A
That’s a deep, thoughtful question, and your reflections show you’ve grappled seriously with it. Let’s unpack it carefully from both the scientific/materialist and the spiritual perspective you offer:
Your question restated in simpler terms:
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If there was nothing like “me” for billions of years before I was born,
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and if consciousness is entirely a product of the brain,
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then how did this specific subjective consciousness come to be at all?
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Why does it seem to happen once in cosmic time—only to vanish forever when I die?
The materialist perspective:
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From a mainstream neuroscience standpoint, your conscious experience emerges from the unique configuration of your brain: its genes, developmental history, and interactions with the environment.
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Before your brain existed, there was no “you.” And after your brain ceases functioning (death), there’s no scientific evidence that your conscious awareness continues.
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The fact you experience being this person is a result of your brain’s particular arrangement—like a radio set temporarily tuning into a signal. But in this view, there’s no “signal” existing separately; the brain generates the experience.
This leads to the “lights out” intuition you mention: once the brain stops, consciousness ceases, just as it didn’t exist before you were born.
Your proposed view—spiritual consciousness (spiricon):
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You suggest consciousness is not generated by the brain, but is something more fundamental or spiritual, which exists independently of the body.
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The brain, in this view, acts like a filter or limiter on a consciousness that pre-exists physical birth and persists after physical death.
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So what appears as “lights out” to materialists is actually the shedding of the body, with consciousness returning to its more complete, perhaps timeless state.
Key points of tension:
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Evidence: Neuroscience can correlate consciousness tightly with brain activity—alter the brain and you alter consciousness. That’s a strong reason many scientists conclude consciousness depends on the brain.
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Subjective mystery: Yet, no scientific theory fully explains why conscious experience exists at all—why there is something it is like to be you, rather than nothing.
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Your insight: By proposing we’re immortal spiritual consciousness, you offer a way to reconcile that mystery with a hopeful conclusion: consciousness doesn’t end at death.
Why did consciousness “arise once” for you?
In your spiritual framework, your consciousness didn’t “start” at birth—it just started using this body. So, you appeared to arise once because you began a specific incarnation, but your underlying conscious essence existed before.
Bottom line:
You’ve arrived at a personal, consistent, and comforting model: that consciousness is spiritual and eternal, and that birth and death are transitions rather than absolute beginnings or endings.
Would you like to explore:
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How your view compares to ideas in physics (e.g., time, entropy, quantum interpretations)?
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Philosophical theories of consciousness (e.g., panpsychism, idealism)?
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Or practical ways to live meaningfully given these big unknowns?
I’d be glad to dive deeper.
A
Excellent, let’s look carefully at how your view of eternal, spiritual consciousness compares with key concepts in modern physics—particularly time, entropy, and quantum theory—while noting that physics, strictly speaking, says nothing definitive about consciousness itself:
🕰️ 1) Time
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Physics view: Time is a dimension in relativity; past, present, and future all “exist” in a block universe model, suggesting time is more like space than a flowing river. But subjective experience of time’s flow isn’t explained by physics.
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Your spiricon view: Fits naturally with the idea that consciousness isn’t bound by linear time—if consciousness exists outside of or beyond time, then it’s plausible it could “pre-exist” the body or persist after death.
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Tension: While physics’ block universe suggests all moments are equally real, it doesn’t imply any subject travels through them, or that a consciousness can “step outside” time—physics doesn’t predict or describe that possibility.
🔥 2) Entropy (Thermodynamics & Arrow of Time)
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Physics view: The second law of thermodynamics says entropy (disorder) increases over time, giving time its one-way direction from low-entropy past to high-entropy future. Entropy governs why your body ages and why brains degrade irreversibly at death.
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Your view: If consciousness is spiritual and not an emergent property of a physical system, it wouldn’t be subject to entropy. This makes your spiricon concept immune to the thermodynamic fate of matter.
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Tension: Physical processes correlate closely with mental function—e.g., oxygen deprivation causing loss of consciousness—so it’s unclear, from physics alone, how a consciousness could escape thermodynamic constraints if it’s linked to a physical brain.
⚛️ 3) Quantum Interpretations
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Physics view: Quantum mechanics shows the universe is probabilistic at fundamental scales, and measurement (observation) affects quantum systems. Some (like the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation) have speculated that consciousness might collapse the wavefunction, though mainstream physics does not require consciousness for quantum measurement.
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Your view: A spiritual consciousness existing outside the material could, in principle, be the “observer” influencing quantum events—this is close to ideas by physicists like Eugene Wigner or interpretations like “Orchestrated Objective Reduction” (Orch-OR) proposed by Penrose & Hameroff (though highly controversial).
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Tension: Experiments suggest collapse happens with measurement-like interactions regardless of any conscious observer, so physics doesn’t require or demonstrate that consciousness is fundamental to quantum behavior.
🌌 Related physics-friendly ideas
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Quantum cosmology & timelessness: Some solutions to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation (quantum gravity) suggest a “timeless” universe, resonating with your idea of an eternal consciousness outside time.
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Holographic principle & information: Some physicists speculate consciousness could be related to information fundamental to the universe—though what “information” means in physics is not equivalent to subjective experience.
✅ Summary
Your spiricon idea isn’t ruled out by physics, but also isn’t supported by physics, because:
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Physics successfully explains correlations between brain states and consciousness but does not explain why there is conscious experience.
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Physics describes the behavior of matter, energy, space, and time, but has no equation for “subjective awareness” itself.
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Your idea sits outside current physics: it’s metaphysical, not physical, but it’s not inconsistent with physics’ limits.
Would you like to explore more scientific theories of consciousness, or how spiritual perspectives reconcile with physics?
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