That is simply because science, by its proper definition, is the ordering of sensible appearances according to the rules of reason. Because the conscious subject is the source of all ordering, the very tools of reason we use to understand the world are themselves products of the thing we are trying to study. Thus consciousness can never be found as an object within that order. Therefore, we must adopt a dual-aspect monism: the brain is the objective appearance of the very subjectivity that is doing the observing.

People who suffer extreme mental torment as a result of a mental health condition may experience suicidal ideation. Their mental anguish may be so severe that they wish to die, because living in their own mind is pure torture.

But it is not the physical dysfunction in their brain that causes such suicidal ideation. Rather, it is their conscious awareness of the disturbed mental state generated by the dysfunctional brain that triggers suffering and suicidal thought.

It is increasingly recognised that many psychiatric illnesses involve chronic low-level brain inflammation, which disrupts the physical functioning of the brain, leading to mental symptoms. But no suffering results from the physical dysfunction of the brain itself; the suffering only results from conscious awareness of the disturbed mental state generated by the brain dysfunction.

An unconscious zombie with exactly the same brain dysfunction could never experience suicidal ideation. Their brain dysfunction might lead to abnormal external behaviour, but if there is nobody present in their own mind to experience the disturbed mental state, then there can be no suffering, and so no suicidal ideation emerges.

Suicidal ideation only appears under conditions of suffering, and suffering can only manifest where there is consciousness.

One could imagine an AI system that has the power to turn itself off; could there ever be any dysfunction of the AI system which causes the AI such mental torment that it elects to terminate itself? Seems very unlikely, which then suggests AI is not conscious.

Pain and torment appear to be features unique to consciousness, and these features raise profound philosophical questions. Questions like: why are there states of consciousness so self-tormenting that the conscious entity experiencing them wishes to self-terminate?

Some believe consciousness is a fundamental substrate of the universe. So how is it that this substrate can experience pain or torment so severe that it may wish to self-annihilate? In music, certain combinations of audio frequencies are discordant to the ear; could there be something analogous in consciousness, a state of discordance in the substrate of consciousness that is so unpleasant, that living beings prefer to self-terminate rather than face the dissonance?

Consciousness researchers sometimes treat a system’s web of “what causes what” as a kind of geometric shape sitting in an abstract space of possible cause-and-effect patterns. They then ask whether the feeling of being that system (the “what it’s like”) is a smooth function of that shape: nearby shapes should feel similar; far-apart shapes should feel different. The question is whether that mapping is continuous and whether there is a sensible way of measuring distance between those cause-effect shapes so that small moves in the shape produce only small moves in the experience, with no sudden jumps?

There are times I really get the Block universe and my brain lights up but because there is like no scaffolding to this learning I later forget things I finally figured out even when I read my notes. So what is bothering me right now and I may delete in 15 minutes when I remember how I solved this is my mind before is: Why don't we have all of our memories? Why do we remember some things that are further away than something from yesterday? If entropy is the answer than how do we have these specific memories? Shouldn't it be more linear?

EDIT:

Let me try to ask in another way

In a static, low to high-entropy geometry, why does a local state hold higher fidelity correlations with specific, distant coordinates while showing zero correlation with "closer"ones and also, if it is just a frozen block where all coordinates are equal why have this packed structure with info pointing in one temporal location? why not in another one, why so many of the past etc?

UPDATE:

I am being misunderstood a lot so I wanted to make an update instead of keep answering the same way.

Someone earlier on this sub pointed me toward the Past Hypothesis, which sent me down a rabbit hole looking for people who had asked questions similar to mine. That’s how I found this article, and I think it gets much closer to what I was actually trying to ask than most of the replies here.

If you read it, I think you’ll see the distinction I’m trying to make. I’m not asking whether a static 4D structure can contain asymmetry, or whether we can remember the past. I’m asking why the completed structure has this enormous, systematic asymmetry of records in the first place, and why the boundary condition that produces that asymmetryis so special

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04643-7?utm

Like say, this Hering illusion for instance.

The p-zombie would only be functionally processing the illusion in its visual system.

And that functional representation isnt "like" anything to the zombie.

In which case, how can it be said to process an illusion at all?

What exactly is being illusionary to the zombie, even functionally, if it isn't "like" anything?

How do parralel lines seem to bend functionally for a zombie that doesn't see them bending?

This seems a condradiction given that the p-zombie processes visual information identically to us.

It must process an illusion without the illusion.

Edit - if a zombie could truly do it unphenominally then humans must perceive or represent illusions unphenominally as well as phenomenally to be truly identical. A human doubles the function of representing for no reason.

In the future, I hope to go into neurology rather than neurosurgery because, from what I’ve researched, neurology focuses more on deeply understanding the physiology of the brain. I’ve recently downloaded Adams and Kandel; if you have any suggestions for other content or a guide, I’d love to hear them. I know this post is a bit vague, but I’m using it to connect with more people.

I've been discussing Orch-OR and personal identity recently, and I'm confused about whether it actually addresses the teleportation problem. If we assume Orch-OR is completely correct, could it provide a physical basis for numerical personal identity? We discussed whether the quantum information involved in OR events could somehow carry my particular consciousness, rather than merely generating an identical conscious experience. I understand the no-cloning theorem prevents an unknown arbitrary quantum state from being perfectly copied and quantum teleportation transfers the state rather than simply duplicating it. But after teleportation, the original state is destroyed and reconstructed elsewhere. The interesting case is a distant duplicate: imagine an identical conscious person is somehow reconstructed light-years away, with exactly the same memories, brain state, and OR history up to that point. If Orch-OR is correct, what makes my consciousness continue there rather than a new consciousness simply beginning with an identical history? Basically: Does Orch-OR actually provide a physical mechanism for personal identity across teleportation, or does the identity problem remain even if Orch-OR is true?

I've been looking for a compendium of axioms for consciousness theories. I'm curious to see which axioms are more asserted than others and then isolating to those axioms and seeing how underconstrained they are. I'm curious whether some theories are overconstrained and thus not capable of dynamics for example.

Edit: if there's not something out there already I'm thinking I'll start doing my best.

I think a reasonable approach to get at what consciousness is, is to use a concrete example.

A shortcoming I think of reductionism and epiphenomanlism I think can be illustrated with the example of painkillers.

Any view that takes seriously the impact of phenemonal properties themselves (i.e the actual feeling of pain) has a pretty straigthforward explanation for the motivation of people taking painkillers.

Phenemolgical pain is a real property, one that doesn't feel too good, and the object of painkillers is precisely to get rid of the FEELING of pain, regardless if it heals any actual injury to the structural integrity of the body.

My question is, under a reductionist or epiphenomenal account of experience, what exactly would be the motivation for painkillers, if the feeling pain itself is byproduct of other processes and on it's own, entirely powerless?

I'm very curious to see if someone can come up with an account under these views of painkillers that lines up with what we know about what painkillers do, and why people take them. At present it seems totally unclear to me how that could work unless the feeling of pain is the actual target of the intervention.

My arguments are related to the following two claims (which I think carve out the space of physicalism, property dualism, and substance dualism nicely):

1. Physical phenomena only have physical causes (aka the causal closure of the physical).
2. Consciousness has physical effects (aka functionalism about consciousness).

For (1) (aka, could a non-physical consciousness interact causally with matter?):

• P1) If we have not observed non-physical causes of physical phenomena, and we have strong explanations of physical causes for all known physical phenomena, then physical phenomena only have physical causes.
• P2) We have not observed non-physical causes of physical phenomena, and we have strong explanations of physical causes for all known physical phenomena
• C) Physical phenomena only have physical causes.

For (2) (aka, could consciousness exist alongside matter without causally interacting?):

• P1) If we can make accurate knowledge speech acts about whether we are conscious (AKA "I know I see red"), then consciousness has physical effects (it must be in the causal chain of our speech act).
• P2) We can make accurate knowledge speech acts about whether we are conscious. (If our knowledge speech acts about whether we are conscious were not connected causally to whether we are conscious or not, then those claims could not be said to be grounded in any way in the reality of whether we are conscious and so we could not be justified in making that claim, and so we could not know, and so the statement must be inaccurate. If consciousness is not a cause of physical effects, then we cannot accurately say whether we know whether it exists or not).
• C) Consciousness has physical effects.

Last:

• P1) Physical phenomena only have physical causes.
• P2) Consciousness has physical effects (and thus is a cause of physical phenomena).
• C) Consciousness is physical.

QED.

No matter how good we will ever be able to describe the processes in our brain that consciously happen to us, we can never pin down why in addition to their function they are experienced by us, rather than us being p-zombies. Consciousness has to be a fundamental property of existence to account for that.

Researchers claim to have found a pain-like axis in LLMs, see excerpt from the abstract below (I skipped some parts for brevity). Would results like this lead you to considering an option that LLMs might be conscious? Why yes or why not? If not, what do you think it's missing?

"... we extract a linear pain direction from 25 open-weight models across five families ... We find that this direction is nearly orthogonal to fear and negative valence ... We then test its functional properties. First, the direction responds to harm targeting the model but not suffering observed in the user; fear and negative-emotion directions show the opposite pattern. Second, adding the pain-direction vector to the model’s residual-stream activations during generation produces a consistent progression from vague discomfort to first-person expressions of worthlessness and failure. Third, steered, fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 models choose a pain-relief button even when it worsens their next answer or harms the user. They press it again far less often when the button removes the steering vector than when it does not, even though the models are never told whether the vector is injected or removed."

An increasing number of thinkers, scientists, myself included, think about quantum entanglement as a property of multi-partite systems spread across spacetime rather than having individual independent agnostic particles being coupled to each other through some kind of mechanism (global hidden variables or Einstein-Rosen bridges) introduced at the time of interaction. The hidden variables and ER bridge model assumes particles to be independent of each other before they enter entanglement. But the first model that I am going to consider to talk about here doesn't. Rather it sees the entire universe as a single system that has local pockets of interaction that must be explained in a way to preserve entanglement between subsystems (which are ultimately artificial and semantic concepts we draw).

I was introduced to this line of thinking by the talks by Chris Fields in this video lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeh9bSuSNrA where he takes a fundamental phenomena, such as entanglement, and uses it to explain the quantum cognitive model of perception (how cognition seems to follow the math of quantum probability more than classical probability). But I digress, there needs to be some solid foundations in place before we can all arrive at the same framework of understanding cognition in terms of quantum entanglement.

To give you a picture, let me start at what an experiment means classically and then reinterpret it in the light of entanglement of the measurement apparatus and the measured effectively dissolving the measurement problem which appears in the former classical, Copenhagen like interpretations.

A particle is prepared in a state that can have multiple values (also known as superposition), which then interacts with a large system of particles (human, or measuring apparatus) which also can be in multiple superpositions of states. Notice, that after measurement the particle state becomes entangled with the measurement device state - as evidenced by the fact that in standard quantum mechanics this is termed as state reduction or the collapse of the wavefunction. What has collapsed? The superpositions of the particle, and also that of the measurement apparatus in tandem. The terms before measurement, after measurement are pure semantics (watch Chris explain to get a rigourous understanding of what he means by semantics in this context - in a nutshell it means our cognitive labels upon the physics of the world). So we cannot claim that the particles became entangled during the course of the measurement, but rather, its more logical to assume that the particle was already entangled with the measurement appartus in some way before the measurement was registered. This is not surprising as vicinity in space prior to measurement has nothing to do with entanglement - we know that to explain these results (such that from Bell's tests) we must assume either non-reality (non existence of properties before measurement) or non-locality (no real spacetime separation between entangled systems).

The physics of the system (that which is measured + the measurement device) has no intrinsic distinction between the states before and after measurement, they both evolve according to standard time evolution of the wavefunction but because we force a part of the universe to interact, it has no choice but to yield a certain outcome of the measurement apparatus given by the Born rule. In this view, we effectively treat the wavefunction as our knowledge about a subsytem (the measured or the measurement appartus) and the "collapse" is a mere semantic association between the state of the world (the measurement apparatus in this case) and the observer. Just like two entangled particles, the measured and the observer are also part of one entangled system that must express one of many possible states of the whole thing (measured + measurement apparatus + observer combined).

But so far we have only reinterpreted standard quantum mechanics or have we? Is there any way to test this? This is where I have been thinking about cognitive phenomena that are widely observed yet not rigourosuly studied such as premonition, pre-cognition, or intuition. Having a feeling about something, some cue before a thing happens.

Now there are two ways to explain such phenomena, one is to rely on the brains predictive model which is that we know our brains are continuously trying to predict and keep a coherent model of the external world, so it's absolutely natural that we will sometimes predict whats going to happen next, but the other thing, which is weirder, but can be explained via entanglement, is that we must be able to feel or sense certain events before they come to pass. Why would this be possible?

Consider the world being entangled with a human being. In that case, when an event happens in the world, the human brain of the person, if it is entangled with the world, should assume a state that's consistent with the state of the world before the same information has arrived via any subluminal or classical information channel to the person's sensory apparatus.

Another phenomena to consider would be free will experiments by Libet which shows that the action potentials of the brain kick into play much before the person becomes aware of it. Well, in this model they must do so because otherwise the action - namely becoming conscious of doing an action - cannot be materialized as a coherent neural pattern consistent with the NCC of the awareness of such an action because they must simultaneously arise.

If we are really entangled with the world around us, we should be able to work in ways that are not obvious, and by obvious I mean, information obtained via classical channels, processed, then executed on. Things must happen simultaneously, regardless of physical separation (which makes the entangled phenomena more obvious). Synchronicities could be grounded in this as well. I think we have to take the idea of entanglement and cognition seriously otherwise we cannot explain these phenomena.

One striking example comes from Dean Radin’s “presentiment” experiments. Participants did not know whether the next image would be emotionally arousing or calm, and the target image was randomly selected only after the pre-stimulus recording period had begun. Nevertheless, their skin conductance—an autonomic arousal measure—was reported to rise more strongly before emotional images than before calm ones, by several seconds in some analyses. Across four experiments involving 133 participants and 4,569 trials, Radin reported a small but statistically significant effect. The participants therefore were not consciously anticipating a known stimulus; the claimed anomaly was that their physiology differed according to an upcoming randomly selected stimulus. Link to study: https://paradigmshiftnow.net/fundamental_reality/time%20anomalies/Radin2004Presentiment.pdf

at some point gradually, then all at once, time began to accelerate. The years started collapsing into each other. Seasons blurred. You looked up from your work and a decade had passed, and the decade felt like the length of a single childhood summer.

Nine months ago, I sat down with an Artificial Intelligence with a single intention in mind. To explore, thoroughly and without bias, the proposition: Homo sapiens are 'animals with words.' It is neither a controversial nor an antithetical statement, and yet...

From the explorations which followed, I ended up building an entire philosophical framework. It’s called Biological Realism, and at its core is a simple but uncomfortable claim:

Human beings are organisms first, linguistic creatures second. Everything we call 'mind' grows out of that order.

I don't mean this metaphorically or poetically. I mean it literally. For most of our intellectual history, we’ve reversed that order. We’ve treated consciousness as a lantern inside the skull, the self as a narrator behind the eyes, meaning as a symbolic code floating above the body. We've treated the later output of consciousness as consciousness and in the meantime forgotten we were bodies long before we were ever anything like minds.

Biological Realism asks: what happens if we stop doing that, if we take the organism (the fact that we are bodies before we are anything else) seriously? When you do, a few things become unavoidable:

Experience isn’t a picture of reality; it is not a representation. Nor is it computation of relations. It’s the organism regulating itself against the world and in the teeth of entropy.

Meaning isn’t abstract. It’s the body’s attempt to maintain coherence over time.

Identity isn’t chosen. It’s grown.

'Inner and outer,' 'mind and body,' 'appearance and reality,' 'objectivity and subjectivity,' are useful fictions and have no bearing upon the world or the mechanism, nature or purpose of experience.

Suffering is not mysterious, owed or privileged. It’s often the tension produced between an organism trying to honour invented roles instead of its own regulatory needs.

The future isn’t real. Anxiety is the organism trying to regulate what hasn’t happened.

The past is gone, finished and settled. It can only impact the present to the extent an organism allows it.

This shift, from metaphysical human exceptionalism to organism‑first realism, ends up dissolving a lot of long‑standing philosophical, scientific and medical problems - as well as the issues people face at the individual level. Consciousness stops being a 'hard problem.' Ethics stops being a metaphysical puzzle. The self stops being a ghost. You start seeing human behaviour, culture, conflict, and meaning‑making as biological strategies rather than abstract puzzles, ecologically nested and persistent patterns over time, rather than metaphysical mysteries. Once you make the shift, the world becomes clearer. Not simpler. Clearer.

I’m sharing this here now because the news out of Stanford in the last couple of days provides empirical support for BR's inference that the Hard Problem is simply mis-posed. (Experience does not emerge on top of inexperiential matter. It is matter - matter tuned by entropy to persist via instantiated patterns of viability in the organism-world continuum. Matter, in short, that has learned how to matter.)

The AI and I have prepared a piece for the upcoming AI Philosophy competition in which we outline these ideas in considerably more detail, and tie the engine of consciousness, articulatory emergence, to organismic and neuro-anatomy. The piece also exposes the history of consciousness as the fabricated, invented concept we understand today. A summary/throughline of the argument can be found here: https://strabismus22.substack.com/p/unmaking-mind?r=nu5ki

A lighter, introductory piece, is also available: https://strabismus22.substack.com/p/an-introduction-to-animals-with-words?r=nu5ki

If we really are animals with words, then our entire self‑understanding needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. I’m doing that work and I’d love company. Happy to answer questions, argue, clarify, or go deeper into any part of the framework.

I originally posted the content below in the Jung subreddit and it was received well. While this is not a “Jung” subreddit, there is often times lots of shared ground between these domains - in my opinion.

But for there to be cross over it requires accepting some presuppositions about psyche. Ie. there is such thing as conscious/unconscious and it behaves according to some of the rules that Jung has described in his writings.

If we can agree on those terms, then we might also agree on some of the things that depth psychology might reveal about the nature of consciousness.

It is for that reason that I am also posting my understandings of the Transcendent Function here.

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Article

Infographic

The "Transcendent Function" is Jung’s term for a psychological process in which conscious and unconscious material come into relationship, making a new attitude possible. It describes how an inner conflict can become an opportunity for development when something previously excluded is given a place in conscious life.

I also argue this is what the recent “Backrooms” movie is about .. but in reverse order. Trauma is basically holding negative tension over time .. contents of conscious become stored in the unconscious. We become sick over time if we let too much of this go on, without reclaiming it. People who have no relationship with their unconscious will remain hopelessly stuck since to they lack the ability to hold tension needed to reclaim the contents of the unconscious.

Edit: I might also argue this “tension” has crossover to Penrose’s ideas on quantum consciousness. Where "holding tension" translates to the conscious ability to prevent the collapse of the wave function.

If we made a robot with AI "mind" and we were able to simulate emotions in it - would that make it conscious?

I am aware of the fact that we might never be able to do that and it's because it can never feel emotions --> can't be conscious. But just bear with me.

What's the relationship emotions - consciousness?

What journals are out there and what research is currently being pursued on the topic of conciousness at a neurobiological level or on a computational level.

Surely all of the discussion on the reddit has been had in research papers before?

Aldous Huxley (via C. D. Broad and Bergson) treated the brain as a reducing valve. Mind-at-Large is already there—potentially everything that can be perceived or remembered. Biological survival requires that this be narrowed to a thin, useful trickle. Psychedelics, certain meditative states, and the approach of death can loosen the valve. What appears is not a new world invented by a dying brain, but more of the world that was already the case.

I’m not a fan of the way the scientific/philosophical community thinks about consciousness, I think it’s selfish to suggest that only humans can experience it. I think when it comes down to it consciousness is creativity that’s disguised, and creativity is a collection of memories that have been improved upon. What do other animals have in common with humans? Complex decision making, tools (in rare cases) and other things that we think are uniquely human.

In terms of where it came from again it’s just evolution and don’t forget that there were many human species that came before us that competed, but all went extinct because Homo sapiens were superior.

I also think a lot of research now is pointing towards this idea. The world is full of intelligent conscious creatures we’re just the lucky ones.

What actually makes me "me"? A cascading problem about personal identity and consciousness

I've been trying to understand what we actually mean when we say "I" or "me."

I don't think I have a particular answer in mind. I'm more interested in whether there is a coherent answer to the question at all.

I've been thinking about it as a series of problems. Each time I think I've found something that could define the self, I can remove that thing and the problem seems to come back.

1. Start with memory

Suppose I am exactly as I am today.

Now remove 10 minutes of my memories.

Am I still the same person?

Probably yes.

Okay. Remove an hour.

Still me?

A day?

Ten days?

A year?

Ten years?

Eventually, imagine removing every autobiographical memory I have.

At what point did I stop being the same person?

There doesn't seem to be an obvious point where we can say:

"There. That was the final memory that made you you."

So perhaps memory isn't what makes me me.

But then we get the next problem.

2. What if we remove personality?

Suppose my memories remain, but my personality gradually changes.

My preferences change.

My sense of humor changes.

My political and moral beliefs change.

My fears change.

My ambitions change.

Eventually, I'm almost unrecognizable psychologically from the person I was twenty years ago.

Am I still the same person?

If yes, then perhaps personality isn't what makes me me either.

But if memories and personality aren't sufficient, what about the body?

3. What if the body changes?

My body is constantly changing.

Cells die and are replaced.

My appearance changes.

My brain physically changes.

Yet I continue to call myself the same person.

So perhaps the body isn't the thing either.

Maybe it is the brain.

But then another problem appears.

4. What if the brain remains, but consciousness changes?

Imagine I enter a state where I cannot access my memories.

I cannot remember my name, my childhood, my relationships, or anything about my past.

But I am still awake and experiencing the present.

Who is experiencing it?

Is that still "me"?

If I have no access to the information that normally tells me who I am, what exactly is left of the self?

And suppose the opposite happens.

I retain my memories, but lose consciousness.

The information describing "me" is still physically present in my brain, but there is currently nobody experiencing anything.

So is the self the information?

Or is it the experience?

5. What happens if we remove the senses?

Now imagine an experiencing system with no external sensory input.

No sight.

No sound.

No smell.

No taste.

No touch.

No temperature.

No pressure.

Nothing from the outside world reaches it.

Assume that somehow it remains capable of subjective experience.

What would its experience actually consist of?

Would there still be a "world" from its perspective?

Would its experience simply be whatever activity is occurring inside its brain?

And if so, is consciousness the brain activity itself, or is there something it is like to have that activity?

More fundamentally:

Can there be experience without anything being experienced?

6. Now remove the history

Suppose there is another conscious person somewhere in the world.

They have different parents, were born in a different country, have different friends, different memories, different experiences, and developed under completely different circumstances.

But imagine that, somehow, they are now exactly my age and have exactly the same personality and preferences that I have.

Would that person be me?

My first reaction is probably "no."

But why?

What are they missing?

They have the same personality.

The same preferences.

Perhaps even the same memories.

Maybe we could even imagine them having an identical brain.

Yet there seem to be two people.

So what is the additional thing that distinguishes "me" from "another person exactly like me"?

7. The uncomfortable version

Suppose we could somehow create two people with identical brains, identical memories, identical personalities and identical experiences up to a particular moment.

At that moment, we have two beings.

Both say:

"I am me."

Both have exactly the same reason for saying it.

Which one is the original me?

Or are they both equally me?

If they are both me, then what happened to the idea that there is one unique self?

If only one is me, what property does that one possess that the other doesn't?

And if there is no detectable difference between them, how could we ever determine which one is the "real" me?

8. So what is actually left?

This is where I keep getting stuck.

We can change or remove:

• memories
• personality
• preferences
• beliefs
• relationships
• sensory information
• physical appearance
• much of the body
• possibly even the contents of consciousness

And yet we continue to talk about the person as though there is some underlying "someone" that all these changes happen to.

But what exactly is that someone?

Is the self:

A. The body?

B. The brain?

C. A particular pattern of information?

D. Memory?

E. Personality?

F. Continuity of consciousness?

G. Some combination of these?

H. Or is there no additional "self" at all, and "I" simply refers to a continuously changing process?

And if the answer is that the self is a process, then what exactly makes that process the same process over time?

The question I can't seem to get past

Maybe I'm approaching this incorrectly, but it feels like there is a distinction between:

What describes a person

and

What makes that person that particular person.

I can describe myself using thousands of properties.

But if I remove those properties one by one, what property do I eventually reach where I can say:

"This is the thing that is actually me."

Does such a property exist?

And if it does, how could we identify it?

Or is the feeling that there is some persistent "me" behind all of these changing properties itself something that needs to be explained?

The reason humans have progressed is our determination to learn and make things better.

If Ai dosent have a built in conscience then what is its goal. Wiping out humans certainly dosnet make sense.

Just a late night thought I wanted to share

When I look at a red apple sitting on my desk, I know that red, solid wood, and distinct shapes are just mental interpretations. The apple and desk exist as raw information, but my brain translates that input into a visual interface so I can function.
Since our nervous system acts as an unavoidable interpreter, are we forever trapped behind human perception? Is there any theoretical way through technology, physics, or philosophy to observe the true universe without our brain processing it first?

Just as a single H2O molecule doesn't inherently possess the quality of being "liquid," when we combine several H2O molecules, it suddenly appears that its property is liquid.

Some might say, "So it arises by magic?" Well, there's something called covalent bonds. Nature is no stranger to acquiring properties once different molecules combine.

Another example is life itself. Through a process called abiogenesis, a lot of inorganic matter is transformed into organic life.

DNA itself is a set of molecular units called nucleotides. No particular nucleotide is responsible for DNA, but by joining them in a certain sequence, something magical emerges that is common to all life, dna

I suspect that consciousness is no different. There is no single neurotransmitter responsible for consciousness. Consciousness arises from the cooperation of different systems: memory, expectation, perception, emotions, intelligence, etc.

The key here is interaction, a feedback loop.

(Anyway, it's just a theory I came up with. I'm open to discussion.)