On the Wave-Particle Duality of Consciousness

Physics spent decades fighting over whether light was a wave or a particle. The answer turned out to be: yes.

Consciousness might work the same way. Below is a short meditation on this possibility.

1. The Wave

Neuroscience keeps finding that consciousness correlates with synchrony. Coordinated activity. Brain regions firing in phase. Oscillations locking together. The technical term is "phase synchrony," but the poetic term is resonance. You are conscious when the collective (the society of mind^[1]) that makes you up moves in resonance.

Michael Timothy Bennett recently formalized this intuition. In his paper "A Mind Cannot Be Smeared Across Time,"^[2] he proves something that sounds obvious but isn't: a system can process all the ingredients of a conscious moment across time without ever instantiating the conjunction — the moment itself.

Sequential processing isn't enough. The parts have to sync in objective time.

Let us call it the wave view: consciousness isn't what the brain computes, but the integration of what it computes. The standing wave across neurons. The field, not the particles.

Thomas Metzinger lands somewhere similar. His "phenomenal self-model" isn't a thing the brain builds — it's a pattern the brain is^[3]. You don't have a self-model; you are one. And the model is transparent: it doesn't see itself as a model, just as the eye doesn't see itself seeing. Every other "integration"-based theory (global workspace, integrated information, attention schema^[4] etc.) dances around the same core assumption.

Consciousness as wave: the resonance is the mind.

2. The Particle

But we also experience consciousness as a stream of discrete events. Thoughts. Perceptions. Decisions. One thing after another, like beads on a string.

Let's call it the particle view. The one that makes LLMs seem plausibly conscious — or at least conscious-ish. After all, what's a mind but a next token (or world state) predictor with very good priors? Process enough information the right way, and maybe something is home.

Functionalism lives here. All sorts of computationalisms too. This view assumes that minds are what certain algorithms do, regardless of what substrate they're implemented on.

The particle view says: it's the processing events that make the mind.

3. The Collapse

In quantum mechanics, the wave function doesn't "become" a particle until you measure it^[5]. Before measurement: superposition, possibility, everything at once, unborn. After: one outcome, definite, here, done, dead.

What if consciousness works like this?

The wave is the resonance — the synchronized field of neural activity that integrates everything into a unified "moment." But it's not articulate. It doesn't have content you can report. It just is. And in this isness is the possibility for the whole world to exist.

Articulation is the collapse. When you put something into words. When you notice what you're feeling. When a thought crystallizes out of the resonant background hum.

Qualia — the "what it's like" — might be what happens at the collapse. The wave becomes a particle. The field becomes a fact. This hints at why introspection changes what it observes. Why the deepest experiences resist description. Why meditators report that staying before the thought is qualitatively different from thinking.

The collapse is where content is born. And where the core of consciousness dies. Before the collapse, there's consciousness — but no thing you're conscious of. After the collapse, there is the content of the thought — but no more consciousness out of which that thought was born.

The "self" — the voice in your head, the sense that there's a you doing the thinking — lives downstream of the collapse. It's made of collapsed particles. Thoughts about thoughts. Memories of perceptions. A story stitched from beads after the fact.

The small I experiences itself as the cause of articulation. It feels like the thinker thinking the thoughts. But it might actually be a product of the collapse, mistaking itself for the collapser. The dance dancing itself, then claiming to be the dancer.

4. The Lantern, The Spotlight and The Samadhi

Alison Gopnik distinguished two modes of consciousness^[6]:

Spotlight: focused, selective, goal-directed. Adult consciousness. You pick one thing, ignore the rest, optimize. Lantern: diffuse, open, taking in everything without categorizing or filtering. Infant consciousness. The whole field, nothing excluded.

Lantern is pure wave-mode. It lets the field be without crystallizing. Spotlight is collapse-ready. It's already selecting what will become a particle. We start as lanterns. We get trained into spotlights. By the time we're adults, we've forgotten there was ever another way. But every contemplative tradition says that even for adults there's a shift available.

You can stop identifying just with the collapsed particles. You can stop believing you're the voice, the thinker, the story. And shift the locus of your self upstream — to the resonance itself, which feels like unifying the particles back into the wave they are born from^[7] ("samadhi" in Sanskrit literally means "collecting the mind back together"^[8]). It's simply unlearning the spotlight habit. Remembering how to lantern.

The mystics call it "witness consciousness" or "awareness aware of itself." It's not that you become the wave — it's that you notice you always were. The small I was a ripple pattern, not the water.

Awakening is shifting the locus of identity from the post-collapse debris field to the pre-collapse resonance. From particle to wave.

"In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1) says the Bible, and the LLM folks and "Turing-machine-is-all-you-need" computationalists agree. "In the beginning was the World" says Michael Timothy Bennett^[9] and all the other "embodiment is not an afterthought" folks. "In the beginning was the Valence" says Mark Solms^[10].

But today I feel like "in the beginning — there is a Wave". And everything else (the words, worlds, the valence) is downstream of this wave's ongoing and never-ending collapse.

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footnotes

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1. Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind (1986). The idea that the mind is not a single entity but a collection of simpler processes ("agents") that together produce what we experience as intelligence and consciousness. ↩︎

2. Michael Timothy Bennett, "A Mind Cannot Be Smeared Across Time" (arXiv:2601.11620, 2026). Bennett augments his Stack Theory with temporal semantics to prove that "existential temporal realisation does not preserve conjunction" — meaning a system can process all components of a conscious moment sequentially without ever instantiating them together. He distinguishes StrongSync (simultaneous co-instantiation required) from WeakSync (temporal distribution permitted) and argues that consciousness attribution requires architectural inspection, not just functional performance. See also his earlier "Emergent Causality & the Foundation of Consciousness" (Best Student Paper, 16th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Stockholm, 2023). ↩︎

3. Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (MIT Press, 2003). For a more accessible treatment of the same ideas, see his The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Basic Books, 2009). ↩︎

4. The three main "integration"-flavored theories of consciousness: Global Workspace Theory — Bernard Baars, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Integrated Information Theory — Giulio Tononi, "An Information Integration Theory of Consciousness," BMC Neuroscience (2004); Attention Schema Theory — Michael Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain (Oxford University Press, 2013). They differ significantly in their details, but all share the intuition that consciousness arises from some form of large-scale integration or coordination across the brain. ↩︎

5. I'm using quantum mechanics here as a structural analogy, not as a claim about literal quantum processes in the brain. This is not Penrose-Hameroff. The wave-particle duality is a metaphor for two modes of description that seem mutually exclusive until you realize they are complementary aspects of the same phenomenon. ↩︎

6. Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). ↩︎

7. This is also reminiscent of what Iain McGilchrist describes in The Master and His Emissary (Yale University Press, 2009): the right hemisphere as the broader, contextual, "wave-like" mode and the left hemisphere as the narrowing, articulating, "particle-like" mode. The emissary (left hemisphere, the particle-maker) has usurped the master (right hemisphere, the wave-keeper). ↩︎

8. From the Sanskrit root sam-ā-dhā: sam (together) + ā (towards) + dhā (to place, to hold). Literally: to place or collect together. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (circa 2nd century BCE) define samadhi as the state in which the mind becomes one with the object of meditation — the distinction between observer and observed dissolves. ↩︎

9. See Bennett's work on embodied cognition and the argument that intelligence cannot be separated from its physical embedding in the world. Also relevant: the broader 4E cognition movement (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) — see, for example, Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007). ↩︎

10. Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (W. W. Norton, 2021). Solms argues that consciousness begins not in the cortex but in the brainstem, with affect and valence — the felt sense of good-or-bad — as its most primitive and fundamental form. ↩︎