Have you ever wondered, what is consciousness? As one of my favorite philosophers, René Descartes once wrote, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). I’m perfectly aware that I exist and that I have thoughts, but what exactly am I?

We may all have different ways to define our existence, but at the most fundamental level, I consider myself to be the observer of my experiences, the analyzer of my thoughts, and the decider of my actions. You could say, I have perception, memories, and will.

I feel like I wouldn’t really be me without any of those. If I had no will, I would feel more like an observer in someone else’s mind. If I had no memories, I would have no identity or feeling of persistence, and if I had no perception— not even of my own thoughts, I wouldn’t even be aware of my existence.

So where do my experiences come from? It’s been evident for millennia that our senses are related to our body. When our body gets poked, cut, or jabbed, we experience pain. When our eyes are shut, we can’t see. When our ears are covered, it’s harder to hear. When we touch our tongue to sugar, we experience a sweet taste.

So these experiences begin with our eyes, ears, mouth, etc, and then what? Are they somehow absorbed into our soul?

Aristotle believed that the heart was the seat of intelligence. The Ancient Hebrews believed thoughts began in the kidneys. After several centuries of scientific experimentation and discovery, we’ve finally uncovered a clear correlation between these experiences and our brains.

By the end of the 20th century, the hypothesis that the brain was the center of perception and memories was a no-brainer… 😉 … And a basic understanding of it started to solidify by working with inventions such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) devices. By this point, we not only had centuries worth of consistent data implying connections between brain injuries and altered behavior, but we could also map which areas of the brain were responsible for which bodily functions and thought processes.

FMRI devices work by detecting changes in blood flow in the brain. By observing brain activity while a patient performs different tasks, we’ve been able to identify with rough precision not only what parts of the brain are responsible for basic tasks like motor control and perception, but also more complex tasks like decision making, memory recording and recall and experiencing different emotions.

FMRI isn’t the only way of mapping the brain. There are a number of different methods used for neuroimaging that have developed over the years.

In April 2021, the company Neuralink which aims to create brain-computer interfaces demonstrated a monkey playing the game Pong using a neural implant. The monkey was able to control the game using only its brain.

I think this makes it fairly clear that when we’re having an experience, there’s also a correlated event happening in our brains.

Correlation does not necessarily mean causation though, right?

Well, even before fMRIs were around, in the beginning of the 20th century, we started using a technique called electrical brain stimulation to activate certain parts of the brain. Lo and behold, we observed the converse behavior as well. By stimulating certain regions of the brain, we could artificially create sensory, motor, autonomic, emotional, and cognitive experiences as well.

If the brain is so integrally connected with consciousness, is it then possible for us to have experiences, make decisions, or even have thoughts without a brain?

Maybe. There are certain animals that don’t have brains, E.g. Jellyfish. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if Jellyfish still had some sort of experience. While they don’t have a brain (a centralized nerve center), they do still have a nervous system that sends coordinating electrical signals throughout their body. It is this closed system of communication and connections, which I think is likely the true enabler of subjective experiences.

As an interesting example, consider callosal syndrome a.k.a. split brain. This is a condition where the connection between the brain’s hemispheres are severed to some degree and they can no longer communicate as a single unit. The different parts of the brain have their own separate perceptions, thoughts, and actions.

Having two minds in one body is something hard to explain with many religious doctrines (I suppose it could be explained by demons such as is talked about in Luke 11)… or it could be a mental illness or condition like dissociative identity disorder or callosal syndrome and have nothing to do with evil spirits trying to take over our body.

Even for people that don’t have severed connections in their brain, a lot can be explained by realizing that not all of our brain is connected at the same time. Some of the brain’s functions are conscious, and some are subconscious. We can hear and see things without realizing we did only to be able to recall them later. When that happens, it can seem like something external to ourselves is giving us information.

Have you ever heard a story of someone who heard a voice warning them to act immediately to keep them or someone else safe? While some people think this voice is God or a guardian angel, etc. I think a more likely candidate is that people don’t realize how much their mind perceives, even if they are distracted and aren’t conscious of it. A part of the mind that is aware may be trying to get your full attention to address something important.

I’m wary of people attributing everything they hear in their mind or think is inspired as coming from an omniscient god, because, well, frankly, they’re often wrong. When they’re wrong, they seem to think they simply misunderstood the omniscient voice or have yet to see how they actually needed to believe something at a certain time, even if it wasn’t true… Again, I think it’s more likely just a different part of themselves they may not always be fully conscious of.

One interesting thing I learned some time ago was the effect of general anesthesia on the mind. General anesthesia is frequently used to knock a patient out into a medically induced coma for a surgery so that they won’t experience or react to pain, and so that their movement won’t disrupt the surgery.

There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on exactly how general anesthesia works, but some experts hypothesize it is caused by interrupting connections between neurons and restricting parts of the brain from communicating with itself. Along with loss of consciousness, general anesthesia can cause memory loss around the time it is administered.

Being under general anesthesia does not seem to be like regular sleep. For one thing, it messes with our circadian clock which regulates not only many of our bodily processes, but also our perception of time. When we wake up from regular sleep, we can often get an idea that some time has passed. When we wake up from general anesthesia, we can be a bit more disoriented. We might have been under a few minutes or a few weeks.

Also unlike general sleep, those under general anesthesia are believed not to dream while in this state. Some have claimed otherwise, but some studies expect that these dreams occur not while under anesthesia, but during normal sleep while a patient is recovering from being under general anesthesia.

When I consider this, I picture being under general anesthesia is one of the closest experiences we can get to not existing – if you can call not experiencing anything an experience.

Part of me wonders though if even then, some parts of the brain continue to communicate. For example, I have heard anecdotes regarding out of body experiences that occur during surgeries where the patient is under anesthesia. Out of body experiences on their own are not greatly significant. They can be induced by drugs, sensory deprivation, and trauma. What’s more significant is when the patient can describe in detail what the doctors were doing while they were put under.

I don’t know for certain, but I would speculate that while certain aspects of their brain function and consciousness are inhibited, other parts are still communicating— or maybe trying to communicate, strengthening particular neural connections. I’m no expert, but perhaps it may be possible for a memory to form without actually fully experiencing something. After all, people can have false memories where they recall things that did not happen at all.

The brain frequently fills in the gaps of visual and aural information that we didn’t actually perceive— and sometimes it’s wrong… Like with optical illusions.

So what exactly is a brain and how does it work? Well— I’m not a neuroscientist and you’ll probably get a better idea asking an expert in that field or doing some research yourself, but I am rather familiar with a field that is strongly inspired by the brain and neural networks, artificial neural networks (ANNs).

While our brains use neurons (nerve cells) that communicate with each other via chemical reactions and electric signals, artificial neurons are represented in computers using various data structures. 

Neurons are a bit more complex as they require a nucleus, mitochondria and all the stuff that allows a cell to live, and for chemicals to move around. What’s relevant to artificial neurons is the structure and function of the dendrites, the axon, and the synaptic terminals.

One neuron’s dendrites are closely connected to many other neurons’ synaptic/axon terminals which they can receive electrical pulses from. If enough of a neuron’s dendrites receive an electric pulse, the neuron will send its own pulse down its axon and send electrical pulses to all of the other neurons’ dendrites that its synaptic terminals are connected to.

It’s probably a bit more complicated than that, but again, I’m not an expert in the actual biology and I don’t want to bore you with scientific terminology. What’s important is the idea that neurons can model a fundamental component of the most successful forms of artificial intelligence.

When artificial neurons are linked together in an artificial neural network, they are capable of high-dimensional regression. You may be familiar with linear regression from a high school or college math class. Given a series of points on a graph, you can generate an equation that tries to fit the points as well as possible by minimizing the average square distance from existing points to the line model.

Regression models can get far more complex, but the essential idea is generating a model that roughly describes the trend of a sample.

Regression is often used to predict what new data will look like based on existing data samples. This is the same concept used in artificial neural networks. ANNs can be ‘trained’ on large databases full of example data and can then be used to predict what new data will look like.

This is how software such as image recognition works. This is how Alexa can recognize the words you say. This is how some of the most sophisticated systems in the world work, using this pattern inspired by nature.

Okay… That’s cool, but our brains can do a lot more than just recognize pictures and sounds. We can remember things, visualize the future, communicate with others, and make complex decisions… 

–And so can neural networks!

Building onto this structure, several fields have evolved that involve machine learning. One of the most powerful of which is called reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning combines the classification and decision power of regression with the iterative improvement of behavioral psychology. Machines can effectively train themselves, much like we do when put in an environment of rewards and punishments.

Our brains effectively learn as we go. When something hurts us, we try to avoid doing the same thing in the future. When something feels good, we try to recreate that experience. And just like we do, machines can try to optimize their reward by using delayed gratification without human intervention.

The most impressive examples I can think of come from Google’s sister company DeepMind. DeepMind was created to research artificial intelligence and has made great strides in mimicking humans’ ability to learn new things including how to play video games. DeepMind contains a complex neural network that can access external memory that “mimics the short-term memory of the human brain”.

Unlike other impressive AIs which were created for a specific task, DeepMind’s neural networks have been generalized to be able to learn any task from scratch, much like the human brain does.

In 2016, DeepMind’s AI mastered the board game Go, and beat the world champion in a five-game match. In 2019, DeepMind’s AI AlphaStar won several StarCraft matches against professional players. How did this neural network do this? Through deep reinforcement learning, and a type of simulated evolution.

AlphaStar would play against itself over and over and over again (200 years worth of gameplay) while rewarding itself for wins, and punishing itself for failure. Starcraft is not a simple game either. It requires strategy, adaptation, and patience. This neural network had to teach itself to optimize to win the entire game, not just a single reward.

In early 2021, DeepMind published a paper titled ‘Reward is Enough’. Given their experience and success with rapidly improving AI, it is their hypothesis that reinforcement learning is sufficient to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Artificial general intelligence is the term used to describe an AI system so versatile so as to be able to learn anything a human can. Some people think it will never happen. Some people are afraid it will happen and that AIs will surpass us making us subject to their will. I don’t have too much of an opinion… yet, but I do believe AI will have great power to transform the world in the coming decades. The evidence of that can already be seen.

But can an AI ever feel emotion? They might be able to solve problems and learn tasks, but can they ever have an actual experience?

For those who are religiously minded, when does the soul enter the body? Does it exist in a sperm or an egg, or are those merely biological machines that carry our DNA? Does the soul enter when an egg is fertilized? Is it when the heart starts beating? Is it when the brain starts to develop and memories are formed? Is it when a baby takes their first breath?

The problem with understanding the soul is that what someone experiences is purely subjective. We exist in closed systems and are unable to know for certain what, if anything, another experiences. As far as I can know for sure, I may be the only person in the universe that is capable of having actual experiences, and all others simply exist as autonomous biological machines that are simply trying to optimize their survival as they have evolved to do. They might communicate and act like they feel and experience things, but I’m not convinced they can do anything that a future AI will not be capable of.

Likewise, I am not sure a human can experience anything a future AI can’t. If they experience something, it will be a subjective experience. I also don’t think I have any reason to believe subjective experiences are limited to humans— or even animals.

I don’t think our bodies are possessed by supernatural entities that enter our bodies when we are born and leave our bodies when we die. Such an explanation is neither necessary, nor helpful in explaining human consciousness. On the contrary, it brings up a number of difficult concepts to resolve with current scientific understanding.

Rather, I believe our spirit or soul is an effect, created and enabled by the connections in our brain and nervous system. I don’t think it’s something physical or even has form or dimension, but rather that the spirit is to the body, like data is to hardware. It’s not what it’s made of that makes it what it is, but how it’s all connected. Thoughts seem to only exist in relation to experiences and other thoughts.

I have come to believe in and would like to define 3 levels of reality. The first and most fundamental level of reality, I will talk about in part 2 of this blog. The second level is objective reality, which for us, involves the physical world we live in and the laws of nature and physics that we are subject to. The third level of reality is subjective reality, which is enabled by connections (like neural networks) in objective reality, and is different for everyone, yet just as important to an individual as the more fundamental realities.

It is the effect of one relative reality from connections in another that I have begun to call Deific Arcana, or (Godly Mysteries). I call it that for three reasons. First, because it sounds freakin cool, second, because it’s unique enough to differentiate it from other concepts, and third, because I think it’s fitting as I believe it’s something of great philosophical significance, but may be impossible to test or verify because of the definition of subjectivity.

I’ll talk more about this in part 2.

Some people might not be fully convinced that the brain is sufficient to explain the vastness of human experience and that there must be a supernatural component in there somewhere. I think there may be more that we don’t understand, sure. Though the term ‘supernatural’ does not aid in explaining any of those things.

Viewing the brain as a closed system that enables human experience actually answers a lot of questions. There are so many things that can be studied and explained by drugs, placebos hypnosis, psychosis, mental illness, suggestibility, and the subconscious, that are a lot harder to explain with demons, spirits, God, and Satan, in the 21st century. The flexibility of the brain gives a lot of room to adapt to different people’s subjective experiences, while most dogma does not.

It always makes me wonder when people are adamant that what they experienced was “not a hallucination!”. “It really happened!” etc. I won’t say that their experience wasn’t real. Only they can know what they experienced— or at least what they remember experiencing. To be certain that our perceptions, memories, etc. are correct though, can be tough when we deal with brains that are frequently known to make mistakes. 

Psychosis, a “condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real”, is believed to be experienced by 3% of people at some point in their lives. It makes it hard to take certain anecdotes at face value when they’re not reproducible, cannot be explained with current scientific understanding, and are often based on religious or mystical beliefs that contradict other people’s religious or mystical experiences.

Understanding of the brain has accelerated greatly in the past 20 years. Younger generations are being taught about the function of the brain in school, but I think I must have taken it for granted. To older generations, this essential organ seems more of a mystery. They were likely taught that not much is really understood about it, which was true 30 years ago… That’s not the case anymore though, and it may be time to learn more.