BIG BANG OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Last day of silence

East Africa. 74,000 years ago. Dawn at Toba Volcano.

He opens his eyes and the world enters him without words.

Cold stone under your back. The smell of ash in the air - the sky has been covered in ash for many days. The breathing of fellow tribesmen nearby, rhythmic, calm. The distant cry of a bird. Tension in the calves - yesterday we ran for a long time.

He gets up. Doesn’t think “it’s time to get up” - the body just rises. There is no voice in your head that says, “Today we need to find water” or “Yesterday I wasn’t fast enough.”. There is only a pure feeling of thirst that guides the feet towards a familiar path.

His name is... however, his name is not at all. No name. No story about myself. There is no question “who am I?”. He is just something that looks, hears, moves. Point of perception in the flow of reality.

He sees the leader of the pack sitting by an extinguished fire. The body automatically tenses - memory of yesterday's blow. Not the thought “he is dangerous”, but a direct connection: the image of the leader → tightening in the stomach → impulse to look away. Without words. No story.

He comes to the edge of a cliff. Below is a savannah covered with gray ash. There used to be herds of antelope here. Now empty. Hunger is not a concept, but a feeling of emptiness in the stomach that is getting louder.

The group has shrunk. There used to be twenty of them. Now it's eleven. The others just... stopped moving.. He doesn't think about them. There is no memory as history, there are only vague images: the face of a child who no longer cries, an old man lying motionless.

The sun is rising higher, but the light is strange - reddish, muted. A volcano in the north, just over the horizon, spewed so much ash that the sky changed. But he doesn't know the word "volcano". He simply sees: the sky is not the same as before.

The leader makes a sound - low, guttural. Everyone gets up. It's time to move. Not because someone decided, but because it’s always like this - when the leader gets up, everyone goes.

They're going down the hill. He walks behind, watching their backs. His DMN runs in the background, keeping track of who is with whom, who is strong, who is weak.. But these are not thoughts. It's like breathing - it happens on its own.

They find a dry river bed. Digging with hands. Dirt under nails. Finally - moisture. They drink, quenching the thirst that has become a constant background in recent weeks.

And then one of them sees a mushroom.

A strange mushroom with a brown cap growing on the remains of manure. They don't usually eat this. But hunger is not a reasoning, but a command from the body: eat everything that won’t kill you right away.

The first one takes the mushroom and smells it. The smell is earthy, not repulsive. He takes a bite. Chews. The others are watching. They wait - if he doesn’t die, they can eat.

Time passes. He doesn't fall. Doesn't writhe. So it's safe.

They are picking mushrooms. Eating. Bitter taste, but tolerable. The hunger is receding a little.

They sit down in the shade of an acacia tree, waiting for the cool of the evening to move on.

He doesn’t know that in an hour his brain will begin to work in a way that it has never worked in all 4 billion years of the evolution of life on Earth.

Doesn't know that the silence that was his only reality will soon disappear forever. That there will be a voice in his head that will talk non-stop until his death. And that this voice will seem like “himself.”

He sits under an acacia tree, feeling the warmth of the sun on his skin, and for the first time in the history of his species, he has no idea what is happening.

Because suspicion requires thought. But there are no thoughts yet.

But they are already on their way.

About metaphors and mechanisms

Before we continue this story, let's stop.

Writers and pseudo-scientists love beautiful stories. Quantum physics to explain the "power of thought". Neuroplasticity as proof of magic. Evolution as a metaphor for personal growth.

This book is not about that.

What you just read and what you will read next is a big metaphor. But the metaphor is so precise that real scientific facts form an ironclad logical structure that explains:

Why You Can't Stop Your Self-Talk. Why humans are the only species with existential anxiety. Why traditional therapy turns into an endless process. Why is it now, at the moment of the triumph of AI, that the human psyche is collapsing en masse?

It doesn't matter if we prove every link in the chain to within a year. It is important to see the chain itself - and what can interrupt it to improve your own life.

Let's return to our hominid under the acacia. To understand what will happen to him in the next hours, we need to look into the laboratory of the 21st century.

"Dark energy" of the brain

2001. University of Washington. Markus Reichl makes a discovery that revolutionizes neuroscience.

Previously, scientists believed: the brain works like a light bulb - turns on for tasks, turns off when at rest. Reichl noticed an anomaly in the fMRI scans.

When the subjects “did nothing,” brain activity did not fall, but soared. Certain areas greedily absorbed energy precisely in moments of peace.

Reichl called it Default Mode Network (DMN) — Passive mode network.

The discovery showed: our brain is never silent. When we are not busy with an external task, the internal generator turns on: thoughts about the past, plans for the future, worries about what others will think.

Triple architecture

Further research revealed that the brain operates as three interacting networks.

In a healthy brain, this is a balancing system.

For our hominid under the acacia tree, all three networks worked perfectly. But in a few minutes the balance will be disrupted forever.

Portrait of “clean” architecture

Let's return to him - to the creature sitting under the acacia tree in the last minutes of silence.

To understand the scale of what will happen, you need to clearly see what happened “before”. Without romanticizing or belittling. It’s just how the system works.

She worked in the background, but did not create noise. Three functions performed with surgical precision.

Feature One: Social Simulator

The DMN was constantly scrolling through the pack's social map in the background.. Who is next to whom?. Who shared food means he is an ally. Whoever received a blow from the leader means that he is now weak. Those who watched longer than usual need grooming.

But these were not thoughts in our understanding. It was a stream of images, bodily sensations, emotional impulses connected in cause-and-effect chains. Not “they don’t respect me” - but a tightening in the stomach + the image of the leader’s grin + the impulse to look away. Not “I’m a loser” - but a vague feeling of shame + memory of the pain from the blow.

The output of this function: a constant, verbatim calculation of social status. This generated a basic sense of “I” - not as a reflective individual, but as a node in a network of relationships. "I-am-the-one-who-is-respected". “I-am-the-one-being-ignored.” The self was situational and functional—it changed with each new interaction and did not exist separately from the context.

This is why animals don't have existential anxiety. There is no meta-level at which one can question the meaning of existence. The question “who am I?” is identical to the question “what is my place in the pack right now?” - and he always has an immediate, bodily response.

Function two: navigator

DMN built mental maps of the area by superimposing memories on them. "There was fruit here, but there was a snake there". “There are two paths leading to the watering hole, the short one is through the territory of the neighboring group.”. “It’s cold today, like last winter, we need to look for a cave.”

This allowed one to mentally travel through time - but in the most primitive sense. "Yesterday" meant "where it was". “Tomorrow” - “where we’ll go”. Time was spatial, tied to specific places and events.

Function three: autopilot

When actions became habitual—searching for certain plants, making simple tools, grooming—the DMN took over them, freeing up resources for new tasks.

But this is where the trap was hidden. Autopilot created mental ruts - rigid, repetitive patterns of perception and response. The world was perceived through the prism of established programs. Each situation triggered one of the pre-programmed scenarios. One stimulus - one reaction. The track, dug by thousands of repetitions, became the only possible path.

The system was effective in a stable environment. But it is absolutely inflexible when faced with something radically new.

His SN: biological radar

The significance network scanned the environment for threats. Rustle in the grass - assessment - reaction. Only direct physical dangers, only here and now. No abstract fears like “reputation”, “future”, “death as a concept”.

Fear of a specific predator did not become an abstract concept of "danger". Each experience remained unique and specific - radically limiting the transfer of knowledge between contexts, but without creating phantom threats.

His CEN: a tool for specific tasks

It was included in the manufacture of tools, hunting, and solving specific problems.

Critical difference from the modern brain: when CEN was working, DMN was silent. Fully. The shift was clean.

There was no situation familiar to every modern person: you try to concentrate, but your thoughts drag you into the past, into anxiety, into self-criticism. SN switched networks smoothly without failures, without leaks, without conflicts.

Four critical absences

To understand what exactly has changed after the BVZ, it is necessary to understand what there was no in a "clean" system.

Four gaping voids that in an hour will be filled with something completely new.

More about the lack of dialogue

There were no words. At all. There was a stream of images, bodily sensations, smells and sound memories connected in chains of cause and effect.

Modern research shows that inner speech is not just “voicing thoughts”. This is the fundamental structuring mechanism of thinking itself. Without language, mental processes were amorphous - a stream of associative connections without a logical structure. Like a river without a bed, the water flows, but not in a certain direction.

More about transparency

Imagine firmware - basic programs built into the computer hardware. You don't see them on the screen. You can't edit them from the normal interface. They don't appear in the application list. They simply don’t exist for you, even though they determine how everything else works.

This is how DMN worked. She was not "observable thinking". She and was reality itself.

It is this transparency that made the system an ideal target for hacking.. A program that does not know that it is a program cannot protect itself from interference.

Perfection and dead end

Before us is a perfectly tuned biological machine. The result of four billion years of evolutionary optimization. Three networks work in perfect coordination. No noise, no conflicts, no unnecessary energy consumption.

But there is a dead end.

Autopilot mental ruts do not allow adaptation to radically new conditions. The absence of abstractions does not allow the transfer of knowledge beyond direct experience. The inability to see your own programs does not allow you to change them.

And the world around our hominid has already changed: the sky is gray, there is no food, the flock is melting. The old tracks lead to nowhere.

He needs something that doesn't exist in his repertoire of reactions. Something that hasn't happened in four billion years. A fundamentally different way of processing reality.

And this method is already dissolving in his blood.

The first minutes after the Big Bang

Thirty minutes after he ate the mushroom.

At first - nothing. Then something strange.

Hands became... different. He looks at his fingers and doesn't recognize them. Not because they have changed. But because he’s looking at them for the first time as per object. Hands used to be just part of the action - grabbing, digging, hitting. Now they are...separate. Lines on the palm. Dirt under nails. A movement of the fingers that he can slow down and observe.

Something has broken in the usual conveyor of perception.

Phase One: Disinhibition (0–30 minutes)

Psilocybin is more than just a hallucinogen. It is a molecule structurally almost identical to serotonin that binds to 5-HT2A receptors. These receptors are particularly densely located in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, two key nodes of the DMN.

The DMN stops suppressing the activity of other neural networks. Arises hyperconnectivity - areas of the brain that usually do not interact begin to exchange signals. The visual cortex is activated without external stimuli - he sees what is not there. The auditory system generates internal patterns - sounds take on color. The somatosensory cortex produces sensations that are not associated with actual touch.

But the main thing is: the social matrix is ​​collapsing. He looks at the leader - and for the first time in his entire life his body does not shrink automatically. The image of the leader no longer triggers the learned chain of “squeeze → fear → averted gaze”. The track is destroyed.

For a creature whose DMN has always worked as a rigid survival algorithm, this is a shock to the system. Firmware crashed. For the first time in my life, there was a gap between stimulus and response—an empty space that had not existed before.

Phase Two: Existential Disorientation (30–90 minutes)

Without a functioning DMN, everything that makes him “him” is disrupted.

The boundaries of the body—where the “I” ends and the “not-I” begins—are blurred. The hand goes into the ground, the ground goes into the grass, the grass goes into the sky. There is no clear line.

Autobiographical continuity disintegrates. The past is not connected to the present. He doesn't remember himself as history.

Social identity ceases to exist. He doesn't know who he is in relation to others. He doesn't know who he is at all.

This is an existential crisis at the neurophysiological level.

Others in the flock also ate mushrooms. They also see strange things. Someone lies staring at the sky. Someone touches the ground as if touching it for the first time.

Someone makes sounds - not ordinary sounds, but something new, something that the throat has not produced before.

Phase Three: Spontaneous Reorganization (90+ minutes)

The brain is a self-organizing system. When the old order collapses, she does not fall into chaos forever. She is looking for a new pattern.

And he finds it.

A paradoxical state arises: there is an experience, but there is no experiencer. The world is perceived - but there is no one to say “I perceive”. There is seeing, hearing, feeling - but there is no center to which all this flows.

This is a critical moment in the entire history of life on Earth.

For the first time in four billion years, a observer - something that can see the process of perception from the outside. Not as another algorithm within the system, but as a gap, a gap, an empty space from which one can see how all the algorithms work.

Primordial broth of consciousness

Imagine Earth's primordial ocean four billion years ago. Hot water saturated with organic molecules. Chaotic mixing of substances. And at some point - a random combination that begins to copy itself. First replicator. First life.

Under the influence of psilocybin, stable virtual space - a detailed internal simulation of reality, where images and experiences could exist independently of external stimuli.

Previously, every mental content was tied to a real object: the image of a leopard to a real leopard, fear to a real threat. Now the images appeared on their own, mixed, recombined - like molecules in the primordial ocean.

This is the broth in which a new form of life will arise in a few minutes. Not biological. Informational.

And at the same time something happened that had never happened before in any nervous system on the planet.

Recursion. Circularity.

The psychedelic experience is often described as fractal. “I think about what I think about what I think...” Neural circuits, deprived of the usual DMN brakes, closed on themselves. The signal went in a circle: perception → processing → the result of processing became a new object of perception → processing of the result → and this result again became an object...

Animals don't have this loop. Their brain processes the signal and produces a reaction.. Dot. New signal - new reaction. Linear process.

The closure created metacognition - ability to think about thinking. The ability to observe one's own mental processes as objects. This is what we now call “consciousness” in the full sense of the word - and what, in four billion years, evolution has not produced in any other form.

The primordial broth boiled. The virtual space inside the skull has become an independent habitat.

Wednesday was ready. All that remained was to wait for the first replicant.

We didn't have to wait long.

Basic visual cortex code

When the DMN is disabled and the virtual space is active, the brain begins to show its source code.

Entoptic phenomena - visual patterns generated by the architecture of the visual cortex itself when it operates without external input signal. These are not hallucinations in the everyday sense. This is neurogeometry - a literal mapping of the structure of neural columns onto the “internal screen” of perception.

Researcher Heinrich Klüver discovered in the 1920s that these patterns are universal - they are the same in all people, in all cultures, in any method of altering consciousness: psilocybin, mescaline, migraines, hypnagogic states, sensory deprivation. Four basic shapes, hardwired into the hardware itself.

Our hominid sees this right now. With your eyes closed - or even open, because the visual cortex is working at full capacity, superimposing internal patterns on the external world. Zigzags weave through the grass. Spirals spin in the sky. The bars flicker on the ground.

He doesn't know that he sees his own brain working. He has no concept of "brain", "vision", "internal" and "external". For him it's simple - the world has become different. The world is doing something new.

And then something happens that changes everything.

Birth of the first character

Before talking about the first character, it is important to say where this all started to happen. The answer is simple: in what we now call ours Self. This is the same white hole after the Big Bang of Consciousness, the same space in which the first replicants appeared.

But let's return to our hominid. He sees a zigzag. A shimmering, bright, wave-like pattern pulsating before the eyes.

The next day - or a week later, or a month later, when the effect of the mushrooms has long worn off - he meets a snake in the grass. And his brain does something that no other brain on the planet has done in the entire history of life.

He connects.

Zigzag inside and snake outside. They look alike. And at this moment a bridge arises between the internal virtual space and the external world.

When he takes a sharp stone and scratches a zigzag pattern on the rock, he creates more than just a line. He creates the first symbol in history - a sign that does not indicate a specific object visible right now, but the connection between internal experience and external phenomenon.

Zigzag on a stone is not a snake. This is not a memory of a snake. This is a pattern that exists simultaneously in two worlds: internal and external.. It points to something third that is not in any of them.

This is the first step from direct perception to symbolic thinking.

And this is the first meme.

Not a specific idea. Not a word. Not a belief. The principle itself: one pattern may indicate another. A sound can mean a thing. Gesture can mean action. An image can mean a state.

Principle of symbolization - the first self-reproducing information pattern to penetrate the biological nervous system.

It entered through the gap created when the DMN was disabled. He settled in the primordial broth of internal virtual space. And he began to copy himself.

First shared reality

He wasn't alone.

Mushrooms were eaten by several members of the flock. They saw similar patterns - because entoptic forms are universal, hardwired into the very architecture of the visual cortex, the same in all Homo sapiens. Tunnels, spirals, zigzags, lattices - the same basic code, the same neurogeometry.

For the first time in history, multiple beings were experiencing the same inner experience at the same time.

Previously, internal experiences were completely private. My fear of the leopard is mine and mine alone.. I can't give it to anyone else. I don’t even know that it is “internal” - it is just part of the world.

But after the general psychedelic experience arose first shared virtual reality. Several brains saw the same thing - and, more importantly, recognized the same thing when they met.

One scratches a zigzag on a stone. Another sees - and his body reacts. Not just a “familiar sign”, but a resonance: the whole complex of sensations from that experience under the acacia tree rises from the depths. Zigzag causes condition. A stone with a design triggers in someone else’s brain an experience that was in the brain of the person who drew it.

The attempt to reproduce a common experience - through movement, through sound, through drawing - created first rituals. Actions that make sense not for the survival of the body, but for the reproduction of a certain state of consciousness. The first actions that led neither to food, nor to safety, nor to reproduction - but were repeated again and again, because the pattern behind them sought to be copied.

And the need to coordinate these rituals, to convey information about experiences that cannot be pointed out with a finger, created pressure that did not exist before.

Pressure to create a language.

The first “words” were not descriptions of objects. They were defiant formulas - sounds that triggered certain states or memories. Not “snake” as a label for a crawling creature, but a sound that made the body shudder in the same way as when encountering a snake. Not a pointer to an object, but a trigger for an experience.

Irreversibility

Next - an avalanche.

Enlarged prefrontal cortex - for planning and manipulating abstract objects. Broca's and Wernicke's areas have evolved - specialized areas for the production and understanding of speech, which no other species has in such an extent. The parietal cortex has become more complex - for symbolic operations. The structure of the larynx has changed - to produce dozens of different sounds needed by the tongue. The whites of the eyes appeared - white sclera, absent in other primates, which allows you to track the direction of someone else's gaze.

Genetic evidence confirms that after the Toba bottleneck, the surviving population had a selective advantage in cognitive abilities. Those who could better assimilate, store and transmit symbolic information left more offspring. Natural selection began to work not on the body, but on the body's ability to be a good host for memes.

Archeology records: immediately after the “bottleneck” - the explosive appearance of complex tools, symbolic art, funeral rituals, jewelry, ocher for body painting. There have been more innovations in thousands of years than in the previous million.

Not because people have “become smarter”. But because a replicator had started up in their brains, which needed increasingly complex tools for its own copying.

Diagnosis

We have become infected with consciousness.

Not metaphorically. Literally - in the same sense in which a cell is “infected” by a virus that rewrites its DNA and forces it to produce copies of itself instead of what the cell was doing before.

A self-reproducing information pattern has entered the brain. He found a habitat - a virtual space created by a DMN glitch. He began to copy himself - through symbols, rituals, sounds. He rebuilt the owner to suit his needs - physically changing the structure of the brain, throat, eyes.

And he brought with him side effects, which our hominid under the acacia could not have foreseen.

Internal dialogue that cannot be stopped

DMN, rebuilt to serve memes, now runs 24/7, generating a continuous stream of characters. A computer whose power button is stuck.

Existential anxiety

Symbolic thinking made it possible to understand one's own mortality. Animals don't know they will die. A person cannot help but know.

Alienation from the body

Having moved into the virtual space of symbols, we stopped hearing direct signals from the body. We live in our heads, ignoring four billion years of biological wisdom.

Self-destructive behavior for the sake of ideas

People regularly sacrifice their lives for the sake of abstractions - in wars, revolutions, religious acts. No animal behaves like this. This is classic behavior of an organism invaded by a parasite: an ant infected with a lanceolate fluke climbs to the top of a blade of grass to be eaten by a cow - because the parasite needs to get into the next host. A person who goes to his death for the sake of a flag is the same ant on a blade of grass.

Chronic psychological suffering

Animals experience pain. But they don't suffer. Suffering is pain filtered through narrative. "I'm in pain" is a feeling. “I’m in pain, and it’s not fair, and it’s always been like this, and it will never end” - this is suffering. The difference is in the symbolic layer, which animals do not have.

Look around you. Look at the world created by this infection. Skyscrapers, rockets, the Internet, nuclear bombs, antidepressants, wars over ideas, trillions of dollars spent to silence the voice in your head that cannot be turned off.

All this - extended meme phenotype. Like a beaver dam - an extended beaver phenotype.