For all we know, it might be that consciousness is not fully contained in the physical structure of the brain. It might as well be something that partially exists on another layer of reality we have no idea about yet.
Yes, but not another layer. Just the environment around us - physical and social. Every sensation comes from the environment, our perceptions are trained on this data stream, every value is dependent on environment, our emotions reflect it, language and society are part of the environment, we base our thoughts on language and our actions on other people. Our brain is made from environment signals, just like GPT-4 is made from its language corpus.
The unsung hero of consciousness is actually the environment with its reach data stream and feedback. Consciousness, language, genes, internet, LLMs and the evolution of intelligence are all social processes. They don't make sense individually, only as part of an evolutionary population. They can only evolve if there are many agents.
Now, I know this doesn't sound as sexy as quantum consciousness, but it is a more parsimonious and better grounded position. It accounts for the data engine that actually creates consciousness. Don't be looking for consciousness inside the brain or in exotic physics when the magical ingredient is outside.
This is also my understanding of consciousness. We are overly focused on the human brain's capabilities as a generic information processing mechanism (because of its remarkable adaptability), that we ignore how fundamentally dependent it is on its environment, leading us to seek a metaphysical explanation for its functioning, when it's actually all around us.
Language, culture, and abstract thought capabilities that we use to describe consciousness are symbolic overlays upon the physical environment, but ultimately emerge from it, and their objectives ultimately tie back to it.
Human consciousness - especially its group/cultural aspects - has been a tremendous advantage to the species, which is why we are even in a position to be fascinated by it today.
First example, large hive insect nests, such as those of termites and certain ants. Their internal construction is extremely complex and often built in useful (to them) ways that would challenge even the abilities of smart human engineers trying to do the same with similar tools (sharp digging instruments, organic cementing liquids, raw scavenged building materials and nothing else) Yet any individual termite in a nest of millions shows only, maybe, the most minuscule and debatable signs of consciousness. They instead act like biological, physical pieces of an algorithmic process.
Second, obvious example, evolution itself: Here we have a process that produces organic, biological systems of such complexity and self direction that we with all our cognition are barely capable of grasping them robustly let alone emulating any major part of them, yet it's entirely mindless. Sure, it has billions of years to do its thing through the imperatives of brute survival mechanisms, but it's still incredible how on a macro scale none of it involves the least bit of known cognition.
So we genuinely cannot even begin to guess as to what actually imbues consciousness into our neural processes. It could be anything from "it's actually just the physical processes" through "there's a soul piloting our brains by influencing quantum noise" to "the brain is basically an antenna for our metaphysical self and death/disability is the loss of connection"
Unless we obtain any evidence whatsoever that this can't be the case, Occam's razor would suggest that this is the hypothesis to explore, without looking for new physics or other unlikely assumptions.
Are we more than biological "computers"?
I think we are complex biological systems that we do not fully understand yet but that does not mean anything supernatural or beyond our understanding of physics is at play.
1. Monistic physicalists. Here because of the school. We studied physics so everything looks like a nail: reality is made out of atoms, consciousness is an illusion, etc. The most vocal and fanatic crowd in tech.
2. Cartesian dualists. Soul vs. body, etc. Here because of the church. Surprisingly, there can be some degrees of rigour here. In tech circles, members are on average a bit less reluctant to switch to another group.
3. Monistic idealists. Here via critical reasoning, so could switch to another group if there was a good reason. See not only topics of the mind as self-referential, but every other topic as implicitly mind-referential.
And here we have something mysterious and poorly understood (and poorly defined...): consciousness. And again as always the quacks line up with their magic to explain it all. Higher dimensions! Quantum effects! We're all in the matrix and only our minds are real! Even though we can clearly see that so many mental processes can be influenced with drugs, with hormones, with magnetic fields, or with a scalpel. Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.
Indeed; and these days in tech circles it is the magic of atoms (or strings, or whatever entities you like). The fact that physics by design makes no claims about objective existence of anything does not stop them from thinking that somehow all those entities (which are merely metaphors, ways to create models that are legible to our minds) must exist in some fundamentally objective sense; neither does the fact that we cannot directly access them other than via consciousness, or that the entire idea of empirical observation hinges on the existence of the observer.
> Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.
It had been explained [away] already—since you appear to hold physicalism, you may also like illusionist theories of consciousness.
/s
> In a parallel universe where pineapples are the dominant species, intergalactic pizza deliveries are made by flying spaghetti monsters riding unicycles made of marshmallows. Meanwhile, sentient clouds debate the meaning of life with philosophical penguins on top of rainbow-colored mountains made of bubblegum.
(And if they are not formally sound in that way, our models can be safely considered to be incorrect/incomplete simply because they are not formally sound in that way.)
As long as you consider it a figure of speech (a charitable interpretation indeed), then existence of pink elephants (or ghosts, or what have you) is exactly the implication of the theory in context of scientific method.
I found it hard to believe until I used his techniques to contain 'all of reality' into a small space (the visual field) and then 'move' it to my chest. Feeling like music, sight, and body sensations are all happening within a tiny space-contained field is a very startling experience.
And yeah, there absolutely is something to that. Independent wealth totally frees you up to go to the crazier places.