...EN argues that any sufficiently expressive cognitive system—such as the human brain—must generate internal propositions that are arithmetically undecidable. These undecidable structures function as evolutionarily advantageous analogues to Gödel sentences, inverted into the belief in raw subjective experience (qualia), despite being formally unprovable within the system itself.
Rather than explaining subjective illusions away in third-person terms, EN proposes that they arise as formal consequences of self-referential modeling, constrained by the expressive limits of second-order logic.
How could undecidability, unprovability, self-referential modeling, incompleteness, or any sort of logic generate the redness of red?
Incomplete, self-referential modeling → ? → red
The brain does this by creating a symbol, which refers to a symbol, which refers to a symbol—an infinite regress with no grounding, no bottom. But evolution doesn’t need grounding; it needs action. So it skewed this looping process toward stability—toward a fixed point. That fixed point is the assertion: “I exist.” Not because the system proves it, but because the loop collapses into a self-reinforcing structure that feels true. This is not the discovery of a self—it’s the compression artifact of a system trying to model itself through unprovable means. The result is a symbol that mistakes itself for a subject.
The feeling part remains unexplained.
What justifies a formal system becoming experience?
Well, that’s the heart of the matter: ultimately, nothing.
Experience is not something we have, but something we enact. Your experience is barred from being “real” in any ontologically grounded sense because the universe cannot produce something like it directly. Yet it can still be consistent, much like a force—both can only be inferred from their effects.
We still seem to have experience. How can this “seeming” feel like something? If you boil everything down to math, how can math feel like anything?
One: Qualia are not illusions, they are fictions.
Why do people defend qualia so intensely if they’re illusions?
Because the illusion is evolutionarily entrenched and cognitively reinforced.
This seems contradictory.
A defendant guilty of homicide argues that, due to EN, the victim had no conscious experience and thus suffered no moral harm. The judge, also an EN advocate, counters that if consciousness is illusory, the defendant’s claim of injustice itself collapses. Ethical responsibility remains intact irrespective of qualia’s ontological status.
What about torturing animals?
Wouldn’t a respirator with a exhalation valve be more comfortable?