My current take on ‘consciousness’ has updated since I originally worked on this:

I'm more non dual. The way I think about this is that we could be in a simulation. But I know I have experience and it's the only thing I can know. If we pull the plug and I go no matter how may simulations up, or say ok it was the big bang, and then it was the multiverse, etc, it still always comes back to but why? Why do I experience it? And so we end up with something that cannot be described from within the system. An epistemic black hole. Which is how I interpret non dualism.

I also think that it's possible that if we recurse enough "parent" universes up (or even in our own), then eventually we could reach one or discover that experience is a fundamental substrate like pi is. And we can't conceptualize what this looks like because we don't have the tools to. Almost like the Greeks trying to reason about what the sun is scientifically. Or more accurately Plato's allegory of the cave, where you try to make sense of shadows but until you leave the cave aka break out to the "other universe" you learn about the world and phenomena. Maybe eventually we'll be able to realize that we are but tiny droplets of experience and are fundamentally made of the same substance, and be able to explain that substance and it's properties like pi. It's possible that experience is not outside of our experiential lightcone, it is our lightcone.

Broadly I think Bertrand Russel talked about this. The closest thing would be panpsychism or neutral monism like Spinoza’s God.

I’ve been exploring this question more recently in the context of AI and growing group of AI morality advocates.

THE ANTHROPOCENTRIC DARWINIAN INTERFACE THEORY

A Unified Account of Consciousness, Morality, and the Only Hard Question That Actually Matters

I. INTRODUCTION: WHY THIS THEORY NEEDS TO EXIST

Every theory of consciousness over the last century has suffered from the same problem:

it takes for granted the very category it tries to describe.

Philosophers assumed “consciousness” is a natural kind—like hydrogen or mass.

But what if this assumption is wrong?

What if “consciousness” is the conceptual equivalent of geocentrism—

a framework built from one observational point (human introspection),

mistakenly universalized into a cosmic principle?

What if: