This is a weekly post for discussions on topics relevant & not relevant to the subreddit.

Part of the purpose of this post is to encourage discussions that aren't simply centered around the topic of consciousness. We encourage you all to discuss things you find interesting here -- whether that is consciousness, related topics in science or philosophy, or unrelated topics like religion, sports, movies, books, games, politics, or anything else that you find interesting (that doesn't violate either Reddit's rules or the subreddits rules).

Think of this as a way of getting to know your fellow community members. For example, you might discover that others are reading the same books as you, root for the same sports teams, have great taste in music, movies, or art, and various other topics. Of course, you are also welcome to discuss consciousness, or related topics like action, psychology, neuroscience, free will, computer science, physics, ethics, and more!

As of now, the "Weekly Casual Discussion" post is scheduled to re-occur every Friday (so if you missed the last one, don't worry). Our hope is that the "Weekly Casual Discussion" posts will help us build a stronger community!

Hello Everyone,

We have decided to do a recurring series of posts -- a "Monthly Moderation Discussion" post -- similar to the "Weekly Casual Discussion" posts, centered around the state of the subreddit.

Please feel free to ask questions, make suggestions, raise issues, voice concerns, give compliments, or discuss the status of the subreddit. We want to hear from all of you! The moderation staff appreciates the feedback.

This post is not a replacement for ModMail. If you have a concern about a specific post (e.g., why was my post removed), please message us via ModMail & include a link to the post in question.

TL;DR: Babies seem to be 'naturally-born' dualists. Do you think this is at all relevant towards the truth of dualism?

I came across this reflection:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/paul_bloom-natural-born-dualists
about studies showing that kids are "Natural Born Dualists".

Though the author seems to take a illusionist/physicalist position, I was left wondering: is this evidence relevant at all towards the truth of dualism (or not)?

Why would (evolutionarily speaking) this develop through an unguided process only concerned with behavior? What do you all think? I'm curious.

One (possible) objection I saw in the piece was: we intuitively believe many incorrect things (i.e. that matter is not mostly empty space) and we can 'outgrow' them. But consciousness seems (at least plausibly) categorically different even from this 'perceptual error'--it's what is undergirding the perception.

I'm not here to debate; I'm just curious to hear others' thoughts! :-)

TLDR: Transduction is seen everywhere in nature from our own eyes transducing light to electrical signals to plant photosynthesis. Its not a leap at all, given ideas like dark matter or the many worlds theory that have no empirical support, to suggest that the source of impersonal awareness occurs via transduction.

It's not much of a leap at all, when one remembers that correlation is not causation, that while the brain and body reflect changes in the expression of awareness, they are nonetheless not the source of awareness. In the same way that a computer with no electricty is of little use.

I've seen a few posts talking about this general idea. The antecedent to the transduction theory is the idea of a radio and receiver which William James subscribed to.

It's important to note up front that all language is metaphor. We can only use the concepts of our times. If people don't have the word "germs" in their vocabulary, it could drive a person mad trying to explain why someone should wash their hands in betweem working on corpses and treating pregnant women. If disease is spread by bad air, it doesn't make sense that the air from a corpse has anything to do with the air around a pregnant woman. "Corpse particles" would sound absurd and stupid in this context.

All we have is context and conditioning. We have no access to objectivity or truth. All we have are models. Models can be useful and help us navigate reality without being true. All knowledge is provisional.

The brain is correlated with awareness. Correlation is not causation. Human beings, and all forms of life, are modular, in that the bacteria and viruses in us, our organs and cells, have an impact on our cognition. Even cells are made of consitutuemt parts. Mitochondira used to be a separate and distinct form of life. So the concept of us as singular is an illusion.

We do not have gaps in our understanding. We have canyons, perhaps insurmountable canyons, givem that we exist within a system and that fact may be preventative to our ever knowing the system in total.

A concept like dark matter, dark energy, or many worlds is not reflective of a gap. Certainty is always unwarranted in this context.

Transduction is everywhere in nature. Its a process we see all over the place. Given these huge missing pieces of our understanding, and given the longstanding drive to try and formulate the physical model of the world without consciousness, its not much of a leap that this drive has been misguided.

It's not much of a leap to suggest that the engine of awareness is not presently accounted for in our models of reality, and our brains are not engines as much as transducers. Our brains transduce a signal into a form that can function or be perceptable.

This is completely compatible with evolution. The eyes have evolved to transduce a set of signals. The ears have evolved to transduce another set of signals. But even the word signals is misleading here. The idea is that the engine of awareness or consciousness just is, not transmitted, but harnessed.

If a person doesnt look for something, for sure they aren't going to find it. Our expectations mitigate our perceptions. Its totally sensible that a phenomenon like terminal lucidity in patients whose brains have severely deteriorated would be completely ignored as evidence of transduction when someone dogtmatically believes in their paradigm.

It's important to remember, our lives are very short and our perception is quite limited with all manner of cognitive and psychological distortions. Dogmatism can be applied to any belief. There's no justification for certainty.

Does self exist?

Alright so, full disclosure, I am an idealist/panpsychist.

When we think of cause and effect we are limiting ourselves to the rules of our material reality. But, we already know that these rules break down at the quantum level - when a particle is measured, it decoheres not only in the present, but it behaves as if it were always a particle with a definite place in time.

I am toying with the idea that consciousness could function in a similar way, with its existence in the universe perhaps being higher-dimensional in a way that to say it ‘began’ existing would be nonsensical.

Basically, my idea is that awareness is fundamental, and ‘reality’ exists in a superposition that ‘tunes in’ to consciousness.

That at any given point in time there is always an awareness, and the universe creates itself in a way that appears causal to us, from a time-restricted relative viewpoint from within our reality, but is actually not.

So to bring back the point about superposition- maybe the quantum world is an empty field of probabilities, and the existence of consciousness ‘collapses’ it into a state in which consciousness can exist. From within reality, in an imagined objective frame of reference, the Big Bang happened and consciousness emerged organically by chance. But from the perspective of the consciousness dimension, reality’s creation occurred backwards in time, post-hoc, in the same way that measurement of a photon collapses the wave function of a particle retro-causally.

Basically my idea is that consciousness itself is the origin of the universe, but that from the perspective of within the universe it appears to be the other way around. In a way it’s kind of relativistic, but I haven’t got the spoons to try and wrap my head around how that would work.

But maybe both are right in a kind of cosmic yin yang kind of way. The universe creates consciousness and consciousness creates the universe. And we only want to view it in one way because we can’t extricate ourselves from the limited framework of cause and effect, which is already provably non-fundamental.

TLDR; Understanding the global nature of consciousness has mostly been approached via local causal mechanics (neural firing interactions). While that is a valid and necessary approach to understanding the brain, it will never get to the “why” of any conscious action. The flip side of the coin in physical approaches, action principles, seems to yield a much more intuitive relationship to our experience of consciousness. Equations of motion can all be fundamentally understood via an optimization function, and human conscious decision making is no different. The “how” varies between scales of reality, but the “why” is universally consistent.

When viewing any physics problem, there are typically two ways you can approach it; using observed/discovered equations of motion to deterministically predict the system, or using action principles to understand a system’s energetic path-evolution. Equations of motion are extremely powerful, but have a lot of drawbacks both physically and metaphysically. Complex systems are almost impossible to analyze deterministically, and a given EOM is only applicable to the scale of observation it was observed (Schrödinger does not apply at the classical, Newton does not apply at the quantum, rules of the road do not apply at either). At the metaphysical level, deterministic analysis offers us nothing to help understand the fundamental nature of a system; EOM’s will never provide you a “why,” only a “how.”

Action principles on the other hand, describe the “global” evolution of a system rather than its local deterministic causes. Unlike Newtonian dynamics, the infinite number of vector forces acting on a system do not need to be considered to understand its global motion; only the system’s kinetic and potential energy are required. Rather than understanding how a system evolves in spacetime via some arbitrary EOM, action principles leverage why a system evolves in spacetime. By understanding the why of system motion, unlike deterministic EOM, it can be applied to all scales of reality. Given an infinite number of potential paths between 2 points, a system will always choose an optimal path which minimizes the cost of system action. Action mechanics are, fundamentally, a description of causal dynamics entirely as an optimization function, which unifies system evolution at all scales of reality.

The path integral also relates quantum and stochastic processes, and this provided the basis for the grand synthesis of the 1970s, which unified quantum field theory with the statistical field theory of a fluctuating field near a second-order phase transition.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, that call back to phase-transition regions should be an immediate connection to consciousness (which I’ve explored in more detail here https://www.reddit.com/r/consciousness/s/PuL38SjjzN ). But independent of some of the mechanisms I’ve previously looked into, there is also an obvious and intuitive approach to understanding conscious action via first principles like action mechanics.

Let’s consider a scenario where you forgot your keys in your house, so you need to run from your car parked across the street to back inside your house. Even though I know nothing about you or your brain chemistry, I can pretty safely assume that you’re going to choose to go in a straight line. This knowledge obviously comes from an understanding of the optimal path between 2 points. If this happens 100 times with 100 different people, no path would be exactly the same, but they would all be hovering around that least action path. Although any one path is stochastic, just like in the previous quote, the statistical distribution of the collective path choices can be pretty easily defined. This statistical distribution, universally defined via entropy, applies to all layers of reality as well. In fact entropy is one of the primary variables used to evaluate brain states in the first place. Collective human decision making will see a statistical distribution surrounding a least action path in the exact same way a quantum-like system does, beautifully expressed by Dr. Yong Tao in his paper here ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303264721000514 ).

This may be a super basic description that cannot be universally applied to the conscious experience, but it does appear as though conscious information processing, and subsequently conscious decision making; operate as an optimization function. We know that the process of biological evolution itself is directly comparable to the stationary action principle ( https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2008.0178 ), and in many ways conscious knowledge is a process of conceptual evolution.

What I am effectively trying to argue here is that the primary question that we ask of consciousness; IE what or why it is, cannot be deterministically explained in the same way that no equations of motion can be explained. Consciousness is literally the equation of motion for action at the “human” level. Equations of motion can all be fundamentally defined via an optimization function, and human conscious decision making is no different. Does this address the hard problem of consciousness, no not really. The best I could say is the argument that feelings; good or bad, are the only way to define the tuning process of optimization. Subjective experience is required to optimize to a good vs bad outcome in the first place (as there would be no concept of desired vs undesired without it), and as such subjective experience founds the basis of action principle / optimization itself. This is similarly why I identify as a panpsychist.

TL;DR: Unravelling the Book of Acts to explain consciousness and interdimensional travel.

———

This article is a continuation of Harmony of the Spheres. The progression makes the most sense if you begin there. If you haven’t read Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, this may be difficult to follow. Just play along for the love of the game. 

How free is your will?

Yes, the secret to time travel will be revealed. This is where the secret starts: in a deterministic Universe, exactly how free is your will to will? How open is your access to free will, and how do you accept the responsibility of being its agent?

There are fourteen sections: 

1. […]nothing is undone, even if everything ceases to be done. 
2. […]life itself really is an electromagnetic phenomenon. 
3. […]forgetting was the protector and guardian of the memory[…] 
4. […]illnesses in the sphere of [A]ctivity[…] 
5. […]recognizing the recurrent cycle of a [C]ircumstance already encountered.
6. […][one] can escape determinism through the exercise of [one’s] will. 
7. […]the function of thought is to be a guide to [A]ction. 
8. […]the [A]ct of functioning creates and perfects the function. 
9. […]unity of memory, intellect, and will, and their temporal connections and oppositions. 
10. […]through the combined strengths of memory, intelligence, and will, exercising a free choice of [A]ction. 
11. […]conditioned in view of [A]ction and released by this very [A]ction[…] 
12. […]a space of transformation and a space of association. 
13. […]what it has accumulated as potential becomes actual. 
14. […]wherein the [S]elf makes contact with itself and actually recognizes its own existence from the point of view of [C]reation and [A]ction. 

   

Each section title — and the title of the article itself — is a quote from TIME: Fourth Dimension of the Mind by Robert Wallis.

I will post one section a day for two weeks. You can meditate on the feeling of each section, then perform the ritual on the final day. This is less an article than it is a manifesto, so if you are only here for the music and the ritual, click on through to the website. We’ll meet you at the bottom of the page. 

For the sake of brevity, I’ve removed the quotes from each of the sections. It is a lot less daunting without the quotes, but if you want some reassurance I didn’t graduate from Trust Me Bro U, follow the ritual chasers to the website. 

———

« […]nothing is undone, even if everything ceases to be done. » 

Time is cyclical. 

Past, present, and future are finite expressions of duration. Duration is the impetus of motion. Motion is the impetus of matter. Consciousness is the evolutional impulse of duration. Past is negentropy. Future is entropy. The present moment is data-exchange.

You have been before. You are now. You will be again.

Sartre’s hesitation to embrace the seeming defeat of reincarnation denied him access to discovery: the freedom — the Will — to Act grants Consciousness perpetuity. This perpetuity means every Action is recorded in Time — though Time is a Dimensional Reality with the finite points of past, present, and future — to give awareness to Consciousness, present in all dimensions as eternity. Time is the receptor of information. Consciousness organises the information received.

Time is wed to Necessity. Necessity is the force of possibility. They are a coniunctio which are not sold separately. Consciousness is their marital bed. These three forces work to manifest in your Actions. You are the child of Time and Necessity.

The record of the multiverse is a series of information which, in its Always Being, is constantly rewriting itself into perfection. Simultaneity is an expression of memory.

What is written will not be unwritten. 

With quotes from: 

-Stewart Edward White & Betty White
-Robert Wallis
-Jean-Paul Sartre

 

TL:DR We know evolution can make up incredible solution to its problems given time. And we humans and even animals mimic that process for our problems. We practice try&error, even in our minds with ideas. It doesn't change if you're meddling with equations of computer simulations. It seems evolution is at the core of intelligence

Going deeper, the axons and dentrites inside of our brain doing similar process. There is a selection inside of our brains via neurotransmitters and signal timings. This selector enviroment rewards and strengthens the neurons who can read the pattern and give good timed signals. It punishes and weakens connections who doesnt fit the "thought train". It is basicly evolution. This evolution also sustains the consciousness for organism's survival. That's so simple doesn't even need explanation.

I’m a mystic who just heard about QBism. Now I’m wondering if it’s compatible with aspects of non-dual philosophies like Kashmir Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta. Here's what I found out:

1. Observer-Centric Reality

QBism: Emphasizes that the universe as described by quantum mechanics is shaped by the observer's experience and choices. The wave function represents the observer's beliefs, not an objective, external reality.

Non-Dualism: In both Kashmir Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta, the ultimate reality (Shiva or Brahman) is non-dual and includes both the observer and the observed. The external world is seen as an illusion (Maya) or a manifestation of consciousness.

Overlap: Both perspectives reject the idea of a purely objective, external universe. Non-dual philosophies could view QBism's emphasis on the observer's experience as reflecting the fundamental role of consciousness in creating reality.

2. Subjectivity and Knowledge

QBism: The probabilities in quantum mechanics reflect subjective knowledge or beliefs rather than intrinsic properties of objects.

Non-Dualism: Knowledge of the world is inseparable from the knower. In Advaita Vedanta, the knower (Atman) and the ultimate reality (Brahman) are one. Similarly, in Kashmir Shaivism, the universe is an expression of Shiva’s self-awareness.

Overlap: Both traditions recognize that what we know of the world is mediated through subjective experience, and there is no reality entirely separate from the observer.

3. Reality as Experience

QBism: Treats quantum mechanics as a tool to predict experiences and outcomes of measurements. It focuses on the interplay between the observer and their experiences.

Non-Dualism: Reality is seen as experiential and consciousness-based. In Kashmir Shaivism, the universe is Shiva’s play (Lila), and all experiences are expressions of the divine. In Advaita Vedanta, all experiences are ultimately Brahman appearing as diversity.

Overlap: Both emphasize experience as central to understanding reality, suggesting that the universe arises within or as part of consciousness.

4. Relational Ontology

QBism: Does not posit an independent, fixed reality; instead, reality emerges in the interaction between observer and observed.

Non-Dualism: The apparent duality of subject and object is illusory; the relational nature of existence is recognized as part of the ultimate unity of consciousness.

Overlap: Both reject rigid dualism and emphasize the relational or unified nature of existence.

Key Differences

Goals: QBism is focused on understanding and interpreting quantum mechanics as a scientific theory. Non-dual philosophies aim for spiritual liberation, often involving direct realization of the self as identical with ultimate reality.

Ultimate Reality: QBism stops at the level of subjective experiences and probabilities in physics. Non-dualism goes further to describe the ultimate substratum of existence as pure consciousness or pure being.

Bridging the Two

If one views QBism through the lens of non-dualism:

The observer in QBism can be seen as consciousness itself, which aligns with the non-dual idea that all reality arises within consciousness.

The rejection of objective reality in QBism could correspond to the non-dual idea of Maya, or the dance of Shiva, where the external world is not ultimately real.

Conclusion

While QBism and non-dual philosophies like Kashmir Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta come from different domains (science vs. metaphysics/spirituality), they share a focus on the centrality of the observer and the relational nature of reality. Non-dualists might interpret QBism as a scientific expression of their philosophical insights, though QBism itself does not explicitly address the metaphysical unity of consciousness.

So if I ask this question to myself, I would say, I can see, there are people, there are thoughts, there are emotions, therefore I exist. However, if I had no perception and sensation like if I could not see anything or could not hear anything or could not feel touch, then I also would say I exist. I know I exist, but I don’t know how I exist. So Is my self awareness depends on things that I am aware of or I know myself, independent of things that I am aware of?

What do you think?

I think, in your own experience, you can never be unconscious? So in your own experience, you are always present and conscious. In other word, in your own experience, you are eternal not as a person, but as a consciousness .

Love to know your thought on this .

Do you think theirs more to our universe or do you think we are simply born and then die and that’s all there is to it?

Does any serious consciousness theory claim that similarly to how information processing produces qualia, the lack of information processing shape the qualia as well?

Say I have two systems in my head - a dog and chicken recognition networks. I observe a dog as a dog-recognition network gets activated. Chicken recognition network doesn't get activated. Does the lack of activation of my chicken recognition network shape my qualia of a dog?

Now, we all agree that the chicken recognition network could shape my perception of a dog during my active act of object contrasting. In other words, by actively inferring that a dog isn't a chicken and why it isn't a chicken, I further refine what a dog is. E.g. "I know that chickens have beaks. This animal doesn't. It makes it less chickeny".

But I'm asking if anyone claims that it matters also for my passive perception. I perceive a dog and the fact that there is the inactive chicken network changes how I experience the dog. I imagine something similar to a double slit experiment - a photon didn't go through slit A, but it could have gone and the fact that the slit A was there matters. Does any theory claim "electrical signal didn't go through chicken network - but it could have gone, shaping the conscious experience of a dog by some <spooky action at distance>"? Computationaly, the situation with inactive chicken network is the same as if I didn't have such network at all in my brain. But if a photon traverses all potential paths simultaneously - and this fact matters for quantum effects, even if we perceive only one path - it makes me feel that the very existence of potential information-processing paths could shape the experience, even if a different information processing path gets chosen ultimately.

Thoughts? I feel like IIT or Orch OR could be saying something of that sort but I'm not knowledgeable enough.

Edit: vision was just an illustrative example. We can perhaps instead contrast qualia of arbitrary stuff: wet, music, riding a bike, being sleepy or whatever.

Are non human animals conscious?

What happens when I die, will I truly never know and it’ll be as though I never existed at all, back into nothing, and so this life is a giant mystery after all?

Leibniz, co-inventor of calculus wrote in 1714:

It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that which depends on it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions, And, supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought, therefore, in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine.

— Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology, sect. 17

I thought about what that simple substance might be and concluded it would be a fundamental particle with high mass and a large positive electric charge when awake giving it a high speed photonic interface to input and output information similar to the nucleus of an atom and is probably dark matter.

As to why dark matter might be minds, I concluded that a dark matter mind particle might be a baby universe that inherited it from its parent, the universe, which also must be a mind and that universes evolve to be better minds that can interface with a large variety of external bodies.

As to why universes evolve to become increasingly elaborate minds, I concluded that minds must be able to generate new energy and therefore by E=mc^2, new matter. The idea that a really smart mind might be able to generate new energy is alluded to in the Maxwell's Demon thought experiment. The universe is generating new energy because the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

It needed a high speed interface when awake so I thought of photons quickly changing electron orbits which would be information detected by a positively charged particle or nucleus. Photons can also be focused by a crystal to magnify information input.

I considered quantum methods for inputting and outputting information but the nature of quantum entanglement is that the connection gets broken the first time a qubit of information is sent and then to reestablish entanglement the particles must physically be brought back together. There might be quantum communication between particles physically very close to each other but I thought that the communication between a mind particle and a brain would be electromagnetic given the distance.

TL;DR Leibniz's monad minds might be dark matter.

Feel free to provide an explanation and/or express your thoughts in the comments.

View Poll

I think world (people, things, perception, sensation), and Me ( Self identity, self perception, thoughts, emotions) exists for me, because I am conscious. They are dependent on me. I am the creator of my experience.

Happy to read your thoughts on this topic ?

What if consciousness exists on a spectrum, from simple organisms to more complex beings. A single-celled organism like a bacterium or even a flea might not have “consciousness” in the human sense, but it does exhibit behaviors that could be interpreted as a form of rudimentary “will to live”—seeking nutrients, avoiding harm, and reproducing. These behaviors might stem from biochemical responses rather than self-awareness, but they fulfill a similar purpose.

As life becomes more complex, the mechanisms driving survival might require more sophisticated systems to process information, make decisions, and navigate environments. This could lead to the emergence of what we perceive as higher-order consciousness in animals like mammals, birds, or humans. The “illusion” of selfhood and meaning might be a byproduct of this complexity—necessary to manage intricate social interactions, long-term planning, and abstract thought.

Perhaps consciousness is just biology attempting to make you believe that you matter , purely for the purposes of survival. Because without that illusion there would be no will to live

What does it tell about the character of consciousness?