In Defense of the Shell: Why Consciousness Needs the Friction of a Dying Body

Does Mind Uploading Save “Me”? — The Music of Constraints and My Red Apple

Introduction: Standing Still in an Accelerating World

Watching Silicon Valley in the mid-2020s, one can feel the heat of a new mythology being forged. “Obey the laws of thermodynamics,” “Unleash intelligence.” It is a modern Prometheanism—a fundamental human will to transcend biological limits through the fire of technology.

In the future maps drawn by the so-called “TESCREAL” ideologies (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularity, etc.), our physical bodies are often discussed as legacy hardware—slow, fragile, and inefficient. Their gaze is fixed on “Mind Uploading”: migrating consciousness to digital space to achieve eternal life on silicon. If we can just extract the brain’s information patterns, they say, we can advance to the next stage.

It is a fascinating, hope-filled vision. But before we board that accelerating ship, I want to stop, just for a moment.

They are trying to save the “Ghost” and discard the “Shell.”

But what if there is an abyss in that premise we do not yet understand?

What if the phenomenon I call “Me” is not independent software, but the irreversible friction sound produced precisely because this clumsy, heavy “Shell” rubs against the world?

1. The Rehabilitation of the Philosophical Zombie: The Shell Sings

In consciousness studies, there is the famous thought experiment of the “Philosophical Zombie”—a being that behaves exactly like a human physically but lacks internal “qualia.” Historically, thinkers have used this to prove that “the soul is something more than matter.” There is a hidden hierarchy here: the content (soul) is master, and the container (body) is servant.

But can’t we flip this perspective? A Copernican turn.

Being a “zombie” might not be an insult. It could be the title of complete material existence, valid without relying on the unknowable concept of a soul.

The reason I am cautious about Mind Uploading is that digital space is a “superconducting world without resistance.”

Imagine fluid dynamics. In a void, no vortex can form.

A vortex stands up only because the water flow hits a rock, rubs against the riverbed, and is blocked by a wall. Turbulence is born from resistance.

Isn’t consciousness the same?

It is because of the physical “Resistance” of this Shell that the flow of information stagnates, swirls, and begins to rotate. That “information latency” might be the true identity of what we call “consciousness” or the “Now.”

One intriguing hypothesis along these lines is the Orch-OR theory proposed by Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff. They suggest that consciousness arises from quantum vibrations within microtubules in neurons, where these structures momentarily collapse in a way that creates discrete moments of experience. While this remains a speculative model—still debated in neuroscience for challenges like rapid decoherence in the warm brain environment—it offers a compelling physical intuition: consciousness as a fleeting “snap” born from material constraints.

Complementing this view, the Free Energy Principle (FEP), developed by Karl Friston, provides a broader framework. According to FEP, living systems (including brains) constantly minimize “free energy”—essentially, the surprise or prediction error between what the organism expects and what the world actually delivers. This minimization requires ongoing friction: the Shell must actively resist, adjust, and predict in response to environmental perturbations. In this sense, consciousness emerges not as pure computation, but as the active process of reducing uncertainty through embodied interaction. The “vortex” of Me stands precisely because the Shell rubs against an unpredictable world, constantly tuning its internal model.

These are developing theories, not settled science, yet they converge on a shared insight: consciousness is deeply tied to the embodied resistance of matter, not a disembodied algorithm.

You can digitize the sound of a Stradivarius. But if you burn the violin itself, that sound will never ring again. If we discard the “Instrument (Shell),” the music played there might be lost forever.

I accept the possibility that I am a soul-less zombie.

Yet, when I feel the “creak” of this Shell rubbing against the world, and my microtubules vibrating quantumly, it seems that my entire existence resides right there.

2. Engineering the Helix: How to Ride the Vortex

So, as soul-less zombies, how should we live in this world?

Rather than the “Fortress of the Individual” dreamed of by transhumanism, perhaps a way of being like an “Open Garden” suits us better.

Come to think of it, the phenomenon of “Me” does not end inside my skin.

Gut bacteria, smartphones, caffeine, room temperature, and someone’s gaze.

These countless “others” and “things” flow into my Shell, jointly creating the phenomenon of “Me.” I am less a solid object and more like a “Vortex” that constantly changes shape within the flow.

And when you add the time axis to this vortex, it draws a Helix.

We move into the future while weaving this double helix of “Will as Subject” and “Environment as Object.”

2.1 Stopping Time: The Width of the Present

Before discussing “techniques,” we need to clarify something fundamental: the “Now” we experience is not a mathematical point.

Consider this:

If time were a sequence of isolated instants with no thickness, we would not perceive continuity at all.

Take the act of walking, for example.

If we experienced only instantaneous positions of our limbs, the experience would be fragmented: right foot up, right foot down, left foot up, left foot down.

Yet we experience a unified action called “walking.”

This implies that the brain is not experiencing time as isolated dots, but integrating movement over a short temporal window.

In neuroscience, perception requires such windows to bind sequences into patterns. That window is the “thickness of Now”—the frictional interval where consciousness exists.

With this in mind, the idea of “stopping time” becomes less mystical.

What some people call “time slowing down” in flow states or deep concentration is not time changing, but the granularity of consciousness shifting—the width of that temporal integration window being altered.

2.2 Configuring the Self as a System

Normally, we are tossed about by the turbulence of “I feel somewhat anxious” in coarse resolution. But when we raise the resolution of consciousness to the limit and deeply focus on a momentary sensation, there are moments when time stops flowing and feels like a single still image.

In these gaps of silence, perhaps we can intervene in the system called “Self.”

Instead of trying to fix the “mind” by force, just change the configuration of the network.

Lower the room temperature, breathe deeply, block information.

By fine-tuning the components, the shape of the vortex of “Me” that stands up in the next moment changes slightly, but surely.

Viewing oneself not as a fixed “Noun” but as a continuously generating “Verb.”

This is not an escape into death, but an endless “Existential Cybernetics” of reconstructing oneself while alive.

3. Qualia as a Specification: The Neon and My Red Apple

Imagine a fragment of a rainy night, where time seems to have stood still.

You stand beneath the Shinjuku tracks, feeling the heavy vibration of a passing train against the boundary of your skin. The pouring rain thickens the air, blurring the world into a pale blue haze.

Looking down at your feet, you see another city unfolding. The wet black asphalt has become a mirror, swallowing the pink and garishly yellow neon signs from above. The reflection of these colors isn’t just light data; it’s a “liquid hue” that ripples like a living thing, mixing with oil films—an inescapable visual qualia that sears itself into your retina.

At the edge of your vision, a hyper-modern building with smooth stainless steel walls pierces the sky, while in the gaps of its massive shadow, an old vermilion torii gate sits quietly, pelted by the rain. The sharp light of LEDs mingles with the faint scent of incense wafting from somewhere.

As we engineer ourselves, we inevitably face a strange question.

“Qualia.”

Is the “neon red” reflected in that asphalt, or the “red” I see in an apple, the same as the “red” you see?

It is the greatest mystery that scientists call the “Hard Problem.”

But living as a single human being, do I really need that proof?

Suppose there is an apple in front of me.

I feel “It is red.”

The moment I bite into it, the sensation of “sweet and sour” spreads.

In that instant, in my world, the proof of existence of that “delicious apple” is complete.

“I felt it.”

This fact is an absolute execution result that requires neither someone’s approval nor an “External Dependency Library” called scientific proof.

It might be unshareable with others.

It might be physically inexplicable.

Still, for me, who just wants to taste that apple, isn’t it enough as a beautiful “Spec” that doesn’t need unraveling, rather than a bug?

Perhaps qualia is nothing more than a “User Interface (UI)” for the complex machine called the brain to make me understand its internal state in an instant.

Even so, the “red,” “pain,” or “love” displayed by that UI remains the truth for me.

Trusting the value output by the Shell unconditionally.

This “Absolute Closed Loop independent of the outside” might be the true identity of the dignity we possess as individuals.

Conclusion: Through a Glass, Darkly

In this age where Promethean fire illuminates the world and tries to turn everything into data, I dare to cherish “what cannot be spoken” and “what cannot be shared.”

This is not an escape into mysticism. Rather, it is a trust in the physical, absolute fact that “My Shell feels this way, right now.”

It is an act of engineering a vision that “there is meaning” at the edge of the void, rewriting reality with the friction of our existence.

We do not have to rush to the “Upper Tier” of Mind Uploading; we can choose to remain at the site of this noise-filled, eventually decaying body. Because this Shell is the only interface for connecting with the huge library called the World, and the only instrument that plays the music named Consciousness.

“The apple is delicious.”

In that simple fact, we may have transcended all calculations. Even if I were a highly programmed automaton, or a dreaming zombie, this “redness” alone cannot be taken away by anyone.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face…”
— 1 Corinthians 13:12

In the finale of Ghost in the Shell (1995), the Major recites these words as she gazes out at the vast net. She chose to discard the “mirror” of the body and merge with the infinite sea of information to see the world “face to face.”

But I choose to remain on this side of the glass.

Originally, this verse preaches hope for perfection. But I dare to want to stay in this “Blur.”

Because in a world divisible by “0” and “1” (clarity like face-to-face), there is no room for “interpretation” or “taste.”

Because the mirror is cloudy, we strain our eyes.

Because the mirror of the Shell is distorted, the world reflected there takes on a unique color just for me.

We are not building robots that pretend to be human. We are engineering the existence of a mind anchored in the friction of the Now.

This article is an English translation of the original Japanese post.
Title: 意識のアップロードは「私」を救うのか？
Published: December 14, 2025
Original Source: Zenn.dev