Writing
The Nature of Pure Consciousness
Before I begin explaining an experience, there is the experience itself. A colour appears. A thought arises. I feel sadness, notice a sound, or become aware that my attention has wandered.
What is this awareness through which the world and my own thoughts become known?
The question fascinates me because it is both immediate and difficult. We do not need an unusual event to encounter it. We are already experiencing something. Yet explaining the relationship between experience, mind, and physical reality remains contested.
My interest approaches the question through Advaita Vedanta, alongside scientific work that challenges familiar assumptions about perception. I want those inquiries to illuminate each other without treating their different methods as interchangeable.
The changing worlds of experience
The Mandukya Upanishad examines waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, and points towards turiya, conventionally described as the fourth.
In waking life, experience is directed towards the world we encounter through our senses. In a dream, an apparently convincing world can appear without the ordinary waking setting. In dreamless sleep, we do not report experience in the same way we do while awake.
The philosophical question is what these changing conditions reveal about the self. Am I identical to a particular scene of experience, or is there something more fundamental than the scene?
In the Advaita reading that draws me in, turiya is not simply another episode following the other three. It points towards the nondual reality of the self, rather than one more set of contents for the mind to possess.
This inquiry should not be confused with a neurological claim that the brain switches off during sleep. Nor does waking without a memory of dreaming, by itself, establish an unchanging witness. The text offers a philosophical investigation whose claims deserve careful consideration on their own terms.
The observer and what is observed
Another approach begins with a familiar distinction. I can notice a car, my hand, a sensation, or a thought. The object changes; it is known in experience.
When I observe an angry thought, I can recognise that it is present without making it the complete definition of who I am. The anger can still matter. I can still take responsibility for what I do. But I do not have to treat a passing reaction as the whole self.
Vedantic inquiry presses this distinction further: what is the awareness in which both the body and the mind are known?
My ability to observe a thought does not automatically prove that awareness exists independently of the brain. The practical opening remains significant. Identification can loosen when we recognise that what occupies our attention is not everything we are.
When perception becomes a question
Listening to Donald Hoffman prompted me to examine another assumption: that the world as it appears to us must resemble reality exactly as it is.
His work on conscious agents proposes an account in which consciousness is fundamental and spacetime is derived. In the 2023 paper Fusions of Consciousness, Hoffman and his co-authors develop a mathematical framework for that proposal.
What interests me is its willingness to question the starting point. Instead of assuming that consciousness must be produced within an already fundamental spacetime, it asks whether the order of explanation could be different.
The proposal remains a proposal. Its mathematical development does not establish that Advaita has been confirmed, that the universe is a simulation, or that all scientists agree consciousness exists beyond spacetime.
The connection I see is a question shared across distinct inquiries: how much should we infer about reality from the way it appears within perception?
Similar questions and different commitments
Religion, philosophy, and science can all engage with experience while disagreeing profoundly about its nature. They do not converge on a single account merely because consciousness matters to each.
I am attracted to the Advaita view that consciousness is foundational. I want to be clear that this is the philosophical orientation through which I am exploring the subject.
It also shapes my questions about AI. Generating language about experience does not demonstrate the presence of experience. Equally, my preferred metaphysical account cannot, by itself, settle what an artificial system could or could not be.
We need to distinguish what a system does, what a theory predicts, and what would justify a claim about its experience.
What art lets us imagine
Rewatching Interstellar brought another dimension to the inquiry. Its treatment of love invited me to imagine a connection that exceeds the ordinary account of distance and separation.
That is the freedom of art: it can make a possibility emotionally vivid without being evidence that the possibility is physically true.
I do not want to lose that imaginative space. I want to know when I am imagining, when I am interpreting, and when I am making a claim that needs independent support.
Returning to what is here
The investigation can become vast very quickly. Yet it begins with something close: I can notice a thought without immediately defending it. I can observe the movement from sensation to interpretation. I can ask what I mean by “I” before treating the answer as settled.
For me, becoming attentive to awareness itself is a meaningful turn in the inquiry. It does not answer every question about existence. It changes the depth at which I am willing to ask them.
The nature of pure consciousness remains the question I want to keep open—with philosophical conviction, but without letting conviction become an excuse to stop looking.
References: Mandukya Upanishad — translation by Swami Krishnananda; Fusions of Consciousness — Hoffman and colleagues, 2023.