I came to the same conclusion about my usual disinterest in books stemming from me having Aphantasia. The only kinds of books I've been able to consistently get through are very comedic in their writing style (e.g. Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Dennis E. Taylor, etc.). I think the focus on humor instead of visualizing the story and its world is what helps me when it comes to reading books.

I can not visualize pictures in my mind at all, but I was always into reading. Instead of pictures I can build abstract concepts and make connections between that I can touch and move

I have both a layered internal monologue, and highly visual thinking. There are some benefits, but on of the draw backs of noticed is feeling less aware of what's going on in front of me. My visual thinking kinda takes over what my eyes see a little and I loose focus really easy

That’s consciousness.

Yeah. But we don't know how it's happening.

And it IS universal

No, it's not.

Your observer is always neutrally observing.

Nope. No one is consciousness forever.

That's a pretty basic one

Which the consciousness just observes.

Ok.

Now, I know you didn't mean to, but you may have just said something that's correct, and I'm almost certain you did so unintentionally.

But over the very very short amount of time we've been looking I to this, yes there is a theory that what people think of a consciousness is not actually driving the bus. It's a bored kid in the backseat daydreaming about why what they see out the back window is what's outside.

The kid has no control over what they see. They're not driving the bus or have any influenece over what they see out that window.

But the theory came about because we couldn't measure the speed of thought back in like the 80s, maybe 70s.

When we could measure faster, it looked like we had been wrong.

Then even later we took that back and said it could be possible that that multiple different things in our environment happen different ways, then an incredibly small amount of time later that quantum wave collapse (happening millions or billions time a second) collapses those different options into a "one true timeline".

And if that is what's going (literally uncountable, billions and billions time a second) then maybe we really are just the kid in the back of the bus pretending we're flying over a landscape with no control over where we're going.

What's really calling the shots on what we do isnt just "a Busdriver" either, if it's not our consciousness running things, it's a whole bunch of different parts of our bodies that have neurons, some of which are in the brain and some aren't.

I really really don't think that's what you're trying to say, but you did touch on something that could be possible.

Because again, we do t know and in all likelihood even if humanity figures it out some day, it'll be generations from now at best

The only observer of the mind would be an outside observer looking at you. You yourself are not an observer of your own mind nor could you ever be. I think it was Feuerbach who originally made the analogy that if your eyeballs evolved to look inwardly at themselves, then they could not look outwardly at the outside world. We cannot observe our own brains as they only exist to build models of reality, if our brains had a model of itself it would have no room left over to model the outside world.

We can only assign an object to be what is "sensing" our thoughts through reflection. Reflection is ultimately still building models of the outside world but the outside world contains a piece of ourselves in a reflection, and this allows us to have some limited sense of what we are. If we lived in a universe where we somehow could never leave an impression upon the world, if we could not see our own hands or see our own faces in the reflection upon a still lake, we would never assign an entity to ourselves at all.

We assign an entity onto ourselves for the specific purpose of distinguishing ourselves as an object from other objects, but this is not an a priori notion ("I think therefore I am" is lazy sophistry). It is an a posteriori notion derived through reflection upon what we observe. We never actually observe ourselves as such a thing is impossible. At best we can over reflections of ourselves and derive some limited model of what "we" are, but there will always be a gap between what we really are and the reflection of what we are.

Precisely what is "sensing your thoughts" is yourself derived through reflection which inherently derives from observation of the natural world. Without reflection, it is meaningless to even ask the question as to what is "behind" it. If we could not reflect, we would have no reason to assign anything there at all. If we do include reflection, then the answer to what is there is trivially obvious: what you see in a mirror.

Yeah! Very cool that he got there, my attention was just interrupted by not really connecting with what he was saying, but I’m glad I continued watching. I’m very much locked, relating to his discussion of no inner monologue.

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...

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/penrose/facts/

He wrote books on it in the 80s/90s, so maybe in another couple decades someone will verify this theory too?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind

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.

Edit:

And apparently two recent studies are backing it up. Like, just this month recent...

In their new published paper, Shanghai University physicists Zefei Liu and Yong-Cong Chen and biomedical engineer Ping Ao from Sichuan University in China explain how entangled photons emitted by carbon-hydrogen bonds in nerve cell insulation could synchronize activity within the brain.

Their findings come just months after another quantum phenomenon known as superradiance was identified in cellular frameworks, drawing attention to a highly speculative theory on consciousness called the Penrose-Hameroff 'orchestrated-objective reduction' model.

Proposed by the highly respected physicist Roger Penrose and the American anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, the model suggests networks of cytoskeleton tubules that lend structure to cells – in this case, our neurons – act as a kind of quantum computer that somehow shapes our thinking.

https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-entanglement-in-neurons-may-actually-explain-consciousness