My (probably wrong) theory of consciousness

I believe randomness does not exist; it just seems like it - and consciousness is merely the expression of this phenomena.

Start with one assumption: everything in the universe obeys the laws of physics.

If that's true, the human brain must obey them too — including whatever we call the "soul." Nothing gets to violate these rules just because we experience it from the inside.

Classical physics says every effect has a cause. Consciousness seems to challenge that. I am typing this right now, and it feels like I chose to do it. No obvious external force made me. The action appears to originate from me.

The only other thing in the universe that behaves this way is quantum randomness.

Set aside entanglement and everything else we do not yet understand. We do know that when we measure certain quantum properties — particle spin, for instance — the result appears genuinely random. A value becomes 1 or 0 with no visible deterministic cause. I believe this is the "trick" used by consciousness - it somehow takes a property only observed at quantum scales and propagates/expresses it at macro scale.

If you can accept the former then that leaves two options:

• Randomness is real. It is the seed of all variety, our actions included. Therefore we do not have free will; it only feels like we do. A dice roll we cannot control keeps deciding what happens next.

• Randomness only looks random. It is predetermined, but the seed is hidden from us. In other words, we just see a version of it that's already processed. The value it was derived from is not random, but it still determines the universal state change and therefore our next action. So still, no free will. (this is what I think is true)

In either scenario, it means that if you knew the true source value, it could be applied to the current state of the universe to compute the next state. The universe is just redux 🥲

That allows it to be both deterministic and random at the same time: the source value is only random in our own dimension. It passed through earlier steps we cannot see. Observe the original seed, and you would find it was actually deterministic all along.

And somehow, this is the secret to God's magic trick.