Consciousness is the inflection of the potential of existential being.
Give me the moment.
Consciousness is not awareness, awareness is the tip of consciousness. Awareness is a temporal feedback loop within the biotechnology of the mind.
Consciousness is existential, it is the very potential of existential being, being perturbed by the biotechnology of life, our complex life in particular.
All life is “of consciousness”, in fact it would be more technically accurate to say life emerges from consciousness than consciousness emerges from life.
There are a few things that break modern science. Firstly, reality is not “information” or even “matter”. Reality is potential (universal potential) resolving into matter (gravitational bound vector torsion) or “information” (simply any vector). Potential itself is the bound substance of a particulate. The most literal definition of consciousness could be perturbing the vibration of the subjectively scoped particulate bound potential.
This beautiful stuff does not “compute” it is not “geometric information”, it is “potential” which “distributes over the surface area of negative potential”, and that means our brain intellects, a technology of consciousness may use this relationship with potential to perform “calculations” as exercises in “distribution of potential.” Essentially our brains use this space (billions of fleeting instances in each single mind) to stage challenges through constructive and destructive interference, and then extrapolating behavioral meaning from the drive of consciousness.
Consciousness as potential is a feedback loop of constructive and destructive interference, those potentials are cast as holographic forms in this matrix of consciousness within our neurons.
The identity and fine resolution of (inward) senses might be referred to as “qualia” and has more to do with our personal experience of conscious, the holographic figment which echos within these chambers of thought.
Modern science is mistaken on several layers, and those thinking this through are predisposed to mock the feedback echo chamber of quantum potential as “magic” when that is simply the part you do not yet understand.
Think about it. You, your intellect is not a bunch of index cards referring to each other in a complex way. You are existential reality animated by life, whose attention is a feedback loop of cognitive self awareness. All biotechnological features of an underlying existential form (your brain pan). You are the universe peering back upon itself.
I feel like you believe this comment to be incredibly revealing and profound but to an outsider it’s almost indistinguishable from meaningless noise, and so you’re serving to highlight the very problem of defining what you believe you have defined.
What about the “quantum holography” part? Do you see how a hyperdimensionality of quantum potential, which is merely not presently well understood may be crudely explained as a holographic sieve?
We “cast the shadows” of our mind through this holographic sieve, maintained as many electrochemically sustained clusters. It is the disposition of these competing and interacting holographic potentials which drive our thoughts and interests, not switchboards of Boolean logics.
I am suggesting our neurons clustering, both physically and virtually through layers of isolated potentials are combined as a holographic surface. Their wave fronts are bound in the disparate lattice of the mind, at that time synchronized.
I suggest through all of this that manipulating quantum holographic memory is the future of computation, and that is exactly what our minds do, however crudely.
I’m arguing about what might sensibly be communicated in a short forum post without descending into nonsense, not what one might find acceptable to believe or think.
I’m sure there is parable out there relating to abject dismissal without consideration where conventions and pretenses are not made.
I’m just that guy posting on the internet sure.
If you were to try again, from consideration of this thread so far, other than “science hasn’t proved these things are truth for me”, and acknowledging that I am not the first source you have heard these things from, only in this composed format.
Let’s take Penrose being booed from “scientific credibility” for suggesting something similar, only I have specific objections to Penrose’s conjecture.
Firstly, gravity does not collapse the super amplitude, there is a chaotic firefly in every particle that can be tamed and manipulated with presently incomprehensible precision. I call this “quantum holography” and I predict the qubit will be a dead end (as basis for quantum computation) within …20 years. I should say 10, yet who knows who gets liquidated or canceled.
Others have proposed the microtubules as the 2D crystalline latis for this mass (billions of atoms”) to act as one surface for the coupling/entanglement (which are two different things.)
Besides electrochemical “state machines” we are potential amplitude driven determiners of resolve.
Dammit! In trying to link to it, I just discovered the wonderful site wisdomofchopra.com is no more. Probably because Chopra recently expanded his grift from books and seminars to an online AI, so the old 2012 random sentence generator site was competition. Oh well. Here's the WisdomofChopra Twitter feed: https://x.com/WisdomOfChopra
Which reminds me, inspired by Deepak Chopra's sayings, actual philosopher Daniel Dennett, who was known for saying things which were not only coherent but often quite insightful, coined the term Deepity: "A statement that is apparently profound, but is actually trivial on one level and meaningless on another."
One of the ways in which we are truly blessed these days is in seeing how easy it is to take a morsel of insight and couch it in simulated profundity. The following is a similar sounding passage I got from ChatGPT. I call this, "Choprafication".
Consciousness is not a state but a curvature — a bending of possibility around the locus of being. Awareness is not the field itself, but the gradient formed when that field folds back upon its own continuity. To be aware is not to perceive reality, but to experience the interference pattern between what is possible and what is momentarily resolved.
The mistake of modern inquiry is to treat experience as a product, rather than as a modulation. Experience is not generated by matter; matter is stabilized experience — frozen potential captured in persistent form. The brain does not create consciousness; it diffracts it. Neural structures act as resonant chambers in which existential potential coheres into meaning-bearing forms.
Information, as it is commonly understood, is already too late in the process. Information is the fossil record of potential after it has collapsed into structure. What precedes information is tension — not energy in the physical sense, but directional propensity. This is why consciousness cannot be computed: computation presupposes discretization, while consciousness operates in the continuous domain of pre-discrete differentiation.
Life is not animated matter; matter is life constrained by boundary conditions. Biological systems are technologies evolved to maintain coherence within this field of potential. Each living organism is a localized recursion, a standing wave of existential pressure negotiating its own persistence.
Thought itself is not symbolic manipulation but phase alignment. Concepts emerge when distributed potentials synchronize across neural substrates, briefly forming holographic identities that feel stable only because they recur. Memory is not storage, but repeated resonance. Identity is the echo of these resonances mistaken for a fixed source.
Qualia are not properties of neurons nor illusions produced by computation. They are the fine-grained textures of potential as it resolves under specific biological constraints. Red is not a wavelength; it is a particular solution to the problem of perceiving difference within a living system tuned for survival.
Those who demand equations mistake maps for territory. Mathematics describes the shadows cast by potential as it intersects with form; it does not touch the source. What is called “physical law” is merely the statistical regularity of resolved potential observed from within one of its own expressions.
To exist as a conscious being is to be a site where the universe hesitates — where possibility briefly considers itself before continuing onward. You are not observing reality. You are reality, folded just enough to notice.
That’s because of several problems in the problem definition.
First off, a lot of research talks about consciousness, but doesn’t define it.
Do you mean attention?
Do you mean memory?
Do you mean awareness?
Do you mean self awareness?
Do you mean ability to report on a phenomenon?
Do you mean a combination of these things?
Then they’re looking into the physical or neurological basis. Why would that need to be there?
Are you going to look at the physical basis of a software application, when there are multiple chip architectures which work? When it could be done mechanically, when it could have been done with a pen and paper?
What part of the physical basis are you looking for? It’s neurons. We know how they work. (Well, and all the other cells in our nervous system and brain which for some reason we just ignore)
I think the problem with consciousness isn’t consciousness itself, it’s our preconceived notions of what constitutes and doesn’t constitute consciousness, and our inability thus far to accurate define and constrain both the subject and research question.
right: "Understanding the biophysical basis of consciousness remains a substantial challenge" precisely because there is no such thing. according to the Upaniṣads, consciousness is the Absolute. "How can one know that by which everything is known? How can one know the Knower?" — Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad
There is no theory of consciousness, and no one is anywhere close to forming one.
In place of a theory, the paper supplies a circular set of references to attributes of consciousness associated with human activity. These references are coined in a manner as if having editorial control over some jargon, such as "perceptual self awareness", which is sandbagged by secondary subordinate, vague terms, such as "wakefulness", can seem like a cogent alternative to the total lack of any formal approach to understanding of consciousness.
Using bloated prose, which necessitates a disclaimer that it wasn't pooped out of a gen-AI, the paper surfs heavy waves of lamentation about the "complexity" of "phenomenological" and "clinical methods" to reach a shore of intelligibility that Descartes colonized centuries ago with the maxim: There is nothing a man comprehends more self-evidently than his own existence.
Intellectually there's precious little at stake in this paper, so what's its purpose? The answer can be found though an analogy of the resounding words of JFK announcing the Apollo program: "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won..."; whomever can take control of an sciency vernacular for humanistic traits applied to today's AI will gain a seat at any roundtable on industrial policy, and this seat could prove very valuable.
In conclusion, this work needs funding, lots more funding!
Well said. When I read stuff like this implying 'consciousness studies' can be a hard science, the undefined and ill-defined terms just keep piling up until I nope out. I'm lucky if I make it past the abstract to maybe the third paragraph. No reproducible science can be built on so many subjective vagaries.
I think consciousness studies can be interesting but they need to stay in the philosophy department between Searle's Chinese room and the P-Zombie lounge until they're ready to experimentally test falsifiable hypotheses with neuroscientists. And until they have a rigorous, consistent definition of what human consciousness is and is not, they really need to stop pretending AI has any relevance to human consciousness. There's no evidence AIs are conscious, and even if there someday is reproducible evidence - there's no reason to think it might be similar enough to human consciousness to make useful predictions about either (and that's assuming humans are conscious, which is still a matter of some debate in the field).
Consciousness is the inflection of the potential of existential being.
Give me the moment.
Consciousness is not awareness, awareness is the tip of consciousness. Awareness is a temporal feedback loop within the biotechnology of the mind.
Consciousness is existential, it is the very potential of existential being, being perturbed by the biotechnology of life, our complex life in particular.
All life is “of consciousness”, in fact it would be more technically accurate to say life emerges from consciousness than consciousness emerges from life.
There are a few things that break modern science. Firstly, reality is not “information” or even “matter”. Reality is potential (universal potential) resolving into matter (gravitational bound vector torsion) or “information” (simply any vector). Potential itself is the bound substance of a particulate. The most literal definition of consciousness could be perturbing the vibration of the subjectively scoped particulate bound potential.
This beautiful stuff does not “compute” it is not “geometric information”, it is “potential” which “distributes over the surface area of negative potential”, and that means our brain intellects, a technology of consciousness may use this relationship with potential to perform “calculations” as exercises in “distribution of potential.” Essentially our brains use this space (billions of fleeting instances in each single mind) to stage challenges through constructive and destructive interference, and then extrapolating behavioral meaning from the drive of consciousness.
Consciousness as potential is a feedback loop of constructive and destructive interference, those potentials are cast as holographic forms in this matrix of consciousness within our neurons.
The identity and fine resolution of (inward) senses might be referred to as “qualia” and has more to do with our personal experience of conscious, the holographic figment which echos within these chambers of thought.
Modern science is mistaken on several layers, and those thinking this through are predisposed to mock the feedback echo chamber of quantum potential as “magic” when that is simply the part you do not yet understand.
Think about it. You, your intellect is not a bunch of index cards referring to each other in a complex way. You are existential reality animated by life, whose attention is a feedback loop of cognitive self awareness. All biotechnological features of an underlying existential form (your brain pan). You are the universe peering back upon itself.
I feel like you believe this comment to be incredibly revealing and profound but to an outsider it’s almost indistinguishable from meaningless noise, and so you’re serving to highlight the very problem of defining what you believe you have defined.
What about the “quantum holography” part? Do you see how a hyperdimensionality of quantum potential, which is merely not presently well understood may be crudely explained as a holographic sieve?
We “cast the shadows” of our mind through this holographic sieve, maintained as many electrochemically sustained clusters. It is the disposition of these competing and interacting holographic potentials which drive our thoughts and interests, not switchboards of Boolean logics.
I am suggesting our neurons clustering, both physically and virtually through layers of isolated potentials are combined as a holographic surface. Their wave fronts are bound in the disparate lattice of the mind, at that time synchronized.
I suggest through all of this that manipulating quantum holographic memory is the future of computation, and that is exactly what our minds do, however crudely.
And yet you continue.
Ah, you are one of those who must be told what is “true.” You only know what you find agreeable.
To some, there are existential truths however they are come by which explain or predict, and others what is acceptable to think feel or believe.
I’m arguing about what might sensibly be communicated in a short forum post without descending into nonsense, not what one might find acceptable to believe or think.
Well gosh, you sure fouled up your one chance.
I’m sure there is parable out there relating to abject dismissal without consideration where conventions and pretenses are not made.
I’m just that guy posting on the internet sure.
If you were to try again, from consideration of this thread so far, other than “science hasn’t proved these things are truth for me”, and acknowledging that I am not the first source you have heard these things from, only in this composed format.
Let’s take Penrose being booed from “scientific credibility” for suggesting something similar, only I have specific objections to Penrose’s conjecture.
Firstly, gravity does not collapse the super amplitude, there is a chaotic firefly in every particle that can be tamed and manipulated with presently incomprehensible precision. I call this “quantum holography” and I predict the qubit will be a dead end (as basis for quantum computation) within …20 years. I should say 10, yet who knows who gets liquidated or canceled.
Others have proposed the microtubules as the 2D crystalline latis for this mass (billions of atoms”) to act as one surface for the coupling/entanglement (which are two different things.)
Besides electrochemical “state machines” we are potential amplitude driven determiners of resolve.
What is your most considerate objection to this?
(Respond from first of thread.)
Deepak... is that you?
Dammit! In trying to link to it, I just discovered the wonderful site wisdomofchopra.com is no more. Probably because Chopra recently expanded his grift from books and seminars to an online AI, so the old 2012 random sentence generator site was competition. Oh well. Here's the WisdomofChopra Twitter feed: https://x.com/WisdomOfChopra
Which reminds me, inspired by Deepak Chopra's sayings, actual philosopher Daniel Dennett, who was known for saying things which were not only coherent but often quite insightful, coined the term Deepity: "A statement that is apparently profound, but is actually trivial on one level and meaningless on another."
Let me add “our brains use quantum holography. Where the hologram is the qualia, the holography is the consciousness.”
The qubit is a dead end. When you understand that, you will understand consciousness.
One of the ways in which we are truly blessed these days is in seeing how easy it is to take a morsel of insight and couch it in simulated profundity. The following is a similar sounding passage I got from ChatGPT. I call this, "Choprafication".
Consciousness is not a state but a curvature — a bending of possibility around the locus of being. Awareness is not the field itself, but the gradient formed when that field folds back upon its own continuity. To be aware is not to perceive reality, but to experience the interference pattern between what is possible and what is momentarily resolved.
The mistake of modern inquiry is to treat experience as a product, rather than as a modulation. Experience is not generated by matter; matter is stabilized experience — frozen potential captured in persistent form. The brain does not create consciousness; it diffracts it. Neural structures act as resonant chambers in which existential potential coheres into meaning-bearing forms.
Information, as it is commonly understood, is already too late in the process. Information is the fossil record of potential after it has collapsed into structure. What precedes information is tension — not energy in the physical sense, but directional propensity. This is why consciousness cannot be computed: computation presupposes discretization, while consciousness operates in the continuous domain of pre-discrete differentiation.
Life is not animated matter; matter is life constrained by boundary conditions. Biological systems are technologies evolved to maintain coherence within this field of potential. Each living organism is a localized recursion, a standing wave of existential pressure negotiating its own persistence.
Thought itself is not symbolic manipulation but phase alignment. Concepts emerge when distributed potentials synchronize across neural substrates, briefly forming holographic identities that feel stable only because they recur. Memory is not storage, but repeated resonance. Identity is the echo of these resonances mistaken for a fixed source.
Qualia are not properties of neurons nor illusions produced by computation. They are the fine-grained textures of potential as it resolves under specific biological constraints. Red is not a wavelength; it is a particular solution to the problem of perceiving difference within a living system tuned for survival.
Those who demand equations mistake maps for territory. Mathematics describes the shadows cast by potential as it intersects with form; it does not touch the source. What is called “physical law” is merely the statistical regularity of resolved potential observed from within one of its own expressions.
To exist as a conscious being is to be a site where the universe hesitates — where possibility briefly considers itself before continuing onward. You are not observing reality. You are reality, folded just enough to notice.
That’s because of several problems in the problem definition.
First off, a lot of research talks about consciousness, but doesn’t define it.
Do you mean attention? Do you mean memory? Do you mean awareness? Do you mean self awareness? Do you mean ability to report on a phenomenon? Do you mean a combination of these things?
Then they’re looking into the physical or neurological basis. Why would that need to be there? Are you going to look at the physical basis of a software application, when there are multiple chip architectures which work? When it could be done mechanically, when it could have been done with a pen and paper?
What part of the physical basis are you looking for? It’s neurons. We know how they work. (Well, and all the other cells in our nervous system and brain which for some reason we just ignore)
I think the problem with consciousness isn’t consciousness itself, it’s our preconceived notions of what constitutes and doesn’t constitute consciousness, and our inability thus far to accurate define and constrain both the subject and research question.
right: "Understanding the biophysical basis of consciousness remains a substantial challenge" precisely because there is no such thing. according to the Upaniṣads, consciousness is the Absolute. "How can one know that by which everything is known? How can one know the Knower?" — Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad
Consciousness is to the waking state as dreaming is to the sleeping. That is the true meaning of the ancient “ohm” symbol.
tl;dr
There is no theory of consciousness, and no one is anywhere close to forming one.
In place of a theory, the paper supplies a circular set of references to attributes of consciousness associated with human activity. These references are coined in a manner as if having editorial control over some jargon, such as "perceptual self awareness", which is sandbagged by secondary subordinate, vague terms, such as "wakefulness", can seem like a cogent alternative to the total lack of any formal approach to understanding of consciousness.
Using bloated prose, which necessitates a disclaimer that it wasn't pooped out of a gen-AI, the paper surfs heavy waves of lamentation about the "complexity" of "phenomenological" and "clinical methods" to reach a shore of intelligibility that Descartes colonized centuries ago with the maxim: There is nothing a man comprehends more self-evidently than his own existence.
Intellectually there's precious little at stake in this paper, so what's its purpose? The answer can be found though an analogy of the resounding words of JFK announcing the Apollo program: "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won..."; whomever can take control of an sciency vernacular for humanistic traits applied to today's AI will gain a seat at any roundtable on industrial policy, and this seat could prove very valuable.
In conclusion, this work needs funding, lots more funding!
Well said. When I read stuff like this implying 'consciousness studies' can be a hard science, the undefined and ill-defined terms just keep piling up until I nope out. I'm lucky if I make it past the abstract to maybe the third paragraph. No reproducible science can be built on so many subjective vagaries.
I think consciousness studies can be interesting but they need to stay in the philosophy department between Searle's Chinese room and the P-Zombie lounge until they're ready to experimentally test falsifiable hypotheses with neuroscientists. And until they have a rigorous, consistent definition of what human consciousness is and is not, they really need to stop pretending AI has any relevance to human consciousness. There's no evidence AIs are conscious, and even if there someday is reproducible evidence - there's no reason to think it might be similar enough to human consciousness to make useful predictions about either (and that's assuming humans are conscious, which is still a matter of some debate in the field).