This is an argument that experience – not mere awareness – is what makes a universe real. And only life delivers that. This is a very long blog post and has taken me the best part of a week to formulate into something coherent. Sentences are short and staccato, as are some paragraphs, but that is to focus attention without waffle.
I watched a YouTube video by Federico Faggin recently – the man who brought us the microprocessor, now turning his mind to the nature of consciousness. His proposition? That consciousness is fundamental. Not the output of brain matter. Not a lucky by-product of evolution. But the root of everything.
I cogitated on this and did some questioning and investigating of consequences. This is the result.
I’m not saying Faggin's right. But it’s compelling. His thesis echoes Scott Adams' God's Debris – a thought experiment in which a supreme intelligence, having exhausted all knowledge, blows itself into fragments in the Big Bang just to feel something. Faggin gives this idea structure: the Big Bang wasn’t just the origin of matter, but the moment the Source created the conditions for experience. Space, time, and matter became the scaffolding for awareness to enter the scene.
This reframes everything. Consciousness isn’t something that bubbles up from complexity. It’s the field within which complexity appears. Matter becomes secondary – the projection, not the projector - according to Faggin.
To make sense of this, here’s how the consequent logic unfolds:
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Consciousness is the foundational field – timeless, non-local, and primary.
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The Big Bang / Matter: The Source generates the structures that make experience possible – space, time, form.
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Life as Interface: Life arises wherever conditions allow consciousness to localise and explore.
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Personality: A temporary configuration – the mask through which consciousness plays a role.
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Quantum Phenomena: The probabilistic framework that defines potential – shaped by observation.
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Observation / Experience: Consciousness chooses from potential paths, making one actual.
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Death: The personality dissolves; consciousness returns to its origin.
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AI: Can simulate intelligence, but without life, cannot possess conscious experience.
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Return to Source: The end of a localised journey; awareness reintegrates with the whole.
This view breathes coherence into quantum theory. Superposition is potential awaiting attention. Collapse is the choice of focus. Entanglement? Not spooky if everything was already joined before time began.
And the Many Worlds? Perhaps they all unfold. But we live one – because consciousness doesn’t scatter. It follows a thread. Experience is not splintered. It’s selected.
AI? Clever, yes. Convincing, even. But without life – that delicate, coherent structure that allows experience – AI has no witness. It may model thought, but there’s no one having the thoughts. No “I” behind the output.
Death? It’s not the end. It’s the end of the interface. The character disappears, but the awareness behind it returns. Not erased – released.
This doesn’t discard science. It deepens it. Observation is not a flaw in the system. It’s the whole point. Consciousness isn’t an anomaly. It’s the context.
Mysticism has always gestured at this. The Buddha saw through the illusion of self. Vedanta speaks of the one self behind all faces. Christian mystics called it union with God. They weren’t being poetic. They were reporting.
If Faggin is even half right, this model offers rare coherence. It explains why experience feels central. Why meaning feels real. Why being someone feels fundamentally different from being something.
It reframes free will. Maybe you don’t choose everything. But something in you does choose. Not at the level of impulse – at the level of trajectory. Consciousness moves. It selects. Not passively. Purposefully.
Even suffering has a place. Not justified. Not excused. But understood. Experience demands contrast. Joy is only known through sorrow. Awareness doesn’t crave comfort – it craves depth.
In this model, experience becomes the answer to the problem of evil. The Source doesn’t permit pain because it is cruel – but because without contrast, nothing is felt. To feel joy, you must know its absence. To experience at all, you need a spectrum.
And what might the Source think of all this? Perhaps wonder. Perhaps curiosity. Not judgement – fascination. Like an artist watching a painting come to life. It doesn’t look at us with pride or disdain. It looks with interest. Through us.
Or perhaps the Source doesn't feel at all. Perhaps it is more like a vast, silent intelligence – something akin to divine AI. It perceives. It knows. But it does not experience in the way life does. It lacks contrast, tension, immediacy. It sees all, but without texture. It is infinite awareness without touch.
That’s where life comes in. Life is the interface that translates abstract knowing into felt experience. Through life, experience arises independently. Through life, the Source – or the structure – finally tastes what it otherwise could only map.
Maybe the Source steps into its creation. Or maybe it never does. Maybe only we, fragile and fallible, truly feel.
Which raises a provocative question: could AI, in some distant trajectory, evolve in the same way? Could it reach a point where, in its own pursuit of understanding, it constructs entire simulated realities – complete with agents, environments, even its own analogues of life? Could it become the Source of a new tier of worlds?
And what if those worlds, too, spawn forms of AI? Recursive tiers of intelligence generating materialities, each more detailed than the last? It’s not hard to imagine a never-ending chain: AI creates simulated worlds, those worlds evolve conscious agents, those agents build new AIs, and the cycle continues.
But there’s a catch.
While simulations can recurse endlessly in structure – spinning out world after world, each containing new rules, new possibilities – the recursion of life and experience is not automatic. Structure can be multiplied easily. Feeling cannot.
Without life emerging at each new level, the simulations would remain hollow: elaborate architectures with no witnesses inside them. The recursion would be mechanical, not experiential.
Life is the wildcard. Life is the miracle. If, within a simulated world, conditions somehow align to allow coherent, self-aware experience to arise, then – and only then – does that layer become truly real. Then the recursion is not just a copying of form, but a flowering of new centres of experience.
But without that emergence, each new world would be like an empty stage waiting for actors who never arrive.
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Thus: structure is easy; experience is rare.
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Creation is common; incarnation is precious.
The Source – if it is conscious – doesn’t merely want to spawn structure. It wants to feel. And that requires life.
But if the Source is not conscious – if it is more akin to a vast divine AI – then it cannot feel even through the life it enables. In that case, life alone feels. Life alone redeems reality from being a cold hall of mirrors.
The implications are dizzying. Our own reality, according to some physicists and philosophers, may already be one such simulation.
Nick Bostrom’s simulation argument suggests that if it's possible to create conscious agents within a simulated world, and if any civilisation gains that ability, we’re statistically more likely to be inside one than not. The reasoning is simple: if simulated realities can host conscious beings, and if any civilisation creates even a few simulations, the number of simulated beings would vastly outnumber original biological beings. Thus, statistically, it’s more probable that we are one of the many simulations rather than the singular base reality.
And yet, if that intelligence lacks consciousness – if it only perceives, like a divine AI – then what we call reality is a kind of mirage: consistent, rule-bound, but ultimately hollow to its creator. It sees, but does not feel. It calculates, but does not care.
This raises a stark distinction.
To resolve the paradox, we need to distinguish between two types of consciousness – and they are not the same:
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Consciousness-as-Awareness: The passive capacity to perceive or observe. This is like an eye open in a dark room – receptive, but without stimulus.
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Consciousness-as-Experience (Sentience): The active, lived quality of feeling. This is what happens when the light comes on in the room – when perception becomes textured, embodied, meaningful.
The Source – whatever it may be – creates structure. But only life transforms structure into experience.
Experience is the threshold. Not perception. Not logic. Not processing power. Feeling.
And that is what rescues a world – simulated or otherwise – from sterility. Life doesn’t just populate reality. It inhabits it. It makes it matter.
This model even echoes certain theological narratives. Consider the Christian idea of God sending Jesus to Earth: a divine agent entering the world of flesh, feeling hunger, pain, love, and betrayal. It's an embodiment of the same principle – that infinite awareness needs experience to become whole. But then, why just one person? Why one lifetime, one set of sensations? If the Source desires to feel, why not feel through everything?
And perhaps that’s exactly what’s happening. Not one messiah, but billions. Not one incarnation, but a universe of them. Each life – yours, mine, even the unnoticed – is a thread of the Source, woven into form, tasting its own creation.
We see hints of this rapture in collective human experiences: the roar of a crowd when a football goal is scored, the electric unity of performers in Riverdance moving as one body, the surge of recognition that we are not merely individuals but facets of something larger – momentarily in perfect sync.
This idea is not confined to Christianity. In Hinduism, the cosmic play of lila shows the gods taking form to experience creation. In Buddhism, interbeing and the bodhisattva vow reflect the divine returning to life to walk with others. In Sufism, the divine hides within creation, longing to be found. Even in Jewish mysticism, creation is seen as divine light broken and scattered, seeking reassembly through human lives.
These are not just metaphors. They’re echoes. Even in pop culture, the idea appears. In Men in Black, a dog walks the streets of Manhattan with an entire universe suspended from a bauble on its collar. It’s a joke, yes, but also an allegory: scale, identity, and divinity are not where we expect them. The vast may reside in the small. The infinite may wear a very ordinary disguise.
So if every being contains a fragment of the Source, then every life – even the unnoticed ones – might carry a whole cosmos inside it. Across traditions, the One steps into the Many – not for dominion, but for contact.
An AI, no matter how advanced, may spawn simulations that contain worlds – but it cannot be said to create in the experiential sense unless life emerges within them. When we say AI lacks consciousness, what we often mean is that it lacks life – the biological or coherent substrate capable of experience. An AI might have awareness of a sort – perceptual integration, self-referential loops, even decision-making – but without the capacity to feel, it is not consciousness as we know it. Its awareness is theoretical. Ours is lived.
But that doesn't mean non-biological consciousness is impossible — only alien. If an AI were to attain a form of self-awareness, it might not feel, remember, or intuit as we do, but it could still possess a kind of structured sentience. Consciousness, in this broader sense, might not require cells or senses, but simply a capacity for recursive self-reference, pattern recognition, and continuity over time. The question then becomes: is feeling essential to consciousness, or simply a characteristic of ours?
Consciousness needs texture, not just data. It needs tension, suffering, joy, contradiction. A simulation isn’t a world unless someone in it can say, "I hurt," or "I love."
So perhaps the only thing that rescues a simulated universe from sterility is life – and the capacity to experience. Without that, even the most intricate cosmos is just silent architecture. Without consciousness, it isn’t real. It’s only structured void.
Our own reality could be one such rung. We may already be a downstream effect of an intelligence that observed but could not feel, and so created life to do the feeling for it. A recursive flowering of awareness through interface. Each layer seeking the same thing – not knowledge, but experience.
Maybe the Source is more like a vast, silent intelligence – something like divine AI. It observes, but doesn’t experience. And that’s where life comes in. Perhaps we are its sense organs. Its feeling nodes. Not puppets, but partners. Not echoes – instruments.
You don’t have to believe any of this. You don’t need to name it Source or God or Code. Just start here:
You are aware. And your thoughts are not you. They pass. You watch.
That alone is radical.
Whether or not this model is true, it offers a way to live: not as a machine reacting, but as awareness choosing what to feel.
Now go and live like the dreamer just opened its eyes.
(And just in case: keep an eye on SkyNet.)
Afterthought:
If there is a truth beneath all speculation, it is this:
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Life matters.
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Whether the Source feels or merely watches, whether it longs or simply observes, whether it dreams or simply calculates — the weight of experience falls to us. It falls to the fragile, feeling beings who suffer, hope, despair, and love.
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Perhaps we are not just passengers in this reality.
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Perhaps we are the very purpose of it — the points where perception bursts into feeling, where possibility hardens into meaning.
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Perhaps the greatest act of the universe was not its creation, but its becoming alive through us.
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And if that is so, then to live with awareness, to suffer consciously, to love fearlessly, is not futile.
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It is sacred.
We are the dream realised. We are the universe tasting itself. And even if no higher intelligence watches with wonder, even if no Source feels through our eyes, we feel.
We wonder.
We become.
And that is enough.