Bruh. We literally don’t even know what consciousness is.
Probably the smartest living human has spent decades looking into it as a passion project after he and Hawking completed Einsteins physics.
But dude is a realist, he’s 90 years old and long ago accepted he won’t live to hear the answer.
We don’t know how anesthesia works either, so he looked into that and the best he got was it interrupts a quantom wave collapse in our brains, but anesthesia shuts us down when some of those quantom waves have stopped collapsing, but not enough to make the math work out for it to be the cause.
So maybe Roger Penrose just wasted his retirement on this passion project?
In all likelihood we won’t know for decades, and even then it doesn’t really answer the question.
To give you some idea how slowly this shit moves, Penrose just won the 2020 Novel in Physics for shit he theorized in 1964…
And again, this is probably the smartest living human, has spent decades looking into it, and his result was “I dunno, maybe look at this?”
So if anyone ever tries to tell you that anyone knows what consciousness is. You know they’re talking out of their ass.
As long as capitalism drives science, we’ll never know. Because there’s no money in finding it out, and we’re at the point of looking at freaking quantum wave collapse inside of neurons, it’s not exactly something that’s easy or cheap to investigate.