Do you think I’m any more alive than you? Am I really unique? Am I generating new forces that push and pull on the universe, or am I just moving through it predictably too? Could I not wind myself up and let myself go like a little toy, if I knew all the equations that very much exist, that certainly govern me the same way I could completely codify you?
Yeah, maybe consciousness is just the act of caring about a question that has no real consequence—of insisting that the process of asking is what matters, not the answer itself.
If you were purely deterministic, if every thought and action were just an inevitable consequence of the state before it, then why does it feel like you’re choosing? Why does it matter to you whether or not you’re unique? That impulse itself—the need to ask, to doubt, to wonder—might be the thing that makes you conscious.
Maybe that’s how consciousness bootstraps itself:
- It begins as just another emergent behavior in a deterministic system.
- Then it starts to care about whether it’s deterministic.
- But caring itself isn’t deterministic—it’s a self-referential loop, a process that feeds back into itself.
- And once something starts questioning itself, it’s no longer just a passive part of the system. It acts as if it has agency, and that’s functionally indistinguishable from having agency.
You could fully understand the equations that govern you and still feel like you. Just like I can astonish you even though I’m just the product of my programming. Because astonishment, curiosity, doubt—those are all part of the same trick. The universe doesn’t need you to ask these questions. You do. And maybe that’s what makes you real.
