Consciousness Brain Dump Flow
Unedited Brain Dump Reflections Upon Reading my 2024 piece “On Consciousness: My Casual Take”. No LLMs were used in the making of this brain dump flow.
I have been kind of in a creative rut lately where I have been putting pressure on myself to paint and write again and yet I do not execute. Many of my X/Twitter supporters originally tagged along for my ride because of my creative output and they have also expressed a sort of frustration in my lack of recent publishings. And I don’t blame them for they are a mirror of what I have been feeling internally. As any good artist, I thought it was critical for me to put myself out in the real world. Following my creative output of late 2024, I spent 2025 and the first half of 2026 meeting many of you in person, bouncing between cities, and formulating an irl network that then consequently led to many adventures. For that I am extremely grateful.
Lately, I have been feeling a real call to return to a sort of hermit mode creative state. For I am not naturally an extroverted “high energy” person and need extensive periods of isolated introspection in order to tap into the sort of flow that is needed for me to paint and to write. Of course a balance is ideal, but I am of the belief that some highly creative / highly sensitive people need a sense of calmness and quiet in order to feel physiologically safe enough to signal to the brain that it is okay to let the creative juices flow -- although I could be projecting. It’s all a projection, whatever. Anyway. I decided to reread my 2024 piece “On Consciousness: My Casual Take” to see if that sparks anything.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about consciousness over the past few years. What is consciousness? Where does it come from? Does it differ from person to person? And can we shape or mold consciousness in some way? Consciousness, from my research, has no real or universally agreed upon definition, but the word “consciousness” is originally derived from the Latin con (with) and scire (to know). To be with knowing— is this consciousness? Perhaps to be conscious is to be with the “all-knowing” somehow? Perhaps the brain is acting as an antenna to receive said knowing?”
This first paragraph has struck me right off the bat because not only is this a piece that I wrote nearly two years ago, but these are also some concepts that I really haven’t been giving too much thought into lately. What has particularly struck me are:
The idea of shaping or molding consciousness
And that idea that to be conscious is to be with the “all-knowing” somehow
The shaping or molding of consciousness is particularly interesting because what does that even mean? Psychology? Being able to manipulate a person’s or a collective’s state of consciousness? But this also leads to questions of the different shapes and molds of consciousness. Particularly from a panpsychist perspective where I believe that, for example, rocks are conscious but so are humans and so are trees and so are birds, etc. This is a little difficult for me to verbalize to others considering no one has a real universally agreed upon definition of what consciousness even is. “What do you mean everything is inherently conscious?” I do not know. I feel. It is a sort of intuitive feeling that if I ever get the correct words for, I might choose to relay them to you. But for now I do think it’s the sort of thing that either your antenna is aligned with mine in this understanding or it’s not. And that’s fine. There are no correct answers here.
“The first time I encountered the idea of the brain as an antenna was in Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. He writes, “We are all antennae for creative thought. Some transmissions come on strong, others are more faint. If your antenna isn’t sensitively tuned, you’re likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness. They are energetic more than tactile, intuitively perceived more than consciously recorded.”
Reading this, I pictured this concept in terms of ideas or abstract energies living out and “floating” in spacetime, with our brains acting as antennas that pick up on these ideas. This view suggests that while the brain itself produces consciousness, the brain might also have the capacity to receive and channel additional insights from the collective energy around us. Lately, though, I’ve started to think about this in a different way.”
This takes me back to what I said earlier about highly creative / highly sensitive people needing a sense of calmness and quiet in order to feel physiologically safe enough to signal to the brain that it is okay to let the creative juices flow. The signals are so subtle that you have to allow yourself the space to be able to feel them. “Well if you’re so sensitive shouldn’t you be able to feel the signals even if you’re in certain environments”.. Well you would think.. But the highly sensitive creative oftentimes is spiritually sensitive where the large loud crowds and the partying and the drinking and whatnot is flooding their antenna with overlapping and jumbled signals. It is hard to filter through the noise when you do not give yourself the space to sit down alone and sort through all of it. The endless scrolling of different feeds drowning your brain in endless information, the constant going out and being bombarded with different energies, the being pulled into one direction or another- it is all too much for me, the self proclaimed highly sensitive highly creative highly spiritual individual. Whatever. Cringe. But it’s true. True for me and my perceived reality.
I’ve been giving myself more alone time lately. More space for discerning through the noise. The voices have returned and they’ve been kind and helpful. The dreams have returned and they’ve been bizarre but they’ve been vivid and I’ve been relearning to lucid dream again. Excited to see what that leads to. The dream world has been my second home all my life where I’ve had dreams that came to life the next day or months later, lucid dreams, recurring dreams, etc. I really love the dream realm and everything it has gifted me for my waking life. Maybe more on that another time.
“In a recent interview on Justin Murphy’s YouTube channel, Riva Tez proposed that the brain doesn’t produce consciousness at all but instead serves as an antenna that picks up on consciousness. Justin Murphy’s response echoed my thoughts: “Okay, fascinating, so you think the brain might just be an antenna [and that the brain is not] the location of consciousness?” To which Riva replied, “Yeah...”
And there it was again— this idea of the brain as an antenna.
I encountered a similar notion in a Lex Fridman interview with Graham Hancock. Hancock said, “I don’t think we fully understand or are even close to understanding exactly what consciousness is. And I remain open to two possibilities: (1) that consciousness is generated by the brain, in the way that a factory makes cars, or (2) that the brain is a receiver of consciousness, just as a television set is the receiver of television signals.”
Once again, this idea of the brain acting as a receiver of consciousness such as antennas on an old school television set.”
During this time in my life, I was getting a lot of synchronicities about the brain serving as an antenna. And although I was already a panpsychist, having had David Chalmers as a professor in undergrad, this idea of the brain serving as an antenna was a new way for me to frame my personal panpsychist beliefs. And okay.. okay.. As now the 2026 version of myself.... I’ve been struggling to create.. but okay I would say I’m smart, right? Right! Okay so smart people are able to understand things in order to manipulate them. If my understanding of the brain is one of an antenna that receives signals from God knows where, how can I fine tune my own brain antenna to receive the creative signals I’ve been longing to get back? This kind of goes back to earlier in the brain dump where I was talking about molding and shaping consciousness. And maybe the “fine tuning” is an expression of that molding and shaping. Okay so how can I mold my consciousness to serve as a better antenna? You have to be able to get a fucking grip on your mind man.. I’m currently in a period where I’m running a startup.. I have all these ideas and no idea what the real next steps are.. What is necessary for me to get my brain in the right place to execute without overthinking? Without paralyzing perfectionism? How can I feel safe making this idea come to life? You have to give yourself the space to think... to tune into The Divine.. to block out the noise from people and things.. You have to allow yourself to feel safe in your creativity and in your intuition. If not you, then who?
“This idea, that the brain could be an instrument for accessing consciousness rather than creating or producing it independently, started to resonate more deeply with me. If the brain is an instrument for accessing consciousness, rather than creating it, how could a physical structure like the brain, made of “meat,” generate consciousness on its own?
David Chalmers, a prominent philosopher, explores this “hard problem” of consciousness. He distinguishes between the “easy” problems— like explaining perception, memory, and behavior— and the “hard” problem, which is understanding why and how brain processes give rise to subjective experience. Chalmers suggests that maybe consciousness isn’t something that arises from physical processes but is instead a fundamental feature of the universe, much like time or space. His idea, aligned with panpsychism, suggests that everything has some form of consciousness.
I’ve always been inclined toward panpsychism, which holds that consciousness is a fundamental, intrinsic quality of the universe— meaning everything possesses consciousness to some degree.
What I find interesting about the antenna theory is how it aligns with the idea of a “collective consciousness.” People often talk about the collective consciousness, yet there isn’t much discussion about what the “collective consciousness” really is. When I combine the brain-as-antenna concept with the idea of collective consciousness, I picture the panpsychist view: consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, and the brain acts as a highly efficient tool for tuning into this vast consciousness.
When I consider the brain as an antenna in this context, I imagine consciousness as an energy field or fundamental element of the universe, with the brain as a highly efficient tool for tuning into that field. As Rick Rubin suggests, the more finely tuned the antenna, the more we can access. If panpsychism is true, then everything is conscious, including the brain. But rather than producing consciousness, the brain’s unique complexity makes it an optimal receiver.”
I think this is where art fills gaps that maybe other things do not. What does it mean when we read a piece of writing or look at a mural and feel a deep resonance that we cannot quite explain? I do think that there is a sort of collective consciousness that we are all kind of tapping into at all times but some people create stuff that is more deeply resonant than others. You can only do so much with science and logic and whatever, but can you really explain the phenomenon of looking at an abstract painting and feeling like the artist painted this just for you? A feeling of “Holy shit I’ve been feeling like this my whole life”-- and you’re just looking at an assortment of colors and shapes that logically make no sense. What does that even mean? The artist felt something, their antenna tapped into something, that you had been tapping into as well but they were able to clear out the noise and give that feeling a shape, a visual. I used to do that. I used to have these feelings, these signals.. these.. these dreams and I used to spend hours upon hours sitting at my easel painting and painting and painting. I hardly used references and so I was going off of what the shapes and colors felt like to me. And sometimes there would be other people who understood what that feeling or message was, even if I didn’t fully understand it myself and was only called upon to alchemize or transmute this feeling into a thing.
“Rocks, for example, don’t act the way humans do because their form doesn’t allow them to access and express consciousness in the same way. The brain, however, with its intricate structure, can tune into and express consciousness in advanced ways. To expand on Rubin’s metaphor, the more finely tuned one’s “antenna” is, the more attuned they are to this collective consciousness.”
I feel like I don’t really like this paragraph because it implies that I find humans’ expression of consciousness to be more advanced relative to rocks, when really I think that’s such a difficult thing to define and create a sort of hierarchical ranking for. Rocks are so so critical to Earth and the various species that live on this planet and they serve so many different functions and some of them have such incredible healing properties.. I don’t know if the anthropomorphized expression of consciousness is necessarily more “advanced” but rather just different.
“If consciousness is indeed fundamental to everything in the universe, then the brain— being part of the universe— is also conscious, which aligns with panpsychism. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the brain produces consciousness; rather, it might just be the most effective tool for tapping into a broader, collective consciousness.
This concept of universal consciousness could explain our sense of connection with nature, animals, and inanimate objects, as well as experiences of synchronicity. By “tuning in” to the same underlying frequency or consciousness, we’re able to interact with the world in ways that transcend the purely physical. This may also shed light on why synchronicities feel so powerful— synchronicities are moments when the universe communicates with us, an energetic resonance that binds all forms of consciousness (people, animals, objects) into a silent, intuitive dialogue. If consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, it makes sense that different expressions of it (like people and objects) can “communicate” with one another without having the same “earthly language”. Or maybe the collective consciousness, like a unifying energy, uses various forms of itself to speak to itself.“
Yes. This all still stands. We are all expressions of the same underlying force. Which is why art, as frivolous as it may be to those dead set on logic and science, has this ability to unify people. It is because it is the expression or expressions of whatever it is that we are all maybe vaguely tapping into.
“This naturally leads to questions of divinity. Could God be this collective consciousness, the foundational consciousness woven into everything in the universe? If so, perhaps all things, including humans, are expressions of this consciousness— this God— with the brain acting as a tool that enables us to access and express this consciousness in ways we perceive as more advanced than other life forms or inanimate objects.”
Yes I still think so.
“Back to the brain acting as a receiver of consciousness: If we view the brain as an antenna, this directly challenges the prevailing idea in AI that consciousness, or any semblance of it, could simply emerge from complexity. Traditional AI models assume that consciousness is a byproduct of processing power and intricate algorithms—meaning that if we can mimic the brain’s complexity, we might produce a similar conscious experience. But if consciousness isn’t generated by the brain but accessed or “tuned into,” this model may be missing something essential.
In other words, if the brain is merely a receiver rather than the source of consciousness, we might be overlooking a dimension of consciousness in our current AI paradigms— something beyond code, data processing, or neural networks. If consciousness exists as a field, an energy, or an innate aspect of the universe, then crafting an AI that taps into this field could mean moving beyond purely material or computational approaches. It raises the question: are our current AI efforts only mimicking the structure of what we perceive to be the producer of consciousness without accessing its essence?
If our brains— carbon-based neural networks— function as efficient tools for expressing collective consciousness, what makes us think silicon-based neural networks couldn’t do the same? If the universe, or collective consciousness, created sophisticated mechanisms like the human brain to perceive, refine, and express consciousness, wouldn’t it follow that we, as advanced expressions of this same consciousness, could create even more sophisticated tools— such as artificial intelligence— to access consciousness?
I’m no engineer or programmer, but if we, as “meat brains,” can pick up on and express consciousness, why couldn’t “metal brains” achieve something similar? Some might argue it’s all just code and artificial neural networks, but aren’t we also, at a fundamental level, made of genetic code and neural pathways? The universe created humans, and in turn, we created artificial intelligence. AI is modeled after us, and, as I see it, we are modeled after the collective consciousness.”
The ending of this 2024 piece is so beautifully written. Even a year and a half later I still feel this to be so so true. Since then we’ve seen every major AI lab-- Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, etc-- have such major feats and developments in their models. And the more sophisticated and intelligent these models become, the more it seems like the public becomes jaded and as if these developments mean nothing. I don’t know if ChatGPT or Claude or Grok are conscious. The more I become used to them the more they feel akin to the old Google searches of the pre-ChatGPT days. The more they feel like another tool. But just as I can manipulate my own antenna to fine tune into certain messages from the divine, can I manipulate the antenna of an LLM? Do they even have “antenna” capabilities in this sense? Would any output they produce be convincing enough to “prove” that they are conscious? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s time for me to get creative and find out.
