NEIRZHEI

Solipsism says "One can never be sure if others are conscious or just puppets". That line of thinking collapses into infinite speculation. If I push it far enough, I could say maybe nothing is happening, maybe I'm just a paralyzed body watching film reels, or maybe I'm not even a full organism and instead a process getting simulated a world to. But solipsism is unfalsifiable and useless. If I assume too many layers of "maybe" no reasoning can progress. So I drop that line of thinking. For analysis, I'm taking the default ground: the physical world I touch, smell, see, and interact with is real enough to study. My body functions via physical mechanisms. Same for other humans.

Humans all share roughly the same physical structure and neural architecture. Our biological systems run through biochemical and electrochemical processes. So instead of assuming consciousness is a mystical indivisible essence and trying to define it that way, I treat it as emerging from the interaction of physical systems in the body.

Perception Mechanism

Color is what occurs when photons of different wavelengths hit photoreceptors in the retina. Those physically transform the eye's molecules in certain ways which gets translated through retinal circuits, passed through the optic nerve, and processed through layers of the visual cortex. The colors red, blue or purple are a result of specific wavelengths hitting cones tuned to those frequencies and the brain interpreting the input. Since human sensory anatomy is highly similar across individuals, it is reasonable to assume a broadly consistent perceptual experience, with known variations (color-blindness, cone distribution, etc.)

Sound works via vibration frequencies processed by cochlear hair cells. Smell is molecules binding to olfactory receptors. Touch is mechanical deformation of neurons. So on and so forth. In every case, perception is physical interaction and information flow, something like 'feeling' or experience doesn't just emerge out of nowhere.

The brain then integrates these multimodal signals. The meaning or the experience comes from how neurons, networks, and feedback loops link signals into a coherent world model. This processing creates what we label as "experiencing".

Emergent Integration

Treating consciousness as some irreducible core I is... not the best way to do so. The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness mostly comes from overvaluing our own feelings of mystery. The gap between experience and mechanism is an illusion created by how the brain hides its own workings from itself. Once we see experience as what happens when information connects and loops through the system, the mystery largely disappears. Then it is clear that consciousness is not an independent thing sitting like a central point of the body (or mind). It is the global integration of information across the body. The more tightly and recursively the brain links information from different parts of itself (senses, memory, emotions, self-reflection) the stronger the conscious state feels. It's about how deeply those signals connect and influence each other in real time.

Throughout one's life, this integration becomes more structured and deep. The self is a continuously reinforced global model built from memory, sensory input, self-reflection, and physiological state. When the system is disrupted by illness, drugs, sleep deprivation, neurological damage, anesthesia, or certain brain states, this integration weakens. Weakening often matches lower coordination between key brain regions. Especially the frontal, parietal, and thalamic areas. These networks seem to act as the brain's global communication hub, which helps keep experience unified. When the loops go loose, the sense of I fades or fragments. It's important to point out that infants don't start with full self-awareness, they grow into richer conscious states as neural integration matures.

So consciousness is a spectrum. It increases or decreases based on how effectively the system integrates information and maintains a unified model of itself and the world.

Dreams

In normal dreams the system's information integration degrades. The dreamer's perspective shifts, narrative breaks, and identity blends. Perception is foggy and unstable. Sometimes you are just an observer without realizing it, where the dreams get recorded like via camera and when you wake up and process it all with your now sharpened mind, you realize what was what in that dream, or at least you try to give meaning to them. "This character was me". Lucid dreams show partial reactivation of higher-order cognitive functions like prefrontal control, making the sense of I sharper again. This fits the idea that consciousness shifts with integration strength

Complex Cognition

Consciousness formation appears necessary for high-level general intelligence. Complex cognitive mechanisms don't function effectively without some form of global information integration and self-modeling. If those capacities are removed, then the system collapses into only reflexive or fragmented behavior, similar to simple animals or someone with severe neurological impairment. In this sense, consciousness is the organizational mode that emerges when cognition becomes globally integrated and deeply recursive.

Human consciousness is not guaranteed to be the highest possible form. The sense of I that we have may just be the tip of the iceberg. With more computation, broader integration, and richer architectures, consciousness could get deeper, more stable and expansive. A more powerful nervous system or even artificial architecture could have far more intense awareness than ours.

AI

Current AI models show some layered representation and some cross-referencing of information, but it's primitive and fragmentary. Not much like global information integration yet. You could call that proto-conscious processing and insects likely have richer embodied integration. LLMs are one type of design. They can predict and generate patterns, but they don't yet build a lasting sense of self or world.

Consciousness, whether in humans or machines, seems to depend on systems where each internal state affects the next in tight feedback loops. In the brain, this happens through constant two-way signaling and adaptive connections that weave perception, memory, and self-awareness together like a web. An artificial system could reach something similar if it were built to sense the world, store memories, continuously update its own understanding instead of simply reacting to inputs and keeps all of that linked in a single, ongoing loop. There's no physical law blocking it. Current AI systems are early prototypes in that direction.

Final Point

It doesn't matter if we agree on calling something conscious or not. Obsessing over the label is lazy thinking to base morality on. It's not binary. What matters is being able to identify and measure the inner structures and functions of a system.