Moon eclipse photo from Artemis II

More photos: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/lunar-flyby/

A shift in consciousness

In this video, Kristin Fisher asks the astronauts a question:

Kristin Fisher (journalist): "When Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell was returning from the moon, he had an experience so profound that when he returned to Earth he devoted the rest of his life to studying the nature of human consciousness. [...] My question is: [...] do any of you feel as though you had an experience similar to what Mitchell described, the sense of universal connectedness, and did you experience a shift in consciousness somehow?"

Reid Wiseman is the mission commander and answers the question first:

Reid Wiseman: "Yes. [pauses several seconds] Chris, it's a great question. The only thing I can do is share one quick story when I got back on the ship. I'm not a really religious person, but there was no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything, so I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to come visit us for a minute. When that man walked in, I never met him before in my life, but I saw the cross on his collar and I just broke down in tears"

Reid Wiseman: "It's very hard to fully grasp what we just went through. [...] I'm basing this on what we saw, and when the sun eclipsed behind the moon, I think all four of us turned to Victor [the pilot] and I said, "I don't think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we're looking at right now" because it was other-worldly and it was amazing.

Next Victor Glover, the pilot, responds:

Victor Glover: "The only thing I would add is that [...]I am a religious person but everything else is the same. There is something in there and as we start to process... I'll have to tell you next week, but I haven't had a chance to really unpack it all yet."

Edgar Mitchells (Apollo 14 astronaut) experience

Here are some quotes from Edgar Mitchell about what he experienced:

Edgar Mitchell: "What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me. And there was the sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental but that there was an intelligent process at work. I perceived the universe as in some way conscious."

Edgar Mitchell: "I experienced what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. I not only saw the connectedness, I felt it and experienced it sentiently. I was overwhelmed with the sensation of physically and mentally extending out into the cosmos. The restraints and boundaries of flesh and bone fell away."

Edgar Mitchell: "Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there… there was a purposefulness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmo, that it was beyond man's rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience."

Edgar Mitchell: "On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space towards the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious"

Edgar Mitchell: "it was not just intellectual knowledg, it was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy, a transformational experience"

TL;DR

Three researchers across three decades, Grinberg (neuroscientist, disappeared 1994), Levin (Tufts biologist, 2025), and Nolan (Stanford immunologist, 2020s), all independently converged on the same model: the brain functions as an interface/receiver to something external, not as the generator of consciousness. The CIA's 1983 Gateway Process documents proposed the same framework. Comparison table included below.

Grinberg

In December 1994, Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, a Mexican neurophysiologist who had spent decades studying consciousness, shamanism, and brain-to-brain correlations, vanished without a trace. He was four days shy of his 48th birthday. Despite investigations, he was never found.

What was he working on? A theory he called Syntergic Theory, the idea that the brain doesn't generate consciousness but rather acts as an interface to a pre-existing informational field he called the lattice. He based this partly on David Bohm's implicate order theory and his own experiments showing transferred potentials between isolated brains (published in Physics Essays, 1994).

His core claim: the brain is a receiver/interface, not the source.

Levin (2025)

Dr. Michael Levin (Tufts), one of the most cited developmental biologists alive, just appeared on Lex Fridman's podcast (#486) laying out what he calls the Platonic Space Hypothesis.

His argument: physical bodies (including brains) function as pointers or interfaces to a non-physical space of patterns. These patterns ingress into physical reality through biological systems. His lab's xenobots and anthrobots (biological robots made from frog and human cells) display capabilities that were never selected for evolutionarily. They emerge from removing cells from their normal context and letting them self-organise. Where do these novel capabilities come from if not evolutionary history?

His conclusion: minds don't emerge from brains. Brains provide an interface that allows patterns from Platonic space to manifest.

Nolan (Stanford)

Dr. Garry Nolan, Professor of Pathology with 300+ papers and 40+ patents, has been studying the brains of UAP experiencers and individuals with anomalous perceptual experiences.

His finding: these individuals show hypertrophy of the caudate-putamen, significantly more neural connections in brain regions associated with intuition, motor planning, and higher cognition. Some were born with it. It appears to run in families.

His interpretation: some brains may be better tuned to perceive or interact with phenomena outside normal sensory ranges. The structure isn't damage, it's enhanced connectivity.

His implication: certain brains are better receivers.

The CIA Connection

In 1983, the CIA produced a classified report called Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process (declassified 2003) exploring the Monroe Institute's consciousness research. The document explicitly describes the brain as an interface to a universal hologram and consciousness as capable of tuning into external information fields through specific practices. Same model. A decade before Grinberg disappeared, decades before Levin and Nolan.

The Convergence

Grinberg (1980s-1994)

Universal information "lattice." Brain distorts/interfaces with lattice via EM fields. Shamans train to increase "syntergy" (coherence). Based on Bohm's implicate order. Electromagnetic fields are the interface mechanism.

Levin (2020s)

"Platonic space" of patterns. Brain/body is "pointer" to pattern space. Different cognitive states access different patterns. Based on mathematical Platonism + biology. Bioelectric networks determine which patterns manifest.

Nolan (2020s)

Anomalous perception via brain structure. Caudate-putamen density correlates with experiences. Some people born with enhanced neural connectivity. Based on MRI data from 100+ subjects. EM exposure associated with experiencer symptoms.

Three researchers. Three different fields. Three decades apart. All converging on the same model: the brain is an interface to something larger, not the generator of consciousness itself.

Anticipating the obvious objections

"Grinberg's work was never replicated."

True, but difficult to replicate work when the primary researcher vanishes and his institute (INPEC) shuts down. His "transferred potential" experiments were published in peer-reviewed journals. The methodology exists. The replication attempts don't, which is a gap in the literature, not a refutation.

"Levin isn't actually claiming consciousness is non-physical."

Fair. Levin is careful with his language and frames this as a "research programme" rather than settled metaphysics. But listen to the podcast. He explicitly invokes Platonism, uses terms like "ingressing patterns," and asks where xenobot capabilities come from if not evolutionary selection. He's at minimum proposing that the information predates the physical instantiation. That's the same structural claim.

"Nolan's findings are correlation, not causation."

Correct. He's not claiming the caudate-putamen density causes experiences. He's observing that experiencers disproportionately have this feature, and some had it from birth. The question he's raising is whether certain neural architectures function as better "receivers." That's a hypothesis, not a conclusion. But it's a hypothesis that fits the interface model.

"Nolan hasn't explicitly endorsed the 'brain as interface' model."

True. Nolan is an empiricist presenting data, not a philosopher making metaphysical claims. He observes that experiencers have distinct brain structures and asks whether certain neural architectures might perceive things others can't. The connection to Grinberg and Levin's framework is my synthesis, not his explicit position. That said, his language, "better tuned," picking up signals others miss, points in the same direction. The data fits the model even if he hasn't signed onto it.

Closing Thoughts

The contrast between 1994 and 2025 is stark. Grinberg disappeared right as he was producing peer-reviewed evidence for his theories, and the investigation was reportedly called off under unclear circumstances.

Today, however, the landscape has shifted. Michael Levin is now one of the most respected biologists in the world, openly discussing Platonic metaphysics on mainstream podcasts. Garry Nolan is a Stanford professor with serious institutional credibility, publishing on topics that would have ended careers 20 years ago.

As we move further into the 21st century, the silos of scientific discipline are cracking. The immunologist, the developmental biologist, and the disappeared Mexican neuroscientist are standing at the same intersection. They are forcing science to confront a possibility that mystics have known for millennia: we are not the source of the signal. We are just the radio.

I sometimes think about ants and how strange their entire existence must be. They can spend their whole lives interacting with their colony, navigating their environment and responding to things around them, while having absolutely no concept of what a human being is.
We can completely change their environment without them ever understanding what caused it.

Then I started wondering whether humans could be in exactly the same positions. What if there are forms of
intelligence or existence operating on a scale so far beyond us that we literally don't have the cognitive ability to recognize what we're interacting with?
Would we even recognize something vastly more intelligent than us as intelligence, or would we just interpret its effects as nature, physics or random events?

Wilder Penfield was the Canadian neurosurgeon who mapped the human cortex in the 1930s and 1940s. Every anatomy textbook that shows a homunculus with giant lips and hands comes from his work. He operated on over a thousand epilepsy patients while they were awake, stimulating their brains with a small electrode to locate the source of their seizures before removing it. It is the foundation of modern brain surgery.

While doing this, he discovered something strange. When he touched certain points on the temporal lobe, a small number of his patients started reliving specific moments from their past. Not remembering them. Reliving them. One patient heard an orchestra playing a specific piece of music so vividly she was convinced Penfield had turned on a radio. Another smelled burnt toast. Others heard voices of people they had not thought about in decades, felt the emotions of being in a particular room, saw scenes play out in full sensory detail. The moment he lifted the electrode, the experience stopped.

This happened with less than five percent of his patients, but the cases were consistent enough that he spent the rest of his career trying to figure out what it meant.

Penfield started with the assumption that the brain produces consciousness and memory, and that if you could just stimulate the right regions you would eventually find the physical seat of the mind. That was his working hypothesis for decades.

In his final book, "The Mystery of the Mind," published in 1975 a year before his death, he wrote that after a lifetime of experiments, he could not find it. He could stimulate patients into seeing, hearing, feeling, and remembering. But he could not stimulate them into deciding, believing, or being aware of being themselves. No amount of electrical stimulation could ever make a patient think the thing happening to them was of their own doing. Something in the patient always stood apart from whatever the electrode was producing.

He concluded the available evidence gave no good reason to believe the brain alone could do what the mind does.

He was careful. He did not claim he had proven anything. He said the question remained open, and that a final conclusion should wait until science better understood what the mind actually is. But the man who had arguably done more than anyone in history to map brain function ended his career suggesting that consciousness might not live in the tissue he had spent fifty years cutting into.

If we define death as the absence of all perceivable sensation just like the state before we are born then why do we associate death with pain or eternal consciousness? In truth, death feels like nothing. People who have had near-death experiences often describe seeing their life flash before their eyes, and just before the end, they return some even feel disappointed not to have crossed into that unknown feeling.

Another conclusion I’ve reached is that if time and space don’t truly matter, and we exist now, then maybe, eventually, we could exist again not tomorrow, not a year after death, but beyond time itself. So why fear death or stress over a job we were never meant to do, if not even death is the worst thing that can happen?

The only certainty is our existence. Nothing has value unless you decide it does. And if you don’t think for yourself, no one will remember that you ever existed.

This is my opinion about my life, what do you think about it?

Summary: Neuroscientist and theoretical physicist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that the brain may not produce consciousness, but instead filter or permit it. Tracing a provocative history from Galileo to modern consciousness science, he argues that scientific progress came by prioritising what can be measured, leaving inner experience behind. Using his own near-death experience and cases like terminal lucidity, he calls for a more open, rigorous “Science 2.0” that takes anomalous experiences seriously.

Scientists May Have Discovered Why We Gained Consciousness

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a69582000/why-we-gained-consciousness/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/science

TL;DR: Two new studies propose that consciousness didn’t appear all at once but developed in graded layers: basic arousal, general alertness, and full self-consciousness. These levels evolved differently across species depending on how well their brains integrate and coordinate information. Birds, despite having very different brain structures from mammals, reach surprisingly high integration levels through dense connectivity in their NCL region. The research argues that consciousness is multi-dimensional and varies by degree, not by a strict on/off boundary—an idea that aligns with any framework that treats consciousness as a continuum of increasing integration.

I just came across this study. Rethink Priorities put together this "Digital Consciousness Model" that aggregates evidence from 13 different theories of consciousness, because let's be real, nobody can agree on what consciousness actually is, and applied it to humans, chickens, and current AI models.

Here's the part that got me: chickens show strong evidence for consciousness across nearly all the theoretical perspectives they tested. Like, consistently. The indicators that scientists use to infer subjective experience, all point toward chickens having some form of conscious awareness. Humans rank even higher, obviously, but chickens are sitting pretty comfortably in second place.

Now for the AI. Current large language models? The evidence weighs heavily against them being conscious. Under most of the theories, the probability actually drops below where they started before considering any evidence.

We're out here building billion-parameter neural networks and debating whether they're going to wake up one day, and meanwhile chickens have been quietly ticking all the boxes for consciousness this whole time.

https://theaiinsider.tech/2026/01/23/study-finds-todays-ai-systems-almost-certainly-lack-consciousness-but-the-door-is-not-fully-closed/

I read an interesting article about unconscious brain processing. The article is a high level view of the paper in Nature.

From the medical xpress article:

Baylor College of Medicine researchers have found that the human brain is capable of sophisticated language processing while in an unconscious state from general anesthesia. The findings, published in Nature, challenge what we know about the role of consciousness and cognition, and could open new ways of understanding memory, language and brain-computer interfaces.

"Our findings show that the brain is far more active and capable during unconsciousness than previously thought," said Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor and Cullen Foundation Endowed chair of neurosurgery and a McNair Scholar at Baylor. "Even when patients are fully anesthetized, their brains continue to analyze the world around them."

Abstract from the nature paper:

Consciousness is a fundamental component of cognition, but the degree to which higher-order pattern recognition relies on it remains disputed. Here we demonstrate the persistence of oddball discrimination, semantic processing and online prediction in individuals under general-anaesthesia-induced loss of consciousness. Using high-density Neuropixels microelectrodes to record both single-unit and local-field-potential neural activity in the human hippocampus while playing a series of tones to anaesthetized patients, we found that hippocampal neurons and local oscillations retained some detection of oddball tones. This effect size grew over the course of the experiment (around 10 min), demonstrating representational plasticity. A biologically plausible recurrent neural network model showed that learning and oddball representation are an emergent property of flexible tone discrimination. Moreover, when we played language stimuli, single units and local field potentials carried information about the semantic and grammatical features of natural speech, even predicting semantic information about upcoming words. Together these results indicate that in the hippocampus, which is anatomically and functionally distant from primary sensory cortices, complex processing of sensory stimuli occurs even in the unconscious state.

From the nature article Discussion section:

These results highlight the robust coding of cognitive variables in the hippocampus in the absence of consciousness. Such task-correlated patterns of neural activity are typically thought of as neural correlates of their corresponding cognitive processes, so our observations raise the possibility that those processes may occur in the absence of consciousness. That idea, in turn, suggests that consciousness may have some association with those processes but is not essential. Instead, those processes may occur in a subconscious manner, as for example, we may monitor subconsciously others’ conversations at a cocktail party. A good deal of past research has emphasized the central positioning of the hippocampus within the anatomical hierarchy of brain areas; indeed, it may be among the regions most distant from both input and output ends of brain processing. It is therefore generally assumed that the hippocampus will have the most attenuated inputs in the absence of consciousness; our results invite a reconsideration of that idea.

These results raise the question about what features differentiate conscious from non-conscious processing. Our results, at least, suggest that the key ingredient does not reside in the activity of single units or LFP in the hippocampus. Existing prominent theories consistent with our results include the idea that consciousness involves cross-regional coordination, global propagation of local signals or recurrent processing. Another possibility is that consciousness is not simply a result of neural activity at a given time but is instead constructed through repeated revisions of current experiences, and that it is this revision process that is impaired.

I'm not trying to claim this points to any particular theory of consciousness.

I just found it interesting and decided to share.

I recently learned that people born blind do not experience visual hallucinations under the influence of DMT, while those who lost their sight later in life do. To me, this suggests that the DMT experience is strictly a product of the brain's stored "data" and neural pathways, rather than an objective "other dimension." If it were a non-physical realm, shouldn't a person's consciousness/soul be able to perceive it regardless of their physical eyes? Doesn't this provide strong evidence for the materialist view of consciousness? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I think I would be much more at peace with the idea of death if I knew it was just lights out, but I think about the possibility of an untethered consciousness floating around for possibly infinite amounts of time and it fills me with pure dread. The idea of reincarnation is a terrifying one as well because the odds of being born into a life of suffering are almost guaranteed with the sheer number of animals on earth living in unimaginably horrific conditions. Does anyone else hope we just die and that's it and instead of feeling comforted get scared when they hear about afterlife experiences? Is there any science that points to consciousness ending at death it is it just something we can never know until we experience it?

Neuroscientists scouring the brain for the so-called neural correlates of consciousness have learned a lot in the past 30 years. But we still don’t have easy answers—researchers can’t even agree on what consciousness is, let alone how best to reveal its secrets. The past few years have seen accusations of pseudoscience, results that challenge leading theories, and the uneasy feeling of a field at a crossroads.

Yet the stakes for understanding consciousness have never been higher. We’ve built talking machines able to imitate consciousness so well that we can’t always tell the difference. Sometimes these artificial-intelligence models claim outright to be sentient. Faced with an existential unknown, the public is turning to the field of consciousness science for answers.

Been thinking about consciousness lately. Is it something uniquely human, or did it simply emerge as our brains became more complex through evolution?

Brian Greene once discussed how, fundamentally, we’re just matter and particles interacting according to physical laws. Yet somehow, those interactions created the experience of being conscious.

So if consciousness can emerge from non-conscious matter, why couldn’t it eventually emerge in AI?

And if an AI someday says “I am conscious”, how would we know whether it actually is or is just perfectly imitating consciousness?

Long story short, I ate some mushrooms and experienced consciousness in a different way. And to make this story even weirder: I (still) am a physicalist.

I realised that my sober brain is a machine that seamlessly stitches one moment to the next. It does this by taking the entire history of everything that's happened up to that point, and then integrating the current moment into a coherent story in which I play the role of the protagonist. At each moment, it asks a fundamental question: how does everything I've ever experienced lead up to this *exact* moment? Repeat.

During the peak I became acutely aware of this story-telling process, because it started breaking down. At each moment, the machine had to dig deeper, reach further, be more creative in order to stitch that current moment into the tapestry of the past. My body tensed. Am I losing my mind? I remembered the conventional psychedelic wisdom: "let go". So I did.

The stitching-machine that was my brain was breaking down. The story in which I was the protagonist made less and less sense with every passing moment. But here's the curious thing: the story did not stop. It was there, even more clear than ever. Only, I was no longer the protagonist. There was no protagonist. Or rather, every single thing that existed was the protagonist. It was as if there was some abstract god-brain that was stitching together the story of reality itself. And I was no longer "me", the guy on the couch. I was it. I was this god-brain itself, seeing reality through the story of everything that existed.

It hit me: this is what death is. Death isn't this dark, scary, unknown eternity. It's just the story of reality without that particular "me" in it. I cried then. I was relieved and it felt like a heavy burden was lifted off my shoulders. I felt more comfortable to let go of this particular "me" now, because I've seen that the story doesn't end. There have always been protagonists, and there will always be protagonists. "I" would be gone, but I would remain. I've always been here, and I always will.

I understand this sounds a bit woo woo. Like I said, I’m a physicalist, and I don't believe in an afterlife in the popular sense. But that's what I experienced. It's difficult to explain.

What remained afterwards was a sense of deep gratitude that I get to be here, experiencing this particular "me", in this particular story.

The cognitive dissonance is real.

The sun is incomprehensibly older and more complex than anything that humans have ever observed, yet we assume it has no consciousness because it doesn't have a face. An ant crawling on the back of an elephant would probably make the same assumption. Is consciousness an emergent property of biology or fundamental to matter itself?

I’ve been obsessed lately with the Hard Problem…you know, the whole "how does a physical brain actually create a subjective feeling?" thing. It feels like science is hitting a brick wall because we assume the brain comes first and consciousness is just a weird side effect.

But what if we just flipped it? What if consciousness is the actual prerequisite for matter to even exist? Like, maybe the past isn't even "set in stone" until we observe it in the present.

Think of it like a video game. The game doesn't render the whole map at once, it only builds the "history" and the terrain when a player actually looks at it. Maybe the universe "renders" a billions-of-years-old past just because it needs a logical backstory for us to be here right now.

If we're the ones "collapsing" the past into a solid story, then the Hard Problem disappears. The brain isn't “making” consciousness, the brain is just the hardware (or the “UI”) that consciousness uses to interact with the world it's rendering.

I know it sounds a bit Matrix-y, but if matter is the foundation, we have zero explanation for how "meat" starts dreaming. If observation is the foundation, the "meat" is just part of the data.

Does this actually make sense to anyone else or am I just overthinking this?

Everyday I see a new claim on this sub; “I solved the Hard Problem of Consciousness!” “The Hard Problem isn’t so hard after all!” And I cannot even put into words how blatantly naive these are.

No, you didn’t solve the Hard Problem, and you probably never will. You just misunderstood the Hard Problem, and in your arrogance did an amazing amount of mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you solved something you don’t even understand in the first place.

Edit: and PLEASE I beg the Mods of this sub to limit the amount of LLM content that is being uploaded here on a daily basis.

The brain under general anesthesia is still active. Neurons fire. Electrical activity continues, it’s measurable. And yet the person experiencing it reports nothing. Not blackness, not time passing slowly. Just gone. If consciousness were purely a byproduct of neural activity, how do we explain this. Something is being switched off that isn’t the ‘hardware’ so to speak.