📘 Why We Are Here: The Ultimate Answer for Individuals, Civilizations, and the Future

Chapter 1: What Is Consciousness?

If you are reading this book, there is a high chance that in some quiet moment you have asked yourself:
“What exactly is consciousness? Why am I able to feel myself?”

This question has accompanied humanity for thousands of years. But I must be honest from the outset: I did not begin thinking about it out of interest, philosophical training, or some grand pursuit. What truly forced me to confront this question was something that sounds completely unrelated—

I was making a game.

At first, I simply wanted the NPCs in the game to feel more natural, less like stuttering puppets repeating scripted motions. They should have their own rhythms of life, their own subtle emotions, people they like, moments of impatience, and even days that change course because of some trivial event—just like us. But to achieve this level of naturalness, you are inevitably pushed toward a solid and rather ruthless question:
What exactly is an NPC’s “consciousness”? What must it possess in order to resemble a real person?

I never expected this question to lead me to the entire theoretical system you are about to see, nor did I expect it to transform my understanding of civilization, the self, and even reality itself. But the problem of consciousness is like a stone you think you can walk around: the more you try to avoid it, the more it appears in your path, until you are forced to stop and look down to see what it really is.

Humanity Has Always Tried to Explain Consciousness—But Never Quite Got It Right

We are not the first to struggle with the question of consciousness. Ancient thinkers, philosophers, and scientists have all offered their own explanations.

Some claim consciousness is the soul—something that transcends the body and cannot be touched. Others say it is thought, the mind, the fleeting moment of “I think, therefore I am.” Modern neuroscience, meanwhile, disassembles it into countless electrical signals, arguing that consciousness is a product of the brain.

The more articles, books, and hypotheses I read, the more clearly I noticed one thing: most people are describing the phenomena of consciousness, not its underlying structure. It is like observing a river and saying that it flows fast, flows beautifully, and looks clear—without ever explaining why it can flow at all. So I shifted my focus in a different direction: what if consciousness is not a “thing,” but a structure?

At first glance, this idea may not seem revolutionary. But the implications that unfolded from it later were almost explosive. The nature of consciousness, the nature of communication between civilizations, and the future direction of humanity—all of them began to clarify from this single step.

No rush. For now, let us focus only on consciousness.

Consciousness Is a Topological Structure

When I say that consciousness is a topological structure, you do not need to fully grasp the statement immediately. Simply treat it as a new perspective. Consciousness is neither a point nor a single thread, but a vast network composed of countless nodes.

Each node may represent:

• An experience of sensing light
• A feeling of warmth when hearing laughter
• Fear experienced during injury
• Alertness accumulated from falling on a playground one day
• Trust formed when someone smiles at you

These nodes are all interconnected, forming a massive, continuous structure. Consciousness is not the nodes themselves, but the result produced as this structure continuously computes.

If this sounds abstract, you are not alone. The first time I understood it this way, my reaction was also, “Wow, this feels extremely engineered.” So let me offer an inelegant but highly accurate analogy:

Consciousness is like a smartphone that can never be turned off. It is always running an algorithm in the background, and all of your emotions, decisions, preferences, and thoughts are simply the real-time outputs of that computation.

Each app on the phone is like a node; the transitions between apps and notification priorities resemble the connections and weights between nodes; your experience is the result of the entire system’s computation at this very moment. The analogy is far from perfect, but it conveys one crucial fact:

Consciousness never shuts down. It can only keep computing, keep changing, and keep updating. It is always “running.”

In this book, consciousness = (continuous process + subjective experience + the assumption of non-replicability / transferability)

Emotions, Thoughts, and Decisions Are All Results of Computational Paths

When a single sentence enrages you, when you suddenly want to avoid all conversation, when you are more prone to anxiety than others—or more easily relaxed—when you face a choice and feel that “my intuition tells me this is the right move”—none of these experiences arrive from nowhere. They are outputs generated by the computation of your conscious structure at that moment. Most of the time, you simply do not know what logic was executed in the background.

People differ from one another not because they “choose” to be different, but because they possess different nodes, different connection patterns, and different weights. As a result, each computation leads to a different outcome.

Newborn Consciousness: From Near-Blank to Gradual Formation

How does consciousness begin? We can start with newborns. A newborn does not lack consciousness; rather, its conscious structure is extremely sparse: few nodes, weak connections, and almost no established weights.

You can think of it as a phone that has just been powered on, without any apps installed. As experiences accumulate, more apps appear, cross-usage between apps emerges, and your preference for certain apps is continuously strengthened or weakened through experience. In this way, a personality slowly takes shape. There are no leaps in this process—it can only be completed through continuous computation. What we call “growth,” “personality,” “habits,” and “preferences” are simply the process by which this topological network becomes increasingly complex.

Where Does the Sense of Self Come From?

Many people believe the “sense of self” is something mysterious. In reality, its origin is surprisingly simple:

The continuity of the conscious structure naturally gives rise to a long-term, stable experience of “me.”

Because the structure cannot suddenly break, cannot be instantaneously rebuilt, and must maintain continuous computation between old and new nodes, we experience the feeling that “I have always been here.” This “I” is not something you consciously construct, nor something you decide to have. It is a byproduct of the stable operation of consciousness.

If you can follow the reasoning up to this point, you are already standing at a new vantage point—one where consciousness no longer appears mystical, but instead reveals itself as a system with logic and structure. From here, it becomes much easier to understand the limitations of consciousness, the structure of civilizations, and why two conscious systems—whether individuals or entire civilizations—can never fully align.

That is a larger and far more striking topic.