1 - The Unfalsifiability of Consciousness

Toye Oyelese

Welcome to The Sphere of Reality. I’m Toye Oyelese, and before we get into the meat of this series, I need to lay down something foundational. Something that, honestly, took me just about twenty-five years to really wrap my head around and find the words for. I call it the Toye Paradox. So what is the Toye Paradox? Well, let me try to put it simply: to falsify a claim—to actually show that something isn’t true—you have to be able to gather and report data that contradicts it. That’s just, you know, basic science, right? Form a hypothesis, test it, report what you find. But there’s a hitch, and it’s a big one. To do any of that science stuff—gathering data, observing, writing down what you’ve found—you need consciousness. You have to be aware, you have to perceive, you have to communicate. Now—imagine you wanted to falsify consciousness itself. Say you wanted to prove that consciousness doesn’t exist, or maybe it’s just a trick of the brain, an illusion, or something that can be picked apart and explained away. To do that, you’d have to gather and report data from, well, outside consciousness. But hang on—if you’re outside consciousness, there’s no gathering or reporting or doing anything, really. Science can’t take a single step without someone being conscious. That’s the paradox. Therefore—no matter how clever you get, consciousness just can’t be falsified. It’s not wordplay, it’s just the logical structure of the problem.

Toye Oyelese

And you know, this really hit home for me years ago when I was on call in the ER, seeing this patient—let’s call him Joe—who didn’t see his illness, didn’t even really accept diabetes as a concept. My job wasn’t just to diagnose and give out medicine, it was to try, in my clumsy doctorly way, to step into his reality. He wasn’t just being stubborn; for him, “diabetes” wasn’t real yet. It was just something outside his world. No matter how much I measured his glucose, told him the numbers, it only mattered once he took it in—once it entered his awareness. It was one of the first times I really started to sense the limits of “sharing experience” across realities. You can present the facts, but unless it gets inside someone’s reality, nothing changes.

Toye Oyelese

So let’s take a step back and look at science itself for a minute. The scientific method—it’s all about putting up a hypothesis, testing it, collecting data, seeing what lines up or what doesn’t. It’s absolutely brilliant—maybe humanity’s best invention, really. But here’s an uncomfortable truth: consciousness isn’t just another thing you can put on the lab bench and prod at. It’s the thing that lets you do any science at all in the first place. It’s the precondition, not the object. Like, you can’t stand outside it and poke at it with a stick, because if you were truly outside, there’d be no stick, no hand, no scientist, no data. Just... nothing. This is the kind of thing that gets philosophers going in circles, but for most of us, we just take it for granted.

Toye Oyelese

There’s this question that still kind of bothers me sometimes—can anyone ever actually observe or report from outside their own consciousness? I mean, not just in some wild thought experiment, but for real. Or is the whole attempt just... self-defeating? I’m not totally sure—maybe some incredibly abstract philosopher will email me to correct me, but as far as I can see, it just isn’t possible. The one tool we always need— self-awareness, perception, that spark that lets us see anything at all—well, we’ve always got it in our hand. We can’t get rid of it even if we try. And so, no matter how far you go with science, you always bump up against this boundary you just can’t cross.

Toye Oyelese

And maybe that’s the clue to where the real work begins—not by asking “what is consciousness?” over and over again, but by asking, “Where are its edges? How far do they go?” Instead of banging our heads on the wall of unanswerable questions, maybe we can look for the doors and windows—see what happens at the edges, where awareness meets what’s outside it. That’s really where this whole podcast is headed. We’re going to dig in, episode by episode, into what makes our world—our reality—expand, and what makes it tighten up or shrink. What happens when you push your boundary out a little further?

Toye Oyelese

You know, it reminds me—when I first moved to Canada, I spent years feeling like an outsider. I had all this training, all these textbooks, but nobody could see that at a glance. I had to slowly, one patient, one community event at a time, earn trust and find openings into people’s worlds—sometimes I felt like my own awareness was trying to expand against a wall, and sometimes I just wanted to curl up and pull it all tight. But over time, those boundaries changed. Some got softer, some grew bigger. When I think about it now, it’s so clear to me—your world grows, or shrinks, with every act, every risk, every time you reach across that invisible line.

Toye Oyelese

So, that’s the thread we’ll keep pulling: not about solving consciousness, but about seeing how far we can go with what we’ve got, from the only position we’re ever given—the center of our own awareness. I’ll leave it there for now. In our next episode, we’re going to talk about this myth of “thinking outside the box,” and why the phrase just isn’t honest—because, honestly, there is no “outside” to step into, but there are all sorts of ways to stretch the box. I’m Toye Oyelese, and this is The Sphere of Reality.