The Context of Consciousness

It is well known in the state of the art that computer hardware and software can be functionally substituted for each other; that hardware and software can run equivalent processes in different forms (the physical vs. the logical). The advantage of the software form of a process is that it is more flexible and easier to change.

The basic premise of this book is that there is no reason such a functional substitution cannot be extended to the processes of life-forms, provided that the controlling part of the logical form of the system (the software) is designed to be teleological; that is, it must be designed to cause the system as a whole to be goal-directed as it interacts with reality.

The only currently available technology with the potential to simulate life functions and consciousness is a computer simulation system, but none of the systems extant in the state of the art are up to the task because they are all simply mechanistic automatons.

If a computer system is to simulate consciousness, it must be designed to be as causally equivalent to a biological life-form as possible, because consciousness is a process that is only found as an attribute of some living things, a survival mechanism that they possess, and it can exist in no other known form. Consciousness is not a mechanistic process, and it cannot simply be run as a computer program like a spreadsheet or a robotics application.

How close the causal equivalence of a simulation can be made to mimic real life processes is an open question that depends on the power of computer technology and many other factors, but clearly, some level of causal equivalence can be achieved with the technology that is available even today. Some minimal life-like behaviors have already been simulated with state of the art Artificial Life (AL) simulation systems and robots, though they are not very good ones because they are purely mechanistic in design.

The main purpose of this book is to explain the context of consciousness from a perspective that is not widely known to most scientists and to provide a description and a reduction to practice explanation of my invention to simulate it. Another purpose is to distinguish my invention from the current state of the art in the fields of Artificial Life (AL) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The formulation of ideas this book contains has resulted from my project to design a new kind of computer system that simulates consciousness as it is observed to function in higher animals and human beings.

By "simulates consciousness," I mean a system mimics its causal functions, including higher level conscious functions such as language, reason, and free will. The mechanistic aspects of the computer system will function merely to animate the new form of virtual, teleological entity that will emerge from the design of the system as a whole. The mechanisms of the computer will animate this virtual entity in a manner analogous to the way the mechanisms of physics and chemistry animate biological life-forms.

The interaction with reality of new kinds of data structures, teleological processes, and causal functions in the my simulator's design will make this virtual entity possible. The virtual entity's simulated consciousness will emerge from that interaction.

This book is intended as an instruction manual on how to design and build such a computer simulation system. It must be made clear that this project is not an attempt to recreate biological consciousness in a machine, which is impossible. Such a disclaimer is necessary because of the poor understanding most people have of the nature of what life and consciousness are, as opposed to what machines are.

Before I begin the description of my simulator design and explain how to reduce the invention to practice, there are some more fundamental ideas that need to be introduced and explained in order to set the context for the reader and describe the methods I will be using in explaining how the invention works.

First, the term "computer" is a misnomer. The tools that are commonly called computers are defined too narrowly in the current state of the art; this has happened as a result of their early designs, the uses they were put to initially, and the uses for computers that could be foreseen at the time they were named, given the limits of our technology in those early years. Computers are really reality simulators; they are man-made tools which can animate the objects and relationships that make up any aspect of reality as dynamic symbols. In doing so, they represent that reality in an animated, virtual form that mimics the real form.

Reality exists, it just is. Reality consists of entities, each of which is its own unique identity, and it is the identities of entities that exist in various relationships. Of the different types of relationships that occur between entities, causality is particularly important because it is the means by which entities interact dynamically; without causality there can be no action; causality is the identities of entities interacting with each other.

Simulations are man-made analogs of reality that symbolically represent the entities as data structures, and their relationships (including causality), with logic. If accurately designed, and when animated by computer hardware and software, simulations reproduce reality in virtual form; that is, in a world of symbols rather than objects, in the form of information; in other words, simulations reproduce reality in epistemological form (as symbols and logic) rather than how it exists in metaphysical form (as physical objects).

In the current state of the art, all computer based simulations work mechanistically; that is, the data structures and logic they use are designed to simulate mechanistic causality.

For example, the word processing, database, spreadsheet, and accounting programs that are commonly used with computers today are really simulations of paper documents, paper filing systems, paper spreadsheets, and paper accounting systems. Their value derives from the fact that in addition to simulating the paper, these programs and the computer hardware they run on, mechanistically simulate some of the calculation and other actions that were originated in human consciousness and that people perform consciously and manually when doing such tasks using real paper. The computers automate and greatly speed up these manual processes.

A more complex example of a mechanistic simulation is that of a major airplane manufacturer which designed a computer simulation of a new airplane; the simulation was used to test the design and instruct the machine tools to make the plane's parts. The airplane was then assembled, and it was flown without any paper blue prints or physical mock-up having been used. In other words, the mechanistic causality of the plane in flight was simulated by the computer system to validate the design by mimicking reality, and then it was translated into real objects with the only human intervention being to design the airplane, to assemble the plane's parts, and fly the finished product.

Another example is the first contest in which a computer chess program beat a human chess master. The program is a simulation of a human chess player in mechanistic form; the computer system was used to animate a symbolic chess board using mechanistic causality such that it was able to beat the human player.

In all of these examples, entities and their relationships to each other in reality were represented symbolically; that is, they were converted into information by a human consciousness using data structures and logic as a counterpart to the real objects and relationships that exist in the world, in reality, and then they were re-animated using computer hardware. These simulations are the best that the current state of the art has to offer.

But, as you will see later in this book, there is more than one form of causality. This is contrary to most peoples' understanding because it is a new idea, an idea that was discovered in the later part of the Twentieth Century.

Life-forms, and especially conscious life-forms, are a form of continuous action, action that depends on more complex causality than non-living mechanisms do. While this more complex form of causality itself still depends on mechanistic causality at its root, as does everything in reality, it endows life-forms with new capacities that non-living entities do not possess, such as generating their own energy, sustaining their lives, and regulating their own actions through goal-directed behavior.

There is no reason that this more complex form of causality cannot be symbolically represented and animated in a computer simulation system; the entities involved in living systems are real entities just like their non-living counterparts, and the complex causality involved in their function is still a form of causality none the less. All that is required is that the appropriate data structures and logic be invented to represent this new, complex causal form in order to simulate living systems. Both real life-forms and simulations of them have mechanistic causality as the ultimate motive power that underlies their more complex higher level processes. These complex higher level processes, however, can only be animated by a teleological simulation; that is, they must be goal-directed.

The second point of context that needs to be made is as follows: If this were an instruction manual on how to design a computer based accounting system, it would have certain prerequisites, including knowledge of counting, arithmetic, some algebra, an integrated knowledge of accounting that included processes such as double-entry bookkeeping, business practices, and why using such a system and its operating principle is important to business success. In other words, such an instruction manual would need to include all the subjects that would be needed to identify the entities of accounting processes and their relationships, especially the causal relationships that would need to be included in the simulation to make it correspond to the actual reality of business accounting.

Likewise as prerequisites, this project requires an integrated knowledge of the nature of reality, causality, consciousness, biology, teleology, epistemology, volition (free will), concept formation, objectivity, logic, human beings, natural language, computer science, and so on. Unlike accounting, however, because these subject areas are so fundamental, they encompass a very large part of human knowledge. Few people have had the perspective to understand the inter-relationships involved and to work with these subjects as an integrated whole until recently, until the philosophy of Objectivism provided that perspective. No other philosophy in history has made possible such a broad integration of human knowledge.

Philosophy is the only field broad enough to do so. Unfortunately, errors perpetuated by other philosophical systems prevented such broad integrations in the past.

Philosophy cannot specify the content of subjects outside its own boundaries; that is up to science. But philosophy can specify the necessary structure of knowledge by explaining how it is acquired (epistemology), set the boundaries of the possible by explaining the fundamental nature of reality (metaphysics), and identify logical fallacies and illegitimate questions. The last function is especially important because without it, one could waste time attempting to answer questions like: "What will be the long term economic effects of dividing costs by zero?"

1.1.1 Setting a Philosophical Context

Philosophy cannot provide very much of the content of the prerequisites listed in the last section, but it can supply the epistemological rules and guidelines for evaluating the prerequisites' content, their connection to each other, and to reality. In this regard, philosophy functions in a way analogous to the way structured programming does for creating computer programs which function properly when completed, or as quality management does for creating products that ultimately work as they were intended for the people who buy them.

I know that philosophy has a bad reputation in science because so much of it is mysticism or other forms of subjectivism. However, this is not true of all philosophy. Moreover, all people including scientists have a philosophy, whether they admit it or not: Science cannot function without perception of reality, forming and using concepts, logic, objectivity, and various other methodological processes, all of which come from one philosophy or another. The choice is not whether to have a philosophy to guide your work, the choice is: Which one?

The whole point of the scientific method is to help achieve objective results, instead of subjective fantasies. But the scientific method is not enough; more and more in today's culture science is portrayed as a mere "alternative" to various forms of mysticism or other forms of subjectivism, with the resulting pseudo-sciences such as creationism and environmentalism. Science itself can only survive, and be defended, by an objective philosophy that is ultimately based on our observations about the reality we live in.

In developing the technology for my invention, I have followed the ideas and methods of the philosophy of Objectivism as closely as my own understanding of the subject has allowed. In addition to providing guidelines and connection to reality for this project's content, the ideas offered are original and differ significantly from traditional approaches; some of the implications of Objectivism's conclusions provided many new insights as to how to select and conceptualize my ideas.

Objectivism is a philosophy which was originated by Ayn Rand in the 1950's and has been explained in detail by Dr. Leonard Peikoff, Dr. Harry Binswanger, and others in books and taped lectures, many of which are cited as references for this book. Its ideas, however, are not well known in the scientific community.

I chose Objectivism as my guide because it is the only body of ideas I have ever found that can explain the genesis of the abstract ideas of the science, on which an understanding of consciousness depends, and give them a verifiable connection to reality. I do not accept the idea that science is or should be a body of arbitrary, floating abstractions or compartmentalized ideas separated from other knowledge and sense perceptions.

Reality is an integrated whole, a "plenum" as Aristotle once said, and our knowledge of it must be as well, or it is not knowledge.

The subject of this book, however, is neither about philosophy in general, nor is it about Objectivism in particular; rather, its subject is to explain how to build a consciousness simulator. I will introduce and explain only those ideas from Objectivism that are essential to understanding the technology being discussed on these pages. The prerequisite ideas I am referring to are fundamental to understanding the technology of my invention, and they are not available anywhere else so far as I have been able to discover.

I noted earlier that starting a science project with philosophy is not a conventional approach to scientific research, but that philosophy is the discipline that sets the standards for all of our knowledge and one integrates that knowledge as a system, just like biology does for the subject matter of life or computer science does for the subject matter of computer systems. While historically, philosophy has not performed this function very well, a philosophy based on the observation of reality and reason, in other words, one that operates like any other science does, makes such an approach reasonable.

In some ways human knowledge is similar to the data and structure of complex computer systems; it is similar in that our consciousness processes information that has a specific identity and structure and does so by a specific means; due to this fact, the identity and means of that processing can be abstracted from the content of consciousness and its interaction with reality, for scientific study and other purposes.

But this technique is only possible if we start with a reality-based approach and methodology in the first place.

If you survey all of human knowledge, you will find that Objectivism is the only philosophical system that starts with reality (as perceived by human senses), and not with God (universal, disembodied consciousness) or a materialistic universe in which consciousness is replaced solely by mechanism. Objectivism provides the structure to build a unified system of knowledge that either consists of direct, perceptual observations, or unbroken chains of inferences based on direct, perceptual observations; no parts of Objectivism are compartmentalized, arbitrary assertions. This epistemological approach is the foundation for the ideas presented in this book.

Objectivism qualifies as a set of guidelines for this project precisely because it is the only philosophy that is neither based on the ideas of Idealism nor Materialism, the two primary schools of philosophy in human history. Idealism starts with the idea that a disembodied consciousness is supernatural (or at least some unknowable metaphysical primary) and Man uses intuition as the means (epistemological method) to identify the "intrinsic essences" of objects in the world, "essences" that supposedly give objects their identity; that is, it starts with the idea that the identity of objects is somehow intrinsic to objects (metaphysically embedded in them and ultimately unknowable by us); that they are available to neither human sense perception nor reason. Hence the fuzzy idea of "intuition" as its main means of the identification of the world around us.

Materialism, on the other hand, denies the existence of consciousness outright; materialism is the view that all life is mechanistic (completely reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics), and that consciousness is an illusion, a transparent epiphenomenon, and a process that has no identity itself. Under this view consciousness adds nothing to, and interacts in no way, with our identification of objects in the world around us.

For the reader to understand this issue is of utmost importance because many of the ideas of biology, consciousness, and computer science I will be discussing consist of concepts that are not well known in the culture at large; they are new ideas, and they cannot be understood from the Idealist or Materialist points of view.

Yet most people, unknowingly and implicitly, have accepted one of the other of these views; they have done so because the viewpoints are pervasive in every culture in the world in one form or another. And it is precisely because most people hold either the ideas of Idealism or Materialism unknowingly and implicitly, that I have taken such pains to explain these ideas and their relationship to understanding the content of this book, to explain the key differences in content and method. Unless the reader purposefully thinks about this issue, their subconscious will automatically interpret what I have written on these pages from their implicit idealistic or materialistic points of view. The only way to have a choice about this issue, is recognize it as important and think about it explicitly.

For Objectivism, how knowledge is acquired is as important as its content, the what or subject of knowledge. Questioning and thinking about how we know what we know, about our implicit premises, is therefore, paramount to our understanding of any subject, and it is the only effective way to validate what we think.

Unlike either Idealism or Materialism, Objectivism is based on and starts with the observation of reality using sense perception. Abstract ideas are concepts formed by a specific, reality based method and symbolized by words; concepts contain data that are derived only from their ultimate connection to sense perceptions or through an unbroken chain of definitions that are ultimately connected to specific percepts. Using Objectivist methods, concepts are formed using a quasi-mathematical process by which perceptual measurements are compared by human conscious processing, processing that is initiated by choice. Concepts thus formed are based on ranges of perceptual measurements, not intuition or pragmatic guesses.

In other words, in Objectivist epistemology, knowledge is acquired using a specific, limited method of consciousness consisting of both automatic sense perceptions and a process of concept formation that is initiated by choice to produce a hierarchy of abstractions, but one that is connected to percepts at its base. Moreover, this conceptual method is observable by each of us by means of introspection as we perform it, if we choose to focus and look.

Objectivist epistemology explains the integration of the nature and requirements of reality and of the nature and requirements of human consciousness, dynamically interacting with each other. This dynamic interaction between the identities of both reality and consciousness is the specific way consciousness operates as it processes the data of reality, data which are its content.

The idea of using a method to form concepts is a new idea in epistemology identified by Ayn Rand in the 1960's, and I am explaining it here to be sure it is clearly understood because my invention is built upon it.

You will find no such idea as this in the entire history of philosophy. Prior to Ayn Rand, philosophers had only identified two other alternatives for forming concepts: intrinsicism and subjectivism. As Dr. Peikoff has explained his lecture: "For intrinsicism knowledge is revealed by God or Nature, so no method is necessary; for subjectivism knowledge is simply made up, so no method is possible."₂ Neither of these approaches is appropriate for a science project.

Because Objectivist metaphysics and epistemology are such recent innovations, many readers will be unfamiliar with them. Yet unless readers understand the implications of concept formation using a method, rather than using intuition or subjectivism, they will not be able to completely grasp the new concepts that are explained in this book, such as complex causality and consciousness as a non-mystical process.

Each reader must retrace the steps connecting these new concepts to reality as a prerequisite to understanding them. That requires following the methods of Objectivist epistemology of reduction and integration. If you are not familiar with these methods, I suggest you obtain and study the references before you begin reading the next chapter.

In summary, the ideas I am referring to that I consider to be prerequisite a proper understanding of this book are the following:

• That reality is the world we perceive, a world of objects with inter-related identities, identities which interact causally, and that causation is of more than one kind.

• That our sense perception is valid, automatic (in a biological sense) and the starting point of all knowledge, and that all abstract knowledge is a series of conceptual relationships built on sense perceptions.

• That consciousness is neither mystical nor mechanical, but a means of survival, a causal process that consists of relating objects in reality to some life-forms' state of awareness (of mind), a process performed by some life-forms using a complex form of causality of which life itself is an example.

• That some truths about reality are axiomatic, self-evident from perceptual observation, absolute, and inescapable.

• That concepts are volitionally abstracted from percepts by a specific, measurement-based process that is in part mathematical.

• That our conceptual knowledge, which is volitionally inferred using reason from our observations, is true (if inferred without error), is certain, is objective, and is absolute within a specific context.

These ideas are in direct contradiction to the prevailing assumptions of our culture (implicit Idealism and Materialism), and I offer you fair warning of this fact here in the Introduction. Unless you are interested in questioning those assumptions (some of which you probably hold without even realizing it), there is little point to reading any further.

On the other hand, if you find the idea of questioning your assumptions and previously learned ideas inviting and interesting, if you value objective opinions, then by all means read on!

1.2 Where to Start a Project to Simulate Consciousness?

The question of where to start such a project as this is a most important one. Consciousness, like all other phenomenon, does not exist in a vacuum; in order to understand it, one must start with what gives rise to consciousness in the first place, and that context must never be dropped.

As with all other scientific inquiries, the proper starting point is reality as perceived by our senses, and the life-forms that struggle to survive in it using consciousness as a means of survival.

The commonly accepted approach of choosing the game of chess or a problem in pattern recognition or natural language understanding as the starting point to learn to build a simulation of consciousness, precludes success right from the beginning: Whatever such systems are, they are not simulations of consciousness; at best they are mechanistic simulations of one or two isolated attributes of consciousness.

Using a method such as this does limit the scope of the problems that must be solved, but the context that provides all the clues as to how consciousness works is then lost as well. Reality is an interconnected whole, a plenum, and our consciousness is limited and cannot take all of reality in as one large piece of information; our knowledge of reality must therefore be contextual, that is, our knowledge must consist of many small pieces of information that are integrated or linked together as a whole; the links are what connect all the contexts that give each piece of knowledge its meaning. If simplifying a problem by breaking it up cuts the problem off from its context and the hierarchical connections to other knowledge, the result is guaranteed to be arbitrary, narrow in scope, and brittle (to paraphrase Randall D. Beer); if one's goal is to simulate what intelligent life-forms actually do, simulating a disembodied attribute will not accomplish that goal.

In his book, Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior, Beer takes issue with this approach to designing computer systems to simulate living entities as he clearly outlines the basic assumptions of the traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) position. He cites many of the top Cognitive Psychology and AI researchers and shows how most consider intelligence to be deliberative reasoning, and deliberative reasoning to be a form of computation that can be represented inside an electronic computer. Beer goes on to point out that one researcher (Dennett) clearly identified the three underlying assumptions of traditional AI research: "1) Thinking is information processing...2) Information processing is computation (which is symbol manipulation)...3) The semantics of these symbols connects thinking to the external world."_a

Beer sums up his description of the traditional AI view, known as the representationalist position, is as follows: "Under the rubric of this hypothesis, perception is the construction of internal representations of the external environment. Learning is the modification of the existing representations and the accumulation of new ones. Memory is the storage and retrieval of representations. Language is the encoding, exchange, and decoding of representations. Reasoning is the logical manipulation of representations. Taking action is the execution of a representation of the plan of action to be performed."_a

The representationalist position has two major weaknesses according to Beer. First, it depends on the answers to questions traditional philosophers and psychologists have worked on for years without much success. The descriptions of the world that have resulted from such work have "...no absolute existence, and certainly do not reflect an objective reality."_a

But it is just such an "objective reality" that programmers need knowledge of to write their programs. Beer should be given credit for calling into question the shoddy work of most philosophers, especially those since Kant, and the lack of thoroughness on the part of cognitive psychologists for blindly accepting so many philosophical fallacies.

Beer goes on to point out that the second weakness in the current approach to AI results from the first; since there is no "objective reality" for programmers to use, they try to find one by breaking the problem domain into tiny pieces for which objective data do exist, hoping to build a grand solution from all the smaller ones.

Beer points out correctly that, to date, this approach has produced only a patchwork of very brittle solutions to AI problems, such as expert chess playing programs which cannot be applied outside extremely narrow problem domains. The essential goal of his approach is to reintegrate AI into a whole from the patchwork of tiny subproblems that have resulted from the traditional representationalist approach. Beer believes this will work because the model of biology will provide the "objective reality" that cognitive psychology and philosophy have not.

Even the success of chess playing computer programs does not contradict this fact; chess is a game invented by human beings, and computer programs that play chess are merely mechanistically reacting to the consciousness of human opponents according to the computer's programming. Chess playing computer programs do not perceive, make choices, calculate, use language, or think as humans do; they mechanistically execute a very narrow range of instructions preprogrammed by humans that calculate chess moves. Other Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems with broader goals have not been as successful.

Note - In a strict sense, these programs do not even calculate. The bits they flip can only be thought of as "calculations" if the human consciousness (that created the mechanisms by which they operate in the first place) is included in the context as part of the meaning of the word "calculate".

Recent successes in the field of Artificial Life (AL) support the viewpoint that context and connection to reality must be maintained. Projects in artificial life have succeeded, in part, because they start with the problems faced by real animals attempting to survive in reality, and because they use the context of the animals' existence and their specific survival problems to provide the criteria for choosing the goals and implementation of the programs intended to simulate the animals' actions.

While these successes seem to validate Beer's conclusions, I don't think Beer went far enough. As I indicated above, more than mimicking biology is needed in order to have the "objective reality" and the full context that programmers need. In fact, the only reality that will do is the same reality the we perceive every day, including all of its aspects.

The Digital Life-Form (abbreviated: DLF) and also referred to as DLF Simulation Technology that is described in this book falls into the AL category in as well, but its scope is much broader than the physical/biological processes simulated by most AL programs, or the natural selection process that is simulated by genetic algorithms. This project is an attempt to simulate an entire organism, including its goal-directed behavior, its consciousness, and its connections to reality, by simulating a more complex form of causality on which biological life depends and by which it operates.

Consciousness is an interactive, reality based process that is a means of awareness for some types of life-forms; it is a process that presupposes simpler mechanistic physical and chemical processes, but its goal is awareness of (and action in) reality; the data of reality are its content. A conscious life-form gets and maintains such awareness only by a continuous interaction with reality, by continuously building relationships to the other objects in reality, and by processing and storing the information that results.

In order to describe how to simulate consciousness of reality and animate that process with a computer simulation system, it is first necessary to make perfectly clear to the reader what is meant by "reality" and "consciousness" because these concepts have such fuzzy definitions in our culture.

1.3 What is Reality and Consciousness?

Reality is the world of objects and energy that exists around us; it is the world we and other life-forms see, touch, and act in every day. What you see is what you get. There is no "real" reality at some "higher plain" or in some "supernatural realm." Reality just is.

The objects of existence are, they are identities of specific kinds, and they are dynamic; their identities interact constantly. The interaction is causality. We human beings are also objects with identities, and we are part of the same causal processes as all other objects; our consciousness of reality is one aspect of those processes. Our conscious perception of reality is both the starting point and ultimate source of all human knowledge. Consciousness is the process of awareness; our percepts of the objects we sense in reality are the content of that process, the data.

Consciousness is the series of actions we perform to process the data from our senses in order to have that awareness, and we do so in order to survive; consciousness is our means of survival. We need a means of survival because we are biological organisms, not machines.

Consciousness evolved as a survival mechanism of living organisms. To understand how it works, one must therefore always keep this biological context in mind; there is no mystical component to consciousness. In fact, the existence and validity of consciousness and our senses is axiomatic and self evident to anyone who cares to make the necessary observations.

Unfortunately, reality is not where most people start their investigation; most people start with ideas, not observations, but other peoples' ideas. They start with whole bodies of ideas that they have ingested into their minds without questioning or analyzing. The result is confusion: Which are true, the ideas or sense perceptions? Which came first? Yet to know reality, there is only one way to begin learning about it, and that way is to observe it directly with your own senses.

Existence, Identity, and Consciousness are basic, self-evident axioms which are inescapable because they are presupposed by any attempt to deny them: You may deny them, but you must use them in order to do so.

1.3.1 The Data of Reality

When you or I perceive reality (that is, are conscious of it), we smell, we taste, we hear, we see, and we touch. What we perceive are objects, energy, and those two things interacting. (We, are also objects ourselves that interact using energy with other objects around us, so sometimes this process is recursive.)

The process of consciousness, like any other process, operates by a specific, limited means; at the perceptual level its sensors transduce various forms of energy to produce sense data; that is, the process of consciousness at this level is sensors that transform energy into information.₄

Information in this context is one form of energy converted to another; it is the electrical energy of groups of neurons firing at a certain rate converted from light energy, for example, in the case of sight. The boundary of the body of an organism and the energy conversion that must take place to cross it, is also a context boundary: The energy is no longer just energy, but energy that has been processed by a living organism. The energy now has a relationship with the life-form. In addition to being energy, it is now also information within the context of that life-form's systems, information that has survival value to the organism.

A transformation has occurred; the identity of the energy and the identity of the life-form have interacted causally, and a new relationship has been created based on their mutual identities. The sensations that result from that relationship are emergent properties in the organism; they are emergent because they depend on energy from outside the organism and come into existence (or emerge) only when the energy is present at and processed by the senses.

The energy is changed only in form by the conversion process that sensors perform; it is still just energy. The organism, on the other hand, is changed metaphysically, that is, in its fundamental relationship to reality. The reason is that the information the energy carries changes the identity of the organism, changes its attributes or properties. That means, in effect, the energy changes the organism's capacity to act in its environment. This is because the energy can be further processed once inside the organism; the information the energy carries can be extracted, stored, and used by the organism to take action in reality in the future.

In the case of visual information, these processed data do not symbolize or "represent" the light energy; they are the light energy, just in a different form, a form in which it can be processed by the brain of a life-form to extract the identity information it carries.

As part of the conscious awareness process in higher life-forms, the sense data (sensations) are integrated into the form of percepts, that is, into informational objects, informational objects with the same identities as we see around us. The informational objects in the form of percepts are a second level relationship that emerges from sensations with additional processing by the nervous system and constitute the perceptual level of consciousness. The informational objects do not represent reality, they are reality in the form of percepts, which are a form of information, of conscious content.

Humans also have a third level of awareness: conceptual awareness. Humans alone can use percepts (and the implicit measurements they contain) as data to volitionally infer still more relationships between the properties of objects to form concepts. But these data structures (concepts) are less direct than percepts; concepts are the result of many observations and conscious comparisons of ranges of perceptual measurements. They result from a concept formation method performed by choice, and in many cases, long chains of conceptual reasoning employing language.₅ Unlike percepts (which are formed automatically and infallibly), concepts can be formed in error.

Concepts are part of our knowledge about reality that has been produced by another aspect of our conscious processing of percepts to identify relationships. Classes or categories of objects, various types of relationships, and other abstract ideas are part of reality insofar as our minds are part of reality, but they are not reality itself; they would not exist but for human beings. Metaphysically, only objects exist. Classes or categories are part of our knowledge of reality (as content), part of the process of consciousness (as mental data structures), and part of the specific kind of consciousness possessed only by human beings (reason). By analogy, the computer data structures used by an accounting program do not exist in a manual accounting system, only pieces of paper do. However, computer science identifies and uses various categories, relationships, and abstract ideas to enable a computer system to process accounting information. In both cases, these entities are the result of the relationship between the processor and the processed data.

Abstract ideas stored in memory by concepts and their definitions are another form of information, but a form that does symbolize or "represent" certain aspects of reality, unlike percepts which are reality. Abstract ideas are stored as concepts and accessed using words in a code of visual-auditory symbols called natural language. Abstract ideas amplify the survival value of percepts by reusing some of them as symbols which broaden the scope of our knowledge and reduce the number of units of information that we must process. The reduction of information units to be processed is one way concepts offer survival value.

To summarize, for the higher life-forms such as humans, reality is the body of things we observe using our perceptual consciousness; it is the world automatically identified by our senses using certain relationships of perceptual form. This automatic knowledge may later be amplified by our choice to form abstract ideas, that is, to form concepts which are symbolized by words and are themselves yet another form of information created by consciousness volitionally processing percepts.

In the world of computer simulation, a similar set of relationships could be created by an appropriately designed simulated consciousness running as part of a digital life-form on a computer system, provided that it was given a similar means to convert sense data into information in the form of identifiable objects (percepts) and to form concepts.

Exactly how the process of perception and the volitional process of conception could be designed to work in a computer simulation system will be discussed in detail later; for now, let's just focus on reality itself (the data of consciousness), to differentiate it from consciousness as a process; to do so, we must allow for the fact that some terms of consciousness, such as "measurement," "difference," "information," and so on must be used as part of that description.

Note - These terms must be used because reality and consciousness are so closely related; consciousness is about reality; it is a series of relationships based on reality. But when we use consciousness to describe and explain itself recursively, the concepts used must have double meanings: One meaning refers to the data of reality itself, and the other refers to the data of reality as processed by consciousness. This is a subtle distinction, and one must be careful to avoid confusion.

Objects

Objects are parts of reality that can be separated or differentiated by a consciousness from other parts of reality due to some difference that can be detected or measured by our senses.

Note - The differentiation of objects by consciousness is not metaphysical, but epistemological; that is, it is a separation made by a specific means of measurement (foreground from background) and as part of the processing of reality by consciousness, by our perceptual system; the separation of objects is "in the form of information," not a literal separation of "parts of reality." Reality is one interconnected whole metaphysically, and cannot be separated into parts, except in the form of information. The sum total of all objects, energy, relationships, and information equals reality, all of existence, which is a plenum. This fact was first identified by Parmenides, then Aristotle, and fully validated by Ayn Rand.

This differentiation by our perceptual system distinguishes the object or objects of our attention (foreground) from a background, which consists of all other objects or energy (i.e. - the rest of reality) and correspond to actual boundaries or other aspects in reality. Objects are their identity; that is, each object possesses a set of attributes or properties that are an integral part of itself to make it what it is, and each of these properties has a measurement or value that results from the way each object interacts with the energy conversion process performed by our perceptual system. Percepts, therefore, contain implicit measurements of the properties of objects.

Note - There can be no entities, the properties of which, have zero or infinite values; to exist is to have some properties, each with some non-zero value, to have an identity. To have a zero value would imply there was no energy to interact with our sensors, which in turn would imply no object exists. But "non-existence" is not a fact; it is the absence of fact.₆

There are two broad categories of objects in existence (excluding man-made objects): Non-living objects and living objects. Non-living objects cannot act unless acted upon by an outside force. In addition, the existence of inanimate objects is unconditional; the form they take is determined strictly by the laws of physics and chemistry, but they exist in one form or another without any action on their part. Living objects, on the other hand, exist conditionally; they must generate their own energy by their own action or they will cease to exist; without continuous action to maintain their survival, life-forms disintegrate and revert back to their inanimate, molecular component parts.₇

Actions

Objects interact with each other. As this occurs, their identities change; that is, the measurement values of their properties or the properties themselves are modified over some period of time. The result is that the same objects that have one set of properties and values at some time T1, will have a different set at time T2.

Only objects can act, and actions are always changes to the identity of some object or objects in reality, or the energy that connects them. Actions independent of objects do not exist, except in the form of information as the measured property of some real object in a conscious process.₈

Energy

Energy is the medium that conveys action between objects, that transfers identity and puts the "cause" in causality; it provides the motive power for actions and interconnects all objects.

Motive power is energy in action; it is forces such as gravity moving the water in a river or the fuel burning in an engine to move a car or the nuclear fusion in the sun.

Life is also a form of action, but it is action generated and controlled internal to the life-form itself; the energy of life is self-generated, self-sustaining, and self-regulated. Self-generated energy is accumulated by life-forms by processing external sources of energy such as plants using sunlight to make sugar or by animals eating the bodies of other life-forms. Self-generated energy is part of the very being and fabric of life-forms; it is not stored separately as it is in machines. The use of self-generated energy to act to survive is self-regulated chemically in every cell and by the nervous systems of higher life-forms. All of these functions occur internal to a biological organism, and these properties are the identity of such an organism.

Existence, then, is a plenum that consists of non-living and living objects interacting with energy as their intermediary and is completely interconnected; reality has no "holes" of "non-existence" in it. "Non-existence" is not just another kind of thing; there is no such "thing" as "non-existence" between objects, or anywhere else; there is only other objects or energy, everywhere.

Note - "Non-existence" or "nothing" is a relational concept formed by observing space between two or more objects; "non-existence" is a conceptual relationship (an abstract idea), not an object or thing itself. "Non-existence" does not exist physically, but only as an informational placeholder, like the concepts "zero" and "infinity."6

Energy interconnects all objects and carries identity from one object to another; it forms the links in a cause and effect chain of events.

Energy always carries the identity of the last object with which it has had contact. So, for example, if light energy from the sun, which carries the identity information (including all the colors of the sun in its spectrum) reflects from a tree, the identity of the light is changed by that interaction (as is the identity of the tree). The light reflected from the tree is predominately of the green wavelength from interaction with the identity of the leaves, and now carries information about the identity of the tree, rather than of the sun. The reflection process is an interactive relationship between the energy and the tree that changes the identity of the energy. Astronomers use this fact every time they take a spectrograph of distant object to determine is composition.

Relationships

Relationships have two tightly integrated aspects; one is an aspect of reality and the other is part of the content of consciousness, or an aspect of information.

Relationships are implicit in the specific interactions of the identities of two or more objects, such as a tree reflecting sunlight or two billiard balls colliding.

Relationships, as the data of consciousness (as information), are the measurements of the interacting objects as processed by our senses (and their inferred derivatives such as abstract concepts), in other words, as processed by a consciousness. In our minds, relationships are implicit if we are not conscious of them, and explicit if we are.

There are many different types of relationships such as spacial relationships or temporal relationships, cause and effect relationships, and so on. In fact, consciousness itself is a relational process between a life-form and reality.

The relationship of cause and effect in particular is important to the process of simulating consciousness. A cause and effect relationship is the mutual change in the identities of two or more interacting objects (mediated by energy) that is necessitated by what those identities are. Cause and effect is not action-reaction as commonly thought, but rather it is identity interaction.8

Cause and effect relationships may be simple, such as two billiard balls colliding, or complex, such as the self-generated and self-sustaining processes that maintain the existence of life-forms.

Note - The fact that cause and effect is not action-reaction and that there is more than one kind of cause and effect may be a new idea to you; it will be explained in more detail in the next chapter.

One kind of complex cause and effect is teleological (goal-directed) action; that is, the cause is the means to not only the immediate effect, but the continuation of the cause and effect relationship itself as an on-going process in that particular chain of events. It is in this way that life-forms cause their own future survival; they maintain the cause and effect chain that is known as their life.

1.4 The Integration of the Parts of Reality

Objects, their actions, and energy make up the plenum of reality. Each object is its identity, including a place and a time, and objects are all interconnected by energy.

These are the data of consciousness, real or simulated. The objects of reality reflect energy, sensors in a life-form convert the energy into a different form (sensations and percepts), at which point it emerges as information inside an organism, but it is still real, it is still reality, just in a different form, a form of information.

The fact that inside an organism energy is information too, that is has an additional attribute added to it by the processing of consciousness, does not invalidate what it contains. Being inside a life-form in no way changes its original attributes or properties; nor does the energy's transduction and processing make it any less real. The identity data the energy carries is conserved just as it is for a picture transmitted over a TV network, only its form changes during transmission. Its content remains the same.

The difference for biology is that the information the energy carries has meaning, survival value to the organism that is conscious of it. As content in the mind of an organism, the energy simply has a different relationship to reality than it had outside the organism, only its form has changed.

If energy processed by consciousness were to be changed in arbitrary ways, the resulting content would be rendered useless for survival. Biologically, such a process could not persist in the long-term.

The sensed information is processed by consciousness, and some of it is stored in memory. The information is evaluated by the organism and actions are selected either automatically or by choice depending on the type of life-form. The actions are implemented by the life-form and objects in reality (including the life-form itself) are affected. The cycle then repeats if the life-form survives. This is the process of consciousness operating as a causal process, as a survival mechanism.

1.5 Summary

In this chapter, I have set the philosophical context for understanding the nature of life and consciousness based on my understanding of the consequences of some of the important premises of biology and the philosophy of Objectivism. Grasping this perspective is a necessary prerequisite to designing a consciousness simulator because consciousness is such a fundamental aspect of reality, and only philosophy is a broad enough subject to encompass and set the guidelines required to understand it properly.

I have chosen Objectivism as the basis for explaining the technology for the simulation of consciousness because in my opinion it is the only philosophy that is connected to the facts of reality and, therefore, able to explain what consciousness is metaphysically and how it works epistemologically. Understanding how consciousness works is a prerequisite to simulating it on a computer system.

In the next chapter, I will set the biological context for DLF Simulation Technology, which is the other key prerequisite. I will discuss life-forms and how they function in more detail, and describe the aspects of their identities that are crucial to understanding how to simulate consciousness. This is also prerequisite information because consciousness exists in nature only as a property of life-forms.

How to Simulate Consciousness Using a Computer System

Chapter 1