this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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I find it odd that we doubt the afterlife.
This is a universe where nothing is ever truly created or destroyed, merely changing form from one thing to another.
And yet the view we associate with "Science!" is that conciousness is the one exception? What makes you think you're so special that the universe will only experience you for a limited time? You're not a happy meal promotion, you're as immortal as everything else.
How do you define consciousness?
If it's any kind of complex system, then of course it can be permanently destroyed. The same way that a computer or a building or a car can be destroyed and not exist anymore, even if its physical components still do.
And if consciousness is a material or an energy or something real, what's the evidence that it even exists? Why do you believe it exists?
I believe it is something simple we do not yet have the capacity to measure and that which can not be recreated as an AI.
Why do I believe it exists? Because I experience it constantly.
I am going to tell you something based on a true story about a spring in Rome believed to cure disease. For centuries even after the fall of the Empire fell people flocked to it believing the Gods blessed it with healing properties.
The scientific minded said bad to the whole thing and assumed it nothing but a legend that fools took stock in. However people continued to come and be healed, no one could explain it.
Until the invention of the Geiger Counter and the discovery of radiation.
The legend had been true all along. The spring had been mildly radioactive! It was killing off what was killing the patrons!
No one had anyway of knowing until suddenly they did.
I believe conciousness to be a similar story that we haven't seen the end of. Perhaps free will is one as well.
The thing is your story seems more to confirm the scientific consensus around consciousness as connected to the physical existence of the brain. You describe how ancient medicine functioned through trial and error. Some times they came up with stuff that worked, more often than not they didn't, and they had no way of knowing why a cure worked until scientific progress had discovered the underlying explanations for it. So when they found a cure that just happened to work on a certain disease, they would apply it for all sorts of diseases, or lacking proper diagnosis, would mistake other diseases for the disease it worked on and so forth.
It was blind chance without any actual useful theory behind it. Now we have useful theory which explains why consciousness would be linked to the physical cognitive functions of a brain, and less and less that would explain how it could exist without it.
What we have are correlations, not causation. We still cannot point to a part of the brain and say "There it is, there's conciousness."
One theory is the idea that if enough brain power is gathered together it makes a conciousness as an emergent property.
Except, why can't we make an AI? Why is it that putting a bunch of processors together doesn't give us skynet? Why are chatbots that spew regurgitation the best we can do?
Where is the emerging conciousness in the AI?
We will never have it, because we are still missing what makes humans concious. At some point we need to stop laughing at the idea that it could be in some way quantum or undetectable and ask why neurology can't answer the hard question.