I thought I would pick a nice audacious title to get your attention.
If you’re into philosophy, science, or are just a generally informed person, you may have heard of this thing called the ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness. It’s the idea that explaining the origins of consciousness is really hard - specifically, that explaining consciousness with the axiom that it originates from the brain is difficult: how can the physical process of the brain produce subjective experience?
I want to get this out of the way really early: we need to define what we mean by consciousness. I’m sure most of us are on the same page, but sometimes people say things that make me wonder if we’re thinking of the same thing when we speak about consciousness.
Consciousness is first-person, subjective experience: the state or quality of being aware of one’s own existence, thoughts, feelings, and the external world.
Some people say that AI may be conscious. Some authors have even gone as far as to say that a video camera is conscious because it ‘sees’ the world.
If we’re thinking about the same thing when we talk about consciousness, you’ll agree that calling a video camera conscious is absolutely ridiculous. At the very least, it hints at a divergence somewhere in what some people think consciousness means. For the sake of this essay, let’s agree that it does NOT mean simply that the ‘conscious’ thing has some internal process that reacts to the outside world, like a sensing machine such as a camera. I would go as far as to say that for something to have consciousness, it has to possess some metaphysical aspect that literally sees and experiences the phenomena it senses subjectively, and is actually beyond the physical world.
With regards to AI being conscious, this is a more contentious point, but along the same lines, I would again say that AI is not conscious. AI is ultimately just sophisticated algorithms running on powerful chips. Yes, chatbots can seem self-aware, but at what point in algorithm development does the software suddenly attain some literal subjective metaphysical experience? Was it when we invented code? Was it when we invented the neural net? Was it when we invented the first LLM? At no point does the software become anything more than just that: software.
And so we come to the hard problem of consciousness: at what point in the development of our wetware (our brains) do we attain literal subjective metaphysical experience? It seems that the theory of evolution can explain a lot about how our bodies have developed over long periods of time, but I would postulate that the traditional theory of evolution does not explain the origin of consciousness in living beings.
As with the AI case, at what point in the evolution of our brains do we actually need, from an evolutionary point of view, to literally experience our senses? Surely in an evolutionary chain, there is no point where we meat machines actually need to subjectively experience anything: yes, our circuits process our senses and we react to the outer world, but actually sitting in the seat of consciousness is not the same thing.
It seems there are no words to describe exactly what I mean, precisely because our language is optimised for describing the rational things of the world, existing within the bounds of time and space. As such, it has always been hard to satisfactorily convey descriptions of mystical experience; and consciousness is itself a divine and mystical thing.
When I outlined what the hard problem of consciousness was, I said that it was the difficulty in explaining the origin of consciousness with the axiom that it originates from within the brain. If we remove that axiom, and open ourselves up to some potentially fantastical thinking, the hardness of the whole thing gets jelly soft. This does, of course, require some ability to think intuitively, along the lines of mystical, ineffable things; after all, we’re talking about the very substrate on which the perceived universe exists - of course it’s mystical!
There is something we often take for granted when considering the nature of existence: what does it actually mean for something to exist? In scientific rationalism, we are conscious beings who experience a very real external world that would exist regardless of whether or not it’s perceived. This means that the non-observed universe exists somewhere, but where?
The idea that the physical universe just exists somewhere, and that our consciousness is some mere afterthought made within that soup of matter, is the whole reason the attempt to understand consciousness has caused such vexation. We tie ourselves in knots trying to make sense of it, all the while taking for granted that the physical universe “just exists” without considering what existence even means outside of perception.
Flip the axiom, and instead of consciousness emerging from the brain - itself a by-product of an independently existing external world - consciousness becomes not just independent of the brain, but an essential component in the fabric of the universe as a whole, if not the very substrate on which the universe exists. Taken to the extreme, this reframes the manifested universe as a mere ‘hallucination’ in the mind of god.
To this end, existence coincides exclusively with perception; all that it means for something to exist is that it is perceived. When someone asks where is the universe, you say here. When someone asks when is the universe, you say now.
This, of course, is a totally audacious proposition to materialists, and I can see why: we’ve long taken the existence of the laws of nature as given - “that’s just the way it is.” When we take consciousness as the fundamental thing, it all of a sudden seems too mystical. I think this is because we are beings of consciousness, and the view in which consciousness is fundamental to the universe elevates us to heights most of us feel unworthy of.
Secondly, in materialism, it seems we are on the way to having defined a complete system for explaining the mechanics of the universe. If this is all just a ‘dream,’ in essence, then anything goes: or does it? We are used to experiencing individual dreams at night, often where fantastic things happen, but in some larger-scale universal dream, another step up the psychic fractal tree, it is likely that there would also be some laws of nature: laws and tendencies governing both nature and conscious (spiritual) energy.
We’ve spent a long time in physics saying how things are, how things just exist. This is the gravitational constant. This is the speed of light. The sun is over there. Alright, cool - where and how does that stuff all exist? What is the basis of its suchness? This stuff must all exist on some substrate, some container, some universal chalice of existence.
All I’m saying: that chalice of existence is consciousness.
It’s all a dream. Boom.
I like to say it’s a dream because it provides a framework in which you can more easily explain it to lay people. I’ve been talking a lot about how existence and perception are one and the same, more or less. It’s a lot easier to understand what I mean by thinking about what it means to exist within a dream. In a dream, the things in the dream do not literally exist separate from the dreamer. In the same way, the physical universe does not exist separate from the universal consciousness.
If the substrate of the universe is consciousness, then existence and perception are one and the same. Materialism’s assumption that a physical universe outside consciousness “just exists” isn’t a deeper answer. It’s the same move as saying consciousness is primary, just made one step earlier, and dressed up as though it needed no further explanation.
With regards to the philosophical argument: if we’re going to compare which starting point actually costs less, consciousness wins on Occam’s razor alone. Materialism needs matter to exist independently, and it needs some further, unexplained mechanism by which that matter produces subjective experience - the hard problem I opened this whole essay with. Consciousness as the fundamental thing needs none of that. Matter just falls out of it, as its content. One substance, not two.
Everything in space and time is in flux, and all in existence is perceived by this universal consciousness. The materialist points at something and says it exists as a measurable quantity - some energy, some configuration of matter. From the universal consciousness perspective, we are just saying the same thing can be described not just as matter with mind added on top, but as a quantity of conscious phenomenon. This is much in the same way that the materialist’s “energy” is a quantity. The materialist takes readings from the outside, and the idealist from the inside.