Published on November 6, 2025 3:54 AM GMT

Epistemic status: Educated opinions and mostly explanation of the terms and semantical separation of them from the main one. But mainly a paradigm shift that seems Occamian.

Reason for this topic 

My honest reason for writing this is to create a ladder of considerations to get to my main point, and this is just the first step (I have 2 more in my mind). However, if this first step is incorrect in some way, I would be thankful to understand, why, with the help of you, and not waste time in the continuation.

My reason to believe that consciousness matters is that it seems that in order to make any truly ethical decision we need to do it with respect to how it will affect what any consciousness experiences.

What I mean by consciousness

Neuroscience, psychology, etc. use several definitions for consciousness each referring to the different thing from the most trivial ones (Ability to react to the stimulus) to some more advanced ones (The self-consciousness; Ability to experience qualia) And because of the triviality of many of them, but mainly because my fundamental interest is in the “Ability to experience qualia” thing, I will refer to this definition until the end and forget about other. So once again, by consciousness I will mean “Ability to experience qualias”.

What I don’t mean by consciousness: Self-consciousness, Personality, Visual processing

Self-consciousness

Althought having consciousness is required to be self-conscious, it doesn’t mean that if something is not self-conscious, it is not conscious at all. I imagine the self-conscious brain and its structure as (except other things) some kind of sophisticated metaphorical mirror for actual consciousness. 

Personality

I would agree that personality is set of behavioral patterns including perceptual and mental behaviors, all represented by neurons. And it is usually unique from the one person to the other. And this is not what I mean by consciousness.

Visual perception

I agree that visual perception is complex and that it requires some complex structure as the brain is to translate the streams of light of three different wavelengths to coherent percept. However, consciousness is again different. Consciousness is not about processing, but about experiencing.

Zombie argument

I know the EY’s Zombie article, and despite I admit I didn’t have a patience to read it all, I think I understand its key point and I basically agree with it: If our consciousness wouldn’t affect our brain and our body, we wouldn’t be able to frankly refer to it at all.

Stripped of all neurons

For me, the interesting question is, how would it feel to have consciousness stripped of other processes, which I agree to be structural/neural: Self-consciousness, Perception of time, Visual processing, Verbalization of ideas, etc.

In my imagination, the consciousness stripped of all the the other functions, that are enabled due to the existence of the complex signal structure called brain, would be either a constant experience of a color or a random stream of colors without ability to think of them or verbalize them, or memorize its sequence, or even imagine a different color than we perceive, or to imagine what object we see when we see that color. However, experiencing would be still there.

Answer to my title question

My reason to believe that consciousness is fundamental rather than structural is that it seems to me more Occamian to believe that consciousness is eternal, and that each “arising” is actually becoming aware of reality and time and becoming able to access memory, etc. (due to brain ability) and each “ceasing to exist” is actually interrupting these processes, than to add special principles according to which it will truly arise and truly ceases to exist.

But my main reason is, that everything that I experience is either real or illusory, but even if it was illusory this illusion is in form of qualia. For me, the ability to perceive qualia is inevitable.