About consciousness
I think consciousness is fundamental in the universe, and I do not think it is a product of space, time, or anything contained within space-time. I have come to think that repeated attempts to derive consciousness from physical reality, whether through identity theories or causal theories, have failed, and that this failure forces us to take seriously the idea that consciousness comes first rather than last. I argue that consciousness is fundamental and that the physical world is not the deepest level of reality.
I understand the standard scientific view, and I do not dismiss it lightly. On that view, the brain is a product of evolution, consciousness emerged for some fitness-related reason, and conscious life is ultimately a feature of biological organisms rather than a basic feature of the universe. I do not reject evolution. I think the evidence for evolution is strong. What I reject is the claim that anyone has shown how consciousness could emerge from brain activity itself.
I. The Hard Problem and the Explanatory Gap
That is where my departure begins. I do not present it as certainty or as rebellion for its own sake. I present it as a response to a real intellectual failure. If nearly everyone is searching for an answer in one part of the problem space and no one has produced a genuine explanation, then it makes sense for at least a few people to look elsewhere. That is one reason I stepped outside the usual physicalist framework and began exploring the possibility that consciousness is fundamental. I also admit, quite candidly, that this is the kind of risk most scholars only take after tenure, and tenure exists precisely to make room for serious intellectual risk.
The deeper reason for my shift lies in the nature of consciousness itself. Conscious experience is first-person and subjective, while our standard descriptions of the physical world are third-person and objective. Between those two domains lies what philosophers now call the hard problem of consciousness: the gap between physical processes in the brain and the felt quality of experience. When I see a green apple, the brain shows electrical activity, chemical signaling, and information passing between neurons. What it does not show is anything green. It does not show the apple as it is experienced. That gap, in my view, has not been explained.
I also want to emphasize that this problem is not new. John Locke admitted centuries ago that he could not understand how bodily activity could be connected to conscious experience, and Thomas Huxley later described the rise of consciousness from nervous tissue as deeply mysterious. Modern neuroscience has given us vastly more data than Locke or Huxley possessed, but my point is that the extra data has not yet bridged the core explanatory gap.
II. The Limits of Correlation
To be fair, neuroscience has made major progress in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness. Researchers can show that specific features of visual experience are closely tied to specific processes in the cortex. Damage to area MT, also called V5, can impair or eliminate motion perception, while damage to area V4 can impair or eliminate color perception. These are strong and important correlations, and I fully acknowledge how impressive this work is.
But for me, correlation is not enough. The real question is how neural activity becomes experience. If a certain pattern of brain activity is present when someone sees red, why should that activity produce the experience of red rather than the smell of a rose, the taste of chocolate, or nothing at all? I do not think we currently have any scientific theory that makes that kind of prediction with precision. We do not have a theory that explains why one neural event must correspond to one specific conscious experience and could not correspond to another.
I often sharpen the point with a thought experiment. Imagine that science discovers a perfect neural correlate for a particular shade of red: one exact neuron firing at one exact rate always produces that precise experience in every human being. That would be an extraordinary discovery. But even then, the mystery would remain. In fact, it would become more intense. Why should sodium, potassium, and calcium ions moving through the membrane of that particular neuron generate that particular experience? The correlation would be exact, but the explanation would still be missing.
III. Moving Beyond Functionalism
That is why I think neural correlates, however valuable, do not solve the problem of consciousness. They sharpen it. They show that conscious experience is tightly linked to brain activity, while leaving open the harder question of why something so different in kind from experience should be linked to it at all.
I spent a long time, like many others, trying to solve the problem through physicalist and functionalist approaches. Perhaps consciousness was not identical to neurobiology itself, but to some functional organization realized by the brain. Given my background in artificial intelligence and computational modeling, this was a natural route for me to explore. But I came to think that these approaches always fail at the crucial moment. They can describe function, organization, and processing, yet when consciousness appears, it seems to do so without a real derivation.
That is why I say I do not want a miracle at the critical stage. In science, assumptions have to be placed clearly at the start. They cannot be inserted secretly at the exact point where the most important explanation is supposed to happen. For me, many theories of consciousness do precisely that: they begin with physical or functional primitives and then, at the decisive moment, consciousness simply appears. I regard that as an unacceptable move.
IV. The Project: Generating Physics from Consciousness
From there, my interest change direction. Instead of beginning with physical or functional assumptions and trying to derive consciousness, I ask what happens if one starts with consciousness itself. I want a mathematically precise model of consciousness on its own terms, not because I assume the first model will be correct, but because science advances by being precise enough to discover exactly where it is wrong. In my formal work, this ambition appears in conscious realism and in my attempt to define conscious agents mathematically.
The test, in my view, is severe. A genuine theory of consciousness should not remain a philosophical gesture. It should be capable of generating physics from the side of consciousness rather than trying and failing to generate consciousness from the side of physics. That is why I have argued that the real challenge is whether a mathematically precise theory of consciousness can recover structures central to modern physics, including quantum theory. Critics of my program have also noted that this is exactly the standard it must meet if it is to become genuinely plausible as a scientific research program.
I do not want hand-waving, and I do not want mysticism. What I want is a model of consciousness that a mathematician would recognize as well specified and that an empirical scientist would regard as at least serious enough to test. If such a model could generate quantum physics without smuggling in unexplained miracles, then it would provide the first real bridge across the mind-body problem from the opposite direction. That has been my project.
What makes this position striking, at least to many people, is that it does not deny neuroscience, evolution, or the value of physical science. I accept all of them while claiming that they still leave the deepest question open. My argument is not that the brain is irrelevant. It is that the brain, however important, has not yet been shown to be the source of consciousness. Until that explanatory step is made, I think it remains reasonable, and perhaps necessary, to consider the possibility that consciousness is not a byproduct of the universe but one of its fundamental features.
Vocabulary of the Mind
Physicalist Framework: The philosophical position that everything is physical, and that consciousness must eventually be explained as a byproduct of material interactions (like brain states).
Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC): The specific brain structures and activities that are consistently associated with particular conscious experiences. While NCCs identify where and when experience happens, they do not explain how or why.
Functionalist Approaches: The theory that mental states are defined solely by their functional role—their inputs, outputs, and internal transitions—rather than the material (neurons or silicon) that realizes them.
Conscious Realism / Conscious Agents: A mathematical framework that treats consciousness as the fundamental "atom" of reality. Instead of particles in space-time, this model starts with a network of "agents" that perceive, decide, and act.
The Hard Problem: A term coined by David Chalmers referring to the question of why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective, qualitative experience (Qualia).