consciousness
By Janhavi and SG. Originally published on Substack, 2025-09-23.
If you have used chatGPT, then you for sure have thought this: “…these tools are so human like and also faster than us… so are they going to replace us? will we be their pet or their parent? are they next species in the evolutionary chain? will we be like monkeys to them? huh….” You most probably have some version of the answer for these questions.
Are machines like us or not?
What do we need to check if machines are like us or not? We need to define what is human, and what is machine and do one-to-one comparison. Simple. But the problem is, we don’t yet have any definition of human. Biology understands a lot about our bodies but we are probably more than our bodies. Or are we not? We don’t have concrete answer for it. We are constantly experiencing ‘being’, but science have no clue what it is. Science doesn’t know why do you experience you? What does it mean to be conscious? I have presented my theory in this post; I am curious to know yours, so let me know in comments how you differ or resonate with my theory.
Structure
Here is what we are going to do; we are going to chop off all little flakes that are treatable from the question of consciousness; so at the end we will have clear view of what exactly is the real mystery. If you finish reading complete post, you will have clearer picture of what exactly about consciousness we don’t understand. You will be able to observe it without the noise.
This is how I have structured it; We are going to first define the hard problem of consciousness that David Chalmers formulated. When he did that, some of the scientists reacted very passively to that; they were like, there was no need to get so excited about consciousness, its nothing fancy.
Scientists are divided in these two groups. We will see what is the state of the debate right now. Till here, we had gotten down our car, walked near the green rock and had finished having a good look at it. Now is the time to pick the tool and start chopping off flakes.
Base is set. We know neurons fire in our brain, we know those neurons get energy from the food we eat, we know if we stop eating, bad things happen. But that’s not it. We know lot more than that. We know cells are made of molecules, we literally know everything about what those molecules are made of, we have whole periodic table and we even know how those elements come into existence. That’s not it. We are little more fancier, so we know that all answers are not present in parts, we also came up with the concept of emergence. Idea that explains behaviour of the masses, of brain, of body, of materials. But there is lot much we don’t understand yet. It is important to separate what we understand from what is truly a mystery. Remaining part of the post is on this separating efforts.
Let’s get into it….
We, humans, literally skipped sciencing about consciousness trying to be all fancy
Maths, physics, biology, history, computer science are common subjects little kids have in their school. Notice; all of these subjects require third person inquiry. We didn’t know, but all of us were given this careful poison, and before we realised our brain’s default mode of inquiry became third person. Think about it, how your gossips with friends would have changed had you been comfortable with first person inquiries. How your world view would have changed had you have bunch of inquiry approaches at hand?
World was NOT always this way. Specially eastern world. It started with Francis Bacon. His Bacon’s method = institutionalized third person inquiry. Modern sciency people know him as ‘person who formulated scientific method’; everyone thank him for doing it. Google his name and you will know. Good work, BUT, humanity couldn’t control the dosage; we are talking too much of it leaving no space for other ways to think.
Positive feedback is one of the key drivers of our interests. If we are only rewarded for some narrow set of methods, we will naturally only move in that single direction. All of us are very well trained in third person inquiries but extremely poorly in any other way. This was one of the realizations scientists had when they discovered the wonders of Quantum mechanics; we realised pure third person inquiry have limits.
Bacon started this idea of “science methods” and it spread to entire world. Philosophers in the east had been studying our inner world through first person inquiry since centuries. Hindu, Buddhist, Tao, Zen philosophy is very good framework for it. Stakeholders couldn’t brand it well, or maybe there were practical problems or something else but by now, first person way of thinking has shrunk and rationalist way has expanded too much. It is only now, that we are starting to see the point of first person inquiry as more and more scientists are attempting to find answers to questions of our inner world.
Consciousness is first person subject
There is nothing that we know more intimately than our own consciousness. Think about it! Eastern thinkers had realised this and chosen to work on it but their work is not rigorous.
(There is nothing that we know more intimately than consciousness, but there is nothing harder to explain; that makes me okay with eastern philosophy not being rigorous; maybe we can do it now.) Scientists have picked this problem up again because with the rise of AI it has become urgent to get some answers. David Chalmers coined the term,
Chalmers, 1994. The fight that split the field.
Some people liked him for doing this, some didn’t. The ones who side with him believes that the problem is hard and other side believes the problem is easy.
The hard side has an opinion that…
all other problems are easy because mechanics can explain it. Scientists know where to look for. They then just need to design structure and dynamics using laws of physics to get things done. Be it finding antibiotics, making machine to dig hole in earth, making machine to explore our galaxy, or designing Large Hadron Collider. In case of consciousness, we don’t know where to look for? We don’t even know how to form the question. That is why, it is hard problem.
The easy side has an opinion that…
we know where to look for. Consciousness is emerging from material. Same laws of physics govern it, same structure, same dynamics, we just need to keep moving deeper and deeper and we will know it. This side believes third person inquiry is right way for this problem as well.
Fortunately, both of these are just opinions. Both sides have extremely smart people but no one has proved their side; we only have smart hunches, and that is why the problem of consciousness is extremely interesting :)
Both sides have proposed directions to study it.
This is what they say…
- consciousness is fundamental to universe (hard problem believing side)
- it emerges from material (easy problem believing side)
Camp 1.
It is fundamental to universe. Like space. Like time.
This group believes we will need to add extra law into existing physics to explain consciousness. Consciousness is fundamental to universe just like laws of physics. Subjective experience cannot be completely explained by patterns, structures and processes in brain. They argue that the act of eating can occur without the feeling of hunger. The act is not explanation for ‘hunger’. They do not deny the existence of emergence phenomenon; but rather believes that there is something beyond emergence.
Camp 2.
It is logical consequence of processes.
This side believes that subjective experience arises from complex processes in the brain. Brain has billions of neurons, neurons fire in certain way giving rise to ‘feel’. In other words, it is logical consequence of processes. Just like, how the letters you see on your screen is logical consequence of things in your computer or apple falling on ground is logical consequence of gravity.
Check out this video by Brian Greene. (we will see reply to his question in the last sections)
We are going to see the exact place where we have the opportunity to intercede into those particle motion; that is where free-will sits. Note; merely establishing that there is a space in physics for free-will doesn’t prove that free-will sits there. It is necessary but not sufficient condition. Just the presence of opportunity doesn’t mean it is being utilised. And that is where the first group is confused. Ask this question again when you finish reading.
It’s similar to, how, since we have proved that emergent phenomenon exist, doesn’t mean every unexplainable thing is emergent property. It’s cool we found it but that doesn’t mean that universe doesn’t have any other magic (it would be boring if it doesn’t.)
Let’s do some first person inquiry to get in the zone….
How do you know your friend is conscious?
Qualia, is one instance of subjective experience. Whatever YOU are feeling is your qualia. We have no way to directly compare two qualia. That means, if you are expressing to your friend how sad you are because you came last in the competition and if your friend is saying she understands, you have no way to actually know if she truly understands or not and even your friend has no way to know how exactly you are feeling. “I understand you”, is all pretention.
Qualia can’t be compared. Can they at least be detected?
How do you know your friend is conscious? How are you sure she is not a machine? How do you know you are not the only conscious person in the world. You know it because…
Other qualia express themselves using free will. Free will is how subjective experience CAUSES something in real world. I like to think of consciousness and free-will as mysteries belonging to same class.
Important point here is that free will only help us detect other qualia and not compare them. For example, we know bats are conscious (detection) but we don’t know what does it feel like to be a bat? Bats see using sonar and we humans, have no clue how their world might be. There are some bees that have thousands of eyes. Their world might look something like specific visual patterns. We could never know. But we at least know their qualia exist.
In humans, consider ‘sight’ for example. The world looks like what it looks like to us because our eyes have a specific range on light spectrum it can detect. Had we been able to detect all light, the world would have been a huge bomb of continuous noise to us. (There is a theory that says evolution specifically chose this range because in other ranges there is too much noise. Imagine having eyes that can detect CMB. We would be detecting so much unnecessary data having no use. Interesting topic, I am writing about this in some other post. Right now back to consciousness…)
How free will and subjective experience come together?
Subjective experience enables us to have unexplainable bias; bias below threshold of awareness. (‘Bias’ is what machines don’t appear to have. They have mechanical and explainable biases. For them, solving a math problem is same as drawing a pigeon or playing soccer.)
We express this bias using free will. With this context,
What is consciousness? in simple terms.
I was studying chaotic systems and quantum mechanics and I put together a philosophical theory on consciousness in simple terms.
Physics says we can’t control chaotic systems. We need infinite precision to make it happen and infinite precision is not possible. Even if something is controlling these chaotic systems, physics is blind to it. This is the blind spot consciousness sits in. It controls entities at quantum levels to get the desired outcome in classical level. If it wants you to go and pick up the apple, it will tweak you at quantum level. Physics would be like, how did that happen? I didn’t see what caused you to pick the apple? Poor physics is blind to it; not its fault. This is why free-will seem to be coming from nowhere.
This is closer to hard problem believing side; I am inclined to believe that consciousness is beyond emergence. After forming this high level idea, I had to work on two things; first, make it more rigorous and second, explain how does consciousness do what it does at quantum level. I looked for scientific papers on this.
I found two papers that starts with similar philosophical ideas; first by Roger Penrose (Nobel laureate) and Stuart Hameroff and second by Federico Faggin (he led designing of Intel’s first commercial microprocessor) and Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano. Let’s get into the technical details of it then (chiefly inspired by their papers + few others linked in references).
The crux of the post.
This next paragraph is the crux of the post.
Life resides in autopoietic process. We realize this pattern in real world via dissipative structures. These are complex structures capable of exhibiting unpredictable behaviour (kind of like butterfly effect). Consciousness utilizes such system’s capabilities. Free-will is consciousness utilizing various degrees of freedom the structure have. How? Using quantum dynamics. Consciousness resides in atomic quantum operations whose classical outcomes are genuinely unpredictable. Quantum pure states combine through entanglement giving rise to unpredictable outcomes in classical world. Their combining is what we would call “bias”.
In other words, The brain’s quantum coherence provides non-computable influences, allowing consciousness to act in ways not predictable by standard physical laws.
What do we mean by “systems capable of exhibiting unpredictable behaviour?”
Consider solar system. We know earth takes 365 days per trip. We can predict eclipse. We know positions of every planet and their moon. This is a simple system. System incapable of exhibiting unpredictable behaviour. Even if solar system as a whole is conscious, it has no mechanism to express itself using free-will. Compare solar system with our brain and get feel of how complex it is; it provides consciousness opportunities to express itself.
Are such systems abundant in universe?
Aliens? do they exist? are they on mars? in some other galaxy?
The whole quest of space crafts going here and there in space, is for finding autopoietic systems in universe. We haven’t found any yet. Earth is full of such systems, all animal and plant bodies, bacteria, fungi, plus earth’s ecosystem are autopoietic systems. The rest of the universe just seem to be flowing away with second law of thermodynamics, ever increasing its entropy. Our little pale blue planet seem to be the only one with fighters who are resisting the entropy change. So, no; such consciousness containing systems are not abundant in universe as far as we have observed.
“If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” — Carl Sagan
Is it violation of physics?
No. It is utilising physics.
Everything moves according to laws of physics but that doesn’t mean everything is predictable. Some systems gives rise to chaotic behaviour which can never be predicted. This gives opportunity for free will to express itself. Basic funda is, you need to measure something with infinite precision to make prediction about it. Imagine measuring a number with infinite decimal places. Not possible. This is what intelligence uses to control the outcomes. It adds bias at sub-Lauder limits which we cannot measure. And we see the outcome in our world.
No physical laws are violated. Tell me in comments if you see anything sus.
Why was it so hard to understand it then?
Because it operates below the threshold of awareness. We are complex beings, science is just trying to measure complexity. We could go on forever but never reach end.
What’s our reply to Brian Greene saying everything emerges?
Read this line from the crux paragraph again: “Consciousness resides in atomic quantum operations whose classical outcomes are genuinely unpredictable. Quantum pure states combine through entanglement giving rise to unpredictable outcomes in classical world.”
Quantum states cohere and initiate the bias, rest all is the logical consequence of that bias. But bias is not logical consequence of anything that we can measure. It’s dynamics operates below the threshold of awareness, minimising free energy. We are going to review a paper in detail on this in next post.
Why can’t machines be conscious?
Machine’s actions are always logical consequences of their internal mechanism. Everything they do is explainable. Smallest unit in machine is a bit, 0 or 1. The moment we constrain “bit” to either 0 or 1 we are collapsing all the information present at quantum level. Once we have done the collapsing its done. Everything after that is measurable and known (unlike qubit. we still struggle to make sense of it). And thus, machines are not capable to show any intelligence in their current form. Even chatGPT sits on the digital computer. It is fundamentally incapable to show intelligent behaviour.
It is our limited language that creates part of the confusion. We take digital numbers and measuring system for granted. Maybe in future we will have different machines, analogue systems which will be capable to host consciousness.
Can we build conscious machines in future now that we understand this about it?
Can LLMs access sub-Lauder space? No. Current hardware does not allow that. Our computers use 0/1 bits to compute and those bits are averaging out all tiny fluctuations.
That doesn’t mean future machine will also remain dumb. Now we know what do we lack, so we could just focus on fixing that. And again, there is no reason to believe that there is only one way to achieve intelligent behaviour. There could be multiple; by machines, by biological systems or by something else.
What about animals? are they dumber?
They are conscious. They access quantum (sub-Lauder) space. They are not as good problem solvers as humans because they don’t have means to execute their intelligence. If we give them access to tools, they will use it. For example fancier brain like us. Machines on the other hand have fancy tools but they don’t have real intelligence or consciousness.
Imagine.
Learning this about nature of consciousness made me realise how accidental we are. There are infinite ways autopoietic systems could be realised, we are just one of infinite. We have hands, eyes, fingers; nothing special. We have friends, enemies, lovers; again, not special. There are infinite ways you could have been. All the things we consider precious, our instincts for food, fear, survival, reproduction are nothing but the ones that fits this realisation of dissipative structure.
Imagine a system which has two parts and it is talking to each other using radio waves, can this two part system have a single consciousness? why not?
We speak certain way and draw and sing only because these are the tools available to us at present. The thing in our head is capable of doing lot lot lot lot lot more things than that. It is a general intelligence that can operate any complex adaptive system. If we attach other tool, we will learn to use the new tool too.
I am writing more technically rigorous next part of this post. We will go in technical details of quantum mechanics, complex systems and physics. I will publish it in probably a month, till then do share what your opinions are in comments.
Where you sit decides which side you read next.
I read the side that believes consciousness is fundamental to universe; so is this post. Now, If you want to go and sit with the other side where they say consciousness is nothing fancy, it just emerges like everything else, read the complementary post. If everytime you hear ‘consciousness is fundamental’ and it makes you go what an unnecessary fuss, read that post. If you just love the concept of emergence and think your feelings too are just emerging like ants collecting sugar, go and read that post. If you believe you are just dead matter, whose destiny is decided by the laws of physics, go and read that post. It’s totally possible we are nothing but matter and emergent.
And if you’re torn between both camps, tell us in comment what are you feeling.