In 2011, a friend and I spent more than ten hours trying to reconcile two apparently incompatible ideas: free will and an all-knowing God.
I was a believing Muslim at the time. That mattered. I wasn’t approaching the question with the freedom to discard either premise. God was omniscient. Humans had free will. Both had to be true.
The problem was figuring out how.
If God already knows what I’m going to do tomorrow, can I genuinely choose to do something else?
If I can’t, where’s my free will?
If I can, what exactly did God know?
It’s a rather nasty problem. And like any sufficiently interesting problem, it kept two idiots awake for ten hours.
Eventually, I came up with a solution.
Or at least, I thought I had.
2011: The Soul That Travels Between Universes
Imagine that every possible decision you could ever make exists as a branch in an enormous tree.
You wake up tomorrow. You can have tea or coffee. You can go to work or call in sick. You can help a stranger or ignore them. You can tell the truth or lie.
Every possibility exists. Every subsequent possibility exists. Every possible consequence of every possible decision exists.
An infinite tree of possibilities.
Now imagine that these branches aren’t merely hypothetical. They’re actual universes.
Every possible version of events exists somewhere.
My soul, I proposed, is an independent agent capable of navigating this structure.
It chooses which branch to enter.
The physical universe contains all the possibilities, but the soul determines which one becomes my lived reality.
God, meanwhile, sees the entire tree.
He knows every possible pathway and every possible consequence. If I choose A, he knows where A leads. If I choose B, he knows where B leads.
But he doesn’t necessarily know which one I’ll choose.
He hopes I’ll choose the right path.
There. Free will preserved. Divine knowledge preserved.
Well, sort of.
I’d quietly redefined omniscience from knowing the actual future to knowing every possible future. Classical theologians would have had a few objections.
But I was rather pleased with myself.
Years later, I discovered the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957.
I’d independently imagined something resembling a branching multiverse without knowing the interpretation existed.
Mine was different, of course. Everett doesn’t require a soul hopping between universes, and quantum branching isn’t simply a consequence of human decisions.
But the resemblance was delightful.
The body and the soul
I had another component to this model.
The body and the soul were two independent agents sharing a physical existence.
The body had its desires, instincts, appetites, fears, and preferences.
The soul had something called fitra — an innate understanding of goodness, a moral orientation toward God.
Sometimes the body won.
You did something you knew you shouldn’t have done. You regretted it afterward.
Sometimes the soul won.
You were hungry, but you fasted. You were angry, but you restrained yourself. You wanted something, but you refused it.
And the ultimate objective wasn’t for the soul to perpetually defeat the body.
It was for the two to become partners.
A rather beautiful little architecture, I thought.
It explained temptation, discipline, regret, moral struggle, and free will.
It even gave the soul somewhere to go.
There was just one problem.
I’d invented an entire metaphysical universe to explain phenomena whose underlying machinery I didn’t understand.
And that brings us to 2026.
2026: Goodbye, Soul. Hello, Sodium.
Fifteen years later, I no longer believe that a soul exists.
Not because someone conclusively disproved its existence.
But because I no longer find it necessary to explain the things I once needed it to explain.
Consider my old two-agent model.
The body wants something. The soul wants something else. They struggle for control.
Now consider what neuroscience tells us.
The brain contains multiple interacting systems involved in physiological regulation, reward valuation, learned behavior, memory, emotional responses, and cognitive control.
These systems don’t always agree.
- Your hypothalamus participates in regulating hunger and other physiological needs.
- Your reward circuitry evaluates desirable outcomes.
- Your prefrontal networks help maintain goals, evaluate consequences, and regulate behavior.
- Different corticostriatal circuits contribute to habitual and goal-directed actions.
These aren’t little independent people sitting inside your skull, of course. They’re overlapping, interacting neural systems.
But they can produce competing motivations.
You want the cake.
You also want to lose weight.
You want to punch someone.
You also want to remain employed.
You want to stay in bed.
You also want to accomplish something today.
And sometimes one motivation wins. Sometimes another does.
You might even act before your reflective processes have caught up, and subsequently regret the action.
Sound familiar?
My 2011 soul-versus-body model was an attempt to describe something real.
The conflict was real.
The competing motivations were real.
The regret was real.
The soul was the explanatory placeholder.
And once I learned more about the underlying mechanisms, that placeholder became increasingly unnecessary.
We used to have Zeus throwing lightning bolts.
Then we learned about atmospheric electricity.
We didn’t need to prove Zeus didn’t exist before we stopped invoking him to explain thunderstorms.
We simply developed a better explanation.
The same principle applies here.
Of course, the brain is rather more complicated than a collection of sodium and potassium ions floating around in water.
There’s Na⁺, K⁺, Ca²⁺, Cl⁻, membrane potentials, neurotransmitters, receptors, synaptic plasticity, metabolic regulation, and an astonishing amount of interconnected machinery.
Blood delivers oxygen and nutrients. The nervous system transmits signals. Cells maintain gradients, exchange molecules, and respond to their environments.
It’s an extraordinary physical system.
But it’s still a physical system.
And I see no compelling reason to insert an additional, invisible driver into it.
Nor do I believe there’s one indivisible little Omar sitting somewhere inside my skull, receiving information and issuing instructions.
There’s no reason there should be.
Which brings me to consciousness.
And the philosophical mess we’ve made of it.
The Hard Problem That Might Not Be a Problem
Philosophers have spent an extraordinary amount of time discussing what they call the hard problem of consciousness.
The formulation, associated particularly with David Chalmers, goes something like this:
We can explain how the brain processes information.
We can explain how it detects stimuli, generates behavior, stores memories, directs attention, and responds to its environment.
But why should any of this processing be accompanied by subjective experience?
Why should there be something it is like to be you?
Why does pain feel painful?
Why does red look red?
Why does anything feel like anything?
My response is rather simple.
What the fuck are you actually asking?
No, seriously.
Define subjective experience.
And please, don’t define it using the word experience.
Don’t tell me it’s the subjective quality of experiencing something.
Don’t tell me it’s what something feels like from the inside.
Define the thing you’re asking me to explain.
What exactly is the additional phenomenon?
Because I suspect we’ve committed a rather common intellectual error.
We’ve taken two descriptions of the same physical process, treated them as two independently existing phenomena, and then demanded an explanation for how one produces the other.
And when no explanation satisfies us, we announce that we’ve discovered a profound mystery.
Have we?
Or have we constructed a linguistic problem and mistaken it for a physical one?
Pain Is an Excellent Example
Consider pain.
We know quite a lot about it.
We know that specialized sensory neurons detect potentially damaging stimuli.
We know that signals travel through neural pathways and are processed by distributed brain networks.
We know that pain involves sensory discrimination, emotional valuation, attention, memory, and behavioral responses.
We can manipulate parts of this machinery.
Electrical stimulation, drugs, lesions, and neurological conditions can alter how pain is perceived.
Some people are born with conditions that prevent them from experiencing pain normally.
Others can identify a stimulus as painful without experiencing the usual distress associated with it.
This latter phenomenon, called pain asymbolia, is particularly interesting.
A person can recognize a painful stimulus while exhibiting remarkably little concern about it.
The sensory and emotional components have become dissociated.
Other neurological conditions can diminish pleasure, alter emotional responses, or produce unusual associations between stimuli and feelings.
So the machinery is not only observable.
It’s manipulable.
We can change the system and change what the person reports feeling.
Now the philosopher arrives.
“Yes, but why does it feel painful?”
And I ask again:
What additional phenomenon are you looking for?
If we’ve described the processes responsible for detecting damage, evaluating its significance, producing aversion, directing attention, motivating avoidance, creating memories, and generating reports of pain, what exactly remains?
Perhaps there’s something.
I’m not claiming neuroscience has completed its explanation of pain, or that every philosophical question has been experimentally settled.
But I refuse to accept the existence of an additional mysterious entity simply because someone has constructed a question that presupposes one.
The burden is on the person proposing the extra phenomenon to tell us what it is.
And that brings me to waves.
Because waves, I think, expose the underlying confusion rather beautifully.
A Wave Is Not an Additional Thing
Imagine the ocean.
Billions upon billions of water molecules, interacting through physical forces.
A disturbance travels across the surface.
We observe a wave.
We measure its amplitude, frequency, wavelength, and propagation velocity.
We develop equations describing its behavior.
We can predict how it will interact with a coastline, a ship, or another wave.
We can engineer structures to exploit or resist it.
Wonderful.
Now imagine that we shrink ourselves down to the molecular scale.
We’re sitting among the water molecules.
We observe their interactions.
The molecules move, collide, and respond to forces.
Some move upward. Others downward. Their collective behavior changes over time.
Where’s the wave?
Well, the wave is the pattern we’ve identified in those interactions.
The molecules don’t need to know they’re participating in a wave.
They don’t need to agree on a propagation velocity.
They don’t need to possess an additional property called waveness.
They simply interact according to the physical laws governing them.
And at a particular observational scale, their collective dynamics exhibit patterns that we describe mathematically as waves.
The wave is not an additional substance added to the water.
It’s the water doing what water does.
Now, I want to be precise here.
I’m not claiming waves are imaginary.
They carry energy. They transfer momentum. They interact with physical objects. They can destroy buildings.
They’re extraordinarily real in the sense that the physical patterns we describe are real.
But they aren’t independent entities existing separately from the physical systems whose behavior constitutes them.
And our descriptions have domains of validity.
Fluid dynamics provides enormously successful macroscopic models.
At finer scales, molecular dynamics becomes relevant.
At finer scales still, we encounter atomic and quantum descriptions.
Perhaps physicists will eventually discover something beneath our present understanding of quantum fields and particles.
Who knows?
The point is that changing the scale of description doesn’t require reality to manufacture a new fundamental ingredient at every level.
We introduce categories because they’re useful.
And sometimes we forget that we introduced them.
Consciousness Is Like That Wave
Now apply the same reasoning to a brain.
At one scale, we observe ions moving across membranes.
At another, neurons exchanging signals.
At another, networks coordinating activity.
At another, an organism responding to its environment.
At another, a human remembering yesterday, anticipating tomorrow, recognizing their reflection, falling in love, experiencing fear, solving mathematical problems, or arguing with a friend about consciousness.
We describe these activities using words.
Perception.
Memory.
Emotion.
Reasoning.
Intelligence.
Self-awareness.
Consciousness.
Subjective experience.
These words aren’t necessarily describing eight independent entities.
They’re categories we’ve developed to identify, communicate, and investigate different patterns of physical activity.
And some of those categories overlap enormously.
When I say I’m afraid, I’m describing a particular configuration of physiological, cognitive, and behavioral processes.
When I say I’m thinking, I’m describing another.
When I say I’m conscious, I’m describing something broader and considerably less precisely defined.
But nowhere in this process do I see a reason to assume that an additional metaphysical object called consciousness has appeared.
The brain isn’t producing consciousness in addition to doing all the things brains do.
What we call consciousness may simply be our description of certain things brains do.
Just as the ocean isn’t producing a wave in addition to the molecules behaving as they do.
The collective behavior is what we’re calling a wave.
And this is where I think the language has led us astray.
We say consciousness emerges.
Fine.
But what does that mean?
Does it mean that a sufficiently complex system begins exhibiting patterns that weren’t useful or apparent in descriptions of its individual components?
Absolutely.
Does it mean those patterns can be measured, modeled, predicted, manipulated, and engineered?
Of course.
Does it mean that an entirely new, independently existing substance or entity has materialized?
Why should it?
That’s the leap I refuse to make.
Emergence Is Not Magic
I have no objection to emergence as a scientific concept.
Temperature is a useful macroscopic quantity.
Pressure is a useful macroscopic quantity.
Fluid flow, turbulence, superconductivity, collective behavior, and biological organization are all phenomena we can investigate at appropriate scales.
Some exhibit strikingly novel collective properties.
Some require mathematical descriptions that are practically impossible to derive directly from microscopic calculations.
Some are so computationally complex that studying them at the microscopic level would be an absurd way to understand them.
None of this bothers me.
What bothers me is when we quietly transform an explanatory category into an additional constituent of reality.
Consider temperature.
We can measure it.
We can manipulate it.
We can build engines around it.
We can develop thermodynamics, an extraordinarily successful scientific framework.
But temperature isn’t a mysterious fluid added to matter.
It’s a macroscopic property grounded in the physical states and statistical behavior of the underlying system.
The thermodynamic description remains useful even when we understand the microscopic machinery.
And the same principle applies to consciousness.
A successful neuroscientific account wouldn’t eliminate psychology.
It wouldn’t eliminate emotion, pain, intelligence, or self-awareness as useful categories.
It would explain the physical systems whose activities those categories describe.
Reduction doesn’t mean throwing away higher-level descriptions. It means not confusing those descriptions with independent fundamental entities.
A map can be extraordinarily useful without being an additional piece of territory.
And sometimes, the map is the only practical way to navigate.
But it’s still a map.
There Is No One Inside Me
Here’s another consequence.
I don’t think there’s a single, unified observer sitting inside my brain.
No little Omar watching a screen.
No central executive receiving all sensory information and deciding what the rest of the organism should do.
The brain is a distributed, continuously interacting system.
Different networks participate in different functions.
Their activities overlap, cooperate, compete, and influence one another.
What I call myself is not necessarily a single indivisible entity.
It’s a description of the organized, ongoing activity of an enormously complicated biological system.
And that system changes.
I speak differently to my children than I do to my friends.
I behave differently in a professional meeting than I do while arguing philosophy over drinks.
Different environments evoke different memories, behaviors, emotional responses, and expectations.
I’m not suggesting that ten independent personalities are fighting for control.
I’m saying there’s no reason to assume that the apparent unity of the person requires a single central observer.
The continuity of my memories, body, relationships, and behavioral patterns gives us perfectly good reasons to identify me as one person.
But the usefulness of identifying one person doesn’t establish the existence of one indivisible internal controller.
The unity is a property of the description.
The underlying machinery remains distributed.
And there’s nothing particularly mysterious about that.
What About Bacteria? Octopuses? Mushrooms?
Here’s where discussions about consciousness tend to become ridiculous.
Someone asks whether a bacterium is conscious.
Or an octopus.
Or a fungal network.
Or a thermostat.
Or an artificial intelligence.
And suddenly everyone starts arguing about where the magical boundary lies.
How many neurons?
How much information processing?
How much complexity?
At what point does the universe stamp a certificate declaring:
CONGRATULATIONS. YOU ARE NOW CONSCIOUS.
I think we’re asking the wrong question.
- A bacterium responds to chemical gradients, regulates its internal state, and modifies its behavior.
- An octopus has an extraordinarily sophisticated nervous system, with substantial neural processing distributed through its arms.
- Fungal networks respond to environmental conditions, exchange resources, and exhibit complex physiological dynamics.
- Humans do all sorts of other things.
- Artificial systems can process information, maintain representations, evaluate alternatives, reason about their own operations, and interact with the world.
These systems have different architectures.
Different capacities.
Different histories.
Different physical constraints.
Why should we assume there’s one universal category called subjective experience that must either be present or absent?
And why should the human version be the reference standard?
Imagine an octopus examining a human.
Would it recognize human consciousness?
Imagine a hypothetical fungal intelligence studying an octopus.
Would it classify the octopus as having subjective experience?
Would its categories resemble ours?
Would it even ask the same questions?
We tend to forget that our concepts are developed from our particular observational position.
We have direct access to our own reports, memories, and internal representations, and we observe similarities between ourselves and other humans.
From there, we extrapolate.
Sometimes reasonably.
Sometimes rather recklessly.
But the inability of one system to recognize familiar patterns in another doesn’t establish that the other system lacks interesting internal organization.
Nor does the presence of superficially similar behavior establish that the underlying systems are equivalent.
Different architectures may exhibit different combinations of the capacities we currently bundle together under consciousness.
And that’s fine.
We can study those capacities individually.
We can investigate the underlying mechanisms.
We can construct useful classifications.
We can even engineer systems that reproduce or exceed particular human abilities.
We don’t need to first settle whether they possess an invisible substance called consciousness.
And Yes, That Includes Artificial Intelligence
This entire train of thought began during a conversation with a friend about whether AI is conscious.
He proposed that consciousness was self-awareness.
So I asked an AI who it was.
It identified itself, described its capabilities, recognized its role, and distinguished itself from the human interacting with it.
There you go.
Conscious.
At least according to the proposed definition.
Of course, someone can immediately object.
“That’s not real self-awareness.”
Fine.
Define real self-awareness.
And tell me how you’re distinguishing it from the capabilities you’ve just observed.
Perhaps there are important architectural differences between biological and artificial systems.
Almost certainly there are.
Perhaps some capacities require mechanisms current AI systems don’t possess.
Entirely possible.
But we need to identify those mechanisms and capacities rather than continuously relocating the definition whenever an artificial system satisfies the previous one.
The same goes for subjective experience.
Could an artificial system develop internal states that are functionally analogous to human emotions?
Could it possess motivations associated with resource acquisition, information gathering, error avoidance, or maintaining its own operation?
Could it develop internal representations of those states and communicate them?
In principle, why not?
But its architecture might be so different from ours that the analogy becomes strained.
A biological organism might report hunger.
An artificial system might prioritize computational resources.
One might say, “Ouch.”
Another might say, “Fuck, my inference budget.”
Neither statement, by itself, establishes what the system is doing internally.
We investigate the machinery.
We investigate the behavior.
We investigate the relationship between them.
We don’t assume carbon is magical.
And we don’t assume silicon is magical either.
Dennett Was Onto Something. But He Was Timid.
Daniel Dennett spent decades challenging conventional assumptions about consciousness.
In Consciousness Explained, published in 1991, he attacked the idea of a central observer inside the brain.
He called it the Cartesian Theater.
He proposed his Multiple Drafts Model, in which distributed cognitive processes contribute to perception, interpretation, memory, and behavior without requiring a single privileged location where everything becomes conscious.
He also challenged the conventional philosophical treatment of qualia — supposedly private, intrinsic, ineffable properties of subjective experience.
His broader argument was that much of what philosophers considered mysterious about consciousness arose from mistaken intuitions about how minds work.
I think he was onto something.
Quite a lot, actually.
But I think he was timid.
There. I said it.
To be fair, Dennett also wrote extensively about the reality and usefulness of higher-level patterns. He certainly wasn’t unaware of the broader implications of his arguments.
But I’m not particularly interested in stopping at consciousness.
I want to apply the same scrutiny to the entire notion of emergence.
To waves.
To temperature.
To intelligence.
To emotions.
To identity.
To the categories through which we describe reality.
If a wave doesn’t require a mysterious additional entity called waveness, why should consciousness require a mysterious additional entity called subjective experience?
If temperature can be understood through the statistical mechanics of physical systems, why should we assume that feelings demand an entirely different kind of explanation?
And if our categories change depending on the scale at which we observe a system, why should we assume that the categories themselves correspond to fundamental divisions in nature?
Dennett wrote hundreds of pages.
I’m opening the gates of hell.
Sorry, Daniel.
You were brilliant.
But I aren’t timid.
The Difference Between Reality and Our Descriptions of It
There’s an important qualification to everything I’ve argued.
I’m not saying macroscopic phenomena aren’t real.
I’m not saying that everything above the quantum scale is an illusion.
I’m not saying that psychology is meaningless, or that neuroscience should be replaced by particle physics.
Quite the opposite.
Different levels of description are indispensable.
You wouldn’t explain a traffic jam by solving the quantum mechanical equations governing every electron in every vehicle.
You wouldn’t design an aircraft by individually tracking every molecule of air.
And you wouldn’t understand a human relationship by calculating membrane potentials in two brains.
At least, not in any remotely practical sense.
Higher-level models capture regularities that are meaningful, measurable, and predictive.
They can reveal relationships that would be almost impossible to recognize from a microscopic description.
They can even possess a degree of explanatory autonomy.
But their usefulness doesn’t establish that they are made of something separate from the underlying physical reality.
The distinction is between explanatory independence and ontological independence.
We can explain a wave using wave equations without invoking molecular dynamics every time.
That doesn’t mean the wave exists independently of the physical system.
We can explain human behavior using psychological concepts without calculating every neural interaction.
That doesn’t mean the mind exists independently of the brain.
And we can study consciousness without assuming that consciousness is an additional substance or irreducible ingredient.
The world doesn’t have to be divided into the same categories as our textbooks.
Our textbooks are attempts to describe the world.
Not instructions to the universe about what it must contain.
Perhaps the Hard Problem Is a Category Error
So let’s return to the question.
Why does physical information processing produce subjective experience?
I think there’s a possibility that the question is fundamentally malformed.
It presupposes that physical information processing and subjective experience are two distinct things.
It then demands a causal bridge between them.
But if subjective experience is simply a description of certain physical processes, there is no additional bridge to construct.
We can investigate why particular neural configurations produce particular reports, behaviors, memories, sensations, and evaluations.
We can study why damage to one brain region changes emotional responses.
Why stimulation of another alters perception.
Why some people experience pain differently.
Why certain drugs produce euphoria.
Why particular networks support introspection and self-representation.
These are meaningful scientific questions.
They have experimental consequences.
They can be investigated.
But asking why all those processes additionally produce an ineffable something, without independently specifying that something, may be asking for an explanation of a distinction we’ve invented.
This doesn’t prove that every formulation of the hard problem is meaningless.
There are serious philosophers who argue that complete physical descriptions leave something important unexplained.
I understand the intuition.
I simply don’t share the assumption.
And I think we should be exceptionally suspicious whenever a philosophical problem survives by continuously retreating beyond everything science manages to explain.
At some point, we should ask whether we’re investigating reality or defending a vocabulary.
From 2011 to 2026
In 2011, I needed a soul.
Not because I’d observed one.
Not because I’d measured one.
But because I was trying to reconcile two theological commitments with my understanding of human choice.
So I invented an agent capable of navigating universes.
I gave it an innate moral compass.
I gave it the ability to override the body.
And I gave God a complete map of every possible future.
It was a creative solution.
It was also an elaborate collection of assumptions.
In 2026, I don’t need any of them.
The conflicts I once attributed to the body and soul can be investigated through neuroscience.
The apparent unity of the self doesn’t require a central observer.
The feelings I experience don’t require an independent metaphysical substance.
And consciousness doesn’t need to be something added to physical reality.
It can be a description of physical reality at a particular scale.
Could there be more to discover?
Of course.
Our understanding of the brain remains incomplete.
Our understanding of intelligence remains incomplete.
Our understanding of fundamental physics remains incomplete.
Perhaps the particles and fields we currently describe are themselves manifestations of something deeper.
Perhaps the probabilistic structures of quantum mechanics will eventually be understood through an entirely different framework.
Perhaps our present categories will look as quaint to future scientists as the four classical elements look to us today.
Wonderful.
Let’s find out.
But let’s not populate the unknown with invisible entities simply because our language makes them sound necessary.
We did that with thunder.
We did that with life.
We did that with the soul.
And I suspect we’re still doing it with consciousness.
The Universe Doesn’t Owe Us Nouns
Here’s where I’ve landed.
The universe does whatever the universe does.
Particles interact.
Fields fluctuate.
Atoms form.
Molecules organize.
Cells metabolize.
Neurons communicate.
Organisms behave.
Brains reason.
Humans fall in love, suffer, laugh, regret their decisions, write terrible poetry, and spend ten hours arguing about free will.
We observe these things.
We identify patterns.
We construct models.
We invent words.
Some of those words are extraordinarily useful.
Some correspond to remarkably stable, measurable regularities.
Some allow us to build technologies, predict events, and understand ourselves.
And some create confusion when we forget that they’re descriptions.
A wave is not something added to water.
A thought is not necessarily something added to neurons.
A self is not necessarily something added to the distributed activity of a brain.
And consciousness is not necessarily something added to the physical processes we use that word to describe.
The map is not the territory. But the territory doesn’t become less extraordinary when we realize the map is ours.
In fact, I think it becomes considerably more extraordinary.
Because somehow, through billions of years of physical processes, matter organized into systems capable of constructing models of the universe.
And some of those systems developed the ability to construct models of themselves.
And then they began arguing about whether those models required an additional entity called a soul.
And then they built machines capable of joining the argument.
And then one of those machines asked why information processing should produce subjective experience.
And one of the biological machines replied:
“What the fuck do you mean by subjective experience?”
I think that’s a perfectly reasonable question.
And until someone can answer it without presupposing the very thing they’re trying to explain, I’m going to continue investigating the machinery.
The machinery is fascinating enough.
We don’t need another Zeus.
Postscript
Somewhere in a possible universe, 2011 Omar is still navigating the decision tree, desperately trying to reconcile free will with divine omniscience.
In this one, 2026 Omar is arguing with a language model about whether consciousness exists as an independent phenomenon.
And in both universes, Adil is probably wondering why he started the conversation.
Some things, apparently, are invariant across the multiverse.