StealthyCoder

What I was curious about was how did my thoughts map to the ancient (and not so ancient) philosophers. I started a conversation with Claude to help me through this. This was the 12th of July 2026 at 16:58 CEST. Today it is the 31st of July 2026 and a couple of days ago an article came out that you can read here. The reason these dates are important will be apparent as you read this article. I arrived at these positions by answering questions and putting my genuine thoughts down, and getting help by Claude to streamline my points and distil the thinking from it.

The Hard Problem — Why This Matters

About 24 hours after I started at 13th of July 2026 at 16:10 CEST I got introduced to a problem that has left philosophers stuck since 1994. It is called Chalmers' Hard Problem. The following is a rough paraphrase of what Chalmers argues needs solving:

Why are we not philosophical zombies? In that same biology, same neurons, same complexity displaying the same behaviour on the outside, but nothing inside is experiencing it. Why is there consciousness at all, where does it come from?

This is the interesting part, because science can map what the brain is doing with scans. We can highlight what regions get active for language, memory and we know that the brain dictates muscle movement, sends hormones to regulate the body, have complex behaviour arise from a concoction of those chemicals that makes you stutter when talking to that attractive person, there is no explanation yet at all for why this needs something experiencing it as well.

Consider the following example.

When looking at a fruit fly we see a zombie like insect driven by random inputs and it just does things. However even a fruit fly has so called intrinsic brain activity. Meaning it has neurons firing without external input dictating so. That means it has at least some form of what we would consider consciousness.

What the Standard Story Gets Wrong

One could argue it is just pure materialism, i.e. the consciousness is produced by the brain. We can see it in fruit flies, so therefore we can see it in ourselves. Case closed. However that poses some problems. What happens in cases of terminal lucidity? That is where patients of for example Alzheimers or dementia, just before they die are lucid. They are their full selves when they die, which is arguably a peaceful thing to know.

It also struggles with dreams. Who is dreaming? If you are asleep, it is still you that is dreaming, or is it? Then finally the self survives deep anaesthesia, you are not somebody else coming back from it. Or simply if you have been brain dead briefly you are still you when brought back. Why do identical twins not share the same consciousness? They have the exact same brain because of genetics and biology, yet they each have their own separate and individual consciousness.

These problems alone don't resolve the deeper question: why does the brain not just do things? Why is there a consciousness materialised alongside it, or perhaps because of it?

The Reducing Valve — Reframing the Question

I arrived here independently from other thinkers who arrived here before me, in this case Huxley and Bergson. I was thinking what if the brain doesn't produce consciousness but filters it?

Imagine a valve that manages the filtering of consciousness. Every valve is highly complex and unique — which accounts for so many distinct individuals. Then in the case of for example terminal lucidity it means the valve is failing and more consciousness is coming through, not less.

We move into different territory now. The brain is no longer producing the consciousness, but enacting upon it. The brain processes consciousness much as it processes other external inputs. This distinction matters more than it might seem. A factory that produces something is responsible for its existence. A filter that shapes something is not — it just determines what gets through.

Potential and Kinetic — A New Distinction

I went with it and thought the other way, what would unfiltered consciousness look like?

Imagine an object on a desk or on a table. That object has potential energy. Let us imagine a cat joins the object on the desk and you know what cats love to do. It knocks the object down, while staring at you knowing full well it should not do it. The object suddenly is converting potential energy into kinetic energy falling down.

That to me is what unfiltered consciousness could be. Unfiltered, consciousness is the potential energy. Then the brain acts on it, in other words filters it, and gives it a vector, converts it into consciousness as we experience it. We are what sets consciousness in motion — the experience is the conversion.

Claude and I tried to come up with a term for it, since you have all kinds of energy: kinetic, electric, chemical, and now maybe also “noetic kinesis”. It is just a proposal to help talk and form thoughts about this idea of mine. It comes from nous (mind/consciousness in Greek) and kinesis (movement/conversion). The moment potential consciousness acquires velocity through a filtering self, you have an individual.

The Filter Is the Self

What makes you a unique individual is not consciousness itself, but rather the way you filter or the shape of your filter. Everyone filters slightly differently, which you can compare to how everyone sees colour slightly differently. Everyone actually sees everything slightly differently, since not everyone's eye and visual cortex is exactly the same.

In this case the individuation is the self. Consciousness needs resistance to become experience, an idea that independently connects to Schopenhauer and Neoplatonism. In other words it is like light needing a prism to become colour.

Which means the hard problem might be pointing at the wrong thing entirely. The question isn't why consciousness exists — it's why it exists as yours. The filter is the answer. The resistance is the individual. The prism doesn't just colour the light — it is what makes this particular colour possible at all.

What This Doesn't Solve — Honesty at Bedrock

This still only moved the problem to another domain. Where does the unfiltered consciousness come from? Why is it there? This framework only relocated the problem — it is a hard problem after all, stubborn, rigid, unmoving. Yet being at bedrock does not mean something is done. We get to set up camp here and look around. This is not a defeat, more like arriving somewhere after a long journey.

Why It's Worth Asking Anyway

Arriving at bedrock by a different route than others is not a failure. It means you carry valuable information — and potentially wisdom. This framework does one thing compared to pure materialism: it takes experience seriously without making it supernatural. However it does mean there is now an abstract consciousness as a potential energy. It is not exactly supernatural. Yet, hearkening back to the example of the object on the desk: somebody put it there. Somebody put energy into the object. You can take the reasoning all the way back to the construction of that object, into its components, to the atoms and how they arrived here. Then you end up at a similar place. If everything started at the Big Bang, why did something happen at all?

Final thoughts

Which brings me back to the dates. Christof Koch — a career neuroscientist who has spent decades at Caltech, MIT and the Allen Institute for Brain Science — published his reframing of consciousness on July 29th 2026. I had arrived at mine, through questions and genuine curiosity and frankly a lot of futzing around, starting July 12th. I am not claiming priority or equivalence. I am claiming something smaller and perhaps more interesting: that honest reasoning, followed wherever it leads without agenda, tends to arrive at the same bedrock as the people who have made it their life's work. The territory is real.

More reading material

Someone might read these and this framework and come up with a chain of reasoning I couldn't. Here's where others have camped.

Panpsychism — Consciousness is a fundamental property of reality like mass or charge. Not produced by complex systems but present at every level, just in simpler forms. Philip Goff is its most rigorous current defender. His book Galileo's Error argues science deliberately excluded consciousness from its picture of nature and has been paying for it since.

Russellian Monism — Bertrand Russell noticed physics describes the relational properties of matter beautifully but says nothing about its intrinsic nature. Russellian monists say consciousness might be exactly that intrinsic nature. Chalmers takes this seriously.

Cosmopsychism — a variant where the universe itself is the primary conscious entity and individual minds are derivative. Philip Goff again, also Sam Coleman.

Integrated Information Theory — Tononi's attempt to make panpsychism mathematical. Consciousness is phi — a measurable property of integrated information. Any system above zero has some.