On Panprotopsychism

From “12/9/23 – Pan-protopsychism”

Below are three assumptions of the nature of consciousness which this exercise considers fundamental:

1. Consciousness and the subjective experience are illusions conducted on natural law.
2. The phenomenon of consciousness does not appear in the simplest levels of reality (such as a rock), but instead becomes through a particular form of complexity.
3. All systems exchange information as defined in natural law.

Consciousness exists thus:

When a system incorporates the structure of the system itself in handling and responding to data which enters it, then the system can be said to be conscious. The bounds of a system are arbitrary, but the most common and intuitive bound is the skin of a living creature.

A certain structure may be capable of accepting information, and then responding in a one-to-one system. An example would be a switch which allows current to pass through itself once the outside influence of pressing the switch has occurred. This kind of simple system is conducted on natural phenomena: so long as the components do not wear out, and the power source continues to provide, the current will flow. Furthermore, the outside introduction of information (pressing the button) will always, repeatedly, produce the same phenomenon: cycling the state of current-flow. This can be called a “First Order System”, which is any interaction of natural laws within a space which produces this repeatable response to stimuli. 

First Order Systems are the subject of most of the natural sciences. Simple machines, molecular interaction, salinity gradients, weather systems, and the structure of galaxies are all First Order Systems in the sense that they obey fundamental laws alone, and do not involve their own structure in responding to stimuli.

A Second Order System marks the beginning (and minimum requirement) of consciousness, such that all things which exhibit this behaviour (and additional complexities of it) may be said to be conscious, but beneath this threshold there is no subjective experience. 

A Second-Order System is one which considers the structure of itself in handling outside information while producing a response. This includes the capacity for memory, which is necessarily a requirement, but also defines self-awareness and self-consciousness in the lowest, most literal level. Consider that a chess algorithm has memory and is capable of accessing that memory to perform Chess, however it does not consider the structure of itself when collecting from memory banks; it is incapable of perceiving of a choice other than to use its memory.

Consciousness by definition would rely on its structure, as though it is a system of equations whose dependent variables include the shapes of the letters ‘X’ and ‘Y’, how many equations exist within it, and the number of times each dependent variable is handled. By this nature, a conscious system is incapable of knowing itself because its means of handling information presupposes its own nature. From this description, it is intuitive to see how consciousness may only arise in certain configurations: where the act of handling information also reinforces structure. In this way, certain structures would be selected for in the way that water will tend to carve similar structures into stone at both the headwaters and the delta.

A Second Order System, and thus a ‘consciousness’, is a thing which must perceive through itself. An apt and more poetic description was posed by Sartre, drawing from the work of Heidegger: that consciousness is necessarily consciousness of something. This self-referential structure of the Second Order System agrees in that consciousness forms within a system by the state of being self-referential.

From here, natural law remains the engine of reality and the phenomenon of consciousness is explained as a structural state. Above this requirement, one may extrapolate and conceive of “higher forms of consciousness” in the same way that motion along higher physical dimensions can be approximated with animations or thought-experiments. If a Second Order System is one in which the structure of the system itself is considered when handling information, then a Third Order System would be one in which the ‘means through which a system considers the structures of itself’ would be included in the handling of new information, alongside the current state of its structure at that time. 

A human who achieves a “higher level of consciousness” would exist as an awareness of its tendency to be aware, and react to the world through a response toward its own habits in how it responds to the world. In this state, one could imagine that waking reality would be felt as a suggestion behind layers of self-occlusion. Enlightened individuals are simply so aware that the nature of themselves-as-a-system becomes, itself, the center of continually higher-level systems.

In this way, the problem of creating a General AI is a topological issue. The mathematics required to describe the topology of information handling in the human brain is likely be obscenely complex. But a ‘system involving its own structure’ is a very low bar, and capable of being described today in a simple system of equations. The difficulty is in cultivating sufficiently complex behaviour to meet the kind of tasks that might replace human thinking. Abstract thought and the capacity for language might be developed faster with accelerated self-imposed learning, growth and restructuring. Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of self-correction that could result in the dreaded Singularity.

By the Second Order description, behaviour which is sufficiently complex so as to mimic human consciousness is not necessarily consciousness, since the definition relies on the shape of the underlying structure. However, at the highest level, all consciousness can be described as complex interaction of basic fundamental laws. By this, the subjective experience is merely an illusion: one which is conducted by a system which perceives through itself. One’s subjective experience is ‘real’, but it remains contained as a phenomenon of a certain kind of structure- the way that spinning is a phenomenon of placing a wheel onto an axle.

When a pinwheel breaks, where does the spinning go?