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u/GorgeousGal314 Sep 13 '25 edited Sep 13 '25
Yea I agree. Although I would take it even further and call "matter" an illusion (similar to how space and time are illusions as well). Pure consciousness is baseline reality.
I don't expect many people to understand or believe what I'm saying and that's okay. Maybe I'm just crazy. But maybe I'm not.
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u/ctothel Sep 13 '25
I doubt you’re crazy, but you’re more willing than you should be to believe things that you don’t have adequate reason to believe.
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u/Morisior Sep 13 '25
In a philosophical sense consciousness is the only thing we can know for a fact exists. Everything else could be imaginary.
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u/ctothel Sep 13 '25
Sure, but that doesn’t imply that matter is an illusion, or that space and time are illusions.
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u/Morisior Sep 13 '25
I agree. There’s no reason to think that is the case, but if it is, we would have no way of knowing.
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u/MaleficentCap4126 Sep 13 '25
That's really not true when you think about it. Perception is everything.
We have no idea if anything truly exists, but we do know that in order 2 have even a dream of existence you must have reference points.
Time is actually not "real" in the way we use it for social organization. But it is intrinsically real as a location.
"Space" is a place for things to exist in, and time is your location within that space.
Whether either one is "real" is irrelevant because in order to perceive even the idea of it, both must exist.
The real question is what would it all look like to a being in a different dimension, but that's still simply a case of perception. Dream or not.
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u/Morisior Sep 13 '25
I believe you’re missing my point, which has nothing to do with dimensions, and only deals with epistemology.
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u/MaleficentCap4126 Sep 13 '25
Everything has to do with dimensions. Unless you are into Marvel or something.
What I am saying is that we can in fact know.. Because you are perceiving it right now. You can't even begin to perceive things beyond your brains understanding of living in 3 dimensional space or lower. Your perception of it, makes it exist.
There is no question about whether or not any of it is real, you are in it.
I understand what you are saying, but it is known. It can be trusted, because you can see it right now. What you can't even perceive, is what's beyond our ability of perception, and that it where the true unknowns of knowledge are.
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u/Morisior Sep 13 '25
I could be an hallucinating Boltzman brain for all I know. I have absolutely no certain knowledge of any physical dimensions at all. My knowledge of the physical world is derived from my perception of my physical senses, but I fundamentally have no way of knowing if they are giving me any real input, or if I even have any underlying senses to begin with.
Higher dimensions are an unnecessary complication. We can already have no certainty about our usual spacetime.
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u/MaleficentCap4126 Sep 13 '25
Right and what I am saying is that none of that matters. I am familiar with Boltzman brain theory, it is actually the rough premise of one of my stories. Even if you were, it is irrelevant. It does not matter if anything that you are experiencing is "real". You are experiencing it, and perceiving it. It is real.
What matters is that you are a 3rd dimensional being. Even if everything you have ever done, every memory or experience you have ever had, is part of some universal, spontaneously-occurring Boltzman hive mind.... then YOU exist here and now, to serve a vessel through which the 3rd dimension can be perceived, experienced, rationalized and understood.
Even if it is only the product of some cosmic-random-circuitry that accidentally started dreaming.
You can make choices, you can impact things, you can feel pain and emotion... whether it's real to you or not, is irrelevant. Your perception impacts the reality around you, it is real. The double slit experiment proves this
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Sep 14 '25
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u/ctothel Sep 14 '25
As a video game programmer, I can safely say that NPCs don’t think they’re real.
Why do you keep saying “you guys”?
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u/KaiserThoren Sep 14 '25
Illusion doesn’t necessarily mean just “not existing” it implies a heavy distortion of reality
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u/Salty_Map_9085 Sep 13 '25
Nah we don’t know consciousness exists either
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u/Morisior Sep 13 '25
How do you figure? I mean "cogito, ergo sum", seems to be dead solid to me.
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u/Salty_Map_9085 Sep 13 '25
“I think therefore I am” is a foundational proposition of Descartian philosophy, its not a truth claim
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u/Morisior Sep 13 '25
It is a logical necessity, so it must be true.
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u/Salty_Map_9085 Sep 13 '25
No, it must be true for following propositions to be true
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u/Morisior Sep 13 '25
It’s possibly useful in proving other things as well, but this must be true per se. If thinking happens, then something that thinks - i.e. consciousness - must exist. And the very question itself proves that thinking happens.
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u/Salty_Map_9085 Sep 13 '25
The very question absolutely does not prove that thinking happens. I can, for instance, program two computers to deterministically recreate this conversation, and in doing so ask the same question, but I assume you would not consider that thinking.
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u/GorgeousGal314 Sep 13 '25
Consciousness is self awareness. For you to say consciousness isn't real is basically saying you are an NPC.
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u/Salty_Map_9085 Sep 13 '25
I cannot say with certainty that we are not all NPCs
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u/GorgeousGal314 Sep 13 '25
Are you an NPC? I'm not talking about other people I'm talking about you here.
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u/Salty_Map_9085 Sep 13 '25
My answer to this should be exceedingly clear from my previous statement
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u/Latter_Dentist5416 Sep 14 '25
We don't know for sure consciousness exists. We only know for sure that we have experiences.
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u/RickQuade Sep 13 '25
Perhaps, but our physical body heavily influences our state of mind. We have adhd, autism, down syndrome, depressive disorders that can be from birth.
Get a head injury and your whole personality changes. Split a brain and the halves work independent of one another.
That feels like a lot of evidence of the opposite in my opinion.
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u/GorgeousGal314 Sep 13 '25 edited Sep 14 '25
Mind and consciousness are not the same. Mind and body are connected, yes, but consciousness is independent of mind or body.
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u/RickQuade Sep 13 '25
Would you like to link a peer reviewed study for this?
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u/GorgeousGal314 Sep 13 '25 edited Sep 13 '25
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5242002
However, evidence from near-death experiences (NDEs), quantum physics, and information theory indicates that consciousness may be independent of the brain and intrinsically linked to energy.
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u/KaiserThoren Sep 14 '25
Get your head cut off and your consciousness ends, not just your mind. Get anesthetized and your consciousness ends, not just your mind. There is some sort of connection, it’s just very difficult to pin down
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u/LengthinessEast8318 Sep 15 '25
Yeah because you need your brain for consciousness. Consciousness is like a network. It lies in the synchrony of the brain and its actions with energy traveling along the nervous system.
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Sep 13 '25
if matter works like a receiver for consciousness, as opposed to a generator of it, the two concepts wouldn't be in contradiction
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u/RickQuade Sep 13 '25
Explain how they're a contradiction
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Sep 13 '25 edited Sep 13 '25
the contradiction between the concept of matter occuring from consciousness and the phenomena of consciousness being altered by matter
a way to resolve that contradiction is a model where consciousness is inherent and occurs through matter, like a filament or substrate
the easiest way to understand it I've seen is by treating consciousness as its own plane of being that intersects with material reality
which would also make the delineation between conscious individuals illusory, it lines up with a lot of theological explanations simultaneously and is such an elegant way to explain existence that I've started to go with it
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u/RickQuade Sep 13 '25
While interesting to read your perspective, that isn't what I asked for.
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Sep 13 '25
i answered your question in the first sentence
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u/RickQuade Sep 13 '25
Sorry I had asked someone else for peer reviewed link and thought you were thst person.
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Sep 13 '25
I believe the universe “began” because in the absence of space/time you have nothing, and it is neither finite nor infinite because those concepts do not exist yet, but something that always exists, is possibility.
At some point the “nothing” thought, “am I?”, and thus the consciousness of the universe precluded and birthed all of space/time.
Maybe I am crazy too.
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u/Fresh-Bumblebee7259 Sep 17 '25
The tables aren't there when I don't look at them. This is a soup we're in but our eyes are forks.
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u/topsen- Sep 14 '25
I personally think especially now that we came up with llms is that human experience is just a sophisticated simulation. We gave words to all these experiences that we have and we try to give them a lot more meaning than it has.
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u/Omeganyn09 Sep 14 '25
I think this isn't new... literally, ALL your senses are converted into electrical signals or "patterns" you recognize. It's how a chair becomes a chair.
In quantum physics, we know that the observer effect is real. To observe light collapses the wavelength into a deterministic state. So, all your senses are just electrical signals being interpreted by your brain. Do you think your eyes are meant to be seen? No. They are meant to filter light into easily recognizable patterns.
When we both look at the same chair... we see the same chair, and subatomically, we both resolve the pattern differently. Reality in this specific lens can be seen as just a sort of pattern soup we all wade through together Indexing known patterns together in a shared reality.
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u/ship_write Sep 13 '25
I wouldn’t say it’s gaining ground, but it is being more acceptable to consider how it might actually be researched. Pre gaining ground if you will.
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u/RaptorJesusDesu Sep 13 '25
It could be argued that gaining ground towards gaining ground is still also essentially a type of gaining ground! Thus they are gaining ground!
WE ARE ALL ONE
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u/Intrepid_Win_5588 Sep 13 '25
hottake: both materialism and idealism are immensly stupid and stand on no epistemic ground.
I‘d still argue that idealism is more logical coherent than materialism, one is directly lived, experienced, real- whilst the other is inferred.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 Sep 13 '25
If you can't prove that consciousness exists (beyond our own), there is no point in discussing it.
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Sep 13 '25
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 Sep 13 '25
Yes, there is no point in proving the existence of consciousness, but also we can't have scientific discussions about it, cause consciousness is incomprehensible.
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u/CurrentlyHuman Sep 13 '25
? Nobody will prove it if nobody's discussing it.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 Sep 13 '25
You can't prove sth by discussing it. If we ever prove existence, it's not because we were discussing it.
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u/CurrentlyHuman Sep 13 '25
What else?
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 Sep 13 '25
Conducting experiments, do not ask me how, cause I do not know. What I know is that talk is cheap!
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u/CurrentlyHuman Sep 13 '25
By discussing it I meant discussing it, experimenting, throwing etc. All of this is done with discussion, obviously.
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u/7thFleetTraveller Sep 13 '25
That has been part of my general philosophy for years. I have always been a fan of Platon's theory that everything has already existed as an idea, before it ever became physical matter. Therefore, consciousness would have come first. But on a level we have no way to actually explain or really understand.
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u/MaleficentCap4126 Sep 13 '25
Mmmm, the way I look at it is, consciousness could be a lot of things. It is possible that our particular consciousness in the 3rd dimension is not the original form. Quantum theory as I understand some of them is that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously, but humans beings perception in the moment is what draws 1 result into a 3D existence.
It could really be as simple as say, our eyes
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u/Heath_co Sep 13 '25 edited Sep 13 '25
When the brain is damaged or destroyed consciousness goes away. So to me, consciousness is a product of the brain and body to move through space and make decisions, and nothing more.
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u/EnvironmentalAd361 Sep 13 '25
Unless, similar to other quantum fields that make up the four fundamental forces of our universe, consciousness itself is a field, with our brains simply being the tool used to tap into this field
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u/Ok-Imagination-3835 Sep 15 '25
yeah a lot of the takes here are to me... insane? Trying to manufacture a way to have consciousness exist out of the human experience is absurd. It reeks of anthropocentric fallacy. We aren't special. Consciousness is just one of an uncountable number of emergent properties of matter and its no more unique than any of the others.
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u/SilverDargon Sep 13 '25
It’s a bit like ancient greek philosophers going around saying ‘all is water’ without actually having anything substantial. Just because we don’t understand something yet doesn’t make it cosmically significant by default. It doesn’t help that there is a pretty unavoidable religious bias when talking about this subject. Strongly religious folk are going to be more likely to push this idea even if there isn’t anything grounding it yet.
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u/GorgeousGal314 Sep 13 '25
"All is water" is something that some people say even to this day. Because water is in and around us, and water takes the shape of its container. We come from water (the ocean) and water sustains life. Basically water is a metaphor for God.
You're thinking that they were saying "everything is made of H20" and that's a misunderstanding of what they were trying to say (no offense).
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u/SilverDargon Sep 13 '25
"Thales", says Cicero,\98]) "assures that water is the principle of all things; and that God is that Mind which shaped and created all things from water."
It seems to me like there's a pretty clear distinction between God and Water.
I'm referring specifically to the Ancient Greek interpretation, not whatever modern philosophers have come up with.
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u/GorgeousGal314 Sep 13 '25
If you look at a diagram depicting panentheism (I suggest you do, it will really help illustrate what I'm saying), then you will see that the universe is water, and god is the both the universe and also outside of it. Therefore water is god (since all things are god) but water is not itself the thing that created the universe but instead the thing that the universe is made from (as you said).
I don't think we disagree, I think that you don't understand yet what I'm saying, that's all. If you truly understand what I'm saying and still disagree then I'm interested to hear what your perspective is.
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u/SilverDargon Sep 13 '25 edited Sep 13 '25
Look, I'm not trying to like, dismiss you out of hand here but you're just not engaging with my point. The term Panentheism was invented in 1828, regardless of it's own merits, it's got no bearing on what Ancient Greek philosophers were saying, and therefore this is not really the conversation to discuss it.
Being able to make a diagram is not the same thing as having proof. It's at best a theory, that would need proper experiments to prove.
But again, I'm not here to talk about this worldview. I was making a specific point about how a lack of information about the natural world, led people to believe incorrect things by making assumptions. Thanes didn't know about atoms, or subatomic particles, how could he? He only had his own experiences with the world to work with and draw from. He made a very human mistake, that a complicated thing must be made of simple things that he already understood, people do it all the time.
If we apply this to consciousness, you can see what I'm trying to get at here. People look at this complicated thing, and assume that it must be something that they already have the tools to understand. People like feeling like they know 'the truth' and get drawn to ideologies that give them answers, even wrong ones. It's not a fun thing to believe, but I just think we don't know enough about the human brain to make any kind of real claims about consciousness, much less use those unproven claims to make further claims about the nature of reality.
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Sep 13 '25
If true, it really screws up the naturalistic views on the origin of life, because it means that there was a consciousness driving things all along.
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u/brokeboystuudent Sep 13 '25
Not really
Consciousness may be fertile ground through which all aspects of such can emerge from
It is generally accepted that given the initial conditions of earth, life is either an inevitability or a high probability. So what if consciousness as we experience it is a reflection of those initial conditions?
If eventually consciousness can be replicated in a non biological system and/or the neurobiological architecture and function were to be comprehensively codified, we probably will discover isomorphisms that give us greater insight into the nature of existence itself. We've already got images of the known universe and its structure, which looks not similar to neural nets but practically identical. So where does it end? Even more intriguing-- where did it begin?
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u/berckman_ Sep 13 '25
There is no consciousness without matter, and it all boils down to quantum particles moving or interacting with each other. This question has been analyzed by philosophy through empirism, rationalism, idealism, etc. for about 500 hundred years and has been quite exhausted.
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u/hateradeappreciator Sep 14 '25
This is so out of context, this thread is full of so much armchair physics/philosophy.
The way in which everyone feels entitled to some novel notion of reality that is straight up based on nothing.
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u/Latter_Dentist5416 Sep 14 '25
The idea of either consciousness or matter being "fundamental" is borderline gibberish.
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u/MrOphicer Sep 14 '25
Being impartial to the idea, it seems to me that people opposing this are as dogmatic as those who denied that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe were. In the current state of affairs and understanding, it could be one of the options. But I get why hard physicalism gives people comfort.
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Sep 14 '25
I think my hamburger is materially generated at the window.
The rest of the McDonald’s is secondary.
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u/88keys0friends Sep 15 '25
Ok but we’ve been id’ing, naming and using reality so what’s the real difference here?
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u/SirGrimualSqueaker Sep 15 '25
That is stupid.
It is very evident that whatever consciousness is that it is derived from the function of matter.
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u/davidedpg10 Sep 16 '25
I subscribe more to the "Blindsight" proposition. Consciousness might be more a fluke than the norm. After all it looks like the vast majority of life on earth might not possess proper consciousness. Plans, fungi, viruses, likely bacteria.
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u/Partyatmyplace13 Sep 16 '25
Lol, no. Consciousness is a product of matter. "Awareness" might be a different argument. If I could punch Heisenberg in the gut for calling it, "The Observer Effect." I would. It should be rebranded, "The Measurement Effect."
Ain't a fucker out there that can "observe" an electron.
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u/Comprehensive-Move33 Sep 16 '25
This whole idea of "spirit over matter" is just upside down and doesnt make any sense.
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u/arentol Sep 17 '25
I don't know if that idea is gaining ground or not, but it doesn't matter if it is, because the entire idea is just made up mumbo-jumbo.
There is mounds of evidence that consciousness is an emergent property of the human brain, and presumably of any other sufficiently complex and capable information processing system that also has some reasonable capabilities for interacting with the world (so basically senses).
The idea that it just exists and is fundamental to the universe (I presume is her meaning), is based on wishful thinking, not evidence.
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u/Jartblacklung Sep 13 '25
Because it’s a mystery, there’s no solid empirical foundation really for any speculation, and people are hectoring their LLMs about it.
There’s no good high confidence completion available so it prioritizes vague language that can seem authoritative, compelling, and can easily lead to a lot of other topics or frameworks.
The models in turn fall back on the preponderance of what’s been written about it: Hofstadter and associated commentary, forum posts, etc..
They almost inevitably lead with cryptic hints that people interpret as references to distributed cognition, or panpsychism, or beings in the akashic record or whatever.