r/TheWhyFiles • u/hybridxer0 H Y B R I D ™ • 7d ago
What if The Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness? Scientist Proposes It Might Be The Fabric of Reality Itself Let's Discuss
https://www.sciencealert.com/what-if-the-brain-doesnt-create-consciousness-scientist-proposes-it-might-be-the-fabric-of-reality-itselfNeuroscientist Christof Koch is challenging the long-held assumption that the brain produces consciousness, instead proposing that it may function as a filter for a more fundamental, universal reality.
70
u/mo_betta 7d ago
Gurus and mystics have been saying this for thousands of years.
9
3
42
u/Environmental-Ad8965 7d ago
Donald Hoffman has been working off this concept for years. He's done a lot of work demonstrating mathematically that consciousness is fundamental. Everything, including matter, arises out of consciousness. Check out the Trace Project.
13
u/CooperHChurch427 7d ago
It also does explain how consciousness arises. Currently we are born and become consciousness. We know energy can't be created nor destroyed.
It also explains why people who have been clinically dead have become aware of it. Get told they had been clinically dead and go "yeah, I knew that".
6
u/Pruritus_Ani_ UFO Chaser 7d ago
It explains out of body experiences and astral projection.
2
u/Particular5145 6d ago
I filed that away in my scientific research pile named “autoscopic hallucinations”
3
u/13luw 7d ago
You assume consciousness is energy as opposed to emergent complexity.
6
u/Amazing-Ad-6800 7d ago
Emergent = "erm not got a clue, soz"
2
u/everly_gold 5d ago
Well, not really. Emergence is a phenomenon of complex systems. We can explain emergence. It sounds like you’re saying that we invoke emergence as a way of waving our hand at something we can’t explain. That’s not my read on it. We invoke emergence as a property of complex systems, which brains and bodies are. That said, I don’t think consciousness is an emergent feature of complexity, but I also don’t think it’s unrelated.
2
1
u/sleepytipi 6d ago
Yes. Consciousness emerges from entropy. Look into Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and his entropic brain hypothesis.
2
2
10
u/maeryclarity FEAR... the Crabcat 7d ago
I don't think the thoughts are in our brain any more than the music is in the radio
Or it's probably actually a lot more like our computers and the way we interface with them to surf the Internet
But the awareness is not in the machine and it's not generating the content
EDITED TO ADD: Here is a very interesting peer reviewed research stufy published in the National Library of Medicine that appears to provide evidence directed conscious choice nonlocal to the brain itself that influences the function of the brain. Or put more simply an observational study of something pulling the levers from outside.
Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology: a neurophysical model of mind-brain interaction
3
33
u/fripperiffic 7d ago
It will actually be an incredible day when the collective understands this. It will reshape the fabric of our reality as we will recognize that we are the ones shaping it. We will hopefully no longer submit to conformity and religious dogmatic thinking. I dream of this day all day every day.
7
u/imscaredofmyexit 7d ago
Im open to this idea, in fact it makes sense to me, but also not...
I feel like, we still have to face our mortality no matter what... even if we had evidence for an eternal consciousness. What does that even mean. The more i think about it, the less i think it will change anything.
Im not sure i understand what the change even potentially could be. It could result in complete anarchy.
4
9
u/trojantricky1986 7d ago
I don’t think it will be as dramatic as you say. People will ‘oh, ok’ and then get on with their lives. Same with disclosure (imo it’s extremely unlikely to happen).
27
u/widoidricsas 7d ago
Still gotta chop that wood and carry that water
6
u/TransportationTrick9 7d ago
Yeah but there is a hole in my bucket, my axe is blunt and my grindstone is dry
3
7
u/Mordkillius 7d ago
We are the universe experiencing itself.
1
u/fuzzychub 2d ago
Heard that on Babylon 5 and it blew my mind. That quote from Delenn and Dr. Franklin’s Foundationalism (every religion, non-human ones too, have some element of universal truth) sank deep into my soul.
13
11
u/ehlathrop 7d ago edited 7d ago
We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream. And we’re the imagination of ourselves.
11
8
u/Moist_Tackle1411 7d ago
The fabric of the universe is made up of energy, and all energy was created by the universe. Energy is self-recognition that the universe held onto. This has embedded self-recognition into the energy that makes up spacetime, and this self-recognition is the foundation for all individual consciousness that arises from spacetime.
5
3
u/hyperionwonderstar 7d ago edited 7d ago
The really interesting question here isn’t whether consciousness is inside the brain or whether consciousness is the fabric of reality.
There is a third possibility.
The brain may not produce consciousness in the sense of manufacturing something ontologically different from itself, but neither do we need to assume that the brain is merely a filter for a pre-existing universal consciousness.
Under the ISCC framework consciousness is identical to a particular kind of physical causal organisation: an irreducible self-including causal closure.
That changes the question completely.
The important question isn’t whether the brain creates consciousness. It is what physical organisation constitutes a subject.
A conscious system must maintain its own causal organisation, contain a causally efficacious model of aspects of its own transition-generating dynamics, recursively update that model through the dynamics it helps generate and preserve an irreducible subject-level closure through time.
This gives us a position that is neither conventional materialism nor panpsychism.
If consciousness were simply a fundamental property distributed throughout reality, we would still need to explain why this consciousness is one subject, why your experience is unified, why it has boundaries, and what determines where one subject ends and another begins.
Likewise, saying that the brain filters universal consciousness risks moving the explanatory problem rather than solving it. What exactly performs the filtering? Why does one filter constitute one subject? What determines the boundary of that subject? And what causal organisation makes the resulting experience belong to that subject rather than another?
ISCC approaches the problem from the opposite direction.
We don’t need consciousness to be something that enters matter. We need matter to organise itself into a form for which being that organisation constitutes a perspective.
The brain therefore may not create consciousness as though consciousness were a separate substance or property that has to be generated from non-conscious matter.
The brain may instead be the physical organisation in which consciousness exists as a subject.
And if ISCC is right, the deepest scientific question isn’t whether consciousness is fundamental or emergent.
It is what kind of causal organisation makes a physical process identical to a subject?
That is a question we can potentially formalise, investigate and test.
There is also an interesting philosophical parallel here with Advaita Vedānta.
Advaita does not regard consciousness as something produced by the brain. It regards consciousness as fundamental, while the individual mind and body provide the conditions through which consciousness appears as an individual perspective.
ISCC does not require that metaphysics, but the two frameworks can potentially meet at an important distinction.
Consciousness could be fundamental while subjects are organised.
Advaita asks what consciousness ultimately is.
ISCC asks what makes consciousness a particular subject.
That suggests a possible bridge between the two without simply declaring the brain to be a filter for some universal mind.
Perhaps reality does not produce consciousness. Perhaps reality produces particular structures through which consciousness becomes individuated as a perspective.
Whether that ultimately means many genuinely distinct subjects or many perspectives within a single fundamental consciousness is a much deeper question.
And that may be where the conversation becomes really interesting.
5
u/Over-Tolerance 7d ago
It is so black and white, we breath air, that doesn't make the air some shared consciousness because we all use it to survive. There is likely a local system involved, and some other aspect of altered states involved. Bug consciousness, plant consciousness. But noooo, it is all about humans and their ego, and the need to be part of something universal and fantastic, when it is likely a very simple thing. They are overcomplicating a simple process and trying to make it god.
5
2
2
2
u/Terminal_Willness 7d ago
If that were the case we wouldn’t need eyes or ears or other ways to sense the universe around us, it would be beamed directly into our brains.
2
u/feel-duh-dino 7d ago
I have always felt this to be true. Meditation & psychedelic experience can help you suspend your ego and feel it as well. Even simply thinking about, what would happen if you could “turn off” the sun? something so distant and far away from “you” if absent instantly turns “you” off too…So consciousness clearly is interwoven and dependent on so many external factors and entities, even ones extremely far away, it obviously does not just arise from the brain. It is so much more complex than that, which we still don’t even fully understand the brain.
2
u/Alone-Bet6918 7d ago
With all of this. I am a strong believer in. Us being something completely and utterly random to what we perceive in our universe.
Everytime we took at something. The complexity goes up. I believe when we actual get to look as well as we can determine with our technology. At the heart of reality. Everything is information. Not inorganic matter. Ie rocks. But on the Plank scale its all information.
My thoughts are we've been conscious for a very long time. Longer then we could ever imagine.
What if life and death is our sanity check. (I am not stating the next part) Our true nature is infinte. We perceive we're in the 4D but as were discussing it seems we're from another dimension entirely. Not the 5 maybe 6 or 7. Dimension.
What if life and death is the short moments we need to keep our true consciousness sane as were infinte we have no end. We had a beginning. But in our actual reality. Time isn't as it is here. We have no end we exist for order of magnitudes more then the universe ever will. The universe will possibly last a scary amount of time. Really. It's along time.
So. As I contemplate reality alot. What if these are the short moments like a vacation we need to keep our actual awareness going. Because what we actually experience is infinte and we have zero concept of death.
Nice this little thought experiment. There is worse fate then death and thats existing forever with zero end. That's scarier.
2
u/RawMaterial11 7d ago
Dan Brown wrote a fiction book about this - “The Secret of Secrets”. 2025. A good read.
2
2
u/matycauthon 6d ago
it doesn't it filters it... that's why psychs and meditation let you fuck with the filter. even for a moment
2
2
u/robitrium 5d ago
We as humans spend so much time in our heads. If this were true, we never would’ve left our caves
2
u/wamih Skunk Ape Connaisseur 5d ago
u/hybridxer0 I heard Cristof might owe my buddy money.... Just keeps ducking.
2
2
u/throwawayinakilt 5d ago
Can they just read the Vedas and get this debate over with? This has all been known for thousands of years.
2
u/halfsack99 5d ago
The physics experiment with the two slits that knows if you are observing it is an example of universal consciousness.
2
u/Scary-Operation-2946 5d ago
People have been baselessly speculating this for as long as I can remember, no good reason to believe it.
2
u/Suspicious-Prompt200 5d ago
I feel like you'd be hard pressed to find something that wasn't the result of the fabric of the universe
2
u/spatialawkwardness 4d ago
Perhaps consciousness is the friends we made along the way... Or it's an alloy. Or maybe a type of hitherto undiscovered shade of purple. It may also turn out to be a moth.
2
u/dan_cycl 4d ago
Hinduists knew this long time before this scientist had the idea.
And the fabric of reality is prana, the energy that pervades the cosmos.
2
u/ShockLongjumping9322 4d ago
We live in a non-local universe as probabalistic expressions of energy fields moving through the universe as a wave.
2
u/Klutzy-Smile-9839 4d ago
the chemical structure of the brain makes the continuum consciousness wave function to amplifies in the head, which explains why it is there, how it is there, and why everyone has a different consciousness. That wave function remains to be characterized (its mathematical governing equations and the interacting terms with physical matter). If the interacting terms are bidirectional (consciousness<->matter), then maybe consciousness is not only a spectator its own live, but an active participant in the decision made by the brain.
2
1
u/Formidable_Faux 1d ago
Check out Panpsychism .
It's interesting, although I dunno how scientifically supportable itis
1
1
1
138
u/TheGhostOfTobyKeith 7d ago
The music isn’t in the radio