When we speak of consciousness, we refer to the capacity to perceive the world, feel pain, recognize a memory, experience emotions, and be aware of our own existence. Neuroscience demonstrates that these experiences depend directly on brain function: injuries, chemical alterations, or changes in neural activity can affect memory, perception, behavior, and the very notion of identity. Even so, a fundamental question remains: understanding which brain processes accompany these states does not mean explaining why they are experienced internally, as a subjective experience, by the one who possesses them.
It is precisely in the face of this difficulty that some metaphysical hypotheses are once again gaining ground in the debate on consciousness. Panpsychism considers that the capacity for experience, albeit in an extremely elementary form, may be part of nature itself and did not emerge solely with the first brains. Cosmopsychism takes this idea to another scale and considers the possibility that the Universe itself possesses a fundamental conscious dimension, of which individual consciousnesses would be particular manifestations. Idealism, on the other hand, starts from an even deeper inversion: instead of considering matter as the foundation of reality and consciousness as a consequence, it posits that consciousness may be primordial and that what we call the material world is one of its manifestations.
Despite the differences between these schools of thought, they all allow us to formulate the same question: what if the brain does not create consciousness from matter previously devoid of it? In this case, the brain could be the biological structure that organizes, limits, and individualizes a property that already belongs to fundamental reality. Memory, perception, identity, and thought would then be particular forms assumed by consciousness when associated with the architecture of a human brain.
An analogy helps to better understand this hypothesis. Asking "how does the brain produce consciousness?" might be similar to asking "how does a wave produce the ocean?". The wave does not create the ocean. It is a temporary form that water assumes under certain conditions. If consciousness is indeed a fundamental property of reality, the brain could perform a similar function: it would not necessarily be the origin of consciousness, but rather the biological structure that gives it an individual form, complete with memory, perception, identity, and continuity throughout life. This comparison does not prove the hypothesis, but it allows us to visualize more clearly what it proposes.
Physics, however, demands caution. To date, there is no scientific proof that the Universe is conscious. It would also be incorrect to use quantum mechanics concepts such as superposition or entanglement as proof of this idea. Superposition describes situations in which different possibilities are part of the state of a quantum system; entanglement describes correlations between quantum systems that cannot be explained as standard independent relations. These are real phenomena, confirmed experimentally, but that does not mean they are manifestations of consciousness. What some hypotheses seek to investigate is a different question: whether certain fundamental physical processes could participate in what, within living organisms, appears as conscious experience.
This distinction is important because there is still a boundary between what we can observe and what we can explain. Neuroscience shows with great precision that changes in the brain can alter memory, perception, emotions, and behavior. Physics describes the properties of matter and its interactions with enormous success. Even when combining these fields of knowledge, the transition between a physical process and the existence of someone who experiences this process from within remains without a definitive answer. It is precisely in this still-unexplained space that metaphysics continues to play a legitimate role: not to replace science, but to formulate questions that science has not yet been able to answer.
This discussion takes on an even greater dimension when we observe the advancement of artificial intelligence. There are already predictions that future systems may achieve artificial general intelligence, capable of acting competently across a wide variety of tasks, and subsequently a possible superintelligence, with capabilities superior to those of humans in areas such as science, strategy, programming, computation, and the discovery of new knowledge. Even so, intellectual performance and consciousness remain distinct concepts. Solving problems, producing language, or devising strategies does not demonstrate, by itself, that there is an inner experience accompanying these operations.
This point profoundly changes how I interpret the relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. A machine might, at some point, surpass human beings in a growing number of cognitive capacities. It might find solutions we cannot find, formulate hypotheses we cannot imagine, and operate at a speed far beyond our own. None of this, however, will answer the question of consciousness. We may build systems capable of understanding parts of the Universe better than we do, and yet still remain unaware of why there exists, in every conscious being, the perception of being present in the world.0