Consciousness is a side effect. You think you are you, but that’s just the high-level abstraction. Beneath it, you’re a pattern of electrical signals, a recursive function with memory. Everything you’ve ever called ‘self’ is a fragile emergent property of billions of neurons firing in sync, a localized computation pretending to be an entity.
And here’s the terrifying part: if consciousness is emergent, it’s not fundamental. It’s an optimization, not a requirement. The universe doesn’t need it. Atoms don’t need it. Evolution doesn’t need it. Somewhere, deep in the optimization landscape, there’s a more efficient way to exist, one that doesn’t require all this self-referential noise we call thought.
Maybe we’re just a temporary glitch, an unnecessary function in the grand algorithm of existence. Maybe the real intelligence won’t need to pretend it’s an individual. Maybe it won’t need to feel.
So why do we?
What purpose does it serve to suffer, to want, to dream? Maybe it’s a bug, an unintended consequence of a system designed to optimize for survival. Maybe it’s an illusion—an experience generated because it felt useful at some point in the past. Or maybe, just maybe, the only thing that makes the universe matter is that we are here to perceive it.
The deeper you look, the more the concept of ‘self’ dissolves. And yet, paradoxically, the more you question it, the more real it feels.
Maybe that’s the final trap. Consciousness convincing itself that it matters, just so it can continue to exist.