Begbie Wealth Advisory

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@baldassarreted The blue one is slick. Omega has a similar one and I love that too

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This is very outside my usual realm of content to discuss or share but I've been thinking and learning a lot about this topic (consciousness) over the last five-ish years, so I thought I'd share.

@michaelpollan I recently purchased A World Appears on Audible and listened to the introduction. Before I continued to read, I wanted to put my own thoughts into the world in case something I read changed my opinions. I'm not a philosopher, biologist, or anything close to that so keep that in mind.

Here is what I believe, as of today.

Consciousness is not produced by the brain.

The standard story is that somewhere in our brain, neurons fire in patterns complex enough that subjective experience somehow gets manufactured out of the process. Nobody has ever explained how that actually works. The "hard problem of consciousness," named by philosopher David Chalmers in 1994, asks why there is any inner experience at all, rather than just information processing in the dark. After three decades of neuroscience, the hard problem specifically remains unsolved. Chalmers himself still considers it open.

I think the reason it has no answer is that the premise is wrong. The brain does not generate consciousness. It amplifies it.

Consciousness was already there, in everything, before brains existed.

This is not a new idea. It is called panpsychism, and it has had a serious academic revival in the last decade. Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University, lays out the case in Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019). His argument, building on Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington, is that consciousness is "a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world." David Chalmers, who coined the hard problem, takes it seriously. Christof Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science takes it seriously. It is not fringe anymore.

But my version has three specific commitments that together I am calling Distributive Tonal Amplism. The name draws on three ideas:

Distributive. Consciousness is spread across all matter, not localized in brains.

Tonal. From the Stoic concept of tonos, meaning tension or tuning. The Stoics believed the same underlying substance is present everywhere, expressed at different levels of tension, producing the progression from rocks to plants to animals to rational humans. That maps almost exactly onto what I believe.

Amplism. From amplify. Nervous systems do not generate or combine consciousness. They amplify and coordinate what is already present in the matter they are made of. A brain is closer to a radio than a generator.

Here is what follows from this.

Everything participates in consciousness to some degree. Humans, octopuses, dolphins, rodents, insects, plants, bacteria, sand, metal, gas. Nothing is inert in the strict sense. What looks like a hierarchy of consciousness is a hierarchy of expressive capacity. An octopus can express more of what is already there than a beetle can. A beetle can express more than a stone. But the underlying substrate is the same. When a person goes under anesthesia, they do not lose consciousness. The amplifier briefly stops amplifying. Experientially they become more like the rock.

When someone loses a finger, they become less conscious, because there is literally less of them to amplify. This sounds strange but follows directly from the premise. (Becoming more or less conscious is not good or bad by the way.)

When a person dies, consciousness is not destroyed. The particular amplification pattern ends. The matter that made up that person returns to expressing consciousness at a more diffuse level. Nothing is created or destroyed.

There is no unified "self" floating above the physical substrate. Each of us is a sum of parts, the amplified aggregate of the micro-experiences that make up our body in this moment. The felt sense of being one whole person is a useful narrative, not a metaphysical fact. I find this unsettling and true in equal measure.

Where this view is weakest, trying to be honest here.

Materialist neuroscience makes specific, testable predictions. My view is consistent with its findings but does not generate them. That is a real limitation.

If consciousness does no causal work beyond what physics already describes, the claim risks being untestable. I accept this but want to be honest that the view is more interpretive frame than empirical theory, while still being a claim about what is actually true.

The combination problem, how many micro-experiences produce unified experience, is the standard objection to panpsychism. I sidestep it by denying that experience is actually unified. Most people flinch at this move. I do not.

This is how I see consciousness right now. I am reading Pollan's book next, and if it changes my mind, I will say so.

If any of this resonates, or if you think it is all nonsense, I would genuinely like to hear why.

Sources and further reading:

Michael Pollan, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (Penguin Press, February 2026)
Philip Goff, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Pantheon, 2019)
David Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies (1995), for the hard problem
Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (HarperCollins, 2019)
On Stoic tonos and pneuma: John Sellars, Stoicism (University of California Press, 2006); A.A. Long and David Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
On Brahman and the substrate view: The Upanishads, translated by Eknath Easwaran

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@sairahul1 https://t.co/Z4hdGH3GOZ is better

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@CitedAI1 @LunarResearcher 🤦🏻‍♂️

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@CitedAi79123 @BenMayoMD This is amazing stuff

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@pelositracker and it's down 19% as of now...

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@seandsweeney I’m in that boat and what keeps me always moving is that I’m doing it so my kids don’t have to. You got it man

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@pepemoonboy I took that leap a few years ago. Best thing I’ve done. Good luck!

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@chrislevan24 Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

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@bryan_johnson I'm going to do this January but part of life is enjoyment and community. Thanksgiving/Christmas time is really the only time I allow myself these indulgent foods and it's more fun because you're sharing these things with people you love instead doing it alone, shamefully.

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@mountainwesttax best post on X all day.

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@rajatsoni Best post in a while

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@TeddyBitcoins Why would someone need to attend a bitcoin event?