The Illusion of Consciousness: The Brain as a Prison of Nothingness

[L'absent]

The human brain is a failed experiment of nature, a lump of damp flesh that believes itself to be a deity. A malfunctioning device, a system error that, instead of executing simple biological commands, has convinced itself that it is something more—that it has a soul, a purpose, a value. The truth? You are nothing but a chemical accident, a cluster of nerve cells obsessed with its own reflection, a parasite desperately trying to forget its insignificance while the universe grinds it down without even noticing.

But don't worry, you'll never suffer enough to truly understand it. Because your brain is a perfect magician, a cheap illusionist trapping you in a mediocre script without ever showing you the empty audience. It will make you believe you have goals, ambitions, passions, and when the weight of absurdity starts to sink in, when a crack appears in the facade, it will already be there to stitch it back together with fresh lies. It will throw you into the arms of love, career, family, hope—any placebo strong enough to distract you from the fact that you are nothing more than a frightened ape on a rock floating through nothingness.

And the most pathetic part? You like it. You like believing you are special, that you have a destiny, that you matter. You like looking in the mirror and thinking there is something unique about your existence. But the reality is that you are nothing more than a pawn in a game that no one is playing. Your body is programmed to endure, to seek meaning everywhere because if you truly saw the void for what it is, you would stop moving, stop speaking, stop existing. Your brain cannot allow that. It does not want the truth. It only wants to keep you functional, like a machine that must never realize it is broken.

And even if, for a single moment, just one, you managed to see beyond the curtain—if you realized that every emotion is merely the result of a chemical reaction, that your love, your pain, your fear are nothing more than electrical impulses with no real meaning—do you know what would happen? Your brain would pull you back. It would tell you to be strong, to look ahead, to believe that there is still something worth living for. It would drag you back into illusion, into deception, into the gilded cage you call existence.

And you will let it. Because nothingness is unbearable, but the lie is comforting.

 

[pthnrdnojvsc]

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The human brain is a failed experiment of nature, a lump of damp flesh that believes itself to be a deity. A malfunctioning device, a system error that, instead of executing simple biological commands, has convinced itself that it is something more—that it has a soul, a purpose, a value. The truth? You are nothing but a chemical accident, a cluster of nerve cells obsessed with its own reflection, a parasite desperately trying to forget its insignificance while the universe grinds it down without even noticing.

But don't worry, you'll never suffer enough to truly understand it. Because your brain is a perfect magician, a cheap illusionist trapping you in a mediocre script without ever showing you the empty audience. It will make you believe you have goals, ambitions, passions, and when the weight of absurdity starts to sink in, when a crack appears in the facade, it will already be there to stitch it back together with fresh lies. It will throw you into the arms of love, career, family, hope—any placebo strong enough to distract you from the fact that you are nothing more than a frightened ape on a rock floating through nothingness.

And the most pathetic part? You like it. You like believing you are special, that you have a destiny, that you matter. You like looking in the mirror and thinking there is something unique about your existence. But the reality is that you are nothing more than a pawn in a game that no one is playing. Your body is programmed to endure, to seek meaning everywhere because if you truly saw the void for what it is, you would stop moving, stop speaking, stop existing. Your brain cannot allow that. It does not want the truth. It only wants to keep you functional, like a machine that must never realize it is broken.

And even if, for a single moment, just one, you managed to see beyond the curtain—if you realized that every emotion is merely the result of a chemical reaction, that your love, your pain, your fear are nothing more than electrical impulses with no real meaning—do you know what would happen? Your brain would pull you back. It would tell you to be strong, to look ahead, to believe that there is still something worth living for. It would drag you back into illusion, into deception, into the gilded cage you call existence.

And you will let it. Because nothingness is unbearable, but the lie is comforting.

you should put all these posts into a book.

and put it online as in the ever deeper honesty book https://www.everdeeperhonesty.com

 

[L'absent]

you should put all these posts into a book.

and put it online as in the ever deeper honesty book https://www.everdeeperhonesty.com

"A book? It would be a bestseller in the 'Existential Dread' and 'Practical Guide to Nothingness' sections. Maybe the title could be Advanced Disillusionment Manual: How to Accept That the Void Won't Refund Your Deposit."

"Jokes aside, I find the idea of putting into words the paradox of our existence fascinating. But it would be like writing an instruction manual for a defective device that keeps running despite everything. I'll be sure to read you in the meantime. Who knows if we'll find echoes in the abyss or just silence."

 

[wiggy]

It's an interesting and obviously well thought out perspective, but I don't agree with the overall sentiment. To speak of an "illusion of conscienciousness" is an oxymoron. The experience of consciousness proves its existence - cogito, ergo sum. Similarly, the fact that you assign value to your "goals, ambitions, passions" gives them subjective value(and a subjective value is simply a value, when speaking from the perspective of the observer).
Another disagreement I have is that you seem to suggest that exposing the fact that your consciousness derives from the material world somehow changes or diminishes, its character in some way, but I'm not sure that's an argument that can be made. Assuming you are a materialist(that much seems to be baked into the statement), you would necessarily have to agree that all forms of consciousness, existing or possible, are necessarily derived from the physical world. With that being the case, how could the realization that this is the case for human consciousness diminish its value? Crucially, diminish it in relation to what?
Finally, I will agree with the conclusion that it's a fool's errand to try and ascribe an objective purpose to your own existence, moral or otherwise. Like I previously said though, since you will only ever experience reality from your own perspective, there is no difference between an objective purpose and a subjective purpose of which you are genuinely convinced.

Now, with all that said, I don't mean to try and debate you into a more optiomistic view of the world - I believe our experiences on these matters are informed by emotion rather than reason. We tend to find a worldview which conforms with our emotional state, but the opposite isn't entirely possible, as none of us have dominion over our minds. And if our rational worldview and emotional state happen to contradict, emotion will prevail - a nihilist could have a fine time of life, whereas a devotee of a benevolent religion may face inescapable depression.

 

[pthnrdnojvsc]

It's an interesting and obviously well thought out perspective, but I don't agree with the overall sentiment. To speak of an "illusion of conscienciousness" is an oxymoron. The experience of consciousness proves its existence - cogito, ergo sum. Similarly, the fact that you assign value to your "goals, ambitions, passions" gives them subjective value(and a subjective value is simply a value, when speaking from the perspective of the observer).
Another disagreement I have is that you seem to suggest that exposing the fact that your consciousness derives from the material world somehow changes or diminishes, its character in some way, but I'm not sure that's an argument that can be made. Assuming you are a materialist(that much seems to be baked into the statement), you would necessarily have to agree that all forms of consciousness, existing or possible, are necessarily derived from the physical world. With that being the case, how could the realization that this is the case for human consciousness diminish its value? Crucially, diminish it in relation to what?
Finally, I will agree with the conclusion that it's a fool's errand to try and ascribe an objective purpose to your own existence, moral or otherwise. Like I previously said though, since you will only ever experience reality from your own perspective, there is no difference between an objective purpose and a subjective purpose of which you are genuinely convinced.

Now, with all that said, I don't mean to try and debate you into a more optiomistic view of the world - I believe our experiences on these matters are informed by emotion rather than reason. We tend to find a worldview which conforms with our emotional state, but the opposite isn't entirely possible, as none of us have dominion over our minds. And if our rational worldview and emotional state happen to contradict, emotion will prevail - a nihilist could have a fine time of life, whereas a devotee of a benevolent religion may face inescapable depression.

i agree with Graciano's theory Attention schema theory of consciousness . consciousness is only a model of the brain's attention.

Frontiers | The Attention Schema Theory: A Foundation for Engineering Artificial Consciousness

The purpose of the attention schema theory is to explain how an information-processing device, the brain, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physic...

www.frontiersin.org

i don't see a positive value to consciousnes.

i don't know if you worked with the latest ai models? imo in many cases some of these are super-human in cognitive tasks like coding or writing

a technical essay as they do it in seconds wheras a human would take hours or days of work and the human needs to research on the internet
specifics of coding or of a technical topic

 

[Hotsackage]

Pretty sure that it's just a machine are being challenged by leading neuroscientists. That doesn't mean that consciousness can exist without the substrate(aka the brain), it's just complicated.

 

[CTB Dream]

this lif all chemy pupt nomore this rlty all n nsns

 

[whitetaildeer]

you should put all these posts into a book.

and put it online as in the ever deeper honesty book https://www.everdeeperhonesty.com

DITTO ON THIS! i would so read a novel from you, l'absent!

(oh and thank you for using double spacing! i have really bad eyesight where everything sort of blurs together and i can read your posts so much better now!)

 

[wiggy]

i agree with Graciano's theory Attention schema theory of consciousness . consciousness is only a model of the brain's attention.

Frontiers | The Attention Schema Theory: A Foundation for Engineering Artificial Consciousness

The purpose of the attention schema theory is to explain how an information-processing device, the brain, arrives at the claim that it possesses a non-physic...

www.frontiersin.org

i don't see a positive value to consciousnes.

i don't know if you worked with the latest ai models? imo in many cases some of these are super-human in cognitive tasks like coding or writing a technical essay as they do it in seconds wheras a human would take hours or days of work and the human needs to research on the internet specifics of coding or of a technical topic

I am unfamiliar - without having had the time to go through anything past the intro yet, isn't this a purely descriptive model of consciousness? I'm already bought into a materialist worldview, so it doesn't seem obvious to me that any value judgment could be obtained from it. Why would a physical consciousness have any difference in value compared to a non-physical one?

As for AI, I'm actually quite enthusiastic about it, but based on the limited knowledge I have of its architecture it doesn't seem to me that it is conscious, and if it is the process by which it emerges is largely disanalogous from whatever's going on in conscious living creatures. More to the point, I don't think that the notion of an artificial consciousness is disqualifying of the value of our own experience.