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Thoughts about Minds 1: What is consciousness?

Posted on by Anand Philip


The whole of life is just like watching a flick.. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues. And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.

― Victor, from Terry Pratchett’s, Moving Pictures

Updated on: Thursday 20 November 2025 05:50:57 PM IST

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This post summaries my personal understanding of consciousness, I have not read widely in the topic, beyond the SEP pages on some theories of consciousness, and a few papers. I am not sure I understand most of what’s going on in those entries, and so I have not made an attempt to compare and contrast my ideas with those that are more formally defined. My attempt is to explain to myself and to those who read this, what I understand and believe, and to build on this, learn from its weaknesses etc.

In a sentence, my belief is that consciousness is identical to sensation; distinguishing ‘experience’ from ‘sensation’ adds no predictive or explanatory value in the domains we can study.

This is not a grand unified theory of every kind of consciousness. It is not about everything consciousness could or could not be. This is about what it appears to be in the reality we know. It is about explaining the physical, i do not understand the metaphysical.

What IS Consciousness?

I think of consciousness as the experience of being. It is the ability of a living thing to sense itself and the environment around it. This is not an illusion, nor is it a separate non-physical entity. It is the physical reality of sensation. I do not know of any properties of consciousness that require anything other than sensations to explain it.  Both these factors are important. Life wishes to continue to live, and this is at odds with the reality it is in, which has no needs. Sensations allow life to navigate existence. A thermostat does not react the same way a bacteria does, it produces a fixed outputs given a set of fixed inputs and it neither experiences nor desires the input or the output the way living things do. Disconnect the electricity and the thermostat will not panic. Reduce the amount of glucose in a bacterial culture, and boy you’re going to see some frantic activity. This is the simplest model I can think of that explains as much as possible.

In my view, the sensation of being is the same as the experience of being. When I say ‘sensation,’ I’m not referring to a third-person, observable process that can be measured from the outside. Sensation is, by definition, the first-person, ‘felt’ capacity itself. We can write down what sensations feel like, or reproduce the stimulus that causes them, but the sensation itself is the organism’s private, physical reaction. When an organism experiences something, it is sensing that thing. Sensations take some time, limited by biology and physics, to make themselves known or heard, and so this experience might appear at a different time than an event, and this has its own ramifications, and I think this temporal property is why we seem to want sensation and experience to be different, as they are often temporally separated.

There are also abstractions that life builds on top of the sensation that allow it to sense or feel or experience other things, language, for eg built on top of the sensation of hearing and seeing, but all of that is (mediated by) the ability to sense. Every experience is sensation.1

What is the purpose of sensation?

The purpose of anything life produces is ultimately the propagation of life. But this is often not immediately obvious because the discovery of what helps continue life is an empirical one. Integrating sensations allows for life to find food, joy, mathematics and many other wonderful things that make life want to flourish. It is a recursive process. I think the invention of sensation or of that which is sensate, was the beginning of life. It is the ability to sense along with the ability to manipulate or interact with its environment that made life as we know it on earth possible.

Why does something feel like that?

The specific character of any sensation is a product of life interacting with the world. Different frequencies of light have different properties2, they convey some information that is specific to them. Discovering these is beneficial to life. Over millions of years, we have learned to identify that specific feeling (e.g., redness) because it best serves the organism’s survival and propagation. I think of these as biology-discovered constants. We have invented constants in the world via language and observation, similarly, biology has discovered or invented constants and figured out how to use them.3

The same environmental stimulus can drive very different functions across organisms and even in the same organism, and conversely, similar functions can be achieved using different physical stimuli and receptors. The diversity arises from the biological & environmental differences and incentives.

The philosopher’s question ‘Why does P feel like E?’ doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. They seem to be searching for a universal, necessary law when the answer is contingent4 and biological. The ‘feeling’ of redness is the specific mechanism of recognition that our lineage found useful. That’s it. We know this mapping is contingent because other creatures have solved the same problem differently.5 The function is recognition; the sensation is the biological method of achieving that function. To ask ‘why’ it feels like anything is to ignore that the feeling is the solution.

There is no universal “redness” or “pain.” These are highly individualized, biologically useful constants6 that are unique to each biological system and perhaps even an individual. The identity of red as we sense it is a constant that allows our “machine” to build abstractions and navigate the world effectively.

In the human brain for, a constant that we react to are edges. There are neurons which fire when they sense edges, and the current exploration with CNNs show that this is beneficial even for an ANN to be able to differentiate things and classify objects. Qualia are the sensation of biologically or socially learned constants.

This also explains why not all of our sensations are correct, they are useful even when they are not correct. For e.g. our ability to see the color purple. We don’t need correctness always, we need usefulness, and if some input stimulus can be relied on to produce a specific chemical/physical change, that is enough.

How is sensation organized?

The “self” is a real, composite functional entity, an integrated machine of sensations, memories, and reactions, like pixels of different colors representing different objects in a photograph. The whole is almost never verbally or symbolically represented or represent-able; it is changing, and reactive. Different sensory mechanisms react in different ways to different sensory inputs and what we feel as a self, is a self-other differentiation, and this is not particularly strong, but it is measurable in fMRI studies. This differentiation is a sensation, which allows us to draw boundaries around our selves, providing a feeling of unity. I don’t think any human has ever experienced  themselves as a perfectly synchronized One. We are legion and that is our experience also.

But this doesn’t mean we’re just a chaotic, unbound collection. Lessons from complexity theory and neuroscience show us the actual mechanisms for integrating this information. The ‘it’ that unifies the ‘pixels’ is the self, the learned, composite system itself. The unified thing (the ‘photograph’) is created by the system’s drive for a specific outcome: replication and continued existence.

In humans, it is the nervous system, as far as we can tell, that provides the integration of sensation.  Although each cell possesses the ability to sense its own surroundings and interiors, and react  and make choices, the consciousness of the individual cell is not directly accessible to us. We have developed a system dedicated to sensing and reacting. The nervous system take in the billions of sensory inputs and integrate these into something that is coherent and useful.

Who has consciousness?

Any living system that detects stimuli and reacts possesses consciousness, including bacteria (e.g., chemotaxis in a single bacterium), plants, simple animals, and  humans. Degrees may vary by complexity: simpler systems have basic sensations, while humans have composite selves from integrated sensations/memories. The self as humans experience it is our consciousness and the abstractions we have built on the sensations.

Inanimate matter (e.g., rocks) lack it. The kinds of consciousnesses that different organisms possess depend on the kind of sensations they have access to, the kind of actions they have access to and the kind of map they need to build to survive. This means that the qualia of bacteria are nothing like the qualia of man.

Consciousness therefore is the product of life and sensation.

Some people require a certain amount of complexity to be present before they call something conscious, I do not see the need for this. If there is evidence that a biological entity is able to sense its environment, then it is sensate, and therefore conscious.

If a non-biological system genuinely has needs (not just designer-imposed goal functions, but intrinsic requirements for its continued existence), develops sensory mechanisms to detect relevant stimuli, and exhibits flexible, adaptive responses, then in my view, it would be conscious. Before consciousness, life. But I have not thought enough about this to have a more coherent view. So I will stop here.

Consciousness is often detected through observable behavioral markers: a system’s ability to sense stimuli and react with a range of choices. This is empirically tractable via neuroscience, psychology, and biology e.g., testing chemotaxis in bacteria or neural correlates in brains. But it is possible that there are conscious systems that we cannot assess or verify as being conscious, as sensation and reaction might both be just too fleeting or different from what we generally understand them as.

Mary’s Room

Mary’s Room is a famous philosophical thought experiment about knowledge and experience. Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the color red from books and descriptions but has never actually seen red herself because she has lived only in a black-and-white environment. All this is rather sad, and then one day she goes out one day and sees red light. Philosophers like to ask: When Mary leaves her black-and-white room and sees red for the first time, what does she gain?

She gains a new sensation, her visual system responded to ~700nm light. This is real learning, she’s learning what red feels like for her sensory system.

Reading about red told her what causes the sensation and how it works in other people. Seeing red lets her sense it directly. These are different types of physical information. Different ways of knowing, both entirely physical.

It is possible that she does not identify it as the thing other people call red. because the name is a linguistic constant, not a sensory one.

On Zombies and the Hard Problem

Philosophical zombies, also called “p-zombies” are imaginary beings invented by philosophers. In thought experiments, a p-zombie is physically and behaviorally identical to a real person but supposedly lacks any conscious sensation or subjective feeling. The idea is used to suggest that it’s somehow possible to have all the physical workings of a mind without experience or “what it’s like to be” that mind.

All the imaginations of zombies in popular culture and fiction imagine them as thinking, sensing beings, with a hyper fixation of some kind or an automatism overriding their experience, and their actions in the philosophical epic Zombieland demonstrate how they can be realized as feeling beings.

I think a p-zombie is conceivable but impossible.7 If consciousness is the sensation of detecting and reacting to stimuli, then duplicating all the physical sensing and reacting necessarily duplicates consciousness. There’s no “extra ingredient” called experience sitting on top of sensation; the experience is the sensation.

We can imagine zombies because language lets us separate concepts that reality doesn’t separate. I can imagine water that isn’t H₂O,8 but that doesn’t make it possible or sensible.

Once you understand that the feeling of redness is the specific way our sensory system detects and responds to ~700nm light, zombies become impossible. If you copy the sensing, you copy the experience, because they’re the same thing. There’s only a temporal gap between the sensing and the experiencing because experience is sensation from the perspective of the system doing the sensing.

There is no hard problem of consciousness, there is only the hard problem of not being able to disprove the utility of thought experiments.

Footnotes

  1. The response varies vastly in complexity and I should write some more about what kind of a response would qualify as conscious, etc. For later. ↩︎
  2. sense-able, physical properties that can be used to identify them, that’s the information, an identity, not a use or some fundamental redness. ↩︎
  3. Maybe we discovered them because they cause sensation, but that is a chicken-egg problem and I won’t go there. ↩︎
  4. Stercus Accidit, as they say ↩︎
  5. Magnetotactic bacteria build internal magnetite chains (magnetosomes) that torque cells to align with Earth’s field lines, passively steering them to preferred depths. Cephalopods express opsins and light-sensitive machinery in skin; dermal photoreception locally guides chromatophore expansion for instant camouflage without routing through the eyes. ↩︎
  6. This is a constant in the frame it is deployed in, identifying some physical property of the world in a repeatable and reliable manner is the constant ↩︎
  7. And it irritates me no end that it took me more time to understand the technical difference between conceivability and possibility, than take a stance. ↩︎
  8. Actually, I can’t but David Chalmers claims to be able to ↩︎

Astrology is more freeing than Science

Posted on by Anand Philip

i think belief in astrology is really about expanding the boundary of ones free will. In this bed talk I will

Our free will is bounded by physics, people1, and genetics2.

Some of these boundaries are well defined3 and wars are on to make these less bounded. eg. gender, caste, class, money etc. and some are things that are essential and so war is not the right approach, but they could come up in therapy, eg. parents4.

The default boundary we grow up with is too limiting. in order to go about our business as people we need to do a lot of things that are outside our current free will. to face the world, we need permission or a belief that we can be more and are allowed to be more because of our unique characteristics.

this has individualist as well as collectivist solutions.

the collective ones are about being a member of as many groups as can be. safely. We become members of various groups outside of the immediate family all through our life. We join social media groups, we join things for ethical reasons, we become part of sports teams, wear t shirts about niche things, identify as a nerd etc etc.

The individualistic solutions are the nuclear family, career pride, getting fit, eating clean, learning origami etc. they’re about you and how you are now, and that means you can do more things, behave differently, you have created abilities to expand your boundary.

This might make more sense to me who grew up in India, which is very authoritarian in its epistemic, than to someone who did not. “do you allow your wife to go to work?” someone asked me once, in exactly those words. in my culture, there’s stuff people are allowed to do or not based on their physical and other properties, and what the person **wants** to do is not seen as originating in themselves but the result of prescriptions. There’s food, for eg. that some people in India cannot eat, not allowed, only the म्लेच्छ have free will in this regard, the स्वच्छ and the सात्विक have their free will curtailed at this boundary 5.

And i dont think any of those solutions I mentioned above are all that different from being INTFJP, Libra or Chaotic Neutral. Astrology, Tarot, MBTI etc. all help us create new functions, new capabilities, by expanding our free will map. I think this is true in both “I made this decision because I am intuitive” and “I will listen to my inner child today” ways.

Free will, an aside:

you’re wondering, what on heart do i mean by free will and what in bell is a boundary of will. Let me get into that a little more.

your free will is the person you are, mediated by the tools you have. i say this because if your choices originate within you, they must originate in your personality and be expressed via your skills using the tools available to you6.

We learn to be the people we are based on our environment and most of our environment is other people. This is probably why personality is parent-loaded7, because they contribute both the genetic and, since they create the childhood environment, the early epigenetic.

Our skills & tools are often less parent loaded, they are more the result of later interactions between our environment and our personality. and I think our current environment, money, people,etc. that we can access and use to affect a choice, they are largely temporal loaded and they change a lot from time to time.

Back to Astrology:

all this is exactly the opposite of what science does. science, because of its addiction to the verifiable, presents a universe that is much more tightly bounded than our imaginations. And in the absence of religion/caste/whathaveyou, we often turn to reason, and science, a modern component of reason, becomes our way to be. this is kinda stupid because science is not a way of life. it’s a methodology for answering a very specific type of question leading to a very specific type of answer. and it has no answers for most of the questions we have. Which is why we often turn to other things like belief systems8.

Astrology though, describes you not as a collection of dos and donts (be it scientific ways of sleeping or ethical ways of buying) but a collection of possibilities. These are vague enough to be freeing without being too sparse to offer support when needed.

For pushing our boundaries, we need both permissions, or justifications and explanations. I see Permissions/Justifications as being forward looking. We act almost always out of necessity, inner and outer. what we can do is what is possible in the environment, and when you do something new, we are guided by what we are permitted to do, justified in doing, and then, we explain, guided by where these permissions come from.

which is why, the title.

An Aside about Indian Astrology and The featured Image:

The image is taken from Madhugantagnja. “Tajika Neelakanthi original text with translation and commentary” (1976 ed.). Varanasi: Chaukhamba Amarbharati Prakashan.

What we call astrology today seems to have been a medevial times “personalized predictive analytics” invention. The predicting and learning about the heavens project that scholars were trying to do back in the day goes way back, there are mentions of how to track the movement of stars in several vedas and the oldest indian book we have a copy of is Vedanga Jyotisha which dates back to hundred years BCE. And that book is all about making a sensible calendar, measuring days, equinoxes and stuff that we today call astronomy. How the science became the pseudoscience is still being hotly debated, but it might look a lot like how online advertising began as a branch of mathematics.

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

  1. species > biology ↩︎
  2. chemistry ↩︎
  3. Margin of a lesion ↩︎
  4. To be clear, the boundary of parents isn’t a bad thing it is the best way to learn how to be a person and some of us, like me, lucked out and were taught very fun and useful boundaries. This isn’t an antinatalist rant. Those people got issues (about having issues). ↩︎
  5. Mlechha ↩︎
  6. if you believe that your choices do not originate from within you, then I’m guessing you already believe in astrology or determinism or something ↩︎
  7. a phrase demonstrative of my statistics envy https://nextjournal.com/pc-methods/factor-loading ↩︎
  8. If your belief-boundary is concrete, like “eating for ethical reasons”, has it really pushed your boundary outwards? I don’t know, you would. ↩︎

Take home messages for Indian activists from KONY2012

Posted on by Anand Philip

As far as metrics go, Kony 2012 was a success. some 10 million people have watched the video and I don’t know of another social justice issue that so many people have heard of, let alone watched a half hour movie on.

As far as the production goes, KONY2012 was a job well done. I don’t have the metrics for how many people watched it the whole 30 minutes, but even if half the total number did, they did because the movie was made well, it was gripping and reportedly moved millions to tears.

 

If all publicity is good publicity, there never has been a better justice campaign like KONY2012. The white house has taken notice, as have governments in many places.

Also, if the age-metrics of Youtube are taken into consideration, a remarkable number of young minds have been made aware that young children like them are living in awful conditions in this world and that they can, and should do something about it.

But

It was discovered that people closely associated with KONY 2012  have also been instrumental in arming the present regime, which is as despotic as Kony was.

The campaign turned out to have a specific political aim, which it disguised as a human rights issue.

It fed the white savior industrial complex and hid a lot of information that would have caused people to think and be better informed.

It lead to nothing more than ‘awareness”. Kony is still free, and will be for the forseeable future

So

Success or failure, it is worthwhile to learn something from Kony

People care about other people

People can be manipulated easily

For something to go viral, you need to do a lot of background work, call it creating a tribe.

If your message lacks a call to action and a way to act, it will eventually be forgotten

You might be successful at manipulating emotions, but it is likely to come back to haunt you.

Some Questions that need to be answered on Domestic Violence

Posted on by Anand Philip

Background: Poet and Dalit activist Meena kandasamy recently wrote about her story of domestic violence. She is an evocative writer and her article has resulted in a lot of conversation on various web-platforms.  Among the usual “hear, hear” and “she must be lying”  comments were a few a few questions that are earnest and need to be answered. This is a post addressing those questions.

Note: I am not trying to explain Meena Kandasamy’s story, I have no business doing that. I am strictly answering general questions on the topic of Domestic violence.

How can feminists be victims of violence?

One of the earliest reactions to this story was “how can someone so “strong”, a fierce feminist, put up with domestic violence?”. I hope this leads to people searching for truths about domestic violence, and not concluding that her story is fabricated based on a presupposition that strong women do not get beaten up. On my timeline on twitter, stories were pouring in about VP’s of companies, Doctors, and NGO owners who were victims of violence who suffered in silence for a long time. This is, no doubt, puzzling and I hope to explain why it happens.

Continue reading “Some Questions that need to be answered on Domestic Violence”

Are Rapists Victims?

Posted on by Anand Philip

There seem to be a serious confusion in the minds of our leaders and the common man alike about who is responsible for rape, the victim or the rapist. Things are so confusing that some even wonder if the poor rapist isn’t a victim of the crime of “incitement”.

“You can’t blame the locals; they have never seen such women. Foreign tourists must maintain a certain degree of modesty in their clothing. Walking on the beaches half-naked is bound to titillate the senses,”

This is a quote in response to the rape of a 6 year old Russian girl from no less than the deputy director of tourism of Goa, Pamela Mascarhenas.
So, should Ms Pamela release the rapist, who was apprehended the same day the quote was made, because after all he was titillated into the crime by an immodestly dressed six year old!

Unfortunately this is not an isolated sentiment of an ill-informed politician, a brief look at comments and discussions on eve-teasing would tell you that a majority still hold that more “obscenely” dressed dressed women get eve teased more, and that the onus is on women to avoid eve teasing. Why go on-line, even the deep philosophical discussions every Indian has at the tea shop echo the sentiments that women are somehow responsible for what happens to them, if not always, most of the time.

The reason why such an asinine logic has become so pervasive evades me, and if you dont think it is asinine, take a look at the root arguments:

if X does something “wrong” then Y is justified in doing anything wrong to X

(could be Hindi movies, bec the few Hindi movies I have seen have angry young men avenging the death/rape of their mothers/sisters by extreme violence. )

By this standard, if Ms. Pamela’s dog barks too much in the night, it is perfectly alright for her neighbor to poison it.

It is important that we separate the two actions from each other, and therefore the crime from the victim. Sure, a nocturnal canine opera is awful, but just because your sleep has been wronged and she is and idiot, you cannot poison her dog. You can picket, go on a hunger strike, or even talk things over with the owner, as impotent as these sound, but that’s the way, not murder.

If we all start killing irritating dogs, none of us would have any.

There is of course a bigger and more ignorant assumption underlying such statements. And that is that the human male, particularly in India is somehow a slave to his primal urges, never really having evolved his frontal cortex enough to be able to decide right from wrong. And so, like we would tip-toe around a sleeping giant, lest we wake him up, we should mollycoddle the male lest he be titillated and incited into doing something “unfortunate” and uncontrollable.

For those of you who didn’t catch the sarcasm of the previous paragraph, let me spell it out. Human beings, Indians, Pakistanis French or Greek, have the ability to resist their sexual urges, particularly in socially unacceptable situations.  If we did not, this world would have been one big orgy.

Why  a molester or a rapist commit the crime is a subject much studied and there is good evidence to show that it has nothing to do with the amount of flesh shown. Sexual assault of almost all kinds is related more to issues like power and control than sexual desire or urges. There is also a certain amount of risk-seeking or thrill seeking behavior involved. The rapist/molester gets his thrill by overpowering women and displaying his dominance. Almost all molesters started with less severe and easily overlooked forms of sexual assault and progress to more severe forms.

Dont belive me, read this paper [link]

The wonderful initiative by blank noise has made it very clear, not that we need evidence, that molesters don’t care about what you do or do not wear, people have been raped, whistled at, touched and pinched wearing burkas as well as saris. This adds to the clear evidence that victims of sexual crimes have absolutely no culpability.

This blatant criminal-victim-exchange not only increases the trauma to those affected, but it also makes the power hungry predator more confident of terrorizing women and getting away with it.

This post is a bit too late in joining the petition that blank noise has sent to the deputy director of tourism, but the fight doesnt end with a petition or a hundred, minds need to be enlightened, societies need to be changed, its a war out there, not a lover’s spat.

Having said that, I hope to write about the flip-side also, not about this particular case though, but about what the difference between personal responsibility and culpability is.