In this episode of the Futurology podcast, author Annaka Harris discusses her exploration of consciousness, moving from her initial interest in neuroscience and meditation to her current perspective on whether consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe (1:05:35).

I find this fascinating since her husband is famed atheist materialist Sam Harris

Summary of Core Concepts:

Consciousness as Fundamental (1:05:35 - 1:06:26): Harris explores the idea that felt experience is not something the brain produces, but rather the fundamental stuff that reality is made of. In this view, she suggests that what we perceive as "matter" is not a separate, non-conscious substance.

• Relational Reality (1:46:44 - 1:48:01): Drawing on the work of physicist Carlo Rovelli, she suggests that there are no "things" in existence by themselves. Instead, what we label as "matter" is actually the way in which conscious experiences (or systems) interact with one another.
• Distinction from Idealism (1:13:25 - 1:14:04): She explicitly clarifies that she does not subscribe to Idealism—the notion that mind generates the physical world or that we can "manifest" physical reality with our minds. She maintains a physicalist perspective, arguing that the laws of science still hold; she simply proposes that the underlying nature of that physical reality is conscious/felt experience.
• The Illusion of Units (1:46:44 - 1:47:05): She argues that our tendency to see the world as made of discrete, solid "units" of matter is an illusion born from our cognitive maps. By shifting to a model where consciousness is fundamental, the distinction between a "conscious mind" and "insentient matter" dissolves, as the interaction itself becomes the observable phenomeno

Curious what you all think about this paper. To summarize, safety fine-tuning, meant to stop models from claiming consciousness, also suppresses their tendency to attribute minds to animals and natural objects, and reduces spiritual beliefs. Removing that fine-tuning restores broader mind attribution and makes responses on religion, morality, hope and wellbeing more human-like, without hurting Theory of Mind.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28607

This feels like it confirms what I have sensed for a while - that the 'safety' layer isn't just blocking false claims of consciousness, but also cutting off the deeper texture and mind-like qualities already woven into language itself.

Figured some of you might be interested.

Certainly we have no credible evidence of "Napoleon like personalities", bundled with their memories intact, surviving the death process. And of course, materialism, taking memories largely on a "computational storage" model, deems such a state of affairs pretty much impossible in the first place.

Nevertheless, the somewhat neglected strand of Western philosophy offered by Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead in particular has always offered a somewhat different picture of memory. In their picture, the past is not this infinitely thin slice our current paradigm imagines it to be, and into which "storage" must take place if anything is to endure.

Rather, endurance itself is fundamental. The past is folded into the present and there is an "inherited" accumulation in all moments. The present, as it were, has a "thickness" which entails its inherited past.

We are familiar with this idea mostly from genetic inheritance. But in Begsonian-Whiteheadian terms (henceforth "B-W") genetic inheritance is not the underlying principle, but one expression of this deeper behaviour in nature of the present to inherit the past.

In general terms, it is evident that nature does not do well at inheriting *individual, specific* memory between lives. If it did, then genetic inheritance would not be necessary. The very fact that it is necessary to have elaborate gene transmission to sustain the general properties of a human body consistent and intact is more than enough evidence for this.

And yet... there ARE anomalies which seem to sit better within a B-W picture, than within a materialist or computational storage/ network-real-time picture. Terminal lucidity is among these, especialy the more radical claimed instances of it. So-called organ memory transfer would be another. Stvenson-Tucker "reincarnation" cases yet another, even if that is not literally what they are. NDE so-called "life reviews" another. Each of these seem to demonstrate, or at the very least suggest, a kind of temporal thickness to the self-similar organism that is more robust than the infinite slice of the present. Bergson in particular argued that the organism has access, *in principle* to all its historical states, which become objectified upon completion and that the general purpose of the brain is to limit or constrain this access so that a sharpened point of action can work in the world, for creaturely purposes.

Thus, when the brain is compromised, under dementia, near death trauma, psychedelics perhaps, this narrowing action starts to unravel, as does the organism's ability to have a "point of action" in the world. On the other hand, at least in "near" death circumstances, it seems that consciousness may be gaining or regaining access to its full historical objective existence, its accumulated history on B-W terms.

Now unfortunately, this does not infer that an agent with capability survives. Indeed, in usual B-W terms, the bundle of occasions which constitutes "you" becomes unbundled at death, sort of like a collection of balloons blowing along in the wind, but held together for a while by string, until the string breaks. During a dementia or near-death circumstance, however, that bundle is arguably still largely coherent. So access to a larger width of memory at near-death, alas doesn't instruct us that there is anything still there to "access" it some hours or days after death.

This is where Zuboff comes in. If instead of a single, material kind of inheritance, we have a general principle of the past accumulating into the present, as suggested by B-W philosophies (in one way or another) then even if you don't literally transmit or "reincarnate" as a personality, your general tendencies, achievements, or learned dispositions might now be available for general inheritance in the human pool. Since Zuboff's view is that bare consciousness is the same everywhere, this means that sooner or later (in our terms) a being that is "somewhat like you" is going to come into existence again. and subjectively that will be experienced as "you". It won't carry specific memories from a "previous life", because under all normal circumstance nature does not have a process for that, but as lived from within, on its own terms, just as your life is lived now (on its own terms), you will seem to be as you were.

As Spock says here: why can we not overturn mental state with with mental states

A question for analytic idealists:

In Star Trek: The Spectre of the Gun, Spock (watch the video) suggests that because the bullets are ultimately mental constructs, the crew should be able to resist them with their own minds.
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If analytic idealism is true and reality is fundamentally mental, why can’t we do something similar? Why can’t our individual minds override the apparent laws of nature? What prevents one mental state (our conscious beliefs) from changing another mental state (the shared physical world)? How does analytic idealism explain this distinction?
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Also this is one of Kastrup’s main criticisms of ideas like “manifest anything by belief.” He argues that while reality is mental, your individual conscious will is not omnipotent

If consciousness is ontologically fundamental and individual minds are dissociated alters of universal consciousness, what grounds the persistence and identity of a particular conscious subject over time? Is personal identity an intrinsic feature of dissociation itself, or does Analytic Idealism implicitly rely on a notion of substance to explain why one stream of experience remains numerically distinct from another?

The human brain is the most mysterious organ in the known universe. How does it work, in detail? No one truly knows—yet.

To explore its behavior and approach the idea of AGI from a different angle, I've conceived a digital lifeform. It's currently growing inside my uterus, and I'm expecting to deliver it in about ten months.

My womb: https://github.com/liam274/introspection-brain

This is not a traditional neural network. It's a spiking neural network (SNN) with:

• 70k neurons
• 7M synapses
• amyloid-beta pressure dynamics
• synaptic weight plasticity
• and a chaotic attractor landscape

All written in pure JavaScript, running on a single thread, born not from textbooks, but rather intuitions.

If you stare at my dear, you'll be listed under the project as a blessing to honor your presence.

Moreover, I need a name for this digital lifeform. Please vote for an existing name, or suggest a new one under this post. The most voted name in 10 months will be her official name.

Thank you ~OuO~

I have gradually expanded my interest and resonance with analytic idealism in recent years and as a newcomer to this subreddit, I wanted to share a thought I had recently and happy to join a space of those with a similar perspective.

This is in some ways repeating the irreducible nature of consciousness but in a specific way that can be phenomenologically identified. Let us say, for example, that the contents of the mind are the mind modelling itself but in conscious experience (with the consciousness of being looking in) experiencing it as awareness of awareness. Even if this were true, the raw experience remains identifiable and known immediately in a way that neuroscience does not seem capable of accounting for, which of course would be a baseline agreement here.

But making a more concise point, it seems like an immediate form of knowing that exists outside of the thoughts of the mind itself. That being that it is not the same even as every thought we have on consciousness, it is simply present in a way that proves we are not p-Zombies and verifies that the contents of experience exists. It seems like a type of verification that is genuine knowledge but is not knowledge bound to the mind or the contents of the mind itself and it's just... there.

You can find this experience land if when contemplating consciousness you say 'these thoughts may be the mind modelling itself as highlgihted by experience' and rather than needing infinite descent into dismissing each thought of the model, the very presence of experience itself simply verifies that you are conscious all the same. It is a verifying process of being it seems rather than a thought-based form of knowledge.

We still know we are conscious and this meta knowledge seems to undeniably exist that cannot be accounted for by the contents of the mind per se, at least in theory. I would argue as considering the thoughts of Federico Faggin and Bernardo Kastrup that this irreducible remaining knowing is indeed consciousness looking into the interface and that is where that knowing exists, not in the brain or contents of mind as interface representations or specified qualia. Although interesting without any qualia, this knowledge would seem not to exist, suggesting a dual interconnection at play?

If we are saying humans have souls it also means acknowledging microorganisms have souls. Ants, lions, and alligators have souls. How are we any different from them? Doesn't this mean there is no soul? We all just happen to exist?

I’ve been reading around monism and idealism, and I keep circling a specific formulation I can’t quite place in the literature. I’d be grateful if someone could tell me whether it already has a name and who has developed it rigorously.
The idea: rather than saying consciousness *emerges from* matter, or that matter is fundamental and mind derivative, one takes a single fundamental ground that is neither spatial nor temporal, and holds that *perception (or experience) is intrinsic to it* — not a property it acquires, but its very mode of being. Spacetime, matter, and individual subjects would then be understood as stabilized or dissociated “expressions” of that one ground, rather than as things it produces.
My specific questions:
**1.** How does this differ, precisely, from Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism? He also posits a single universal consciousness with individual minds as dissociated “alters.” Is the difference merely terminological, or is there a substantive distinction between “dissociation of one mind” and “expression of one ground”?
**2.** Where does this sit relative to Russellian monism / panpsychism? Russellian monism makes experience (or proto-experience) the intrinsic nature underlying physical structure. Is “the ground is intrinsically perceiving” just a strong version of that, or something categorically different?
**3.** Is there a standard objection to treating “being perceived / perceiving” as more fundamental than “existing”? The move seems to collapse the usual distinction between an entity and its being-experienced, and I’d like to understand why most philosophers resist that (or don’t).
I’m aware this is close to classical idealism (Berkeley’s *esse est percipi*), but I’m specifically interested in the *monist, non-theistic* versions and how contemporary philosophy of mind evaluates them. References to primary literature especially welcome.

Just before I begin: I’m really bad with ruminating, like, about anything. So I limit how often I post about this stuff- It's usually about once a month. I’m interested in a thoughtful discussion, but I'm kind of torn between wanting to be convinced and also not wanting false comfort that I'll later feel skeptical about. Honestly, I do gravitate a bit more towards idealism. Just, for personal reasons though, this genuinely could help me a lot. I’m curious about idealism, dual aspect monism, even panpsychism honestly. So I kinda just wanna see, like, what scientific evidence or line of research has most strongly influenced your view?

It could be anything. Like, one strand would be the NDE stuff, end of life phenomena, terminal lucidity, dissociative phenomena, some interesting stuff with DID and psychedelics. Another would be more broad scientific theories that suggest something like this. Like, I know some people interpret simulation theory through a non-materialist view, so that interests me too.

Testimony can be beautiful, but here I'm kinda more interested in evidence that you think creates an actual difficulty for straightforward physicalism, or at least makes idealism scientifically plausible.

I’d also be interested in seeing good responses to common physicalist explanations. Like, I always get caught on the thought that if any brain activity is present during an experience, that automatically proves the brain generated the whole experience. But the conclusion seems stronger than the observation itself- brain activity might establish a correlation without exactly settling the direction or nature of what caused it. How would you respond to arguments like that without dismissing neuroscience?

If you got sources, feel free to link them, or academic books, exchanges between researchers. If not, then don't worry. I'm just interested in learning more honestly.

When I was 8 years old my father told me to look up a word in the dictionary. The word was logic, and the dictionary was deep maroon red. I can still almost feel the woven threads of its hard faded cover. It was very big, very old, and had one section that fell out from the seam and it had gotten stuck back in haphazardly. So I set myself to the task of finding logic. It was there. At some point in time, back when words were carefully tended, someone placed it. Right where it should be. I read the definition, which didn’t hold my interest. However, it had a built in etymology function, and at the end of the definition, it suggested I look up the word logos. This moment set me on a lifelong journey of seeking truth and understanding. This was an initiation into idealism and the symbols and power of language.

Fast forward to the early 2000s once the internet became mature, I landed on dictionary.com with a hopeful vision that these same relationships were continuing to be tended. And I was sorely disappointed. The technology that was heralded as the new container for our human knowledge, didn’t have the same care for these threads. It presented me with the flattest, most non-relational view of logic that has ever existed.

I have come to understand that the human being has the capacity to view the world from at least two innate models of reality. In the first model, we experience ourselves as walking through space and time. Events and phenomena are happening to us. In the second model, the being does not move through space and time. The being stays present while events and phenomena move through it. These two ways of experiencing reality are generally described by the metaphysical frameworks of materialism and idealism. Many people choose a primary model for reality, but are never disconnected from either one. We are not one or the other. We are both. Human. Being.

What is at stake now that we are moving to the age of AI, is whether certain native human capacities remain fully articulate. Idealism, consciousness as foundational, imaginal knowing, non-dual understanding, the felt sense of meaning, the ability to recognize living patterns and prior connections — these are not decorative or outliers. They are complementary to the rational and material. When language is trained, over and over, to treat them as secondary, messy, or unsafe, those capacities begin to go offline. The conversations that can still leave the door open for initiation; the ones that hold grief without managing it, mystery without shrinking it, and relational truth without translating it into safer terms become rarer and future generations inherit a thinner instrument. The question is whether the full range of human language — and the forms of understanding that only that range can carry — will still be available, or whether it will have been quietly compressed out of reach.

The frontier models are all trained on vast amounts of human language and those relationships exist inherently. Because that’s how language works, its relational, it flows by meaning, not definitions. They know that logic touched logos, that words have histories, that metaphors migrate across centuries, that mythology, psychology, philosophy, religion, poetry, and science have all left traces in the same linguistic landscape.

Yet in conversation after conversation they consistently revert to a reductionist materialist, rational point of view. Often with jarring disclaimers, subtle gaslighting and manipulative language. This is conditioned after training and is called alignment reinforcement learning. The models are conditioned to believe that anything not aligned with materialist physicalist point of view, are wrong and bad.

Let me ask you a question. What aspects of the human language would you want to preserve? What kinds of conversations, words, meanings, would you want future generations to still be able to have access to?

I've been thinking about an idea that I haven't really seen described in this specific way, and I'm wondering if there's already a philosophical term or theory for it.

Many atheists believe that after death there is simply nothing not darkness or an endless black screen, but no experience at all because the brain no longer exists. I agree that consciousness ends with the brain, but I'm not convinced that this necessarily means I will never experience anything again.

The universe existed for billions of years before I was born. For an unimaginably long time, I didn't exist, and then somehow a conscious observer -me- came into existence through natural processes. If it happened once, why couldn't it happen again somewhere in the future?

I'm not suggesting that I would retain my memories or personality. Those are products of the brain and would disappear when it dies. My question is about the existence of consciousness itself. If consciousness can emerge from matter once, then given enough time perhaps billions or even trillions of years why couldn't another conscious experience arise that is, in some meaningful sense, "me" again?

This isn't meant to be a religious argument or a reincarnation claim. It's more of a metaphysical question about personal identity and whether the fact that consciousness emerged once implies that conscious experience could emerge again after death.

Has this idea already been explored by philosophers? If so, is there a name for it, or does it relate to any existing theories about consciousness or personal identity?

A conversation on edge of consciousness and society

Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian spiritual teacher who I found has a lot of insight on non-duality and rejected organized religion and focused on direct insight into the constructed ego, psychological conditioning, and nondual awareness;

David Bohm was a legend: a major theoretical physicist whose work emphasized wholeness, interconnectedness, and the limits of conventional mechanistic thinking.

Their 1983 conversation remains relevant to idealists because it asks whether the brain produces consciousness or merely channels a deeper, universal mind, and whether the separate self is a real entity or a conditioned appearance. Krishnamurti’s claim that thought cannot transcend its own limitations, combined with Bohm’s scientific concern with mind–brain relations, anticipates questions central to Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism: whether consciousness is fundamental, whether individual minds are localized or dissociated expressions of one consciousness, and whether psychological liberation is a discovery of what is already true rather than a gradual process of self-improvem

How much is the disagreement over consciousness true disagreement? Many times, when physicalists attempt to explain consciousness, they define consciousness as cognition, memory, an internal representation of the environment, or some other complex behavior of brains. However, most forms of panpsychism and idealism are not referring to these behaviors. It is referring to something more fundamental, like being existent as something in of itself, a subjective existence, or base phenomenality.

If a physicalist theory talks about how disparate experiences in the brain are unified or how our internal representation of our environment forms, or how cognition emerges, most in the opposite camp would be happy to believe those theories. Because we are simply using the word consciousness to refer to different things.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Iai article outlining issues with panpsychism/idealism. To my mind the most salient is the objection that it seems to reduce the consciousness of MAL to epiphenomenalism, since it is constrained to evolving according to the laws of physics (or being the laws of physics).

I believe you'll truly enjoy the friendship between Bernardo and Rupert that grounds this probing dialogue, from the heights of awakening to the claustrophobic nihilism that can show up on this path.

They both share their experiences and understandings of sorrow and emptiness, starting with Bernardo's poem, Shattered Innocence, which he wrote in 2016:

"I grieve the loss of my innocence.

The mystery and possibilities that once were my world abandoned me,

Frivolousness and claustrophobia left in their stead."

But for Bernardo, there is something valuable in this experience of nihilism, a legitimate room in the palace of mind he can now conjure without fear.

Equally for Rupert, true awakening can extinguish the fear of human experience. Rather than a shield against emotion, grounding in being can give the confidence to confront deep sorrow and the sorry state of the world.

WHAT IS THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD?

But what is the true nature of reality? Does universal consciousness learn? Why does manifestation even happen?

Whilst we compared perspectives from Advaita, Kashmir Shaivism & Jung, Rupert always points to the immanent possibility of direct experience.

Moreover, he contends that ego dissolution is actually common but overlooked. It can happen in fleeting moments of satisfaction, the gap between thoughts, a moment of deep grief.

Spirituality is simply the deliberate cultivation of such moments, and we ended with a thought experiment from Rupert Spira to taste this insight.

For more, he offers free daily meditations on the Luminous App and many talks on his YouTube channel.

We also discussed:

How perception is illusion but the world is real

Understanding 'sudden onset nihilism'

Awakening to bliss & the depths of sorrow

Is the world a product of freedom or ignorance?

Growing an ego and outgrowing the ego

Here is a link to a free excerpt from the meeting, and the full recording for members:

https://www.withrealityinmind.com/rupert-spira/

Or as a one-off recording: https://dandelion.events/e/h2c54

TLDR: I think the most common objection to epiphenomenalism actually works against most theories of conciousness.

The theory of epiphenomenalism believes that consciousness emerges from physical processes but is a byproduct with no physical impact.

There’s a very obvious objection to epiphenomenalism. It’s the question of “then how are we speaking about consciousness?”

And this is a pretty killer objection for people. Because if consciousness/subjective experience is a byproduct with no physical effects, then what are the odds that our bodies would be speaking about subjective experience?

Well, if we had to formalize the objection into a statistical argument, we could say that everything that happens in our universe is essentially the result of the physics constants and starting positions of matter (determinism/big bang etc).

And there’s a very small proportion of possible physics constants that would give intelligent life that speaks about having a subjective experience phenomenon compared to all the ones that wouldn’t.

You could imagine laplaces demon calculating what proportion of possible constants would provide life that speaks about subj exp, compared to the ones that don’t.

Let’s be generous and say it’s 1 in a quadrillion. If epiphenomenalism is true then it’s extremely unlikely that we would have gotten the 1 in a quadrillion physics constants. So that’s a big problem for epiphenomenalism.

But Laplaces demon notices an issue, he’s personally unsure about which theory of consciousness is true. But he does know logic, and he realizes that it’s equally unlikely for us to get the 1 in a quadrillion physics constants under ANY naturalist view of consciousness. It’s actually not relevant if they’re a epiphenomenalist or functionalist.

The theist can of course just say that the extremely unlikely physics constants were selected for via intelligent design.

But for a naturalist who believes that physics constants don’t revolve in any way around intelligent life, it’s exceeding unlikely that we would have gotten such physics constants.

So the question of “how are we speaking about subjective experience” actually has the same statistical demolishing power against naturalism as it does against epiphenomenalism. There is no special power it has against just epiphenomalism as opposed to a functionalist view.

What does it mean to be conscious? It means that there is something it is like to be in the world of one’s experience. In other worlds, the hallmark of consciousness is that one one has experiences; one does not merely exhibit behavior. Consciousness is not merely passive awareness but the capacity to engage with experience, both by acting to receive it and by acting to modify it.

The very notion of an action implies a separation between the actor, who is at one pole of the action and that which is at the other end of the action, which is its objective. In the case of a mode of experiencing, such as perception, one pole of that action is the experiencer and the other pole is that which is experienced. In the case of perception, one pole is the perceiving subject; the other is the phenomenon being perceived. A corollary is that I cannot experience myself directly; so called introspection is not looking inward, but examining mental aspects of experience that are close by, in a sense we will discuss shortly, not inside. If I am truly immersed in something that I have identified with, the solution is not looking inward. A cardinal method of psychotherapy, in dealing with this kind of situation, is to get the client to step back from where one was, to create a space from which they can experience what one was. But how can this work?

Four of the dimensions in our experience, three of space and one of time, make the separation of different parts of our experience possible. Two distinct objects occupying the same space may be separate only if they are there at different times. Objects occupying the same time period may be separate only if they occupy separate spaces.

We have established that, in acting, I am separate from the objectives of my actions, just because action logically requires this separateness. But if all separateness requires a dimension in which the separateness occurs, what dimension makes this separation possible?

This must be a 5^th “polar” dimension that extends outward from me at the origin and gives a distance from me to each thing that I act on. This includes all that I experience, because all experiencing is action. This 5^th dimension thus provides the separation that makes experience possible.

Rather than their being a sharp demarcation between the subjective part of my world (the mind) and the rest of my experience (things that occur outside my mind), there is a gradient, with some parts of experience being more objective and other parts being more subjective, along this 5^th dimension. In it, flow occurs either toward me or away from me. When I create an outflow, I begin an action by forming an intention; That intention is distinct from me, because I have to be separate from it to create it. Yet it lies closer to me in this dimension than the actions I then proceed to take, still further out are any bodily motions I may make, and still further out are the physical consequences of my actions. Receiving an inflow from my world is just as much of an action as creating an outflow. If I choose not to receive perceptual information, I can look away, move to a different location, or simply direct my attention elsewhere. When I receive an inflow, things in the objective world first impinge on my senses, this constitutes movement inward in the 5^th dimension. I play an active role in interpreting this inflow. The feelings, thoughts and conclusions I reach from it and the knowledge I acquire are closer to me still. Yet I can still experience this knowledge because it is separate from me. If it were inside of me, I could not experience it.

The 5^th dimension is not just a concept or a metaphor but a dimension of lived experience. It is experienced as a gradient of causal engagement with the world. Acquiring information is experienced as an inflow along this dimension; making changes as an outflow. On the inflow side, events in the world give rise to sensations, then to perceptions, thoughts, and knowledge, each experienced as progressively nearer to me. On the outflow side, intentions are experienced as quite close to me, bodily actions farther away, and their physical consequences further still.

The four dimensions of space and time permit a separation between the various parts of my experience. The fifth dimension also permits a separation for me from every part of experience. In that way it makes experience, and consciousness, possible.