Felt Matter

Felt Matter is a resource to collect the current most plausible explanations for how sentience arises in the physical world. By sentience, we mean the capacity experienced by human brains to have feelings and sensations: the redness of red, the warmth of heat, or the feeling of pain.

Specifically, it is trying to answer how, mechanistically, sentience arises by describing the mechanisms in the brain give rise to subjective experience?

How can physical processes, such as those in the human brain, give rise to subjective experience? Why is there something it is like to be a conscious being? This question is often called the hard problem of consciousness, and it remains unsolved.

My ambition is to help solve this problem within my lifetime. This website is one part of that effort: a public, curated resource bringing together the most plausible explanations in language that is easy to follow. The hope is to help more people reach the frontier of what we understand, join the discussion, and bring the question closer to a tractable explanation.

The focus is the mechanism by which subjective experience becomes possible. Related ideas are explored where they help answer that question. This is not an exhaustive atlas of consciousness or a complete history of the field.

This resource brings together other people's work through my own developing understanding. It stands on the shoulders of the researchers, philosophers, scientists, and thinkers who have studied these questions over the years. As we learn more, the material will continue to change.

Contributions, corrections, and discussion are welcome. Suggestions will be debated and edited before they are included. Thank you to everyone who helps make this resource more accurate, clear, and thorough.

Felt Matter is a non-commercial side project, supported by other projects.

Projects

• EpiludeLocal & private AI dictation, meeting notes and text-to-speech for Mac - epilude.com (opens in a new tab)𝕏
• Felt MatterExploring subjective experience - feltmatter.com (opens in a new tab)

Notes on building

• Start with the moment someone needs a tool
• A thought shouldn't have to wait for an interface
• Speaking is a starting point, not a finished draft
• Make the next step clear and the last step reversible
• Small frictions become large when repeated
• Listen to the words and the work behind them
• Give people room to change their minds
• Useful software fits into an existing day
• Make fewer promises and keep them
• The quiet details deserve careful decisions
• A fast response still needs to be the right response
• Build for the ordinary task, then the difficult one
• Make something small enough to understand
• Keep learning from what people actually do