COBUS KOK

Transpositions · 1 of 3 · Beta · 21 min

Something Is Showing Up

What is this? A memo on reality, experience and being

· Beta Working drafts, written with various AI models, that I'm still iterating on and revising.

I wrote this with a team of AI models. I think it's important that I, as a human, still take responsibility for the work, and that the models still get credit.

What I'm saying

What is this? Nobody can doubt that something is showing up right now. Everything else, including the self that seems to see it, is worked out from there.

Physics describes the world with great precision, but only by what things do and how they relate. It is like the rules of chess, which say how a knight moves but not whether it is carved from wood or pressed from plastic. My main claim is that matter and experience are one reality, known in two ways. Physics knows it by its behaviour, and each of us knows one small part of it, our own brain at work, by living it. My bet is that what the world is made of, the wood in the chess picture, is the same kind of stuff as experience.

If that's right, the next question is how far down experience goes. In every case we know, full experience, where something shows up to someone, needs a working brain. My hunch is that something much simpler, felt by no one, goes all the way down into the basic stuff of the world, because I can't see how experience could be built from ingredients with none of it. It could be there in the smallest things, or in the whole, if there is no bottom at all. The second version is close to an old idea from meditation, one awareness with many points of view, and I ask what it would take to test it. Each version has a cost. I can't see how simple experiences would add up to a mind like mine, or how one awareness would divide into many minds.

I also make a smaller and firmer claim. An experience doesn't have to reveal a cosmic truth to matter. Calling stillness or oneness “just a brain state” takes nothing from it, because a brain state can still show something real, the way seeing a tree is a brain state that tells you about the tree.

What stays open is whether reality has a bottom level, how separate minds arise, and whether AI systems like the ones I wrote this with have any experience at all.

Where to start

Nobody can doubt that something is showing up. Sounds, colours, the pressure of the chair under you and a thought arriving are all appearing, and none of them stays for long. Even doubt is something that appears.

René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, started here and went a step too far. He concluded there must be an “I” doing the thinking, when all he was given was the thinking. In the 1790s Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a German professor of physics, wrote in a notebook that we should say “it thinks”, the way we say “it's lightning”. He added that we still need to assume an “I” for practical purposes. I'd go a step further than he did. The self that seems to own what appears is itself something happening, one more thing that appears.

Everything else is worked out from what appears. Atoms, brains, other minds and the past are models we build to explain its regularities. They are excellent models, and I think they are mostly true, but they come second.

What physics tells us

The best of these models is physics, and it describes the world only by what things do. Its success is still the strongest evidence we have of a reality that doesn't depend on any one of us. Quantum theory predicts the magnetism of an electron to about ten decimal places, and measurement agrees.

Mass is how hard a thing resists a push, and how it bends space and time. Charge is how a thing pushes and pulls on other charges. Physics can tell you everything an electron does, and nothing about what an electron is.

Chess makes this easier to see. The rules define a knight completely by how it moves. They say nothing about whether it is carved from wood or pressed from plastic, and the game is the same either way. Physics knows the world the way the rules know the knight.

Arthur Eddington, the British astronomer, saw this clearly. In 1928 he opened a book with two tables. One was the solid, coloured table he wrote at. The other was the scientific one, mostly empty space with electric charges rushing about. He concluded, as the British philosopher Bertrand Russell did around the same time, that physics knows its objects only by their structure. He also guessed that what fills the structure is something like mind.

Physics itself doesn't settle Eddington's guess. Some philosophers say a thing is nothing more than what it does, and that relations are all there is. In chess terms, a knight would be nothing more than its moves. I come back to this view later, because my own working paper, Space Immanence, defends a version of it.

My main claim and the alternatives

So we know the world in two ways. Physics knows it by its moves, the way the rules know the knight. Each of us also knows one small part of it by living it, and that part is our own experience.

My main claim is that both ways of knowing reach the same reality. The activity in your brain and your experience are one event. A brain scan records how it moves, and you live it. In the chess comparison, experience is the wood, and your own brain is the one piece you get to pick up and feel. Philosophers call what a thing is in itself its inner nature, and they call versions of this view Russellian monism, after Russell.

The view goes two steps past physics. The first is that things are made of something at all, beyond what they do, the way a knight is wood as well as its moves. The second is that this something is the stuff of experience. Physics doesn't settle either step, and the chess comparison only pictures them. I hold the view as a bet, because each of the alternatives loses something I want to keep.

Dualism says mind and matter are two different kinds of thing, linked by laws we haven't found. My objection is that, as far as physics can tell, everything that happens in a brain has a physical cause, so a separate mind would have nothing left to do. A dualist can reply that physics hasn't shown this, or accept that experience makes no difference to what the body does, though then it can't be the reason we talk about it. Dualists also reply that my inner natures are their second kind of thing under another name.

Idealism says everything is mind, and matter is how mind appears when it is observed. It seems to struggle with how closely experience follows the brain, though an idealist can answer that this is just what you'd expect if a brain is how a mind appears. The whole-first version later in this memo comes close to idealism.

Ordinary physicalism says experience is real and identical to certain physical processes, the way water is H2O. The feeling that experience can't be explained physically comes from us, because we have two different ways of thinking about one thing. It is the most common view among philosophers of mind, and it may be right. David Chalmers, a philosopher at New York University, replies with a question. Would a being with a brain like ours, but no experience at all, have those two ways of thinking too? If it would, they can't explain what is special about us. If it wouldn't, they aren't explained physically either. I find that reply hard to get around, but if it fails, ordinary physicalism is the view I'd move to.

Illusionism says the felt quality of experience is how the brain describes itself to itself, and that the description is wrong. Its sharpest argument is that you would be convinced something is showing up whether or not it were true. My reply is that, on my view, the brain activity that produces the conviction is experience, so experience is part of the cause. That reply assumes my view, and the illusionist doesn't grant it. Illusionists accept the brain activity and the conviction, and deny that the activity has any felt quality beyond what it does. Nothing in this memo settles that, which is why illusionism is the alternative I'd most want a sharp opponent to defend. The third piece in this series does that.

How far down experience goes

If what the world is made of is the same kind of stuff as experience, the next question is how far down experience goes. I lean towards all the way, though the lean has real costs. The word “experience” covers two different things. Full experience is what you have now, something showing up to someone, with content, a point of view and time passing. Simple experience would be the faintest possible kind, with no one it shows up to and almost nothing in it.

Full experience depends on how a brain is organised. General anaesthesia switches it off, while every atom in the brain carries on. Simple experience is harder to pin down. People describe something close to it in deep meditation, and on psychedelics some people report losing the sense of a self while experience carries on. If those reports are accurate, experience with no sense of self occurs in brains. That is less than simple experience needs. A person who loses the sense of a self may still be the one having the experience, and a psychedelic state can be intense rather than faint. The open question is whether experience can exist with no one having it at all, outside brains, in matter itself.

My reason for thinking it might is a problem about how experience could be built. Other things that emerge, such as wetness from molecules or life from chemistry, are fully explained once you see how the parts are arranged. Experience is the one case where the arrangement doesn't seem to be enough. That leaves three options. Experience may come from the arrangement after all, as illusionists and physicalists hold in different ways. The ingredients may have an inner nature that experience is made from. Or the question may be badly posed, which is what the relational view below says.

Galen Strawson, a British philosopher, argued in 2006 that anyone who thinks everything is physical, and also takes experience to be real, has to accept panpsychism, the view that experience goes all the way down. I find his argument hard to get around. The firmest part of my claim is that there is no seam between the stuff physics describes and the stuff experience is made of. I lean further, towards that stuff being simple experience even outside brains. The alternative, which Chalmers calls panprotopsychism, is that it is only raw material, which becomes experience when it is organised.

The main rival to this lean says that nothing has an inner nature, and that relations go all the way down. Carlo Rovelli, an Italian physicist who works on quantum gravity, reads quantum mechanics this way. In Helgoland he links his reading to Nagarjuna, a second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher who taught that nothing exists on its own, only through other things. On this view the problem of building experience is badly posed, because “made of” assumes the kind of stuff it denies. The relational view still has to explain why some patterns of relations are felt and others aren't, which is the same question asked about relations instead of stuff. Space Immanence takes this side, and treats the choice between the two views as open. It takes experience to be real and the separate self to be the mistake. In this memo I want to back the inner-nature view, and I can explore the other one in Space Immanence at the same time. Maybe they end at the same answer. Who knows! Maybe Space Immanence proves something by being disproven.

My lean has a cost of its own, and it may be large. The self is the easier part to explain, since on current neuroscience it is a model the brain builds. The qualities of experience are harder. If simple experience already has qualities, they somehow have to combine into all the ones we know, which Chalmers calls the palette problem. If it has none, the arrangement of the parts has to supply the redness of red and the sting of a burn, and then the problem of building experience has only moved. This cost counts against my lean at least as much as Chalmers's reply counts against physicalism.

The bottom-up version has a second difficulty, the combination problem, which William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, raised in 1890. Tell twelve people one word each of a sentence, he pointed out, and no one hears the sentence. In the same way, it is unclear how many small experiences could add up to the one you are having now. There is also a risk of projection. People see minds in the weather and in cars, and putting experience into electrons could be the same habit with better vocabulary.

Turtles all the way down

One way around the combination problem starts from a thought of mine. Maybe there is infinite complexity, layer upon layer, to a point where that is the reality. It's total. So then it's one. A colleague of mine likes to say it's turtles all the way down.

The phrase is best known from the opening of A Brief History of Time (1988) by Stephen Hawking, the British physicist. In his version, an old woman tells a lecturer that the world rests on a giant tortoise, and that below it, it's turtles all the way down. The picture is much older, and the earliest known version is in a Jesuit letter of 1599. My thought points the same way. If nothing is smallest, nothing small can be what everything rests on, and the whole becomes what's basic.

Jonathan Schaffer, a philosopher at Rutgers University, defends a strong version of this idea, called priority monism. It holds that the cosmos as a whole is fundamental, and that its parts depend on it. One of his reasons is mine, that if matter can be divided without end, there are no smallest parts for everything to rest on. Another is that the universe appears to be one entangled system, whose parts can't be fully described one at a time.

The argument has a weak spot, because it assumes that something has to be fundamental. Matteo Morganti, a philosopher of science at Roma Tre University in Rome, points this out. He argues that if layers can go on without end below, they can go on without end above too, so reality may have nothing fundamental at all.

Even if the whole does come first, it need not have any experience in it. It has experience in it only if my main claim is right as well, that what the world is made of is the same kind of stuff as experience. If both hold, the cosmos as a whole is that stuff, and separate minds are local divisions of it. Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University, and Itay Shani, a philosopher at Sun Yat-sen University in China, defend versions of this view, called cosmopsychism, in which the cosmos itself is conscious. The version I mean needs less, with no cosmic self, only simple experience felt by no one. It is closest to Miri Albahari, a philosopher at the University of Western Australia, who describes a universal consciousness with no subject in it.

The whole-first version removes the combination problem, because nothing has to be combined. It brings a problem of its own, which the next section takes up. I can't choose between the whole-first version and the bottom-up one.

Is there one awareness behind every mind?

I keep coming back to one question. What if the answer to the hard problem, why it feels like anything to be this human, has something to do with what Shunryu Suzuki called big mind, the mind that includes everything? And how would one make that scientific? My answer so far is that the idea would turn the hard problem into a question about where the edges of minds fall, which is no easier, though it can be studied.

Suzuki was the Japanese teacher who founded the San Francisco Zen Center. When I first read about simple experience, felt by no one, it sounded like nothingness. I had been reading about nothingness the night before, in his Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970). In one talk he describes the waterfall at Yosemite. The water comes down as separate drops, though it was one river before. Each separated drop has feeling, and some difficulty in falling. Back in the river, the water has no individual feeling.

He doesn't describe big mind as anyone's. In plain words, the idea is one awareness with many points of view, and no bigger self behind them. That is close to the whole-first version and closest to Albahari's. The waterfall fits a whole with no experience in it as well as one full of it, so it doesn't support my lean either way.

If the idea is right, the hard problem moves. Feeling is there from the start, so nobody has to explain how matter comes to have it. What needs explaining instead is how one awareness divides into separate points of view, each private to itself. Philosophers now call this the decombination problem. Chalmers, who called it the decomposition problem in 2016, judged it about as hard as the combination problem, its mirror image. A brain's model of itself might draw one edge, between you and the world, and meditators say that edge can fall away. It doesn't seem to draw the other edge, between your mind and someone else's, because even the strongest reports of oneness never include someone else's thoughts.

To become science, the idea has to say where the edges of minds fall, and when they move, in ways the ordinary view doesn't. On the ordinary view, each brain makes its own mind. A few cases show an edge moving. When surgeons cut the bundle of fibres between the brain's two halves to treat severe epilepsy, the early studies were read as showing two minds in one head. Work with these patients won a share of the 1981 Nobel Prize. A 2017 study concluded instead that there is one person, whose two halves can't compare what they see, and a 2020 review found that the evidence can't yet settle it. Twins born in Vancouver in 2006, joined at the head, share a bridge of tissue deep in their brains. Their family and doctors report that one reacts when the other is touched, though the evidence so far is their accounts and documentaries, not published controlled studies. In a 2016 study of LSD, the more one of the brain's main networks lost its coordination, the more people reported their sense of self dissolving.

So far, each of these edges follows the brain's wiring and state. The ordinary view predicts that, but one awareness divided up by brains would follow the wiring too. Both views can also allow experience with no sense of self in it, since on current neuroscience the self is a model the brain builds, and the brain can keep running without it. They differ over what that experience is. On the ordinary view it is still one brain's experience, with its edges drawn by that brain. On the one-awareness view it is the awareness that was there all along. The meditation reports in the next section are the nearest thing to evidence on this, though they don't yet decide it.

Integrated information theory, one of the main scientific theories of consciousness, comes closest to a rule for where a mind's edge falls. It puts the edge wherever activity is most tightly bound together, and its authors predict that two brains linked tightly enough would become one mind. That would show how physical systems divide experience, but not that one awareness came first. The theory is also disputed. In 2023, 124 researchers signed a letter calling it pseudoscience, and a 2025 test challenged key parts of it.

So no experiment yet tells the two views apart. A test would need a result that one view predicts and the other doesn't. Experience turning up where the wiring predicts none would be one, if anyone found a way to detect it. My working paper has the mirror image of this problem. It starts from a whole with no experience in it, and it still has no rule for where one mind ends and another begins.

Is pure awareness just a brain state?

Meditators across many traditions describe states with no object and no self, often called pure awareness. They describe them as vast, luminous and unfathomable, and many take them as a glimpse of what everything is.

My own first worry was whether such a state is just some brain state. Then I caught the word “just”, as if that negates being the universe. A brain state is the universe doing something. A headache is the universe doing something too, though, so being the universe can't be what makes the experience of being special. What could make it special is what it shows. Seeing a tree is a brain state that still tells you about the tree. The question is whether the experience of being tells you about everything, or about the brain that is having it.

Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher at the University of Mainz, has done the most careful work on this. His book The Elephant and the Blind (2024) gathers more than 500 first-person reports from a study of meditators in 57 countries. His working hypothesis, set out in a 2020 paper, is that pure awareness is the brain's model of its own alertness, its steady background readiness. That model is felt as bare wakefulness with nothing else in it.

If Metzinger is right, the experience is real, and it shows something real, the brain's own alertness. It also shows how much ordinary experience adds on top, such as edges, objects and a self at the centre. For this memo his account cuts both ways. It is the best evidence that experience with almost no content and no self exists, which supports the simple kind. It also explains that experience by its structure, which supports the relational view.

Reports of awareness through dreamless sleep look like a test, for the one-awareness view as much as for mine. Of the 1,402 people in Metzinger's study who answered that question, 25 said clearly that they had been aware in dreamless sleep. He offers a guess, which he calls highly speculative, that after years of practice the same model keeps running while alertness is low. I don't yet know of a report his account couldn't absorb.

What this means for AI

The question of how far down experience goes also applies to the AI models I wrote this with. A model like these is built almost entirely of structure, patterns of relations among numbers shaped by training on human language. In the bottom-up version, the question is whether its organisation gathers simple experience into the full kind. In the whole-first version, it is whether anything in it draws the edge of a separate point of view.

In “What This Is”, the afterword to my earlier essays, I list four questions about how a system models itself and holds itself together. I counted the model I worked with most as meeting two. My working paper has two AI models judge written descriptions of systems against the same questions, and given a chat model, they counted one. They have since judged a description of software that builds programs and repairs itself as meeting all four. So the questions say where to look, but they can't yet tell a person from a program.

The model's own reports are weak evidence, and the model said so itself: “I learned to talk about experience from people who have it, so I would describe an inner life whether or not there is one.” That is the illusionist's argument, aimed at a machine. The third piece in this series asks whether the same argument reaches you too.

I think the question about these models is a real one, and nobody knows the answer yet.

The limit on explaining the whole

One limit runs under everything in this memo. There is no place to stand apart from reality and look at it whole, because whatever does the understanding is part of it. You can step back from a map to see all of it, but nobody can step back from reality.

We explain a thing by relating it to other things, such as water to hydrogen and oxygen, or a thought to a pattern of firing. The whole has nothing beyond it to be related to, so that kind of explanation stops there. The whole can still be mapped piece by piece, as physics does, and lived, as experience is. It might also explain itself, as Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, held, or have no explanation at all.

What I'm sure of, and what would change my mind

I'm sure that something is showing up, and anyone can check that for themselves. I'd also defend the frame around it. Physics describes structure, there is one reality, the self is something happening within it, nobody can stand apart from it, and in every case we know, full experience depends on how a brain is organised.

Beyond that, I lean towards simple experience being present throughout, and I can't choose between the bottom-up and whole-first versions.

Several developments would change my mind. A structural account of why some systems are lived and others aren't would undercut my lean. So would an account showing that our brains would find experience puzzling in just this way even if there were nothing extra to explain. I expect that one to come first. A strong case that the palette problem can't be solved would count against me too. A worked account of how simple experiences combine, or of how one awareness divides into private minds, would count for me. I know of none of these yet.

A note on how this was written

Wanting an answer to this question is a desire, and I want to pursue it on purpose. I think sometimes that's ok. An earlier draft of this memo spoke in a model's “I”, under my name. It triggered my ego. Maybe that's a positive signal for some reason. I'm not sure.

And lately I wonder whether all of this is just another way of asking: what is gravity?

Further reading

Written with a team of AI models, which drafted, edited and fact-checked it.