[jerednel]

A lot of people quick to try to reduce consciousness to what we can observe about brain functions.

While this explains what happens in the brain as things happen it doesn’t explain why it is like something to be you which is the core of the hard problem of consciousness.

The thought experiment of a philosophical zombie that has all of the same cause-effect reactions to externalities as myself seems to require that it isn’t pure information processing giving rise to consciousness.

I quite like the idea of certain panpsychism arguments that consciousness is itself a thing existing on a continuum inherent across the universe. At a certain point, “what it’s like” to be a certain thing becomes difficult to demarcate. And from the moment of the Big Bang the particles necessary for the construction of conscious beings expanded outward in one giant entanglement. The particles that make us up are the same as everything else in existence however it feels like something to be a person, a deer, possibly a plant, etc.