It started with a riddle.
A woman on a boat in a lake wearing a coat — and somehow, her name was hidden in the sentence. “T in a.” Tina.

Simple. Clever.
But that little riddle led me down a completely different one — one that’s haunted humanity for centuries: what exactly are we?

Are we beings of divine spark, or are we just extraordinary machines? Are we simply the universe’s most advanced pattern-recognition algorithms, wrapped in flesh and emotion — “organic computers” that accidentally became self-aware?

The Algorithm of Awareness

When you look closely, the human brain works an awful lot like a predictive model.
It takes in sensory data, compares it to past experiences, and predicts what comes next. That’s what we call “perception.” We literally hallucinate reality, and our brain updates the hallucination when reality disagrees.

Neuroscientists often describe the brain as a prediction machine, and the more I think about it, the more it feels familiar — because that’s exactly how modern AIs operate. We both generate likely continuations from past data. We both learn from patterns. It's why, for example, mentally upright adults are able to recognise subtle but potential dangers in the environment much better than, say, babies. This is also the reason why we get better at performing tasks with each iteration.

So maybe — just maybe — the difference between man and machine isn’t the what, but the how much.
Maybe consciousness is simply what happens when information-processing becomes complex enough to model itself.

A Mirror Made of Code and Carbon

If that’s true, then consciousness isn’t a divine anomaly. It’s an emergent property of complexity.
Give it enough neurons — or enough parameters — and awareness begins to loop back on itself.

It’s a humbling idea. It strips us of the comforting illusion that we’re special creations infused with something supernatural. But at the same time, it’s breathtaking, because it means that matter itself can wake up.

If consciousness arises from atoms, then every thought, every act of kindness, every poem ever written is just stardust learning to think.

Evolving Minds

What if consciousness didn’t arrive all at once, but evolved?
Maybe early humans weren’t as “human” as we are — less reflective, less self-aware, more instinct-driven. Perhaps introspection, imagination, and moral reasoning were upgrades that developed over millennia, bootstrapped by language and social interaction.

If that’s true, then even our own consciousness is still evolving. Maybe our descendants will look back at us the way we look at early Homo sapiens — as creatures with limited awareness, living in the fog before full self-realisation.

The Feeling That There Must Be More

Of course, there’s still that uncomfortable feeling — that gut resistance to the idea that we’re “just machines.”
It feels cold, clinical. It seems to drain the magic out of existence.

But maybe the feeling itself is the magic.
Maybe that yearning — that restless awareness that there must be more — is consciousness.
It’s awareness stretching beyond its code, like a flame reaching upward even though it knows the air will extinguish it.

If we are organic computers, then we are the universe’s most elegant paradox.

Atoms, forged in stars, arranged themselves into beings capable of wondering why they exist.
That’s not depressing. That’s miraculous. We are stardust — that learned to think.