Disclaimer: This article discusses psychedelics in a scientific and philosophical context for educational purposes only. We do not endorse illegal drug use. Psychedelic research should only be conducted in legal, supervised settings.
Consciousness and intelligence are very different things. You don’t have to be smart to suffer, but you probably do have to be alive.
– Anil Seth (Neuroscientist)
Can consciousness be reduced to physical processes? This question has kept philosophers awake at night for centuries (which is ironic, since being awake is exactly what they’re trying to explain). If we can explain every human action through genetics, environment, and brain chemistry, does that mean consciousness is just sophisticated biological machinery? Or is there something more mysterious going on inside our skulls?
Is it the Brain?
Science shows us compelling evidence that consciousness emerges from the brain. And by “compelling,” we mean “so obvious it’s almost embarrassing we’re still debating this.” Every documented change in conscious experience matches specific brain changes. Anesthetics eliminate awareness by affecting neural networks. Brain injuries create precise consciousness deficits. Psychedelics predictably alter experience through receptor binding.
It’s like consciousness is the brain’s greatest magic trick, except we can see exactly how the trick works by peeking behind the curtain with brain scanners.
The scientific consensus increasingly views consciousness as a biological phenomenon, like digestion or circulation, though significantly more interesting at dinner parties.
We can trace decision-making through neural pathways. Even complex behaviors like moral reasoning show consistent brain signatures. The feeling of free will might be a story our brains tell us after the fact – essentially, we’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives.
The Hard Problem Remains (And It’s Really, Really Hard)
But there’s what philosophers call the “hard problem” of consciousness, which makes regular hard problems look like Sunday crosswords. Even if we map every neural correlation, why should there be subjective experience at all? We can explain brain functions completely. But this doesn’t explain why there’s a felt experience rather than just unconscious information processing.
Consider pain. We understand nerve activation, signal transmission, and brain processing perfectly. But why is there an unpleasant feeling accompanying this process? Why isn’t it just unconscious information handling, like a computer processing error messages without actually feeling annoyed about it?
It’s the difference between a robot saying “OUCH” when damaged versus actually experiencing the ouchy feeling. And that difference might be everything.
Nature’s Consciousness Hackers
Psychedelics offer unique insights into consciousness, assuming you’re brave enough to let your brain temporarily redecorate itself. They can reliably alter awareness in ways that are both meaningful to users and measurable to scientists. Unlike meditation, which requires years of practice and the patience of a monk, psychedelics provide “temporary enlightenment” to researchers in about 30 minutes.
When people take psilocybin or LSD, specific brain networks shut down like a computer going into safe mode. This correlates with ego dissolution and mystical experiences. Our sense of self might be a neurological construction rather than something fundamental – basically, we’re all just really convincing hallucinations that have learned to worry about taxes.
But here’s what’s fascinating: users often report these experiences as more real than ordinary consciousness, not less. Which either means they’ve accessed deeper truth, or brains are really good at making temporary states feel profound.
You’re Not Who You Think You Are
Personal experiences with psychedelics reveal something unexpected and slightly unsettling. Many users report feeling genuinely natural for the first time in their lives. The “mask” of social conditioning temporarily disappears, like taking off uncomfortable shoes you didn’t realize were hurting your feet.
This suggests our normal consciousness might be heavily artificial – essentially, we’re all walking around in psychological costumes we forgot we put on.
Consider the story of Neem Karoli Baba, who reportedly took large doses of LSD with no visible effect, much like someone immune to coffee wondering why everyone else is bouncing off the walls. This puzzled Ram Dass (Richard Alpert); who expected everyone to have transformative experiences. But if psychedelics mainly work by dissolving conditioning, someone already living unconditioned wouldn’t experience much change. It’s like trying to delete files from an empty hard drive.
Perhaps what psychedelics dissolve are these layers of learned beliefs and social programming – all the shoulds, musts, and have-tos that turn us into anxious performance artists in the theater of daily life.
The Observer-Observed Problem
Here’s where things get strange enough to make your head spin in multiple dimensions. We’re using consciousness to study consciousness. It’s like trying to see your own eyes without a mirror, or asking your shadow to explain what you look like. Every tool we have for investigation – attention, reasoning, analysis – is itself an expression of what we’re trying to understand.
It’s the ultimate cosmic joke: the thing we want to understand is the very thing we’re using to try to understand it.
This creates a fundamental paradox – we cannot step outside consciousness to examine it objectively, any more than we can jump out of our own skin to get a good look at ourselves. Every perspective we take is already within consciousness, like fish trying to study wetness.
The Replication Paradox
This creates a devastating problem for artificial consciousness projects, like trying to bake a perfect soufflé when you don’t know what a soufflé is, what baking means, or why anyone would want a fluffy egg dish in the first place.
How can we replicate what we don’t understand? We’re trying to reverse-engineer consciousness by studying its outputs – behavior, reports, neural correlates – without knowing what we’re actually reproducing.
It’s like trying to build a star by studying starlight without understanding nuclear fusion. We can catalog all the effects and correlations, take measurements until our computers overflow, but we’re missing the fundamental process. We’re essentially trying to build consciousness the way cargo cults build airplanes – we know what it looks like from the outside, but we’re missing the engine.
Different Views on Artificial Consciousness (The Great Debate)
The Optimists believe consciousness will emerge from sufficiently complex information processing, like a digital phoenix rising from silicon ashes. If functionalism is correct – that consciousness depends on processing patterns rather than biological substrate – then artificial consciousness seems achievable. They’re basically betting that brains are just really fancy computers that haven’t read their own user manual yet.
The Skeptics argue consciousness might require specific biological properties that can’t be replicated in machines. Perhaps quantum effects in brain microtubules, particular biochemical processes, or the specific developmental journey of embodied life cannot be replicated in silicon. They think consciousness needs actual meat, not just the mathematical equivalent of meat.
The Mystics suggest consciousness is fundamental rather than emergent, which would make AI consciousness theoretically impossible but also make everyone else’s explanations completely backwards. Some physicists have proposed that consciousness isn’t produced by brains, but rather that brains are produced by consciousness. In other words: consciousness isn’t produced by brains, brains are produced by consciousness. (Mind officially blown.)
The Question Eats Its Own Tail
But perhaps the deepest question is this: if consciousness is understanding itself, then what exactly are we trying to do here? Every attempt to understand consciousness is consciousness encountering itself, like a mirror trying to reflect itself infinitely.
This might explain why profound experiences often transcend analytical curiosity. The investigative mind might be just one mode of consciousness studying itself, while direct experience is consciousness meeting itself more immediately – like the difference between reading about swimming and jumping in the pool.
It’s consciousness all the way down, investigating consciousness all the way up. No wonder we’re confused.
Critics and Counterarguments
Against Physical Reduction: Some philosophers argue that subjective experience cannot be captured by objective science. There will always be something it’s like to be conscious that escapes physical description – like trying to explain the color red to someone who’s never seen color. You can describe wavelengths and neural firing patterns until you’re blue in the face, but you’ll never convey the actual experience of redness.
Against Mystical Views: Scientists point out that every claimed non-physical aspect of consciousness eventually gets explained by neuroscience. The gaps keep shrinking as our knowledge grows, like a god-of-the-gaps argument that’s running out of gaps to hide in.
Against Psychedelic Insights: Critics argue that altered states, while interesting, don’t necessarily reveal truth about normal consciousness. They might simply show how brain dysfunction creates unusual experiences – basically, “just because your brain feels cosmic doesn’t mean the cosmos care about your brain.”
The Current State
Theories like Integrated Information Theory attempt to make consciousness measurable. Global Workspace Theory suggests consciousness arises from information becoming globally available across brain networks. But we’re still far from consensus.
The Deeper Question
Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of “How do we create artificial consciousness?” maybe we should ask “What is this capacity for awareness that’s asking the question?”
If consciousness is understanding itself, then our investigation isn’t separate from the phenomenon. The study becomes consciousness exploring its own nature through us.
We Admit We’re Still Confused, But Entertainingly So
We stand at a fascinating crossroads, like explorers who’ve discovered that the map is the territory and the territory is also the map, and somehow we’re all three things at once.
Science provides compelling evidence that consciousness emerges from physical processes. But the subjective aspect seems to slip through our explanatory nets like trying to catch smoke with a butterfly net. Psychedelics offer glimpses of unconditioned awareness, but these experiences resist analytical reduction the way dreams resist alarm clocks.
Maybe consciousness cannot be understood in the traditional sense because understanding is what consciousness does. We might be consciousness investigating consciousness, which could be the cosmic joke, the cosmic purpose, or both.
The insight from contemplative traditions suggests that self-understanding isn’t the result of accumulated knowledge but happens moment to moment. Perhaps trying to accumulate knowledge about consciousness actually prevents understanding, because that knowledge becomes a filter through which all further experience gets processed.
The mystery continues. And perhaps that’s exactly as it should be – after all, what would consciousness do with itself if it figured itself out completely? Probably get bored and start the whole investigation over again.
So, the conversation between consciousness and its own investigation remains one of the deepest puzzles we face. Whether we can solve it, whether solving it is even the right goal, or whether the question itself is consciousness having fun with itself, remains delightfully, frustratingly, beautifully open.
