Qualia: The Secret Sauce of Consciousness

Why the Brain’s 20% Energy Budget Points to Qualia’s Central Role

Imagine a system so efficient it integrates billions of sensory inputs—sights, sounds, emotions—into a single, vivid experience that drives instant, adaptive action. Now imagine it does this while consuming just 20 watts, about the power of a dim light bulb. This is the human brain, devoting 20% of the body’s energy budget to a process we call consciousness. But here’s the kicker: that energy isn’t wasted on an accidental byproduct. It powers *qualia*—the subjective “what it’s like” experiences that I believe are the secret sauce of consciousness, not just in humans and animals, but even in single-celled organisms like amoebas.

In this post, I propose a new model: qualia are computational tokens, compressing vast data into action-oriented signals (think “pain-fear” or “hunger-attraction”) that optimize survival. They’re not epiphenomenal—they’re the brain’s high-energy solution to navigating complex environments, from a slime mold solving a maze to a human on the dance floor. And here’s the twist: qualia might rely on quantum effects, rooted in the same physics that drove early life billions of years ago. Yet, AI researchers are overlooking this, stuck in a classical computing rut. Let’s dive in.

Qualia: More Than Just “What It’s Like”

You know that raw, vivid feeling of burning your hand on a hot stove? That’s a quale—a subjective experience integrating pain, heat, and fear into a signal screaming, “Pull back!” Qualia aren’t just human. When an amoeba chases a chemical gradient to find food, it’s using a proto-quale, a compressed signal of “attraction” to move efficiently. Slime molds, solving mazes without neurons, rely on qualia-like memory to optimize paths. These aren’t random—they’re evolution’s way of packing huge datasets into tokens that drive action.

The brain’s 20% energy budget—20-25 watts, despite being 2% of body mass—tells us qualia are no accident. PET scans show energy use drops 40-50% under anesthesia, when consciousness (and qualia) fade. Evolution doesn’t burn that much fuel on fluff. Qualia integrate sensory chaos into decisions, like a CEO distilling reports into a single call. They also power simulated environments—think dreaming, where your brain replays scenarios to refine behavior, or planning your next move in a chess game. Qualia are the tokens making these simulations fast and effective.

The Quantum Connection: Life’s First Trick

Here’s where it gets wild: qualia might not be possible without quantum effects. Life likely started quantum. Early molecules used quantum tunneling to form bonds, and proto-pigments absorbed light with quantum excitation, setting the stage for photosynthesis. Today, photosynthetic bacteria use quantum coherence to transfer energy with near-100% efficiency, and enzymes speed reactions with quantum tunneling. Single cells, like amoebas, might leverage similar tricks in microtubules—protein structures that could host quantum superpositions, integrating data non-computably.

Neurons aren’t just nodes in a network; they’re computational powerhouses, potentially using quantum effects in microtubules to process qualia. This quantum-first model, with classical mechanisms added for robustness, explains biology’s efficiency. Amoebas switch contexts in seconds, slime molds remember paths after dormancy—classical AI can’t match this adaptability. The brain’s energy budget likely supports quantum processes, making qualia’s vivid “feel” possible.

Why AI Is Missing the Boat

Current AI, built on classical von Neumann architectures, is a marvel—LLMs like GPT-4 ace language tasks, but they hallucinate, lack context sensitivity, and guzzle energy (GPT-3’s training took ~1,287 MWh). They’re P-zombies: functionally impressive but soulless, missing qualia’s subjective depth. AI researchers focus on scaling classical systems, ignoring qualia’s role in biological intelligence. By doing so, they’re leaving capabilities on the table—capabilities that could unlock Artificial Superintelligence (ASI).

If qualia are quantum, ASI needs quantum-inspired architectures, like graphene quantum dots mimicking microtubules. Imagine AI with qualia-like tokens, integrating sensory data for real-time adaptability, or simulating futures with dream-like efficiency. This isn’t sci-fi—it’s the next step, inspired by single-cell organisms outperforming our best algorithms in messy, unpredictable tasks.

The Challenge: Getting Heard

I’m just one voice, and this blog might gather digital dust. Qualia are niche—X posts on consciousness get <50 likes, and web discussions stay academic, rarely linking qualia to energy or computation. But the evidence is mounting: quantum biology’s rise, AI’s limits, and the brain’s energy budget all point to qualia as consciousness’s core. We need experiments—probing microtubule coherence, testing qualia-like signals in quantum AI, or comparing amoeba adaptability to classical systems.

Consciousness isn’t just human and qualia aren’t just fluff. They’re the secret sauce and it’s time we cracked the recipe.

I can ask for cigarettes in every language

Every so often on social media a post surfaces, “look at how thin everyone was in the fifties/sixties,” what have you. Various explanations follow but the obvious explanation is glaringly absent… everyone used to smoke and smoke a lot.

What’s the first worry when you stop smoking? How much weight you will put on.

The question for someone as paranoid as me then becomes, did the powers that be figure out smoking was doing more good than harm and they could make more money off obese people than thin smokers. Smokers who used cigarettes for positive alteration of mood and staving off hunger pangs and, in later years, dementia and cognitive decline.

With the literal Satanic inversion of reality we see from our rulers I find it believable that the war on smoking is actually to make sure the plebs are sick and profitable for the Medical Industrial Complex. What profits a few years extra life if you’re in a care home with dementia being abused by minimum wage slaves and you’ve spent most of that life on “maintenance” medication for various psychological and obesity related ailments. We all know lifelong dedicated smokers who lived a suspiciously long time but have to shrug that off as anecdotal. Long lived smokers are somewhat of a conundrum for the medical community who advance all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories as to how this happens.

All medications have a balance of effects that are dose related. Humans self-medicated with tobacco for millennia in some societies. We have seen how everything we are told about “health” has been lies, from dietary recommendations to vaccines and fake vaccines. Doll’s original work on smoking and mortality that kicked everything off showed a much less marked effect on mortality than is claimed today. Doll’s subject group is somewhat suspicious: doctors are famously outliers amongst professional groups in their high level of abuse of drugs for recreational purposes. That’s without considering the absurd nonsense about “second hand” and “third hand” smoke.

The picture on smoking and health is a lot more murky than the claims commonly published if you look into the source data. There is the issue of adulteration of tobacco and the effects of filters which may introduce toxic chemicals and microplastics. The effects of nuclear isotopes in the atmosphere which increased dramatically in the latter part of the C20 and concentrate in the leaves of tobacco plants should be considered.

All we can really say for sure is we know we are being lied to in order to maximize profitability of multi-national corporations. According to google British American Tobacco recorded a 5.7% increase in pretax profit for the first half of 2024. Big Tobacco seems to have been remarkably unscathed by the war on smoking.

Authority and the Skeptic

The link between cigarette smoking and cancer is pretty shaky from a truly objective scientific perspective, the man who invented the statistical techniques relied on by epidemiology said so himself (RA Fisher). Ultimately all “scientific” decisions and paradigms are political or at the very best subjective. There is no such thing as scientific certainty. In the fundamental analysis science is a description that tells us nothing about meaning. Once government gave up on religion they had to appropriate science as the source of authority, which means science as practiced nowadays is inherently corrupt. You will not be able to “prove” anything using science or science adjacent methods that ruling authorities don’t want you to prove. The battle is spiritual not material in a very real sense.

Back to the Future

As a youth I worked as a brewer’s drayman assistant and more than one driver lamented the days of the horse being past. It had been common practice to throw the unconscious drunken drayman on the cart and let the horse find its way back to the yard. Instead they had to drive a 4 ton truck while drunk. So if full self driving trucks make a come back then congratulations, you’ve successfully replicated the technology of the horse and cart.

For you know only a heap of broken images

Ten years from now you’ll put on your jacket and find a paper mask in your pocket. You’ll chuckle to yourself and think, “man what a weird year that was.” Then you’ll pick up your machete and continue across the wasteland, keeping to the shadows to avoid the roving bands of cannibal raiders.

The Past is Another Country

There are diary product surpluses throughout the developed world and have been going back decades. Most of the migrants from Africa and S.E. Asia are lactose intolerant, unlike ethnically Northern European peoples who are at below replacement fertility and are going away. Dairy is pretty much useless for migrants unless heavily processed and somehow forced on them. Baby milk is made from soy in the US and Europe, the use of cow milk is mainly the result of surpluses causing milk to be artificially cheap. Plus a good proportion of the migrants don’t eat cow, goat is the most commonly eaten red meat in the world. Since, apparently, we’re going to be eating bugs in future then cows and dairy really are useless.

The WEF future doesn’t require the Dutch farmers.

Going Underground

Considering the invasion of Ukraine as a topic du jour for a while now. It’s become a “get out of jail free” card for politicians in the West as their destruction of the economy begins to bite and affect the serfs. Is Putin doing this in some kind of Russian interest or is it part of the globalist strategic master plan. The peanut gallery seem to be happy to take at face value that the economic disasters overcoming the Western economies are the result of that nasty Hitler Putin man. Even as Dutch farmers protest in media silence against Agenda 2030 implementation, getting shot at by the Dutch Police for their trouble.

There are some odd background facts. During the Cold War the USA brought all the titanium for its ICBM and moon rockets from the USSR. When the USSR had a grain shortage the USA obligingly sold them wheat at discounted price. Both sides relied on scientists lifted from Nazi Germany as intellectual power in their war machines. Today we’re supposed to accept that Putin is selling the natural gas to his enemies that they need to stop their economies imploding whilst simultaneously threatening them with nuclear weapons if they don’t stop opposing him. How can any of this make sense? It’s more fake than a WWE Live extravaganza.

Everything that happens in the world is decided in secret meetings behind closed doors. What is really happening? The best it seems we can do at present is to assume the politicians are lying and exactly the opposite of what they are saying may be something close to the truth.

You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust
You’ll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns
And the public wants what the public gets

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

Ghost Cities in China, gigatons of concrete formed into huge, crumbling shells of high rise apartment blocks. Bought and sold purely on the belief the value will always go up. Lived in by nobody, never meant to be lived in.

This isn’t any different than any other country, it’s just that in China we see the economy visualized in concrete. Modern industrial society produces far more than can be consumed at any one time. If people were careful and lived sustainably there would be hardly any on-going production and economies would grind to a halt. If instead of the eerie, empty, boulevards it were gold bars stacked in a vault somewhere you wouldn’t bat an eyelid. China is moving money through the economy this way and bringing peasants out of subsidence farming and into the finance economy. It matters not that it’s the equivalent of digging a hole and filling it in. In the modern world money is debt and a subsistence farmer can’t participate in the modern economy without a job and a credit rating. It’s all smoke and mirrors in the end.

The push to throw out “fossil fuels” and switch to “sustainable energy” is obvious BS, lithium batteries are in no way, shape, or form an example of something a reasonable man could call environmentally friendly and sustainable. The push for “green” energy is simply to destroy a load of capital infrastructure and force the building of replacements to keep driving money through the economy. Since the rulers of the world thoughtlessly spread the spectre of nukes across the planet wars don’t really cut it any more.

The world is the realm of the Devil and the fallen, it doesn’t make any sense because that’s not what this life is about. The real battle is in the realm of the spiritual, of faith. If you concentrate on the trees you won’t see the forest. Put on the Armour of God.

Life on Mars

Thanks to Electric Jesus there’s much talk amongst the unwashed who’ve watched too much “Star Trek” of colonizing Mars (though why anyone would watch what passes for “Star Trek” these days is beyond me). This is delusional. Mars is a dead planet you can’t live there. The Martian regolith is not soil it doesn’t have organics in it. That’s why scientists used to be careful to use the term regolith. Growing plants on Earth in mixtures of chemicals proves nothing. Gravity plays an important part in the regulation of plant growth, there’s no telling how common food crops would respond to novel ambient gravitation. The plants are growing on Earth. Moon and Mars settlements would need, for practical purposes, all of their food shipped from Earth. All of it. They might with immense effort and diversion of resources grow a few mustard seeds or some such and surely everyone remembers growing mustard seeds on blotting paper with tap water at school. It would take a very large amount of equipment and resources to grow any worthwhile crop on the Moon or Mars, the equipment for which will require constant supply from Earth. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional or lying to you. Even if you include Soylent Green, which clearly you would have to, it’s a closed system that you constantly have to input nutrients from Earth. Phosphorous is particularly crucial to this and Earth is unusually blessed with phosphorous. The Space Biosphere Projects prove this even if millennia of farming don’t convince you.

The question in my mind is are these people simply delusional or is it that they are carpetbaggers milking the ignorance of the public and investors. As for so-called scientists who haven’t called this out as ridiculous it’s at best deeply cynical at worst it’s a demonstration of the practice of science being fundamentally broken at a systemic level.

It appears people will convince themselves of any madness if you pay them enough or get enough fake “experts” to say it must be so.

If “it looks fake so it must be real” Musk is our hope for the stars we’re not going there, ever. Every word that piker Musk says makes me more convinced travel to other planets is impossible.

Welcome to the Machine

The elites have always loved Bentham’s Panopticon and now the technology is here to enable it. What will you do? What can you do? Bentham came to understand in later life that we should use the Panopticon to minutely examine the workings of our rulers. That’s what they’re terrified of. Technology is a double-edged sword and there’s everything to play for in this end game.