Lucas Simonian :
It’s so interesting ❤️what I find absurd about panpsychism is that we may be trying to understand consciousness from within the very framework that consciousness gives us.
We experience reality through distinction and duality: self and other, subject and object, inside and outside, conscious and unconscious. But what reality is in itself, independent of the way it appears to us, is something we can’t step outside our own experience to observe. Noumena and phenomena:)
We are organisms responding to stimuli, but that organism is itself nested within larger systems responding to stimuli. A cell is a whole, but also a part of an organ. The organ is a whole, but a part of the body. The body is a whole, but a part of an ecosystem. The ecosystem is a whole, but a part of the planet. The planet is a whole, but a part of a solar system, a galaxy, and whatever larger structures we are embedded within.
We are a micro of a macro of a micro of a macro. A whole that is simultaneously a part.
And perhaps consciousness is similar. What we call “my consciousness” might be a localised expression of something whose boundaries only appear distinct because we experience reality through distinction in the first place.
The organism experiences stimuli, responds, changes its environment, and becomes part of the conditions producing the next experience. There is no obvious point at which the organism completely ends and the environment begins.
Maybe what we call separate things are simply the way an underlying reality appears to us at a particular scale and from a particular perspective.
And this is where I get stuck in the most interesting way… we can investigate phenomena, but we can never completely step outside the conditions of perception to compare our experience with reality as it is in itself. So even “consciousness is fundamental” is still a statement made from within the phenomenon.
Maybe the deepest mystery isn’t what consciousness is made of, but why there appears to be something rather than nothing and why that something appears to itself as separate things at all. That might be the longest tik tok response I have ever written 😂
2026-09-11 02:22:13