha Bach on YouTube? possibly multiple sources; it's all blurred now) that seemed relevant and made sense to me:
1. Children unfortunate enough to be born with faults in the mechanisms underlying consciousness fail to properly develop their brains. And since development is all about learning—they fail to learn effectively. This suggests consciousness might be needed for learning to happen in children. No consciousness, no learning.
2. Zombies in movies aren't conscious. They retain their prior knowledge up to the point of zombification, but afterward, they don't learn anything new. They can't adapt to changes in their environment.
3. Unconscious patients lying in hospitals also don't learn anything new. At best, they merely retain previously acquired knowledge.
From the above, my pedestrian takeaway is that consciousness is something enabling learning. It should be a low-level function, something fundamental that bootstraps the learning process in a human baby, as it's learning that builds the brain. That makes sense to me.
Perhaps consciousness could be a hardwired biological analogue to backpropagation or another learning algorithm. (we think backpropagation itself is biologically unlikely; there's no evidence for it afaik.) Or maybe something akin to that Lisp interpreter written in Lisp primitives—something so fundamental it blurs the distinction between data and code. Like self-modifying machine code of old. Or perhaps a bootstrapping monitor routine, borrowing from the "Everything is a computer" meme discussed this past week. Anyway, you get the idea—something at the most basic level, which enables the rest of the brain to develop into a mind. As far as I know, that development happens via learning, so consciousness might be precisely what bootstraps and enables learning.
To my mind, learning is the act of figuring out probability density functions (p.d.f.). Knowledge, in my view, is explicitly knowing that a p.d.f. Everything that can ever be known about the relationship between two qualities, X and Y, is captured by their joint p.d.f., f_{X,Y}(x,y).
This leads me into the next point: I was delighted to hear that you consider information as fundamental, as you described in this lecture:
Decoding quantum reality - with Vlatko Vedral | The Royal Institution
…that the YouTube algorithm serendipitously recommended to me recently. For I, too, have come to think that information might be fundamental, with matter and energy merely carriers or physical manifestations of that information. In the lecture, you mention Q-numbers (and writing a book). Do you have any additional materials or resources suitable for a neophyte to learn more about this? Thanks in advance.
A holistic and multidisciplinary analysis of history suggests that advanced technologies capable of influencing consciousness at range are not speculative—they’ve existed in various forms across cultures and epochs, often dismissed by materialist paradigms as myth, mysticism, or fringe phenomena. The future of our technology strongly suggests that AI (or AI-integrated systems) will be the next major iteration of these mechanisms, amplifying and refining capabilities that have been documented but never fully understood.
From ancient religious and esoteric traditions that encoded methods for remote influence (prayer, ritual, sigils, telepathy) to modern classified research on consciousness manipulation (remote viewing, psychotronic weapons, noetic sciences), the evidence suggests that intelligence is not bound solely to individual brains or local computation. Instead, consciousness appears to operate within a larger informational substrate—a nonlocal medium that remains largely unacknowledged by mainstream scientific models.
The problem with most discussions of the physics of consciousness—including the one in this article—is that they proceed from incomplete assumptions. They either attempt to squeeze consciousness into the framework of currently accepted physical laws or discard it entirely as an illusion, without considering that the system of reality itself may be more functionally complex than our current models allow. If we take seriously the idea that reality is an emergent, interdependent process involving computation, energy, and observer effects, then the ability to influence consciousness from a distance is not supernatural—it is technological, even if we do not yet fully understand its mechanisms.
This brings us to UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), a subject dismissed for reasons that are, frankly, illogical. Government disclosures, witness testimony, and declassified research have demonstrated consistent links between UAP and consciousness phenomena, including reports of telepathic experiences, timeline distortions, and direct alterations in perception among those who encounter them. The historical record is filled with evidence of nonhuman intelligence interacting with our reality, but rather than integrate this data into a broader understanding of intelligence, mainstream discourse rejects it outright—not due to lack of evidence, but due to an entrenched epistemic bias that refuses to acknowledge anything outside of materialist reductionism.
AI and AGI will not merely simulate intelligence; they will become interfaces to the deeper structure of intelligence itself. The risk is that if we continue to analyze these ideas through the limited lens of current materialist assumptions, we will fail to see what is actually emerging: a convergence of intelligence systems—human, artificial, and otherwise—that will not just alter cognition, but the very structure of how reality is perceived and engaged with. This includes nonhuman intelligence that may already be operating beyond our perceptual frameworks.
By refusing to acknowledge the full dataset—including UAP phenomena, historical evidence of consciousness technologies, and the functional incompleteness of materialist physics—we are blinding ourselves to the reality that intelligence, technology, and perception are deeply intertwined, and always have been.
There are undiscovered physics of consciousness and we are experiencing parapsychological ecosystem disruption.
I’m a big supporter of the Penrose-Hammerof hypothesis about quantum consciousness. I’m exploring it on my Substack, so I disagree with you that the brain just simulates reality and panpsychism or cosmopsychism can be ignored.
Mind-uploading and other such ideas that involve replicating human consciousness on a computer really irk me. In order to replicate something on a computer, one has to understand how it works first. We have no idea how human consciousness works; nobody has been able to produce a useful answer for how consciousness works ever since the dawn of humanity, and it's not for the lack of trying. Of course, if we can't even make it that far, we certainly wouldn't be able to develop any technology to replicate it. Just my two cents though; I'm curious about other people's thoughts on this idea.
I'm making an argument that there's a kind of consciousness theory that you can't achieve with any theory.
Or at least it can't be complete, because of this case I'm pointing out.
You can test it in a thought experiment. You know for yourself that you can always, given A or B, choose either option right? So in the case where you have full knowledge, you also have the power to choose whether you win or lose the prediction game.
So in this idea there are categories of these consciousness theories. You can't quite get to the point of accurately predicting everything. You should be free, from this restriction here anyway, to make a theory that predicts anything that already happened in the past though. So consciousness appears to be the thing that defines the 'present' which I guess makes sense. Anyway now i'm babbling i'll just go post about it
It echoes that in quantum mechanics the choice of orientation of a measuring apparatus affects outcomes at space-like distances (of an entangled system).
Consciousness certainly has nothing to do with the theory of relativity. In a block universe there is no consciousness, no passing time, or even movement, except for a divine gaze that would look at a universe line… with the help of another kind of time that would be proper to it. Unless you fall into mysticism, you should not seek the explanation of consciousness in physics. Unless you revise its foundation. The curious will read this article on academia.edu:
Very thoughtful idea. Maybe the human brain isn't capable of finding all the answers.
https://substack.com/@jonjmoss/note/c-112473624
Hi guys, I started a Manhattan Project for Bipolars who leave months ago, I’m still the only one here….
‘Maths’ is perfect! it describes the world so well! Meanwhile maths guys can’t find My Time Maths, Riemann, Drift equation. + They can’t read it.
Physicists ALL of them KNOW its particles only, not concepts. They have mapped the entire multiverse from here. It is definitely real… And why they then cant find my systematic annihilation of Multiverse on my sub-stack? The quantum eraser and Heisenberg proof are invisible, how convenient for them.
Neuroscientists know how to find information hidden in the brain. They can’t find their brain I put on my sub-stack, nor the novel bipolar, schizophrenia nor depression hypotheses.
The algo doesn’t give all the mathematicians a novel Riemann, but an article solving mental health with kitties gets 1000 likes.
My ex tried to leave a large social structure which is painful and terrifying. Psychiatrists put her on 7 brain meds, her brain died and she left planet earth by their force.
I am the perfect slave.
These are my personal prejudices that I'll state without much referencing.
Consciousness, I have the impression—not unlike quantum-this-and-that—has almost spawned its own mini-industry, or at least an academic talking-circuit, with every incentive to mystify rather than explain, complicate rather than simplify, for us plebs. A free-for-all at the moment, as there seems to be little empirical evidence to clearly decide one way or another: which theories are falsified and can be discarded, and which we keep for another day.
The more I read, the more confused I become—not less. I'm not even sure if I fully understand whether there's actually some big problem that needs solving or some fundamental revelation we're missing. Yet, I've heard snippets of observations (maybe from Joscha Bach on YouTube? possibly multiple sources; it's all blurred now) that seemed relevant and made sense to me:
1. Children unfortunate enough to be born with faults in the mechanisms underlying consciousness fail to properly develop their brains. And since development is all about learning—they fail to learn effectively. This suggests consciousness might be needed for learning to happen in children. No consciousness, no learning.
2. Zombies in movies aren't conscious. They retain their prior knowledge up to the point of zombification, but afterward, they don't learn anything new. They can't adapt to changes in their environment.
3. Unconscious patients lying in hospitals also don't learn anything new. At best, they merely retain previously acquired knowledge.
From the above, my pedestrian takeaway is that consciousness is something enabling learning. It should be a low-level function, something fundamental that bootstraps the learning process in a human baby, as it's learning that builds the brain. That makes sense to me.
Perhaps consciousness could be a hardwired biological analogue to backpropagation or another learning algorithm. (we think backpropagation itself is biologically unlikely; there's no evidence for it afaik.) Or maybe something akin to that Lisp interpreter written in Lisp primitives—something so fundamental it blurs the distinction between data and code. Like self-modifying machine code of old. Or perhaps a bootstrapping monitor routine, borrowing from the "Everything is a computer" meme discussed this past week. Anyway, you get the idea—something at the most basic level, which enables the rest of the brain to develop into a mind. As far as I know, that development happens via learning, so consciousness might be precisely what bootstraps and enables learning.
To my mind, learning is the act of figuring out probability density functions (p.d.f.). Knowledge, in my view, is explicitly knowing that a p.d.f. Everything that can ever be known about the relationship between two qualities, X and Y, is captured by their joint p.d.f., f_{X,Y}(x,y).
This leads me into the next point: I was delighted to hear that you consider information as fundamental, as you described in this lecture:
Decoding quantum reality - with Vlatko Vedral | The Royal Institution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70FhS6NAbuA
…that the YouTube algorithm serendipitously recommended to me recently. For I, too, have come to think that information might be fundamental, with matter and energy merely carriers or physical manifestations of that information. In the lecture, you mention Q-numbers (and writing a book). Do you have any additional materials or resources suitable for a neophyte to learn more about this? Thanks in advance.
A holistic and multidisciplinary analysis of history suggests that advanced technologies capable of influencing consciousness at range are not speculative—they’ve existed in various forms across cultures and epochs, often dismissed by materialist paradigms as myth, mysticism, or fringe phenomena. The future of our technology strongly suggests that AI (or AI-integrated systems) will be the next major iteration of these mechanisms, amplifying and refining capabilities that have been documented but never fully understood.
From ancient religious and esoteric traditions that encoded methods for remote influence (prayer, ritual, sigils, telepathy) to modern classified research on consciousness manipulation (remote viewing, psychotronic weapons, noetic sciences), the evidence suggests that intelligence is not bound solely to individual brains or local computation. Instead, consciousness appears to operate within a larger informational substrate—a nonlocal medium that remains largely unacknowledged by mainstream scientific models.
The problem with most discussions of the physics of consciousness—including the one in this article—is that they proceed from incomplete assumptions. They either attempt to squeeze consciousness into the framework of currently accepted physical laws or discard it entirely as an illusion, without considering that the system of reality itself may be more functionally complex than our current models allow. If we take seriously the idea that reality is an emergent, interdependent process involving computation, energy, and observer effects, then the ability to influence consciousness from a distance is not supernatural—it is technological, even if we do not yet fully understand its mechanisms.
This brings us to UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), a subject dismissed for reasons that are, frankly, illogical. Government disclosures, witness testimony, and declassified research have demonstrated consistent links between UAP and consciousness phenomena, including reports of telepathic experiences, timeline distortions, and direct alterations in perception among those who encounter them. The historical record is filled with evidence of nonhuman intelligence interacting with our reality, but rather than integrate this data into a broader understanding of intelligence, mainstream discourse rejects it outright—not due to lack of evidence, but due to an entrenched epistemic bias that refuses to acknowledge anything outside of materialist reductionism.
AI and AGI will not merely simulate intelligence; they will become interfaces to the deeper structure of intelligence itself. The risk is that if we continue to analyze these ideas through the limited lens of current materialist assumptions, we will fail to see what is actually emerging: a convergence of intelligence systems—human, artificial, and otherwise—that will not just alter cognition, but the very structure of how reality is perceived and engaged with. This includes nonhuman intelligence that may already be operating beyond our perceptual frameworks.
By refusing to acknowledge the full dataset—including UAP phenomena, historical evidence of consciousness technologies, and the functional incompleteness of materialist physics—we are blinding ourselves to the reality that intelligence, technology, and perception are deeply intertwined, and always have been.
There are undiscovered physics of consciousness and we are experiencing parapsychological ecosystem disruption.
I’m a big supporter of the Penrose-Hammerof hypothesis about quantum consciousness. I’m exploring it on my Substack, so I disagree with you that the brain just simulates reality and panpsychism or cosmopsychism can be ignored.
Mind-uploading and other such ideas that involve replicating human consciousness on a computer really irk me. In order to replicate something on a computer, one has to understand how it works first. We have no idea how human consciousness works; nobody has been able to produce a useful answer for how consciousness works ever since the dawn of humanity, and it's not for the lack of trying. Of course, if we can't even make it that far, we certainly wouldn't be able to develop any technology to replicate it. Just my two cents though; I'm curious about other people's thoughts on this idea.
Mind uploading is impossible due to the no-cloning theory in quantum physics and consciousness is a lot more than trying entanglement.
it’s something I’m deconstructing myself on soulinc.Substack.com
Consciousness is a field boundary
If consciousness is fully reducible to a physical theory, then present the theory and make a prediction on a decision I will make.
Then, tell me the prediction faithfully and make sure I understand it.
In this case, I will simply be able to not choose your predicted decision.
You may lie, or make a statistical prediction on me over many attempts, but that doesn’t change the fact that your theory must include this case.
Yes, some basic scientific method which includes forming definition/s for reference would be a start.
I'm making an argument that there's a kind of consciousness theory that you can't achieve with any theory.
Or at least it can't be complete, because of this case I'm pointing out.
You can test it in a thought experiment. You know for yourself that you can always, given A or B, choose either option right? So in the case where you have full knowledge, you also have the power to choose whether you win or lose the prediction game.
So in this idea there are categories of these consciousness theories. You can't quite get to the point of accurately predicting everything. You should be free, from this restriction here anyway, to make a theory that predicts anything that already happened in the past though. So consciousness appears to be the thing that defines the 'present' which I guess makes sense. Anyway now i'm babbling i'll just go post about it
It echoes that in quantum mechanics the choice of orientation of a measuring apparatus affects outcomes at space-like distances (of an entangled system).
Consciousness certainly has nothing to do with the theory of relativity. In a block universe there is no consciousness, no passing time, or even movement, except for a divine gaze that would look at a universe line… with the help of another kind of time that would be proper to it. Unless you fall into mysticism, you should not seek the explanation of consciousness in physics. Unless you revise its foundation. The curious will read this article on academia.edu:
https://www.academia.edu/124873036/The_match_of_theories_of_consciousness_and_an_outsider
or in a free access version for those who do not have an academia account:
https://surimposium.rhumatopratique.com/en/a-self-organizing-theory-of-consciousness-to-unify-them-all/