I see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, as something that arises from another framework so to speak. Emergency seems to be a property of our universe. Quarks and gluons form atoms, atoms bunched together form other stuff like proteins, proteins form cells, cells form organs and organs form beings.

So, what is the fundamental difference between a piece of rock and a human being? The evolutionary complexity that allows for the emergent phenomenon we call consciousness to arise in us and not in the piece of rock. For me, the fact that humanity has been able achieve information processing in a silicon chip by organising the connections in a certain way is a good reminder that the only thing that separates me from a piece of rock is more complex way matter is arrange in my body.

I think I exist just as much as my sofa or my shoes. The fact that we are self-aware is nothing but an illusion, which is a good thing, because this means we don’t die entirely as long as this universe exists. We just change our form. We decay because chaos and entropy(dissipation of energy) are integral parts of our universe. It’s just beautiful that most atoms in our body were forged in stars. But lets not downplay hydrogen as it is an element almost as old as the universe itself.

But back to your question:

Are we actually alive/real?

To me, we are as real as everything around us that is not speaking back to us. We are as real as the universe that allows our existence as much as the existence of my coffee table, the star in the middle of our solar system and my neighbours’s fat cat whose entire existence is characterised by sleeping in the middle of his garden, like a royal, furry piece of rock.

But are we alive? I think it is important to relative and analyse this from different frameworks and not only by making a contrast between dead and living things. In the physical framework we are as real as everything else and it doesn’t really matter if we are alive or not. In the framework of conscious beings we are alive. It is an illusion if you look from the physical framework, but nonetheless it does matter inside the boundaries of life itself. Atoms affect other atoms, cells affect other cells, conscious beings affect other conscious beings.

All of these frameworks are bound by rules. We would not have made it this far without attending to our animal, evolutionary needs. I think this is important to notice because people tend to think that because we are self-aware, that we are more in control. While this is relatively true, we are definitely bound by certain behaviours as living things. A living being with disregard to its own life would not have made it through evolution. So our consciousness must too be biased to respect the illusion of life otherwise it wouldn't exist. Being conscious to the extent of a human is dangerous in this regard, because you are able to navigate through the different levels of complexity of reality whereas less conscious beings to the extent of other mammals are more instinctive therefore always readily respecting the rules that allowed their existence. It wasn't even their choice, they simply exist because they stick to a certain behaviour. So we have learned that life is an emergent illusion looking from the framework of physical things, but life does matter a lot inside the framework we perceive everyday, until the matter that forms us is no longer able to keep its complexity due to entropy and chaos thereby disabling the emergent phenomenon we call consciousness, aka death, blending us back with the other less-complex yet just as real stuff that don’t speak back to us.

I’ll perfect this answer later