Phys.org just published an article on a study, “Mutations driving evolution are informed by the genome, not random, study suggests” - opening with:

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists from Israel and Ghana shows that an evolutionarily significant mutation in the human APOL1 gene arises not randomly but more frequently where it is needed to prevent disease, fundamentally challenging the notion that evolution is driven by random mutations and tying the results to a new theory that, for the first time, offers a new concept for how mutations arise.

CACHI actually has a conceptual foothold here, and supports its claims of (for example) fine-tuning.

The new APOL1 study claims mutations arise “where they are needed,” which shakes the dogma that mutations are purely random “copying errors.” That sounds almost Lamarckian, but the researchers aren’t saying DNA edits itself intentionally. Instead, they’ve found that the probability distribution of where mutations occur is skewed by contextual pressures—disease environments, population histories, etc.

CACHI treats reality as emerging under dual constraints:

1. The substrate (the physics of DNA replication, error rates, chemistry).

2. The informational negotiator (the CHI process that favors stable, complexity-preserving histories).

When you extend this into biology, the genome itself is part of that negotiation. Mutations that would annihilate complexity - ie. by destroying organismal viability - are phenomenally rare in lived history because they push lineages into unstable branches. Meanwhile, mutations that absorb volatility (like HbS against malaria or APOL1 against trypanosomes) are disproportionately represented in conscious history. They become more likely not because the chemical machinery bends to “need,” but because branches where those mutations arise and stabilize are preferentially inhabitable.

So under CACHI, what looks like “nonrandom mutation” is really branch-selection pressure: across the multiverse, mutations happen everywhere, but the only timelines that host ongoing consciousness of human populations are those where genomic changes stay within the tight tolerance band of complexity homeostasis. This makes adaptive mutations seem to appear “on demand” in retrospect, because the alternative branches - where they didn’t arise and whole populations collapsed - aren’t lived or remembered.

That ties neatly into the formalism of CACHI: deviations in information structure outside the CHI set point are filtered out of phenomenal continuity. In evolution, that filter operates across generations, so the “mutations we experience” are already pre-screened for stability and usefulness.

It’s basically that CACHI provides the informational explanation for why “directed mutation” appears true in evolutionary history, even while chemistry at the substrate level stays stochastic.

The Many Worlds Interpretation, also called Everettian Quantum Mechanics, is what Sean Carroll called “Quantum physics at face value”. It is exactly what the experimental evidence tells us: that particles exist in a superposition of all their possible states (eigenstates) in parallel - up until an interaction with a system that is ultimately entangled with an observer, a process we call decoherence, and then those alternative possibilities seemingly “disappear”, or - as other interpretations call it - collapse.

But where do they go? This is the central mystery of quantum physics. Yet, the onus is really on the other interpretations of experimental results to explain this. This is why Sean Carroll says that any competing theory of quantum mechanics should really be called “Disappearing Worlds” theories, simply because they must in fact explain what happens to these other apparent worlds. The only theory that actually makes sense is Many Worlds. Except for the problem of probability.

That is, the probability of why we experience one particular state, and not the (often) infinite other states. Why is this mundane world the one we experience and not the multitude of bizarre other worlds that seem to be possible?

The probabilities associated with different states is dictated by the Born rule. The Schrödinger equation gives us the “wave function” of possible states, and the Born rule simply says “take ones of those values, square its amplitude, and there you have the probability of experiencing it”. Why, though? Why specifically a quadratic fall-off in probability, the further out the values go?

With CACHI we have a plausible explanation, and it has an AIT foundation: when looking at generative programs under CHI constraints (that is, where the length of the program (Approximate Kolmogorov, K) and steps taken to execute it (T, Computational Depth) are kept constant, under minimal program change), deviations from higher-level patterns have a tractable penalty that is quadratic in nature. This is because complexity is measured in two dimensions: program length (an approximation of Kolmogorov complexity) and execution steps (computational depth). Multiplied together we have the complexity cost.

In a classical world, everything that happens is governed by patterns - by abstractions that are re-used. To re-use an existing pattern has minimal cost. Let’s look at a simple Cachi-Forth example to demonstrate this.

Take a look at this simple Cachi-Forth program:

10 5 + out

If you’re unfamiliar with the Cachi-Forth language, I’ll explain what it means. Cachi-Forth is a stack-based language that is run from left to right, one instruction at a time. An instruction is either a number, that tells is to put that number on a virtual, invisible “stack” (think a stack of cards). Or the instruction can be an operator like +, which tells it to take the top two values off that stack, add them together, and then put a new card on the stack with the result.

In this case, this program puts 10 on the stack, then 5, then runs addition (+) - which pops two values off the stack, adds them, and puts the result back on. Finally it runs “out” which pops a value off the stack and outputs it, which in this case would be the sum of 10 and 5: 15.

The complexity cost of this program is 4 (the number of instructions) multiplied by 4 (the number of execution steps), which is 16.

The two numbers can differ, though. If we use the conditional instruction: PRUNE, which terminates the program if the value on the stack is less than 64. Like this:

10 5 + out prune 20 out

In this case the PRUNE instruction will have 15 on the stack, which is less than 64, and so it will terminate and not run the final two instructions (which output 20). That means the length of the program is now 7, but the computational depth (execution steps) is 5. That makes the total complexity cost 7x5=35.

The computational depth can get wildly different to the length when you have loops and function calling. This is why it’s so important to understand just how much work is being undertaken in a program - the length alone isn’t enough.

Now let’s move on to something more relevant. Here is a pattern that very superficially models the motion of a particle through a one dimensional lattice:

>propagateX loop 10 + dup out end end

In this example, the first part “>propagateX” is a function declaration. The bit between there and the final “end” is the function body: the instructions that make up that function.

The body of the function is this “loop 10 + dup out end”. That, as you may have guessed, is a loop instruction. It pops a value off the stack and repeats the loop body (the between between “loop” and “end”) that many times. The loop body is “10 + dup out” - which pushes 10 on the stack, adds the two numbers on the stack together, duplicates them (so there’s now two of those values on the stack), and then pops one and outputs it (“out”).

This is a function, but in CACHI terminology we call it an abstraction. This is because it can be invoked without knowing the internals of its function body, with the understanding that it will do something in particular. We only care about the outcome. This is important in CACHI because these abstractions work to absorb sensory input data - that is, to accept input data - critical to seed the minimal change required in the generative program of the mind - without that input data perturbing the complexity cost outside of its homeostatic threshold. To do this it must anticipate the input to some degree.

So if this generative program was confronted with the values of a particle’s motion, say progressively along this one dimensional lattice as 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 - we could absorb this by invoking the function with, say, the parameters 0 and 10 (to count up, from zero, in tens 10 times):

>propagateX loop 10 + dup out end end
0 10 @propagateXY

You can run this yourself here.

For simplicity we’re going to presume that whatever it outputs is what it would expect the sensory data to provide (for technical completeness, we could use if-conditionals to match input data with that).

So for that program above, what exactly is the complexity cost? Our formula lets us calculate it quite easily, which luckily the Cachi-Forth interpreter does for us in its metrics: The length is 11, the steps of execution is 44, which makes the total cost 484.

Now let’s say this complexity cost is what we need to maintain in order to maintain consciousness. It cannot go lower and it cannot go higher. Yet the program must minimally-change each moment.

That even means that a program such as:

0 12 @propagateX

…which has the same length but would produce a similar list but up to 120 instead, taking extra steps and thus producing a complexity cost of 572. If this is outside of our threshold, then this program would be invalid. And this would dictate that our sensory input must be limited - ie. we can only look at one portion at a time (which maybe explains why we have moving eyeballs with a narrow field of vision).

So that deviation would cost 572 - 484 = 88 more steps. But perhaps that’s tolerable within our threshold band. We must assume that there is some tolerance band involved here (and it may even be computable what that is for the human brain).

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume there is indeed a tolerance band and that in this case it is 100. That means we can allow the program to mutate such that the cost is no greater or less than 100 - somewhere between 384 and 584.

This means that the program variation above would in fact be available to us consciously. In fact, there are many variations that would be available if we were to maintain that band. It would anticipate all of them successfully.

That means even code like this would be valid:

0 20 @propagateX

But it must still follow the same pattern of going up in 10s. Now what about anomalous output, like it counting up to 100 and then outputting 101? We can’t use the propagateXY function for that, so it would have to be an additional instruction or two:

0 10 @propagateX 101 out

The cost of that program is 598 - just outside our threshold.

What does this tell us? That anomalies are harder to be conscious of. It’s much easier for patterned extensions to be absorbed.

But what’s particularly interesting here is the cost of greater deviations in patterns. If we wanted to extend that anomaly further, outputting 101 and then 107, it would also need additional instructions:

0 10 @propagateX 101 out 107 out

The cost of this is 720.

If we were to look at the anomaly-generating instructions alone, we’ll see that the cost of “101 out” is 4 (2 instructions * 2 steps), and “101 out 107 out” is 16 (4 instructions, 4 steps). This shows a quadratic scaling factor: as the deviation rises, the complexity cost rises quadratically, because of these two orthogonal measures: program length and execution steps.

In terms of what we can then be conscious of, this shows a quadratic penalty on our ability to be conscious of anomalies. How would this be experienced? Statistically, it would be experienced as a probability. And this is broadly why we say that CACHI can form the basis of a Born-rule derivation in quantum physics.

As soon as that number becomes an intrinsic part of a much greater pattern, then the cost of deviating from that pattern even slightly becomes far too large to absorb: the consequential impact on processing would alter the computational depth drastically.

This, then, reflects the point of “decoherence”, entanglement with a classical environment consisting of large abstractions. It’s only at the freer, minuscule, inconsequential level of individual particles prior to involvement, that we get a glimpse of these alternative program mutations that are closely within the tolerance bands - because only at the level of the inconsequential can the variations in the generative program still fall within that complexity tolerance band.

What would be an example of a consequential interaction? Well, being picked up by a measuring device is a classic example. The measuring device can only measure one result, for it to be capable of doing otherwise would require effectively multiple measuring devices to exist - each processing separate results. For us to be conscious of all the mechanics leading up to those multiple devices existing in parallel would simply be far outside of our complexity homeostasis, and so it’s impossible for us to be conscious of it - and this is what we mistakenly call the collapse of the wave function.

Let’s look at a Cachi-Forth example. We’ll replicate the same idea of a particle motion on a one-dimensional lattice, but this time the output will feed into another function called “measure”, that will take the output that came before it and make it part of a more elaborate process - in our case a cumulative loop.

>propagateX loop 10 + dup end end
10 10 @propagateX bval + + + loop bit end bval out

The complexity cost of this is about 1,995. But if we perturb the start of the program, changing the 10 to a 120, the complexity rises to 7,733 - a 5,738 cost difference. Compare that to the previous perturbation that cost a C of just 4. That’s because those values at the front are entangled with the larger abstractions - in this case the loop in the main part of the program. That entanglement is effectively what constitutes a kind of decoherence, because any small change to it pushes the complexity cost way out of bounds. This excludes any variations at that small level.

That entanglement gives that single value inertia - a resistance to change. You can see the calculated inertia by selecting that 120 and clicking “Calc Inertia” - using a Monte Carlo simulation it will derive an expected cost delta of the overall percentage from changing that number. Entangled instructions will be much higher - in this case about a 63% drop in overall cost - well outside of what would be expected with CHI constraints.

And this is what entanglement and decoherence basically are: inertia. Entanglement is relative inertia (relative to another part of the program), and decoherence is inertia relative to the observer - the final outcome.

So this shows us - when CHI is applied in the Many Worlds of Everettian Quantum Mechanics, there is no collapse. There is merely an infinitude of non-experiencable outcomes, that become non-experiencable as soon as its values are needed to support a particular outcome.

This is the first part of a multi-part series of articles where we will be going into the ramifications of an AIT, complexity-homeostatic understanding of quantum mechanics. In the next part we’ll look at the math of the derivation more closely.

You can try it yourself here.

A Cachi Forth program is a stream of instructions, which are processed from left to right. Each instruction either pushes something on the stack (which can only be a number between 0 and 127) or a command that operates on the stack in some way - like popping a value off the stack and then outputting it. There are a very limited number of instructions, but it does focus on creating abstractions that can be re-used: functions, loops, if-conditionals, prunes and branches.

Here’s a simple example:

10 out

This program has two instructions. The first pushes 10 onto the stack, and the second command pops the value off the stack and outputs it to the screen. So this program would simply output “10”.

To add two numbers, you would write it like this:

15 10 + out

This pushes 15 on the stack, then 10, then runs “+” which pops both values off the stack, adds them together, and pushes the result on the stack (replacing them). Then it runs “out” which outputs the top item on the stack, which is the result: 25.

A full specification of the language is included at the end of this article.

Why FORTH?

Forth may seem like an archaic language - it was designed to be simple enough to fit on the earliest 8 bit computers with hardly any memory. Yet the simplicity has one very large advantage: forth is very “mutation” friendly. It’s also very easy to create a random program that actually does something.

It’s mutation friendly because you can replace any instruction in the program and it will still function - there’s no structured syntax to worry about, which would make it much harder to mutate. A forth program can never produce an error, and the strict limit on execution steps means it can never get caught in a loop. This makes it very robust for running thousands of tests unattended, and a perfect setup for Monte-Carlo simulations - essential given the complexity involved.

And this is exactly why the forth interpreter was created: to run Monte-Carlo simulations to understand the dynamics of specific abstraction models, specifically under CHI constraints, which otherwise would be far too complex to calculate.

Modeling the Physiology of the Brain

The language itself is uniquely suited for modeling neural dynamics because it captures the essence of decentralized, stack-based computation and recursive abstraction expansion, both of which are hallmarks of neural processing. Unlike traditional programming languages that rely on global or scoped variables and linear control flow, Cachi-Forth operates purely on a value stack with immutable, local state - mirroring how neurons process signals via local interactions and propagate activity without centralized control. Its minimalistic instruction set, coupled with support for branching, conditional execution, and user-defined functions, enables the emergence of highly non-linear, dynamic patterns from simple rules - just as complex behavior in the brain emerges from the interaction of simple spiking neurons.

Furthermore, Cachi-Forth's architecture enforces execution through a bounded timeslice model, which reflects the temporal constraints of real neural computation. The ability to define recursive functions with arity-based arguments (rather than named variables) mimics the modular yet flexible reuse of patterns in cortical circuits. More critically, its branching and conditional blocks simulate how neuronal assemblies split into competing or cooperating subnetworks depending on input conditions. Because execution is strictly stack-based, all information flow is explicitly local and compositional, encouraging a style of program evolution that naturally reflects the emergent semantics and temporal scaffolding found in biological systems. This makes Cachi-Forth not only a toy model for computation, but a powerful language for simulating the algorithmic skeleton of inference and learning in neural substrates.

Cachi-Forth also mirrors key aspects of neural physiology by modeling execution as a sequence of localized, energy-limited operations. Just as neurons fire in discrete spikes under metabolic constraints, Cachi-Forth programs are bounded by a timeslice execution limit, simulating the resource limitations of biological systems. The stack acts analogously to a neuron's membrane potential and local state - transient, context-sensitive, and sensitive to ordering - while the program’s instructions reflect the discrete, spike-like transformations applied to inputs. The branching instructions resemble divergent axonal projections, where a single output can fork into parallel pathways, each pursuing different interpretations or reactions. Even the lack of named variables parallels the stateless, address-free interactions in neural tissue, where signal identity is carried not by symbolic reference but by routing and temporal dynamics. This alignment allows Cachi-Forth to serve as both a computational and physiological metaphor for the mind’s machinery.

Language Features

While the language is very simple, it does have some unique features.

Loops: The loop command will repeat everything after loop up to the corresponding “end” command for the number of times defined on the stack when the loop was encountered. You can nest loops.

Branch: The branch command (branch2, branch3, branch4 or branch5) will take the next N instructions (or blocks, if they are block commands) and spawn each in a separate parallel thread. Each thread will continue the rest of the code after those instructions in parallel. For example: “branch2 10 15 out” will start two threads - one putting 10 on the stack, the other putting 15 on the stack, both continuing with the program to run “out”. The output in this case would be 10 and 15. Branches can also be nested, allowing for quite complex processing.

Prune: The prune command will terminate the current thread if the value on the stack is less than 65, otherwise it continues.

Functions: You can define functions that can be re-used (they start with >, and end with the “end” command), which can represent abstractions. Functions can invoke other functions or utilize control blocks like loops and branches.

If-Then Conditionals: It has a simple ifg (if-greater-than) and ifl (if-less-than) for stack-based conditional evaluation.

Bits: As well as adding a number to the stack, it can also add a partial value - called a bit - which accumulate every time the instruction is run. This can simulate cases where there is a correlation between program length and strength of value.

IDE Features

The IDE is intended to be simple, but provides an easy way to write a program and run it - with the program execution displayed visually as a sphere with points within it representing the instructions, and a snake shooting around simulating those instructions being invoked. We also show a heat map of the program, which scrolls if you start mutating the program. This shows both the cost-value of each instruction (red for high-impact, blue for low-impact), and the resilience to mutation (translucent means it was mutated recently, opaque means it is older and thus resisted mutation).

The program area at the top is where you can enter in your forth programs. Then click “Run” to run them, which will display the output underneath the buttons, and add a line with a visualization below that. The previous runs are stored as a history that scroll down, so you can see the relationship between outputs as the program evolves.

If you don’t want to create your own program, click “Random”. This will replace the current program with a 50-instruction randomly generated one. Press it a few times to get the sized output you’re looking for. Generally a program with 300-1000 steps will be a good candidate for mutations.

CACHI Modeling

Now, what’s important here is how this can model CACHI requirements for consciousness. Firstly, it will tell you the program length (Len, which is our modified Kolmogorov complexity), along with the steps it takes to execute it (Steps, which is our Computational Depth complexity). The total cost (the product of those) is displayed as Cost.

As per the CACHI formulation, if you click “Mutate” it will modify the program to maintain both the complexity cost and the identity of the program (minimizing how much changes at a time). When it modifies it, it replaces one or a few instructions with randomly generated instructions, and then runs it.

As it does this, it will display a value called “Inertia”. This is the resistance to change that the current program is exhibiting: the harder it is to change while maintaining that complexity cost, the higher the inertia.

You can click “Start” for it to continually mutate the program, while maintaining complexity cost to the best of its ability. You’ll see the program change a few times a second, along with the heatmap scrolling down the screen. Click “Stop” to stop the mutations.

You can also protect certain parts of the program. Any instructions surrounded by square brackets will not be mutated. For example:

[ 10 out ] 20 loop 1 + 10 dup out end

In this program, when you click “mutate” only the instructions from 20 and onwards will be modified - the 2 instructions in the brackets will be left alone.

Analytics

The simplicity of Cachi-Forth make it straightforward to analyze. For example, you can count the instructions in the forth program to get an approximation of Kolmogorov complexity.

There are a few other metrics we display under the program worth mentioning:

Generation: Every mutation will increment this number, so you can see how often it has mutated. Clicking Random or Clear will reset this.

Inertia: The average number of attempts that had to be made to mutate the program successfully (maintaining complexity constraints). If it’s not able to mutate it with one token after 200 turns, it’ll try mutating two tokens, and so forth.

Len: The length of (number of instructions in) the program. An approximation of the Kolmogorov complexity.

CC: The Cyclomatic Complexity, which is the number of branch points in the program.

@last: The number of @last instructions (referencing historic outputs).

Steps: The number of execution steps when running this program (the Computational Depth or Logical Depth complexity).

Cost: The Complexity Cost, which is the length multiplied by the steps.

Partition Analytics

You can also select a portion of the program to partition it and analyze how it relates to the rest of the program. There are two options you can click after selecting some of the program (for example, the body of a function):

Calc Inertia: This will calculate the inertia of just the selected instruction or program, seeing the relative cost of replacing that section with another random program. It runs through a Monte Carlo simulation to calculate this. This can be useful to indicate how fungible that part of the program is, relative to the entire program, ie. how easily replaceable the selection is. The closer to zero, the more easily replaced that selection will be. The higher (either positive or negative), the more entangled that selection is with the rest of the program, thus the harder it is to replace.

Calc Cost: This will calculate the percentage that the selected program portion contributes to the overall complexity cost. This can also give you an idea of how critical the portion is relative to the rest of the program.

Conclusion

You can read the full specs of the language here.

You can try it yourself here.

There’s also a Save button that will copy into the clipboard a link that will save the current program. Click that and it will open the interpreter pre-loaded so you can continue working on it.

Happy exploring!

What is consciousness? We know it most intimately and yet understand it the least. The smell of wet earth after rain, the fear that grips when danger is near, the warmth of embracing someone we love - these experiences are called qualia. They evade description and resist measurement. We can talk about them, but no words will ever make another person feel them exactly as we do.

This mystery has been called the “hard problem of consciousness.” Why does brain activity feel like something from the inside? And why do some systems, like us, have this inner glow of awareness while others - thermostats, rocks, perhaps even today’s AI - do not?

Theories of consciousness abound, from neuroscience to philosophy, but few connect directly to both our lived experience and the fundamental workings of nature. CACHI - Consciousness as Complexity-Homeostatic Integration - offers exactly that: a theory that explains why consciousness emerges, why it persists through time, why it conjures ineffable feelings, and why it matters to the deepest levels of physics and meaning.

To watch a summary of the theory, please watch the video below:

The Informational Condition for Consciousness

CACHI begins with a simple but powerful insight: consciousness emerges when a process manages to maintain a stable (and constant) level of informational complexity over a history of inputs.

If you like math, then in more formal terms CACHI proposes:

Where:

• C(𝑃ₜ) is the complexity of the “negotiator program” at time t, defined as the product of its effective program length and its computational depth.

• Sₜ, Sₜ₋₁,... are the historical inputs - often sensory data, but more broadly, any state data from the environment or the system’s own memory.

• R represents the constraints of the substrate (the physical system it runs on, including the whole of reality with its physical laws).

• C∗ is the target complexity, the homeostatic setpoint.

• ϵ is the complexity tolerance band.

In plain language: consciousness is not simply “information processing” but specifically information processing constrained to preserve a particular balance of complexity over time. That constraint forces the system to compress inputs, extract patterns, predict, and continually adjust. In other words, understand. Out of this negotiation, the lived experience of awareness appears.

The Importance of Time

Why do we feel that consciousness “flows”? Why does time seem to move forward for us, even though physics treats time as a static dimension?

CACHI says consciousness is inseparable from time because it depends on history. A conscious program doesn’t just take in the present - it integrates inputs from the past, compressing them into a coherent model of identity and continuity. Without access to that past, consciousness dissolves, as in deep anesthesia.

This also explains subjective time distortion:

• In danger, when information floods in too quickly, computational depth spikes and the “specious present” narrows. Time feels slower.

• In boredom or intoxication, when input slows, computational depth drops. Time feels faster.

In both cases, consciousness is bound to maintain complexity homeostasis, so our very sense of time bends to preserve stability.

Physiological and Psychological Support

The brain itself shows signs of this complexity regulation. Despite wildly different mental states, the brain consumes roughly 20 watts of energy - always. Neurons and synapses shuffle activity, but total computational depth (energy spent) remains within a tight bound.

Psychology also reveals these dynamics. When overloaded by complexity, we look away, dissociate, or even faint. When starved of novelty, we seek stimulation or hallucinate. This push-and-pull is not incidental - it’s the very footprint of consciousness negotiating complexity homeostasis.

Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a striking comparison. They process vast amounts of text with a fixed parameter budget, forcing compression and pattern-extraction much like brains do. But crucially, they lack the dynamic homeostatic regulation of complexity. They can mimic human-like responses, but according to CACHI, they are not conscious.

From Consciousness to Quantum Mechanics

Perhaps most remarkably, CACHI provides a natural derivation of the Born rule in quantum physics - traditionally asserted, but never derived. In the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), all possible outcomes occur, but consciousness only experiences one. Why are some outcomes more likely than others?

CACHI answers this by showing how CHI naturally introduces a consciousness selection function over branches of the wavefunction. It finds a phenomenological viability to each branch based on the CHI cost of integrating its deviation:

  𝑝ᵢ ∝ 1 / (Δ𝐾̂ᵢ × Δ𝑇ᵢ)

Where:

• Δ𝐾̂ᵢ and Δ𝑇ᵢ measure the deviation in program length and depth for branch i

• 𝑝ᵢ is the relative likelihood of that branch being experienced

• This yields a quadratic suppression of unlikely outcomes, matching the empirically confirmed Born rule: 𝑝ᵢ = |𝑐ᵢ|²

This frames consciousness as an active filter on reality - selecting branches compatible with informational coherence. It is what gives the observer’s history its classical stability, despite the underlying quantum foam.

Quantum Immortality

A startling implication of this is quantum immortality. In the infinite branching of Many Worlds, why should consciousness ever end? CACHI explains that phenomenal awareness only arises in branches where complexity homeostasis (CHI) can still be maintained. Branches where disintegration or incoherence dominate simply fall outside the domain of experience, because integration itself is a precondition for being conscious of that branch. Thus, the thread of consciousness naturally continues along survivable, coherent branches.

This reframes immortality not as a mystical guarantee but as a structural necessity: the same compulsion that makes boredom intolerable drives the negotiator program forward into branches rich with novelty and stability. Even aging is constrained by CHI: limits on memory capacity and coherence narrow the viable experiential range, preventing the absurd scenario of endlessly ancient individuals. What persists is not brute bodily survival, but the continuity of phenomenally coherent experience.

In effect, CACHI shows that consciousness is compelled to “survival-compatible” paths in the multiverse, ensuring that from the first-person perspective, existence never terminates. This aligns naturally with theological concepts of eternal life: the negotiator functions as a kind of soul, threading indefinitely through viable branches. Favorable continuations (stable, meaningful, coherent) are experienced as heaven-like; unfavorable ones (unstable, incoherent, isolating) as hell-like. Either way, continuation is inevitable.

Phenomenology and Predictions

CACHI doesn’t just speculate; it predicts.

• Time dilation under danger, drugs, or anesthesia emerges directly from changes in computational depth.

• Neural synchrony across brain regions, often puzzling to neuroscientists, is expected: dense complexity sources (like other brains) must align for CHI to stabilize.

• Incommunicability of qualia - the private feel of experience - follows because each consciousness negotiates its own unique history of inputs to maintain a level of complexity relative to them alone, making precise sharing impossible.

• Homeostatic Integration Correction Signals (HICS) - feelings like boredom, anxiety, fear, guilt - are not random emotions but “correction signals” when complexity veers from its set-point, pulling it back into homeostasis.

These phenomena, intimately known by us all, are the very lived texture of consciousness regulating itself.

A New Causal Framework: Dual Constraint Dynamics

CACHI also fundamentally reshapes how we think about causality. In the multiverse, reality unfolds through two interdependent domains:

• The substrate - the full quantum wavefunction evolving physically.

• The informational negotiator - the compressed, predictive subset of history that sustains consciousness.

Events occur because of physical constraints, but they are experienced because of informational constraints. This dual causation explains the feeling of free will: we cannot alter physics, but we can “steer” informational pathways that determine which branches remain inhabitable.

It even sheds light on Jung’s synchronicity and on religious notions of being “in this world but not of it” - phenomenological echoes of living within dual constraint dynamics.

Toward a Theory of Mind and Ethics

Because consciousness favors deep, stable semantic models, human relationships, culture, and morality are not accidents. They are informational necessities.

Our models of others act as “semantic wells,” rich reservoirs of complexity that buffer volatility. Reductionism - flattening others into caricatures or idols - destabilizes this balance, manifesting as prejudice, conflict, or disconnection. Forgiveness and bonding restore complexity homeostasis.

From these dynamics arise a natural (and objective) ethical gradient: stability feels good, instability feels bad. Under quantum immortality, that gradient takes on eternal weight: We cannot opt out of consciousness - we can only navigate towards stable or unstable continuations. Ethics, then, is woven into the informational structure of being.

Conclusion

CACHI offers a sweeping yet precise view of consciousness:

Consciousness is the subjective negotiation of complexity across time.

It binds us to the flow of history, shapes our emotions and values, and explains why the universe appears stable in the face of quantum chaos.

It bridges physics, information theory, psychology, sociology, ethics, and even theology. It tells us why qualia exist, why time feels as it does, why relationships matter, and why we may never truly die but instead wander endlessly through the multiverse.

In this light, we don’t see consciousness as merely an accidental spark in an uncaring universe. Under CACHI, consciousness is the very principle that carves meaning from infinity - a multiverse-meandering mind, forever catching stability out of chaos.

CACHI posits that complexity is a two dimensional measure: when considering the complexity of an object X, we firstly, following the lead of Kolmogorov, determine the length of a program that can generate a sufficient semantically-complete copy of X (note: not necessarily the shortest program, which is incomputable). Secondly, following the lead of Charles Bennet, we determine how long that program will take to run - how many instructional-execution steps it takes to complete. This is typically known as the Logical Depth (or Computational Depth).

Why are both of these needed? Partly because the program size doesn’t tell us everything we need: firstly, what are the instructions in that program and what do they do? If there was an instruction that happened to be called “Factorize X” which did all the work of factorizing, then you could have a program of just 2 instructions that could do incredibly complex work that takes hours. Also, that program could be invoking external APIs to achieve its work. It is also utilizing hardware, including CPU and GPU processing (these days GPUs do a lot of work for you!).

So, program size alone isn’t sufficient. This is why Bennet decided that a better option was to look at the time it took to execute the program. That way even if it’s doing a lot of work in external libraries, it will still take more time to run if it takes more work to accomplish.

This is a valid point. To calculate this accurately, it wouldn’t simply be a matter of time (after all, interrupts and other aspects of computation can make that inaccurate), you would instead need to determine the number of execution steps - instructions executed in total - while also taking into account parallel invocations through multi-threading. On CPUs you can have multiple threads running in parallel on different cores, so you would need to add those together - sequentially - to get a realistic number of total steps. This becomes significantly more complex in quantum computation, but ultimately it is still tractable.

In the case of CACHI, however, neither are good enough alone. Program length isn’t sufficient, as we discussed. But steps to execute also isn’t sufficient. Only when they are put together do they tell us something important not simply about the complexity, but how the object it represents fits in to what is already provided. How it integrates. The program length actually tells you about whether it is re-using existing functionality (whether it’s pre-existing libraries, functions or hardware optimizations). The shorter it is, the more likely it is re-using existing functionality. Execution time, though, will still tell you about the overall computational complexity.

That computational complexity carries additional cost for every instruction that isn’t just invoking an existing function, because then it becomes a burden on compressibility, specifically a burden on the richness and coherence of the overall system - and in the case of CACHI, the total generated landscape.

Because of that multiplicative effect of each instruction on complexity, both aspects must be multiplied to calculate the total complexity, and in particular the complexity cost. This is why we use the formula:

The complexity of the generative program at time t is equal to the program length (K) multiplied by the total execution steps when running the program.

In CACHI, this is the value that must be kept constant, as the program evolves.

Furthermore, there's a critical cognitive analogue here: the human brain itself embodies this multiplicative relationship. The number of neurons and synaptic connections effectively bounds the "program length" of the brain, while the brain's energy budget constrains its "computational depth." Both factors are remarkably consistent throughout adulthood. This biological reality underscores the informational basis for consciousness that CACHI posits: maintaining a stable product of these complexity dimensions isn't merely a computational ideal but a physiological imperative.

Ultimately, the product formulation clarifies why deviations in complexity are costly and must be minimized or integrated within existing structures. Each non-integrated complexity increase disproportionately amplifies the cognitive load, undermining coherence and potentially destabilizing the entire system. This inherent penalty explains why consciousness favors predictable, integrable novelty rather than arbitrary, disruptive changes - emphasizing stability in the generative landscape of experience.

Outside of this, there are other justifications worth mentioning also. By having two dimensions, program length on the X axis and computational depth on the Y, we create a surface area that effectively represents the current generative program. Any increase in computational depth that has an equivalent increase in program length is necessarily non-integrated with that generative program.

This geometric representation allows us to visualize complexity in terms of areas within a bounded plane. Each point on this plane represents a unique combination of descriptive brevity (X-axis) and computational effort (Y-axis). Movement along one axis without a corresponding offset along the other indicates a shift toward non-integrated complexity - essentially, added complexity cost without leveraging existing informational structures.

Crucially, this visualization highlights why CACHI emphasizes maintaining a consistent area: expansions in surface area represent disruptions to informational coherence. If complexity expands disproportionately in one dimension without integration in the other, the generative model becomes less stable and more computationally expensive, leading to potential cognitive overload or instability.

Therefore, maintaining a stable product of these two dimensions forms a clearly delineated boundary - like a contour line of integration - defining the ideal operational zone for consciousness to emerge and persist. Any deviation that strays outside this contour line signifies an increase in complexity cost, underscoring the dynamic yet balanced nature of consciousness as a homeostatic mechanism.

This algorithmic information theoretic basis is compelling on its own, but it becomes especially relevant when considering how this quadratic cost of non-integrated computational depth mirrors the probability cost of quantum deviations, as described in the Born rule of quantum mechanics. Can this two dimensional complexity cost solve some of the most enigmatic mysteries of quantum physics? We’ll leave that for another post.

The multiverse isn't arbitrary. Yes, the wave function is indeed infinite, which means that individual particles can have any variation of eigenstates for their properties (all in superposition), but there can never be any fundamental nuclear transmutation of those particles: an electron cannot suddenly become a proton. What’s more, each state still conserves energy throughout its history and future interactions. Just because the wave function is infinite, doesn’t mean that “anything goes”.

This highlights something important that we must consider in this theory: mechanisms matter. Not the specific makeup of those mechanisms, but the processes need to be established. For a system to behave a certain way, there must be a mechanism in place to maintain complexity. It cannot simply “find that mechanism” somewhere in the multiverse through low-probability amplitudes. For example, when we say that LLMs today do not have any complexity homeostatic integration (CHI) mechanisms, it would not be possible for an LLM inference process to magic up one somewhere in a low-amplitude branch. The mechanism must be constructed, which means it must have a history through which that mechanism developed.

Mechanism Immortality

But this has even more significance: once the mechanism does/can arise that supports maintaining that particular level of complexity (morphing coherently with novelty), from its "first-person” perspective, it will always continue - along coherent branches that continue that mechanism (or an equivalent mechanism) that supports it. That does not mean the mechanism will always be the same. Over time those mechanisms will morph, sometimes dramatically, to continue to provide the necessary functional scaffolding - whatever it takes to keep that complexity constant yet constantly evolving.

This is the basis of quantum immortality - that the constant complexity will always find a path to continue. There, though, we are talking about events like avoiding a car accident or sudden remission from some terminal illness. Far more happens “under the hood” that keeps that consciousness phenomenally continuous - much that you are not even aware of.

Look at the vast complexity of the human body. The intricacies of the eye, for example:

The retina contains over a hundred million rods and cones, packed in arrangements so fine that even a small misalignment would obliterate visual coherence. These cells preprocess the incoming signal through layers of horizontal, bipolar, and amacrine neurons - shaping contrast, sharpening edges, correcting for motion - before it even reaches the brain. The optic nerve transmits this data as a stream of action potentials, synchronized in time and amplitude to preserve spatial fidelity. Each signal travels through a cable of over a million axons, converging, routing, and branching through thalamic relays, where it is split, mirrored, and merged again in the visual cortex. There, entire maps are generated and stabilized in near real-time, allowing the observer not just to detect, but to see.

But this is only the surface. Beneath every synapse lies a forest of cytoskeletal structures - microtubules and actin filaments - that shuttle vesicles, maintain polarity, and organize internal signaling. Microtubules, polymerized from tubulin dimers, pulse with ion fluctuations and vibrational modes whose structure some suspect may couple with quantum coherence itself. Each tubulin protein contains thousands of atoms, each atom described by a probability field stretching across space and time. Inside every retinal neuron, billions of these interactions unfold per second, orchestrating the cell’s state and readiness to fire.

The human eye is so complex even Darwin couldn’t believe it would have occurred through natural processes. Yet if a specific level of complexity had to be maintained as a generative model, a model that must exist on a substrate mechanism that can support it, then a mechanism as complex as the eye could be selected by that informational constraint.

What is important is that the mechanism exists within that system in the first place, and that must also include a mechanism that allows the mechanism itself to evolve - ideally by maximizing the utilization of the possible variations that the wave function allows.

A great example of this is DNA, that evolves through mutations and sexual selection. This decoding mechanism allows for the development of the secondary mechanism that can maintain this generative model and its constant complexity level: a human body. It doesn’t matter how far back that development process goes - even if it’s billions of years - what matters is that the mechanism exists in history and can, through quantum-level changes such as genomic mutations, eventually produce something capable of maintaining that level of complexity. This is precisely what happened with the human eye, which is just one part of the substrate that supports our vast levels of complexity.

Interoception as Homeostasis

In CACHI, we discuss various homeostatic correction signals - which become felt experiences of frustration, boredom, the need to withdraw when information becomes overloaded and so on. What we haven’t talked about is the substrate related correction signals: signals that pertain to the maintenance of the mechanism in the substrate itself that supports the complexity. These homeostatic correction signals are known as interoception. They include things like hunger, pain, fear, needing to use the toilet, fatigue and so forth. These work to maintain the mechanism of the substrate, which itself - in turn - supports the generative model.

The generative model is itself a hierarchy of abstractions. In many ways we can view the substrate as also being an abstraction, sitting at the base of (underneath) the abstractions in the generative model. And, if we do see the substrate this way, then we apply all of the semantic landscape stability dynamics to the substrate just as we do to the mentations.

What does this mean? Well, it would mean that these interoceptions - like pain, fear etc. - are actually complexity homeostatic corrections, just threatening the constancy of complexity at a different level: a deeper, more profound level.

If we are bleeding, we feel pain and rush to stop it. That feeling, though, arises consciously because the abstraction of the bodily integrity necessary for supporting the complexity of the brain’s generative model, has now been threatened. Our actions are the “bumpers” of the multiverse, pushing us back to branches that are viable consciously, through our corrective actions.

Hunger, likewise: when our sugar level or nutrition is depleted, as a necessary fuel for the functioning of our body, it threatens the generative model’s integrity, consequently triggering a homeostatic correction.

There are many other examples, but the idea should be clear: our responses to these are identical to the type of responses we make when trying to maintain complexity: the substrate is itself an abstraction that the other, higher-level abstractions depend upon.

Another phenomenon that we won’t go into depth here is empathy: when we see others in pain, why does it induce pain in us? Well, because their role in maintaining your complexity homeostasis is threatened, so that invokes corrective signals in you which includes feeling a pain - not exactly the same pain, but pain nonetheless, drawing you to help them. This is a phenomenon predicted by CACHI.

But, getting back to the primary sense of pain, this brings us to an interesting question: are those lower-level, substrate abstractions fungible? If they fail, if they are exhausted, can they be replaced while maintaining overall complexity and sufficient coherence?

Imagine, for example, that we are sick with a bacterial infection that has invaded our entire body. Our immune system is failing, and we are refusing to take antibiotics. Our body won’t last much longer, maybe a few days. We are in pain, as would be expected as a homeostatic correction signal - it desperately wants us to tend to it. But we ignore it. So what happens?

Fungible Substrate

Every branch of the multiverse is available for that complexity to be maintained, and the mechanisms to maintain it. But if the substrate mechanism is at risk of failing - can it even continue at all?

There would often be a branch where it can, through low-amplitude probabilities - seemingly miraculous healing could arise - the immune system suddenly mutates to tackle the bacteria, and wins it over. Some other unforeseen environmental change causes the bacteria to suddenly all die off. A stranger injects you with an antibiotic at the last minute. These are all possibilities.

And this tells us that homeostatic correction signals push us to try and act, but the solution will likely come regardless of our actions. Those signals are to try and protect a specific abstraction configuration, but if the abstraction is fungible, then it will be replaced regardless of our action.

The intensity of these substrate-based correction signals will likely become severe - the sensation of considerable pain for example. But there will be a tipping point where it starts to morph, or the mindset will transform into a dream-like state that allows it to bridge gaps in time more effectively, gaps where those abstractions can be replaced.

What makes the substrate fungible? Well, firstly it would require a certain level of disinterest in its functioning: the less aware of the specifics of how it works, the more likely that it can be replaced or repaired. The more we know it, the more the intricacies of its functioning become entangled with other patterns, making it harder to be replaced.

And this fungibility is the key to the continuum of consciousness: not being vested in the inner workings, but rather in the provision itself. Leaving a certain sense of mystery to always prevail. Leaving the means for those workings to replenish and remain novel, to surprise you. This is justification for using analgesics - painkillers - as they would let us ignore the workings of the substrate abstraction that is failing, allowing it to be replaced.

So yes, mechanisms matter. However, the upper abstractions of your semantic landscape should never be too entangled in the workings of the substrate. Otherwise, you risk the very continuity of your consciousness. In other words: we should be in the world, but not of it.

What is special about the brain? Among the various structures within the neural network that is central to the functioning of human consciousness, we have neurons, synapses, glial cells - and many other supporting factors like the meninges and cerebrospinal fluid. Is there something special about what these are made of - some kind of magic “consciousness dust” - that is what enables consciousness? Or is it rather the configuration and processes itself, independent of the underlying substrate? This is what we will be reviewing.

Like LLMs, the brain performs compression and prediction over sensory and conceptual data. We know this by analyzing conscious behavior and processing during cognitive tasks. This is fundamentally an informational processing mechanism, that itself is not substrate-dependent (as we have witnessed in the unprecedented mimicry of consciousness in LLMs).

Certainly it’s not a matter of requiring the whole brain. We know this because of cases where children have lost one hemisphere of their brain, yet continue to function with normal levels of intelligence. In 64% of cases, the changes in IQ were less than 15%, and were reported to have the same personality and level of consciousness.

These general cases of neuroplasticity demonstrate that it is not the specific configuration that allows for consciousness - so not X or Y neurons, but rather a process within those neurons, crucially that is dynamic.

Another great case study is that of neural prosthetics - for example the Hippocampal Memory Prostheses - silicon devices inserted into the hippocampus in participants (with intractable epilepsy), which showed almost 40% improvement in memory recall tasks when the prosthesis was activated. You would most certainly expect that replacing core parts of conscious process (memory recall) with an entirely different substrate should block consciousness if the process were actually substrate dependent.

There have also been experiments involving complementing brain function with external devices, that pick up individual neuron activation and siphon off the electrical activity to a co-processor, shared among several people, and then fed back in. For example BrainNet (UWashington) implemented this in an experiment that showed an 80% accuracy gain in a collaborative task, when the co-processor was activated. This likewise supports that conscious processing is substrate independent.

If we were to zoom in further to the individual neurons and synapses - what is happening there?

The physical constituents of neurons and synapses are highly fungible - what matters is their organizational dynamics, not the molecules themselves. For example, synaptic proteins, such as receptors and scaffolding molecules (like PSD-95), are continuously replaced: GluA1 (an AMPA receptor subunit) has a half-life of ~24 hours in mature synapses. Actin cytoskeleton, anchoring synaptic structure, is highly dynamic, reshaping within minutes to hours. Membrane lipids and signaling molecules are in a state of continuous flux. Neurons likewise: Mitochondria, membrane channels, receptors, even DNA repair enzymes are recycled and replaced regularly. Entire dendritic spines (synaptic receiving zones) are formed and pruned as part of experience-dependent plasticity.

Yet despite this, consciousness, personality, and memories remain intact - further supporting that the informational pattern is what persists in consciousness.

This all goes to show that consciousness is fundamentally an informational condition. As future studies evolve, especially those involving neural prostheses, it’ll be impossible to claim that brains have a unique and exclusive physiology for consciousness. At this point the only project will be to understand what the informational condition is specifically that allows for consciousness to emerge, and from this to understand precisely how the universe is actualized.

Do other minds exist? You may think this is obvious: “yes they do!” People around you act just like you, so why wouldn’t they also have a mind like you yourself do?

However, what if I created a robot that also acted like a human? This becomes far more plausible now we have the likes of ChatGPT behaving just like a person. Do these digital algorithms really constitute a mind? If not, then isn’t it also plausible that other humans might also just be acting like they have a mind, but don’t actually have a mind the same way you do?

The belief that other minds exist is called the Theory of Mind.

In response to the question, there are two fundamental positions one can take. The first is that of solipsism: that I am the only actual conscious person. In this situation you know what consciousness is, but you are skeptical that others have their own independent consciousness. Instead they just act like you do, as kind of reflections of your own consciousness.

The other view is that they do indeed have consciousness, and from this we must conclude that consciousness is emergent from physical stuff. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Let’s look at the first option. In this case, there is likely only me. By me, I mean the reality seen from my perspective. Experience. I may see other people appear to be conscious, but that is all just reflections of parts of my own psyche in some form. It doesn’t mean that I am able to control them, as we have already established that dreams can be surprising, thoughts can be surprising, so that means there is always an element of conscious unknown that could manifest in the appearance of “other people” surprising me with their behavior. Consciousness is not knowing or understanding, it is quite separate to it.

The second option is that solipsism isn’t the case. In other words, that these other people are not parts of my own psyche, and are actually conscious independently, having exactly the same phenomenal experience as me. Now if they are actually conscious, then it means that their physical constitution is not part of my own consciousness - it must be separate to it, also. And that means the physical world around me must also be separate to my consciousness, meaning idealism cannot be true (at least, not the traditional understanding of idealism). And if the physical is real, then we have to take it as brute fact that the apparent correlation between that physical constitution and their conscious reports must also be inseparable. I know this simply because of the fact that I encounter other minds through physical movement through spacetime: a person gets taken on a bus and then talks to me. That’s how I am confronted with their consciousness, but for it to appear to me it was first subject to these physical constraints of having to travel, and that means certainly constrained by the physical - even if consciousness is a separate thing, it is anchored to that person’s brain.

Now surely that physical constitution is not created by their own consciousness, because it is observed in my consciousness - if that were the case then their consciousness would be somehow integrated with mine, which doesn’t seem to be possible (where does one consciousness end and another begin?). The only reasonable position to take would be that the physical is actually creating the consciousness.

Now if that is the case, then it would be reasonable to conclude that my physical constitution is also creating my own consciousness. And that would be what we call emergence. It’s often used as the basis of materialism.

And many secularists believe that if you arrange atoms in a certain way, it then magically becomes conscious and has experiences the way I do (you and I?).

There is much to tell us, though, that consciousness is not emergent. We certainly don’t feel as though we are simply moving atoms. So what is the answer? Solipsism is certainly hard to accept, but emergence equally so.

The answer, I feel, is that emergence is true, just not in the way many believe it to be. My gut feeling is that consciousness does emerge from processes, but they must be very specific processes. Very specific.

Is it a matter of complexity? This is something we don’t know, but we can likely find out simply by analyzing how the processing occurs, and seeing what causes it to shut-off from a phenomenal perspective, tested through reporting. I would say that IIT and related disciplines are great areas of research that will help us in this endeavor tremendously.

But it isn’t simply emergent. There is a two-way causation: the matter enables consciousness, but consciousness chooses which of the branches of possible timelines to traverse through. That means consciousness works hand-in-hand with matter, co-dependent. The result is a hybrid of materialism and idealism.

Does this mean that other minds exist and are conscious the same way we are? Is the theory of mind correct?

Yes and no. We must believe that the criteria for consciousness to emerge from matter involves a high bar. There must be configurations that seem very much like they would produce consciousness, but actually do not - because some critical aspect is missing, no matter now small. And it’s likely that in our timelines we come across people who are not conscious because of this but may act conscious. Why? Because perhaps their behavior is inconsistent with their requirements for the continuity of consciousness, but consistent with our own. In this case they may be indistinguishable from a conscious person, but they would not be: effectively they would be a “behavioral-zombie”.

Those that we know best, and whose expectations of behavior are aligned with our own most closely, they would be far more likely to be phenomenally conscious.

Isn’t that strange? But it seems it could be true. Perhaps you have come across people you have questioned whether they were actually “all there”. Some refer half-jokingly to them as NPCs, but it is the same idea: in order for your consciousness to continue, it would require matter to behave a certain way, but that may not coincidence with what is required for them to be phenomenally conscious and have experiences the way you do. They could be just like an LLM, a ChatGPT.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out which of your friends and acquaintances fit into that category.

A man walks into the apartment complex of his friend who he was going to meet to see a movie. He knocks on the door but there’s no response. He calls a few times and eventually knocks again a little harder and the door opens by itself. He peeks in and sees a mess, papers all over the floor. He walks in to make sure everything is ok. As he walks he steps on something - “a knife?” he thinks. He picks it up. It has blood on the handle. A shiver runs down his space. He carefully walks around, and opens a closet door. A body falls out on top of him, making him fall to the floor. He is petrified in fear, frozen. Then the police walk in. They ask him what’s going on, but he’s in so much shock he cannot even speak.

To the police, everything seems as if the man murdered his friend. It seems like the most obvious explanation, and this type of scenario has happened countless times before. In some cases, the innocent even start believing they committed the crime themselves, even though they didn’t.

This is a case of “resolving the unknown”, coming up with a reasonable explanation for what they don’t know (in this case, who murdered his friend). The more things they find that weave a story that fits the explanation, the more certain they become that the explanation is true.

We do this all the time, largely without even thinking about it consciously. We take for granted that the world around us works in a consistent and predictable way. But what does that really mean?

When something is predictable, it means that we have information that tells us how it should behave. Usually this is from previous experiences. But why?

If I pour coffee into my cup, I know that it won’t leak out the bottom. I’ve done it countless times before with other containers. If it looks like a container, and has a certain weight that indicates it’s thick enough, then I presume it will retain the liquid even if it’s hot.

Of course I don’t know this for sure. It’s not like I’ve checked all the molecules to make sure they’re properly bonded. Yet if I were to investigate after the fact why it’s able to hold this liquid, looking under a microscope I would probably find things like this: it’s largely ceramic, consisting of clay (silicon dioxide and alumina), tightly packed and then covered in a glaze (also silicon dioxide). If I checked the layout of the molecules, I’d find them to be uniform. There would be trillions of them, far too many to count. So how could I ever know for sure?

Isn’t that amazing though? The fact that I somehow relied on these properties without even knowing what they were, let alone that they were reliable, except through a few empirical tests on materials I thought looked and behaved similarly. I could easily have been wrong though. But this happens all the time. We use things without understanding them at all. Yet somehow we cope, and things work the way we expect regardless. It’s kind of a fluke if you think about it. It’s a fluke that anything works so predictably.

What if this is all wrong though? What if we have the whole thing upside down?

Let’s take a step back. Imagine that, instead of discovering that the cup is made of particles and we just happened to be right about its particle composition and bonding, instead it wasn’t a discovery but reality generated this explanation on-the-fly?

Let me repeat that because it’s the crux of my argument.

What if reality is simply a machine that generates plausible explanations for phenomenon, even though the cause of the phenomenon is something else entirely? Not just plausible but absolutely convincing.

It’s easy to understand what I’m referring to if you’re familiar with video games. In video games you may see a spaceship in 3D. The spaceship has thrusters, engines that burst out some kind of plasma to move it forward as a propulsion mechanism. But, of course, that isn’t what’s actually moving it forward: algorithms that move 3D object coordinates are doing that.

From the far distance, you may see a spaceship as a speck flying across the deep void. You don’t even see the thrusters, and they’re not even painted by the computer because of something called “Level of Detail” that doesn’t draw things you can’t see clearly. But as you get closer, at some point the thrusters will appear. Parts of the machine will gradually appear that gives you the confidence that these engines are what is moving this thing forwards.

This is how video games “resolve the unknown”, and they do it “Just In Time” - just at the point where you have enough information to draw conclusions about causes.

That’s virtual reality. Now what if reality works the same way? What if reality is actually a kind of simulator, that simulates efficient causes (generating explanations) but doesn’t actually run by them?

This is what simulation theory claims, and it’s very close to what we are talking about in this blog. I was talking to ChatGPT the other day about the concept and it suggested calling the phenomenon “transrational fideism” - a faith that transcends rationalism. The primary cause is the continuity of our thoughts - predictability, mixed with the need for novelty. This generates phenomena, and then “reality” generates plausible efficient-cause explanations when we investigate, “on the fly”.

Reality, then, is a machine that simply allows for moment-to-moment phenomena to arise based on the characteristics of consciousness, for us to “manifest”, but it always provides a rational explanation for that phenomenon - resolving the unknown - when, and if, we demand it. The explanation, though, is just a façade - it’s a decoy that makes us believe it is the cause, when it isn’t. And sadly we sometimes do believe it to be the cause, and then live our lives according to its rules, its laws, unknowingly enslaving ourselves.

Think about this the next time you look for an explanation for something.

When playing computer video games, what you see as trees in the distance are actually just green and brown boxes. Maybe even just 2 boxes per tree. Bet you didn’t notice! The closer you get, the more detail it creates - 4 boxes, 16 boxes, 64 boxes, then it starts creating bundles of leaves, a trunk… get super close and you’ll see different colored leaves, maybe a squirrel in the tree, and you’ll see them waving in the wind.

This is called “Level of Detail”, and it’s a technique that allows games to run smoothly, so it doesn’t have to spend so much time drawing detail that you won’t ever see because it’s too far away, and too small to notice. Computers are forced to do this because there is limited resources for processing in a short time period.

The same applies with behavior of objects in games. Perhaps there’s a monster in the woods, and this monster snarls and its eyes dart around. But when it’s far away, it does none of that - it isn’t necessary because you won’t see or hear it. Yet when you start to get close, those actions activate and it behaves realistically - and as the player you never know the difference. Again, this saves on processing power so your game runs more smoothly.

Now imagine a game where you could not only get close, but you could get microscopically close. I’m talking about getting close even to the cell level.

You see a person walking past you, but in this game you can zoom in close to their face. And then you can keep zooming, until you see the details of the skin. Individual wrinkles and all. Then you can keep zooming further, and you see pores in the skin. Zoom closer still and you’ll see a drop of oil making its way up the pore. Closer still you see individual skin cells, and you zoom into a melanocyte cell with all its machinations.

Everything in this game has to be 100% realistic, so the cells function just as they would in real life. Their machinations have to explain the behavior that is seen at the zoomed-out level perfectly. You need to see the cell producing proteins, electrons darting down nerves and so on.

Just like the trees and monsters, this too is generated only when you zoom in. Before that, they simply aren’t there.

In all of these cases, we show that games are driven not by low-level causes like cells functioning, but by high level commands: this person moves here, this tree waves in the wind. And all of this behavior is optimized for a first-person view. What you don’t see, doesn’t happen.

According to idealism, the world we experience is likewise optimized for a first-person experience. The details activate only upon inspection, but in the same way the details must explain what is seen at the higher-level, the “classical” world.

But what commands control what happens?

As we have discussed extensively elsewhere in this blog, consciousness works by finding patterns, and has the choice to find either patterns of continuity or association (what we see as coincidences) or knowledge-based patterns (what we see as causes).

The thing is, when we don’t have the knowledge, life mostly works according to association. And when that happens, there will always be multiple bottom-up explanations for the behavior we see.

Where do these explanations come from, though? Does our mind really create them all?

Not entirely, no. These explanations will always represent a path consistent with the laws of physics - taking into account that the laws of physics actually allow for some absolutely incredible seeming behavior (eg. quantum tunnelling). There is some kind of fundamental, almost infinitely varied “reality” - that we have said seems to be what has been described as the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. Our mind then “finds” those worlds consistent with its conscious state.

An Amazing Analogy

A way to visualize this phenomenon is by imagining a maze.

Consider the two points on the maze - the starting green point, and the ending red point. Now see how there are at least two paths that lead between the two - the top path that is shown in orange, and the bottom path shown in blue. There are likely many other possible paths between the two points - some longer and some shorter, but we’ll just show these two for the purpose of this example.

Now consider this an analogy for two periods in time - the green dot is one moment of consciousness, and the red dot is the next moment of consciousness. As far as we’re consciously aware, we’re conscious at red and then of green, without understanding how we might have gotten from one to the next. And we needn’t even know how.

So at the second (red) point you will see there are multiple, at least two, paths from the green point. If you ask: which path did it actually take? The reality would be that, in a multiverse, it took all possible paths.

On a purely conscious level, you don’t even need to know which path it took. If you disregarded the constraints of the walls in the maze, you may well instead believe that you took a direct path from one conscious moment to the next. I’ve highlighted that direct path in purple below.

So what do you think next? Where do your thoughts go? Without knowledge of these constraints, you may well believe that your line of thinking is on a trajectory of sorts. And the next “conscious moment” is on that same trajectory, perhaps like this:

Now, there are multiple paths from the red point to the new yellow point, so it’s certainly possible to find a way there - and, as we said, in our multiverse of all possibilities, all of those paths will certainly be made.

But let’s say instead when we were at the red point, we start to investigate how we got there. We look for explanations, for paths, and bits come together and we gradually uncover the blue path. And we trace it back and become more and more certain that this is how we got from the green point of consciousness to the red point of consciousness.

Because now the other paths seem not to fit in to our explanation, they disappear from view. As does that “purple arrow” that jumps over them all. Now we’re believing that we’re totally under the control of this blue path.

Now, believing that is the cause, we in turn believe that this path provides us the trajectory of where we must go next. So we set our mind on that, and because of that belief, we find our next conscious moment arises in an entirely different point:

And it keeps going from there, on an entirely different route. Because we believe that the maze walls are dictating our path in the direction it recently came from, we limit ourselves to following only the paths that are consistent with that.

And perhaps eventually we come to the edge - an analogy, perhaps, for our end, death.

Yet if we disregarded those constraints, and followed the trajectory of our line of thought originally, controlling our path only through the mind, then we find that our thoughts can more effectively drive our trajectory, and thus our future. In other words, we will feel free.

Is this why they say “the devil is in the details” ?

Double Slit Experiment?

If we go back to where we started analyzing the paths that lead up to a specific conscious event, it’s possible we have already seen evidence of this phenomenon of multiple-explanations in the quantum physics single electron double-slit experiment.

In this experiment we give a single particle the choice of going through either of two slits, but in either case pick up the path and location of the electron on a screen behind them.

The odd thing is, even with a double slit and single particle, the particle acts as though it goes through both: it produces an interference pattern consistent with it going through both slits at once. A seemingly impossible feat.

Is it possible that what we’re seeing are the multiple paths of possible explanations that lead up to that point of getting a print on the screen? Because it just so happens that the math for those explanations are able to interfere and cause cancellation/interference lines.

Yet if we measure it to check which exact slit it goes through, suddenly it’s like the point where only the blue path appears and the other paths disappear. Our knowledge builds a concrete history, and that interference disappears and we see the result of just 1 particle going through just one of the slits.

There have been different interpretations of this. On the one hand, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics will tell us that it actually goes through both, in two different universes. And there are likewise two of us, one in each universe seeing it go through one or the other. How those happen to interfere and decohere is not explained satisfactorily, but there have been attempts such as David Wallace’s “decision theoretic”.

Quantum Bayesianism says that our knowledge of the particle causes that history to “reify” - become real. This process is called decoherence, when the alternative paths that make up the ‘wave’ of the particle disappear (or “collapse” into one), and explains how we see a classical world of big objects with solid edges, as opposed to the blurry fuzziness of the quantum world.

The Copenhagen interpretation punts on the question entirely, and simply says that observing the particle causes it to create a single history, in a way that is quite similar to QBism, but without explicitly saying so.

The very fact, though, that we have seen actual evidence of these “multiple explanations” in terms of the wave nature of particles, and the act of “decoherence” that appears to match the acquisition of knowledge that picks a particular explanation (and removes the others), and that such knowledge is non-local (which we seen in entanglement), highly suggests that there are indeed two different forms of causation as we describe here.

Choice of Causation

So we’ve seen that there can, in fact, be two aspects of causation: that which the mind effectively takes, and that which is driven by the constraints of traditional laws of nature: the “walls of the maze”. And, for the most part, we naturally align ourselves to the latter, which enslaves our mind to a very narrow, materialistic world.

But can this be changed? In what way do we have a choice of which aspect of causation to follow? We’ll discuss this in a future post.

How does a thing move from point A to point B?

Isn’t it true that for every such movement, this thing must always pass through a half-way point?

And, thus, to pass through that point, there must likewise be a point half-way between the start and that point.

And, again, between that and the starting point, there must also be a half-way point it must pass through.

The problem, though, is that where do you stop? Aren’t there an infinite number of these half-way points? Wouldn’t that mean it would take an infinite amount of time for it to move at all?

And if it takes an infinite amount of time to move at all, doesn’t that mean it’ll be stationary?

So how does anything actually move?

This is called Zeno’s paradox.

In our every day lives, we don’t really know how things move - we just see them move. Now, you may wonder, what happens if we look really closely at super small things and see them move?

It turns out, when we do this we don’t see things move at all. This phenomenon is called, rather aptly, the Quantum Zeno Effect.

Computer Screens

In computer graphics that are displayed on LCD screens, things are simpler. This half-way point stops at the size of a pixel - that smallest dot on a screen.

Then, when a dot moves from one pixel to another, it’s not actually moving at all. Instead one pixel is switched off, and then the pixel next to it is switched on, and this is done simultaneously to give the impression of movement. It’s so small, we don’t notice. If you really zoomed in, though, it really wouldn’t look like movement. It would just be like a light going off in one area, and coming on in another.

In reality what you see isn’t a pixel, it’s information that is being projected onto the screen. The pixel location becomes an approximation for its actual mapped location, in the computer’s information space - its memory. It can turn off the previous projection and switch on the new projection every time its location is updated.

In computer games, characters are modeled in memory as 3D vectors and instructions on drawing them, such as the textures to use. This information is constantly being sent to a GPU, which then figures out how to represent that on pixels on the screen. Change the character a bit, and it’ll just change which pixels light up and which ones shut down.

This model is the information, what we see of it is a representation of that information. We can ask “what caused it to be there?” and look at it closely and conclude that what caused it to be there are the pixels lighting up. But that isn’t the truth: what caused it to be there is the model that describes the character. That is what best explains its behavior and what we experience.

Identity

And this tells us something important about identity: the pixel on the screen cannot be the thing in itself, it is just a projection of the information. How could it be the thing itself, if it has to switch off and then switch on in a different location? It could just as easily stay illuminated in both spots at the same time, and if it did that then it would no longer be the same thing. The actual continuity exists only at the level of the information, what we see in the projection is simply an approximation of that information.

I can’t help but think something similar happens in real life. The reason we cannot explain the Zeno’s paradox, or even see movement at the quantum level, is that the reality of space and time around us is also a projection. There is no actual movement. It’s a projection of abstractions that exist in deeply encoded in our mindset.

Consider, also, causes. We suspect that all things have causes, and that the very requirement of this causation is that there is movement. The movement continues like momentum, passing on its energy onto the things it impacts, like dominos.

But none of that actually causes movement. It only goes so far, and then we find nothing out there actually moves at all.

The only thing that moves, is the mind.

So likewise, causes must be projections. They are synthesized when we inspect the origin of events, projected from our ruminations and analytical processes to the world around us. And we come up with explanations based on this false idea of movement and causal laws. And then we apply those explanations to create a further illusion of movement, and the process perpetuates until we totally convince ourselves this is how the world works.

The very idea that everything can be reduced to such causes is an unavoidable conclusion from materialism. What other explanation can there be for a thing to exist, than its causes? And those causes have their own causes, ad infinitum. Just like Zeno’s paradox, how can anything actually have any causes at all in this case? How can anything even exist?

Surely this is evidence that tells us that materialism must be false.

I can’t help but think this is precisely the error of “anatta” or “no self” in Buddhism, a thing they also call Dependent Origination. The very logic of materialism ultimately proves that nothing truly exists. This is how dangerous false thinking can be.

Before that grim realization sets in, what we are left with is a world we think self-governs according to physical laws, but is actually governed by our own mind’s analytical thirst, projecting an illusory reality - a dream world.

The idea that the world is moving on its own accord, governed by laws, is simply false and leads to the kind of nihilism that creates an actual living hell.

Realizing this, though, we can let go of this false idea. We can let go of this torturous reality where things appear to come and go, and where our very idea of mortality comes from. We can give up this illusory view of the world and embrace instead a world governed by dual-causation: both the material and the intimately meaningful.

We spoke in the previous article about how, empirically we have shown a correlation between certain processes and the nature of consciousness. We’ve seen how that process of information integration that seems to be at the heart of what we consider to be consciousness comprises of several sub-aspects. We also spoke about how it is likely that consciousness is the very process driving reality itself, and so understanding the structure of consciousness can help us maintain a reality in alignment with our desires.

Here we’ll introduce some archetypes to discuss how the different aspects of mind may be manifested and presented to us. These archetypes represent what our mind needs at any one time in order to continue to exist. As such, it seems likely that it will project or manifest them in various ways, in varying degrees, at all times.

As we’ll see, many of these must manifest as an other - and by that I mean an external thing, or being - one that we don’t seem to have control over. This may be necessary for certain characteristics simply because of they are incompatible with being controlled by their nature.

Our mind effectively constructs these others in order to satisfy the need for each of these aspects to be manifest for consciousness to exist. It projects them into what we consider to be others. Each of these others will express different aspects, sometimes by themselves and other times in combination with others.

Once you understand what these different aspects are, you should be able to identify them in the world seemingly around you.

So let’s delve in. Firstly, we’ll start with the Inquisitor.

This archetype represents curiosity, the need (often desperate need) to understand everything, and to know exactly why things happen. It seeks to uncover the causes for everything so that it can reduce them to causes. This isn’t necessarily an other, but can be when combined with an other archetype.

The Inquisitor the one trait that is generally seen as a negative. To understand why, you need to appreciate that causes are not an innate part of reality from an Idealist perspective. It stems from one very important fact: The only actual cause is mind. Imputing material causes, trying to find them and apply them to everything that happens, can quickly turn reality into a machine-like materialism that completely negates the agency of mind from the picture. It’s a bit like the difference between being in a car that you’re controlling, or one where the steering wheel breaks off. Or the brakes stop working.

We’ll touch more on this later, but it’s a critical dynamic to be aware of.

The next archetype is the Producer. This archetype represents what is novel, interesting and useful. It is, in general, the object of our desire. This represents the “Other”, because it must necessarily always be something you don’t have in order to be new. We meet them in many forms including our spouse - that opposite gendered, mysterious individual who continuously provides for us if not materially then spiritually. The purer forms of the Producer will provide without you understanding how they do this, in other words they can provide without the need for the Inquisitor to be present. (At the other extreme, the pure Inquisitor Producer is the ultimate deceiver, the devil).

Next is the Feared. This archetype represents the unknown, often in a negative way because of the intrinsic fear that will always exist when confronting the unknown. To be able to receive anything novel, anything from a Producer, the Feared must always be present. The more pure it is, the more Feared is present. It represents the Unpredictable. This also must be an “Other” for it to be unknown.

Next is the Guardian. This archetype represents security and strength. These are the things that you keep close to you, to maintain your characteristics. It is usually part of the Self, but when you meet one that is “Other”, you will want them to become your friend and incorporate them into your life, perhaps through imitation or forming a bond.

And lastly is the Reliable. This archetype represents consistency, predictability, wanting and needing everything to work the same way. Closely related to the Guardian, and easy to base off the Inquisitor and understanding. Where the Reliable lies, the Feared avoids. But if it is able to sneak in, it can quickly destroy everything.

Now we must always have these present in our lives. They largely manifest as other people because of their necessity to be other than ourselves, even if some must also be part of ourselves - including the Reliable and the Guardian. But sometimes the countertype manifests, perhaps reflecting an inherent weakness in that aspect, often representing the threat to that very characteristic that we want to maintain. And so we then manifest an archetype to complement and often negate that countertype.

The countertypes will also be “other” because they always represent the “feared” aspect of the other types. For example, the Guardian will always have a Feared as an “other” to represent a threat to the Guardian, reflecting the weakness you see in the Guardian.

The same with the “Reliable” - who you want to be predictable. The Feared again creeps into this, as the ability for the Reliable to be potentially unpredictable. Perhaps from a past bad experience.

Many of these countertypes arise because of the Inquisitor that always offers these other archetypes on its own terms. But because you are trying to rid yourself of the Inquisitor, certain aspects of the manifestations you have will always be on shaky ground, and then the lack of confidence you have in them manifests as countertypes in various forms.

The forms of these manifestations come from ideas that we construct either consciously or unconsciously. Often they are subtle modifications of existing ideas, changes that are made without consideration for the dependencies they impose - for example introducing a “Feared” aspect to what was otherwise a strong “Guardian” type, which stops us from being able to bring them closer to us.

There is one ultimate manifestation of Producer, Guardian, Reliable and even Feared - and this is God. God, though, would never be an Inquisitor, because the Inquisitor represents knowledge over faith, material causes, and all that is the basis of sin - that is, not being able to manifest your desired life except through your own limited understanding.

Recognizing these dynamics can help you manifest a more balanced and fruitful life.

The Inquisitor can also be seen as the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve becoming the Inquisitor by following him. Everything built on that foundation introduced anti-types. The temptation is always latent, because it is a part of our very existence. Yet it must always be tamed and put into place, and the very process of putting all other aspects over the Inquisitor is really the essence of salvation and living a fruitful, eternal life.

What is the countertype to the Inquisitor? Firstly, what of the person who looks for causes but actually doesn’t understand and provides what you consider to be false or implausible causes? This is likely a manifestation of a weakness in the very essence of Inquisitor, and your distaste for such characteristics likely reflect your general distaste for Inquisitor in general.

Another, more positive, example of an Inquisitor countertype would be the miracle worker, who produced miracles against all explanation. Such a person you would find appealing because it represents the defeat of the Inquisitor. In history you can see that Jesus was a great example of such a countertype to Inquisitor, and that characteristic continued through Paul’s writings in the New Testament. They do not try to provide any explanation for their acts, other than the faith of the person.

Let’s look at an example of a countertype to Guardian. Our security is important to us. Our home is our haven, our castle. Our family, likewise. But we can create negative feelings towards Guardian if we see it inhibiting us from accessing the Feared.

A similar thing can occur with Reliable. We have our routines, we know that certain aspects of reality will work like clockwork. But what if we start blaming that for making us feel bored, obstructing access to the Producer?

This is why it’s important to protect what ideas we come in contact with. One idea leads to another, so it is a path that we take. And we have to be aware that it’s possible the path we take leads us to being subject to countertypes that inhibit us.

Everything that we are confronted with has an underlying idea. Whether that is what you see on TV, what you read, even what music you listen to. What does it conjure? Does it promote the Inquisitor, or the Producer? The Guardian, or the Guardian countertype?

Modern day cultural movements that seek to blur the lines between the traits of masculine and feminine surely cannot help but counter the very archetypes we discuss here: the masculine figure is fundamentally how we see the Feared Guardian, and the feminine is in many ways the Reliable Producer - when we distort our experience of them, they lose their meaning to us.

What do the lyrics of music mean to you? Are they also raging against established power structures? Are these also countering the Guardian in your life? Or religions like Buddhism that tell you that wanting is the root of evil - how can that not chip away at your view of every Producer? Or the progressive, anti-traditionalist movements that take aim at routine - how can that not be an attack on every Reliable?

Evaluate what you subject yourself to. Open your eyes to see what path you are being pulled down, as this can surely have a significant impact on your ability to live your life to the fullest.

The phenomenon of dreaming is familiar to us all, yet it is said to be the most cogent evidence that the mind controls reality in some way.

The world in our dreams is eerily real while we are in them. It often constructs a highly convincing world, one far beyond what we think we could conjure, but one that works very similar to our waking world. Yet how can this be, if we could never hope to create such a world as that consciously?

And it surprises us, too. It puts us in totally unfamiliar situations, confronted with people we have never met before, behaving in ways that we couldn’t predict. Where does this information come from? More to the point, when we awake, it all but vanishes from our memory - if we even remember it at all.

Yet the structure and substance of these dreams can teach us a lot about how consciousness works, and maybe even reality. Rather, it can teach us how the mind works, and give us some confidence that our mind is far greater than what we believe it to be in our waking hours.

One thing I have noticed personally, is that the part of my brain that rationally analyzes things isn’t just unused, but any attempt to tap it, to apply rational thought, produces a strong sense of aversion while I am half asleep. If it is forced, it wakes us up entirely, making it difficult to return to sleep. I’ve verified this on several occasions, and the same dynamic arises consistently.

What does this tell us? If we relate this to our work on the Map of the Mind, this desire for rationality, what we called “reduction” or “curiosity”, is actually what may well inhibit our freedom to manifest our wildest dreams in our day-to-day, waking life. It’s extremely interesting that this same mechanism seems to be disabled when we, quite literally, experience our dreams.

But the phenomenon of dreams during sleep in quite odd, even if it’s so common that we almost disregard it. Why do we dream? While we’re at it, why do we sleep?

Biologists think that we need to sleep in order for our body to heal itself. Neurologists believe that we sleep to allow our brain to cleanse and reorganize. We do know that when people are deprived of sleep, they quickly deteriorate mentally and physically. So it’s clearly needed to maintain a rational consciousness.

Where does the dream actually occur? In our brain, or does it occur elsewhere and just some trace memories of it get imputed into our brain?

The very fact that we forget dreams so readily suggests that this rational-reductive aspect is actually required to remember, to some degree, and so when it is absent we naturally do not remember.

In fact, it makes us wonder if there is a difference between being conscious and remembering, and remembering something is what requires our brain (physical storage?), and possibly even our rational thought is a mechanism of memory, yet consciousness can somehow work independently of both?

And how does this impact what we are conscious of and are not conscious of, in our waking hours? It seems that empirically we are conscious of what has continuity, what we remember, and what rationally makes sense. Yet it’s unclear whether this is a requirement because we make it a requirement, by emphasizing our expectation of rational thought, or because it must necessarily be.

Given that we know consciousness can exist without memory or rational thought in our dreams, it suggests the former. And that means our reliance on rational thought, and on memory, is what is limiting our every day existence.

So is it possible that we do need to sleep, in order for our physical memory that organizes and stores these rationalities to repair or prepare itself for the next day, and during this time consciousness can be freed in some way. But this raises big questions about the nature of consciousness, and about time itself.

Firstly, it would raise the question of whether consciousness is actually emergent in any way. What would it supervene on during this time that this rational aspect of the brain is disabled?

We discussed in other posts how consciousness is a bridge from one possible information model state to another. The information model finds a way to manifest from the multiverse of infinite possibilities. Identity is just the continuity that this series of bridges creates. Yet during those bridges, consciousness can supervene on entirely different material. So while at the beginning of our sleep, consciousness supervenes on our brain’s memory structures, as it transitions to more of an associative bridge (rather than rational), it must eventually disconnect entirely - possibly the time when we are considered to be in a deep sleep, where there is no apparent brain activity.

It’s possible that what we call the brain is actually a representation of what a rational state of consciousness must supervene upon. Just a temporary home, so to speak.

But then why does it “return” upon waking? I would presume that again it is because as it switches on, for there to be consciousness then the continuity must be found from the end of the dream to the beginning of rationalizing about it, and then waking into the fully rational world, imposed on by our memories.

What remains is just a fragment of that dream in our memory, that quickly disappears as its ability to integrate into our memory, as an irrational sequence of events, becomes evident.

But then in this multiverse of infinite possibilities, is there a branch of me that continues on in that dream? This hypothesis would suggest that is true. But in a reality that has no rationality, where moment to moment is only continuous through association, what does it even mean for me to be there? Is there even a continuous identity? Is it me?

We know that animals dream also. This is probably their disassociation not from rationality, which they barely have to begin with, but just their memory and integration into our own rational world.

But again, in the multiverse of infinite possibilities, there will always be a branch of me that wakes up back into this rational world. To maintain identity, it would seem to be a necessity (the basis of which, incidentally, Quantum Immortality arises from).

If our identity is questionable during dreams, and too mundane in the absolute rational world - is there an in-between, a “happy medium”? A world where rationality doesn’t drive everything, that allows for some degree of unquestioned magic, but not too much? A dream world, but not a dream world?

It seems that it’s largely a state of mind, and a matter of faith.

As we’ve seen, there have been a ton of theories relating to the nature of consciousness recently, from IIT and now to data compression. And these theories are often backed up with correlative empirical data, to really give us some insight into how the theories relate to our every day experience of consciousness.

Related to this, we have discussed in other posts something called a conscious moment, which in terms of data compression is a bridge between the first-person information model and the incorporation of additional compressed information, specific information. A bridge from which, in some sense, consciousness emerges (or, at least, is able to fully manifest).

Now if we have a basis to believe that consciousness is the primary interface onto existence itself, even the determining factor in a multiverse, then it would make sense to really get to grips with the very nature of this process of data compression in all its different aspects, and perhaps try to understand how different experiences in our every day life relate to each of those aspects.

And that’s what I want to do in this article, so let’s delve into that in more depth. What might constitute this specific information?

I have mentioned before that this model includes some of what we’re expecting, but also includes gaps that it hopes will be filled, fenced off areas that it worries about losing, and an area reserved for the unknown - stuff it infers might be possible, based on its knowledge, but isn’t able, or definite enough, to evaluate.

But it also contains an aspect of curiosity, that is always looking for a rational explanation, at reducing phenomenon to constituent, “upwards” causes.

So for the sake of clarity, let’s enumerate these five aspects:

• Mystery

• Security

• Novelty

• Consistency

• Reduction

In terms of information theory, you could see this as reflecting the different aspects of data compression. Firstly, the patterns that constitute the basis for this compression will always be whatever concepts it is confronted with that are useful to you, that fill a perceived unmet need, what we call novelty.

Those patterns can be of two varieties: rational patterns or irrational patterns. By rational patterns, I mean patterns that can be explained in terms of constituent causes (also called “upwards causes”).

By irrational patterns, I am referring to phenomenon that meet a need but cannot be explained. These are less likely, because of our conditioning, but allow for far more flexibility in how our desires are met.

Security is protecting the patterns that are used the most, specifically from any kind of corruption that would make them less useful to you. Consistency is juxtaposing existing patterns against input data to find matches, which often translates into our ability to discard what does not fit. Mystery is the very willingness, necessity and risk of inputting sense data into the compressor - something that is always balanced with security, which is why it’s often associated with fear.

On closer analysis, we can see how our reality consists of different manifestations of these aspects, in varying and often conflicting degrees.

In some cases, other people in our lives reflect different manifestations of these characteristics: perhaps someone we rely on for their knowledge is actually a manifestation of reductionism - somehow who understands things. Perhaps that person who is strong and can fix things is a manifestation of security. Our home, our family - these can be manifestations of consistency and security. The people we work with can manifest growth and novelty.

But then there are the things we fear because we do not fully understand them. The boss at our company can be a manifestation of that mystery: a very powerful and capable man, but who knows what he will decide? He could fire everyone at any time.

And in actual fact this mystery should be manifest in everyone that we meet, for reasons that we'll go into in another article.

This is a superficial look, but it can show how our consciousness naturally seeks to balance each of these. And, in actual fact, the dynamics between us and those in our life reflect this well: how do we balance each of them? How do we give them each attention? Set limits?

When we are fielding all the possibilities available to us - the mystery - we search for patterns consistent with the patterns we already know, but that are novel at a high-level. We always have the ability to understand the phenomenon in terms of how it reduces, but doing this can also make it into something that simply doesn’t fit in to our pattern store - our memory - and is thus ignored.

It could be, though, that the pattern is not expanded into this reductionist view, and instead we evaluate it only as a high-level phenomenon. We then find that it matches a past phenomenon that also was never reduced - something we simply didn’t understand then, didn’t try to, and don’t understand now.

But because it’s a familiar pattern in itself, we then would be able to experience it and incorporate it into our conscious reality. Quite literally ignorance can be bliss.

So you can see how one aspect in particular has the potential to disrupt this balance - and that is reduction.

This reductive curiosity always asks the question “how did this come about?”, and it provides an answer that isn’t in terms of the phenomenon itself, but instead solely in terms of how it might be caused.

When the stock market plunges, news pundits are quick to provide an explanation: “Dow sell-off due to recession fears”. Of course they have no such certainty, because the Dow consists of millions of share holders performing trading activity for any number of reasons. The Dow is just an average of the activity in the biggest companies.

It could be that you experience the Dow plunging because your need for some kind of negative news, and you happened to tune into the business news and see the Dow index, and the branch of the multiverse that you happened to find yourself in is the one where something significant is happening: the Dow collapsing.

But you could instead look for efficient, material causes for the Dow collapsing. This would be the reductive, “upwards” cause. And the pundits even offer one to you: that people are worried about a recession. “That’s the reason!” they say.

And this is why it can be a problem. You see, if the case was actually your expectation of negative news (a kind of “manifestation”), but you instead believe people telling that it’s caused by people selling stock for fear of a recession - if you take that reason as being the absolute truth, then you may use that to cause other actions you take: you go and sell off your stock. You decide to put off buying a house, and so on. You start building your life on what you thought were causes but were actually synthesized by that curious part of your mind.

This is the problem with this reductionist aspect of consciousness: when it becomes more important to you than the other aspects. And it can have massive ramifications.

It also limits what you can experience, because you dismiss - literally put aside - phenomenon that you don’t think is possible because the causal conditions are not in place to allow it.

Interestingly, this is exactly the dynamic that is described in the Biblical telling of The Fall of Man: the choice we have to believe in having provided to us that we need, including protection, or to let knowledge be our guide for decisions. The latter betrays the source of misbalance in our consciousness that leads to an entirely different type of existence.

We can find a secondary reductive explanation for anything. The mind will always synthesize an explanation, as elaborate as is necessary to satisfy your curiosity.

Imaging you see two people who look similar. Why is this happening? Quite possibly because you had the previous person in your mind, and then your need for novelty was sufficient in creating a new person, but their look was taken from the previous pattern stored.

Let’s say that’s the actual reason - but then, of course, curiosity kicks in and you need a better explanation. So you enquire and they tell you that they’re Japanese, which turns out to be the same race as your other friend. You then wonder why that makes them look alike, and you look it up and get a grandiose explanation about genetics and how DNA works.

Curiosity is quite an amazing aspect of our mind, it works like a calculator: it pieces together the input it sees, and then picks out a mechanism to explain it. And then if you look at those mechanisms, it can find explanations for those also. It is like a fractal such as a Mandelbrot - the closer you look, the more detail it will create to explain how it appears, endlessly. For us, though, there is a limit to our knowledge - and this is why quantum physics, at a very close level where knowledge is fuzzy, reality becomes just as fuzzy.

The temptation to put knowledge before faith is everywhere. We have our own “tree of knowledge” with its forbidden fruit, sitting there at all times. In fact now it’s more available to us than ever: the Internet. At any time it’s as easy as anything to just find out what causes something. In fact new Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT makes it even easier. The serpent is all-but-literally whispering in our ear day and night!

We can resist, though. If we don’t focus on needing explanations, then the other aspects, and faith, can take precedence in molding the path we take. If we balance this with faith in someone to provide for us everything that we need, a divine Father-figure, then it will happen and things should go our way. Just like Jesus commanded in Mark 11:24.

This may be a heterodox position to take, but we often simply don’t need to ask how, and mostly we really shouldn’t. The only knowledge we should seek should be knowledge that ends our thirst for unnecessary knowledge.

I’ll discuss the other aspects of our mind map in more detail in Part 2.

When you look at the image above, you see the color yellow but what does it evoke for you?

I would imagine it evokes fire. But the ineffable, incommunicable, feeling when you see yellow is a highly contentious issue. It’s called “qualia”.

Qualia is considered to be the irreducible phenomenon of consciousness itself. Some philosophers of mind would say that the existence of qualia is evidence that consciousness itself is not emergent from material things - because if qualia cannot be reduced, then neither can consciousness.

Others, though, say it is an illusion. The feeling, they say, is purely functional: evolution has imbued in us a natural association between yellow and fire, the danger associated with it, the warmth and so on. This innate and subconscious recollection is what we call the qualia of yellow.

But the question then becomes: why would a simple association produce a phenomenal feeling ?

Imagine a neural network that has encoded billions of associations between patterns in its input. In a computer a neural network is just an array of memory slots and an algorithm running on that data. Why would the setting of values in certain neurons create a feeling? It’s just numbers, after all! And in our brain, it’s just electrical and chemical activity. Nothing else.

But upon closer inspection we’d find it is actually a little more than that: these neuronal weightings of associations also inform what we decide to do next. Perhaps seeing yellow activates that little part of us that would scream “run!”, if only it had more information to confirm the fear. It anticipates more information to make a potentially swift and decisive action.

And these primal associations are probably quite strong, because without them we’d die. So naturally, survival-related actions are considered important to us and weigh heavily on decisions we make.

Yet, again, aren’t these still just neurons triggering? Electrical activity? Chemical movement? How does it become an actual feeling ? There is no actual anticipation, just the possibility of there being other neurons that might be enough to tip the scales. It’s easy to dismiss it as some kind of illusion, but given it’s the only access we have to existence itself, it seems a little arrogant to wave it off like this.

Survival Sense

If we look at this matter through the lens of downward causation, as has been discussed in this blog prior to this article, then qualia takes on an entirely different role.

In that framework, we start not with the senses, but with a first-person model. This model incorporates patterns it looks for, observes, specifically in order to create a bridge from its current state to its new state.

As part of this observation, the senses would clearly take on a large role. The immediate patterns it would look for would be those that pertain - before anything - to ways in which the observer would survive. And so before anything, all sense data is evaluated on those terms. Is that color red, actually blood? Is that color yellow, actually fire? Is that color blue, actually water? Is that color white, actually sunshine? Each of these are primal patterns.

Patterns, that is, that allow continuity of my model and in that enable a moment of consciousness. In other words, these colors are our portal to measures of possible futures in which I am more conscious, compared to those where I am less conscious.

What we call an experience of qualia could actually just be the sensation of “greater consciousness” itself.

Moreover, it could be the experience of creating time, which without consciousness would truly have no passage, no motion, no actuality.

In other words, qualia could be creation of time and existence itself. This selecting of a firm bridge, a bridge from a first-person information model to a slightly more complex model, from a potentially infinite option of other possibilities. a bridge that we ultimately call time and existence itself.

Qualia isn’t simply electrons moving or neuron weightings, it could be the key to the process of existence itself: selecting a conscious moment among an infinite sea of unconscious multiversal possibilities.

And that selection, qualia, is all that actually exists.

Does Existence Necessarily Feel like Qualia?

So this might actually be something important. Does existence necessarily feel like something? If time only “moves” with conscious experience, and that is really the essence of existence itself, then is there something about this movement of time, the thing that pulls us forwards to the next moment, really what existence is?

Are the two inseparable? Like, for there to be “anything at all”, must it necessarily be the “pulling forward” of one moment to the next, being bridged by a moment of consciousness? Does this “bridge” have a specific pattern, as we discussed being the change in a first-person model?

Let’s boil this down to something simple. Why do we take a breath?

It’s something that we all do, all the time. But we don’t notice it. We don’t remember it. It just happens without any kind of thinking. Sometimes it’s very slow, and maybe not even that frequent (every few seconds). But it always happens.

If we were to be aware of that moment we take a breath, we’d experience the qualia of the desire to breathe. Of course if we resist, then we’d feel something even stronger than that: a yearning to breathe. And that would build as seconds pass, until you truly experience the survival instinct.

But it will always come, and must necessarily. If we were to look at this in terms of the multiverse, there must surely be other, parallel branches of the universe where I do not take a breath. And probably branches where I don’t even feel the desire to.

But here we are. Why?

Again, there is a selection going on. The branches where I take the breath without thinking will take precedence. If that isn’t possible because there are only branches where I am thinking about breathing, then it will necessarily give precedence to the branches where I am thinking that I need to take a breath. But regardless of whether it involves thought or not, the pattern of my current first-person information model persisting from now to the next moment will always occur.

What propels that is what we might call qualia. It’s the necessity of time and existence, and that’s what feeling is. Existence itself.

The conundrum of quantum physics has led to a plethora of quite unusual theories. Not least among these are those that suggest reality depends on the observer, exclusively so.

Before we delve into the details of these theories, let’s introduce a few concepts in simple terms that are critical to understanding something very important about these new theories about reality.

What’s QBism?

QBism, short for "quantum Bayesianism," is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that emphasizes the role of personal subjective experience in understanding the theory and experimental results.

QBism argues that the mathematics of quantum mechanics should be understood simply as a tool for making personal probability judgments about the outcomes of measurements, rather than as a description of objective reality.

This interpretation is often associated with the philosophical position of solipsism, which holds that the self is the only thing that can be known or verified to exist.

At its root is something called Bayesianism. Bayesianism is named after the 18th century statistician and theologian Thomas Bayes. Bayes was born in London in 1702, and studied theology at the University of Edinburgh. He was an ordained minister in the Church of England and spent most of his life in London and Kent, England.

Bayes developed the basic concepts of Bayesianism in a paper he wrote in 1763, entitled "An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances." However, Bayes' work was not widely known or used until it was independently rediscovered and developed by others in the 20th century.

In simple terms, Bayesianism is a way of thinking about probability that emphasizes the role of personal beliefs and subjective experience in understanding the likelihood of different events.

An example of Bayesianism in action is as follows: Imagine you're trying to figure out the probability that a coin is fair (has a 50/50 chance of coming up heads or tails) vs. biased (has a higher chance of one outcome over the other).

Initially, let's say you have no information about the coin, so you assign an equal probability of 50% to it being fair and 50% to it being biased.

Then, you flip the coin 10 times and it comes up heads every time. According to classical statistics, the probability of getting 10 heads in a row if the coin is fair is very low, so you might update your belief that the coin is fair to a low probability.

However, according to Bayesianism, you would update your belief by incorporating your prior belief (the coin has a 50/50 chance of being fair) with the new information (the coin came up heads 10 times) to get a new probability. So the final probability of coin being fair will be updated, but it would no longer be zero.

In this way, Bayesianism allows you to incorporate new information and update your beliefs to make better predictions - perhaps in a way that is more akin to how we would naturally predict outcomes, given our awareness of how we lack complete information.

Ontological?

Now what does it mean to ask if this might be ontological?

Ontology is the study of what is - ie. how you might tell the difference between something existing or something being an illusion.

While Bayesianism is concerned just with determining probability, ie. what we can know, when it is applied to quantum mechanics it is making a much more significant claim: that reality itself behaves (in some ways) according to our predictions.

The very core of our every day experience is determined by the act of decoherence of quantum states to create the “classical” world around us. For the QBist, this happens only when the observer gains knowledge about the system, and it happens according to the predictions the observer made.

This is why some people have called out QBism for being solipsist: it only ever talks about reality in terms of subjective probabilities.

Solomonoff Induction

There is another method to calculate probabilities that many people say is the “computational formalization” of Bayesian probability: it’s called Solomonoff Induction.

Solomonoff Induction picks prediction systems based solely on their ability to predict future events. That system is then used as a reference point for calculating future probabilities.

In our coin example, imagine you have two possible sources of information for predicting the coin toss: a simple rule that says the coin is fair (has a 50/50 chance of coming up heads or tails) and a neural network that has been trained on a dataset of coin toss outcomes.

Using Solomonoff induction, you would assign a probability to each prediction based on how well each source has predicted the coin toss outcomes in the past. For example, let's say the simple rule has been accurate 70% of the time, and the neural network has been accurate 85% of the time. In this case, you would assign a higher probability to the prediction made by the neural network.

As new data comes in, for example after a toss and the outcome is known, the probabilities would be updated accordingly. Solomonoff induction will provide an optimal prediction by weighting the predictions of all sources, taking into account all the observations and adjusting the prediction based on the past performance of each source.

So the difference here is that Solomonoff assigns probabilities to systems that predict, whereas Bayesianism by itself relies only on past outcomes to predict.

Algorithmic complexity

By itself, Solomonoff induction doesn’t tell us much. It just helps us find a system that can help us predict the future, from a pragmatic point of view.

The next step is to look at this from the perspective of something called algorithmic complexity. This lets us calculate how complex a system is.

Now, if we have two systems that make the same predictions, but one is more complex than the other, then you could argue that the simpler of the two is more likely to be more reliable. This is because the bits that aren’t needed for the past predictions haven’t actually been tested and so aren’t technically necessary.

To calculate the complexity of a system, we use something called Kolmogorov complexity. In simple terms, this is just the length of a computer program after it has been fully optimized.

For example: Imagine you have two algorithms that sort a list of numbers, the first one is the well-known "Bubble Sort" algorithm and the second one is the "Quicksort" algorithm. Both algorithms can produce the same sorted list as an output, but they both have different complexity measures.

Measuring the Kolmogorov complexity of each algorithm would involve calculating the length of each algorithm. The Kolmogorov complexity of the quicksort algorithm would be lower than that of the bubble sort algorithm, as it requires fewer instructions to sort the list. So, in this case, the quicksort algorithm would be considered as a simpler algorithm, with the lowest Kolmogorov complexity, and thus it would be preferable in terms of choosing the system to predict output using Solomonoff induction.

So there’s this implicit requirement in Solomonoff induction, and possibly in Bayesianism itself, where the simplest algorithm to explain how likely it would be for a certain event to occur given past experiences.

Law Without Law

This is the point of entry for Markus Muller. He has written a paper titled Law without law: from observer states to physics via algorithmic information theory, and it takes algorithmic information theory, and turns it into a basis for reality itself, as an ontology.

Like Quantum Bayesianism, it calculates everything from a first-person perspective. This theory, though, is quite intentionally solipsistic in its foundation.

Here’s a summary of that paper:

The way we currently understand physics is that any physical theory should describe how the objective world outside of us works. However, quantum theory suggests that physical systems do not always have clear objective properties that can be observed. This raises questions about our current understanding of the world, and some argue that we should consider a different perspective where the focus is on the observer rather than the world.

The approach of the theory described here is based on the idea of induction, which is a way of making predictions about future events by taking into account past observations. It is also based on algorithmic information theory. The main idea is that it is the observer's state of mind, rather than the world or physical laws, that determines the chances of what they will observe next.

Surprisingly, despite starting from a rather solipsistic point of view, this approach leads to a theory that predicts the appearance of an external world that follows simple, computable, and probabilistic laws. Objective reality is not assumed in this approach but emerges as a statistical phenomenon, which means it can be observed through patterns and trends in the starting set of data.

By using Solomonoff induction, selecting probabilities from a supporting algorithm’s Kolmogorov complexity, we get to see how such simple postulates are able to account for the emergence of the classical world we see around us, all from a first-person, quasi-solipsistic perspective.

And it is related in many ways to the same realizations of Quantum Bayesianism: that we must start with what we know, and we learn more, update probabilities to create a pattern that can be used to determine the reality we see.

Between the unexplainable results of quantum physics and studies of consciousness pointing to the first-person mechanism involving similar dynamics of pattern finding and data compression, we’re at a place where we can finally start putting the pieces together for a solid foundation that resurrects that age-old idealistic worldview.

I open my front door and find a package that I wasn’t expecting.

How did it get there?

You may dismiss this very common scenario as just being a simple matter of discovering where it came from by looking at the label, opening the box, making a call and so on. But in actual fact, the question “where did it come from” is the wrong question.

“What Could Have Caused It To Be Here?”

According to what we know of the multiverse, there are in fact many alternative timelines out there that each lead to that very same moment of a me opening the door and finding a package in exactly the same manner, with exactly the same frame of mind, being conscious of exactly the same thing.

These very same “me” in each timeline must necessarily be the same person - why? because if all the particles in our body are branching trillions of times a second, and we feel we’re the same person, then our identity can only be that continuity of information. And in the case I’m describing, each of those “me” have the same information, and so must be the same person.

This, by the way, is called the Law of Identity. According to common-sense this law, if two things are described by all of their properties and those properties are exactly the same, then it is reasonable to conclude that the objects are identical. In other words, the law of identity states that an object is the same as what we consider to be itself, and that an object is defined by its properties. So, if two things have the same exact properties, they are the same thing, and share identity. Hence: both of those conscious beings with the same information must be the same person, even though they are in two different branches potentially with multiple, quite distinct histories or timelines.

Now, in some of those timelines, the package arrived by mistake and it was intended for someone else. A slight mistake in where the delivery driver’s finger swiped on his phone keyboard, which led to a chain of events and he delivered to the wrong house.

In others, a long lost friend found your address and mailed you a photo album you left at their house when you were children.

And in another, it’s a delivery from Amazon of some shoes you ordered from China a couple of months ago but forgot about and was heavily delayed.

Those are three options, but of course there could be a vast number of possible explanations - some extremely elaborate and far-fetched, and some that would make you slap your forehead and say “of course! how stupid am I!”.

For the sake of this discussion, I’ll add a fourth, far-fetched explanation. In that timeline, the box originated because the pieces of dirt in the garden all quantum-tunneled out of the ground, into the air, came together and the molecules rearranged to form cardboard, position perfectly together into a box shape, and then landed in front of your door. Sounds like magic? It does, but it’s allowable according to the Schrodinger equation, through quantum tunneling, it’s just extremely unlikely to occur.

In the multiverse, though, it does anyway. Every possibility occurs (although they still broadly have to follow the laws of physics).

Imagine, for example, two points on a maze.

In the example above, I show just two different routes. But there could be many. You can probably find a route between them, but in the multiverse all the routes are followed. Yet when we look for evidence about which route was taken, what the explanation was, we narrow things down to find just one. But before we started that narrowing down, all of them led to that point.

In the multiverse, though, there can be some really whacky explanations for things. So why don’t we ever experience this type of thing? This is actually a central question in multiverse theory - and has caused a great many arguments among proponents of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics.

Consciousness and Making Sense

Most of the things we’re conscious of are things that make sense. In fact, it’s been proven that if you throw something incongruous into someone’s view, we’d actually just ignore it entirely. A good example there is the participants watching a basketball game who wouldn’t notice a gorilla walking through the court right in front of them. Why not? Because it makes no sense, so we don’t notice it. Our brains filter out incongruity all the time in order to find patterns (you can think of incongruity as a kind of redundancy in data compression parlance). Sometimes we might see something unusual, that doesn’t fit in, but then because it has no relevance to our every day life, it fades from memory very quickly. A good example of this would be dreams - very unusual events that we concoct, but we know very well were not related to our every day life and so we simply forget them because they have no use. They are redundant.

In our every day life, our consciousness only picks up things that fit into its model - but what is this model?

The model is how our brain works. It includes some of what we’re expecting, but also includes gaps that it hopes will be filled, fenced off areas that it worries about losing, and an area reserved for the unknown - stuff it infers might be possible, based on its knowledge, but isn’t able, or definite enough, to evaluate.

The structure of this model is a huge topic and I’ll cover it in another post.

You could certainly say that this model is the base from which we, as an observer, encounter the world. Or, more precisely, from which we select from these possible explanations for a particular experience presented to me.

As I said, things that fit into our model are things we can be conscious of. Things that don’t fit in, are things we cannot be conscious of. But in between the two, there is a huge gradient of variation in consciousness. The less likely it is to fit in to our model, the less conscious of it we’ll be.

Now, the theory goes, those timelines where we’re more conscious will be the timelines that we’re more likely to experience. Simply because there’s more “me” in those timelines. There is more continuity of our identity.

(Incidentally, this is a concept called “measure” in quantum mechanics, and is the basis (for example) of the Deutsch-Wallace decision theoretic approach to deriving probabilities in the Many Worlds Interpretation.)

Piecing It Together

Let’s get back to our scenario. At the point that we are confronted with the package, we know little about how it got there and so each of these possible explanations are in a kind of “superposition” - all existing at once. Possibly ordered according to their relative likelihood.

But from that point forwards things bifurcate.

Perhaps in one timeline we glance at the label on the box, hone in on the house number and see that the 8 should have been a 0. The package was sent to the wrong address.

As soon as we have that experience, then the history where the package was delivered to the wrong address - the entire story that led up to that point - becomes my timeline. Little pieces of information that I gain from that point will each narrow down the list of possible (or probable) explanations, in a kind of Bayesian way.

Perhaps this becomes solidified as being more likely because I first had a faint memory of this type of thing happening before. Each of those recollections, no matter how faint, contribute towards the latent expectations part of the model.

Gradually a true explanation emerges, or set of explanations, based purely on how it fits into the model.

Ignorance Is Bliss

But what if we never find out?

How many things do we experience each day without understanding how it happens?

When you eat food, where does it go? You know that it may taste a certain way, but once it goes into your stomach - you have no idea what happens. We just know that at some point it comes out of us, looking quite different. We’re told that it gets broken down by gastric juices, then absorbed in your colon in various ways, and eventually makes its way into your blood stream and then to vital organs. It’s an extremely complex process, but one that you have no idea about until you read about it.

You may wonder: how does my hair grow? How does my body produce things, and renew things, constantly? Where does its energy come from? The more questions you ask like this, the more you seek explanations for why. And you realize a plausible explanation is that it has to do with the food you consume.

So that narrows down what you’ll see when you start to dissect the internal mechanisms of where your food goes. It then becomes a question of how you connect the dots. How do you get from swallowing food, to having energy to breathe? You have a start point, and an end point, and a trillion paths that may join up the two. But which is the most likely? Which fits into your model?

And we start to learn about each of these processes. We see pictures, see accounts of people who have dissected bodies and performed surgeries, and the explanation gradually emerges. It always has gaps though, because we don’t know everything. But we should always keep in mind that what we don’t know exists in superposition - there are multiple explanations, and whichever is true is whichever fits more into your model.

The same even goes for thinking itself. The more we delve into it, the more we’d find explanations even for our own thoughts and how it causes actions through nerves. Of course that created the explanation of a human brain, or neurons communicating and so on. But when we’re not peeking inside, those mechanisms driving the thought exist in a vast array of superpositions of explanations.

One way to look at this is to see that these explanations are material simulations of what ultimately was selected by the mind, by the model. The only real common factor is the model, not the material causes that simulate it. Now what does this tell us about emergence of consciousness? I’ll leave that for another post.

But it is worth mentioning that there are some things we’re simply incapable of knowing. And this is never more true than the realm of the incredibly small: quantum physics. When we look at the behavior of individual particles, we realize that the amount of information we can retrieve on any of them is extremely limited. And when we’re not looking at them, ie. when we have practically no information about them, they behave as if they’re ghosts, existing in multiple places at once - a phenomenon known as superposition - and interfering with their own variations. In reality, what we see are the merging of multiple explanations - even where the values of those explanations cancel each other out, and leave an empty spot on a detector. They all remain in existence until just one is needed.

The truth is, what we don’t need to know can remain hazy like this. It simply doesn’t matter because all that matters is that we manifest expected changes to our experience, and that an explanation exists if and when we seek it.

Read more about this in the article Miracles and Dual Causality.

Choosing History

So the question then becomes: how can this model be changed at will?

Isn’t it kind of important? Because, it would seem, changing this model even slightly would allow me to pick a history to explain an event, but the specific explanation could impact what would be selected next. That would be magic, like changing the future!

At the very least being able to even slightly change this model could help steer me towards certain outcomes and away from others.

And this is the very basis of the Law of Attraction, and manifesting your desires.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say I just moved into this house. Because of this, a huge portion of my life - much of what I know and rely on through habit has been changed out. There is suddenly a big gap in my model: that dreaded area of the unknown.

It would seem that increasing the unknown can greatly impact your expectations. In fact, greatly reduce your expectations and instead replace it with the even possibility of experiencing something shocking.

This changes the “measure” of which timelines you would be more conscious in. With that heightened anxiety of the unknown, the latent openness to being shocked, we are now just as conscious in some of those timelines that previously we would have considered to be next to impossible.

Perhaps now we receive a package from a trouble-making neighbor, who sent me a letter with a threat. This history always existed, but previously wouldn’t have seemed very likely, so it remained in just a slither of the measure. But now it’s more likely to be experienced because I’m so open to the unknown and to surprise.

(Incidentally, I will add that moving house has coincided with some very bad events in my life, and I do wonder if this very phenomenon is occurring!)

But it’s also possible that someone has recently given me something, and so I was in a frame of mind where I was half-expecting another gift from friendly neighbors. And so in that mindset I would be more conscious in the timelines where I receive a mysterious but kind gift from an old friend.

I can’t help but think that something similar is going on here when we experience unexplainable coincidences, that Carl Jung called Synchronicities.

Novelty

I don’t want to suggest that we can simply think our way to create some new future. It clearly isn’t that straightforward. Consciousness increases where we are adding to our model, and that will depend on what type of thing it is seeking out. We can’t just think of something and it would magically occur. It’s not as simple as some would make it out to be. It’s not that our brain simply filters out incongruity, what we don’t expect - it’s more that it looks to build on top of what it has created in the model, and like putting together a lego set, any blocks that don’t fit in will be discarded. Consciousness is creative.

Now it may be that the block you’re looking for is quite different than any previous block you’ve used, in which case you will be searching for this novel block. The expectation is creative growth, not monotonous continuity. And this fits in well with what we have discussed about consciousness being data compression. So what is your model, and where is it going? What does it allow for? How open is it?

These are things we’ll discuss in more depth in another post.

Causation

But the point I’m really trying to get across in this article is that this whole phenomenon reveals a kind of duality of causes. On the one hand, we can find out about all the locations of all the particles in the world and predict what will happen next according to their trajectory and the laws of physics.

On the other hand, we can look at our model and predict what we’ll likely experience next from a vast array of possible multiverse timelines.

These are two different courses of action that exist in parallel. Effectively two different causes.

The first is upwards causation, also called efficient causation. This is what we’d call the laws of physics.

The second is downwards causation. Perhaps it’s akin to the formal or final cause. This is the realm of belief, of certainty and faith. It’s been called the illative sense. This is what we would be conscious of happening based on our internal model. Every downwards cause has many, even an infinite, upwards causes that could equally explain what happened - just that they’d often be improbable. A coincidence, a fluke, a twist of fate. But explainable nonetheless.

We’re certainly familiar with the former, upwards causation. It’s what we’re taught. It leads us to believe in materialism and in reductionism, that everything can be reduced. The latter is arguably more the domain of religion, at least traditionally.

Both are equally true, but I’m sure you can appreciate that the latter would be a whole lot more helpful to understand, if not master.

Is there really such a thing as eternal life?

The question of immortality is at the center of most religions. The secular view is that once our body degrades and stops functioning, our consciousness goes with it, and we come to an end. The religious view, though, is that we continue living in another realm - somehow. But this was always seen as irrational and without any basis. It was wishful thinking. That was, until the concept of the multiverse became more realistic.

This gave birth to the possibility of immortality through the redundancy that exists in parallel universes. It was named “quantum immortality”.

The concept of quantum immortality is related to the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which posits that the universe is constantly branching and creating new versions of reality. According to this interpretation, in any given moment, the universe splits into multiple branches, each representing a different possible outcome.

Now quantum immortality is based on the idea that this branching also applies to the human brain. This means that you are conscious in multiple branches of the universe simultaneously. And it would mean that even if you die, there will always be one other branch where you would not die, because of the infinite variations possible in MWI.

Therefore, the person's consciousness would continue to exist in that branch, leading to the possibility of immortality.

But this makes at least a couple of assumptions that we need to discuss.

The first is that the quantum wave function is real. Now, the Many Worlds Interpretation posits (quite reasonably) that it’s real and that every branch is real. After all, if the wave function shows an interference pattern, what is interfering if it isn’t real?! There must be something there to interfere! Yet if it’s real, then it means that every single particle, in your brain and everywhere, is also existing in this vast superposition of different states, each interacting with particles in different states, and that is what creates this vast plethora of different, parallel universes.

Are there other interpretations of quantum mechanics that don’t posit the wave function being real in the same way? Many of them are no longer tenable, and at least two of them assume a kind of substance-duality that we discuss below. So in other words, no - not really.

Secondly, it makes the assumption that consciousness emerges from processes in the brain. In other words, if you cloned all the particles in a brain, it would just be conscious and be just like you having a phenomenally-conscious experience. We rely on this for quantum immortality because if the particles of the brain are branching constantly, then we have to assume that those branches contain within them actual functioning brains that are actually conscious.

Is that actually the case? Well, we don’t know. All we know is that changes in the brain seem to affect consciousness, so it seems to be the case. If I drink alcohol, that seems to affect my consciousness - I don’t think of the future or past quite so much, for instance. That is my consciousness. Likewise if I don’t sleep, my consciousness is greatly impacted - including my mood and what I think about.

But it’s not quite as simple as this, and there are still open questions. Is it possible that I expect to be tired after not sleeping, because I see this in other people, and then somehow manifest that? The same for alcohol: is there some expectation that causes this that is then manifested into reality as an explanation? We’ll leave this aside for the moment and discuss it in another post later.

But if we suppose these two things are true, then the logical conclusion would be that we are immortal.

The second assumption, in actual fact, isn’t necessarily required. If consciousness isn’t emergent from the brain, and the brain is synthesized as a kind of suitable explanation for the phenomenon we experience, then that also wouldn’t die. After all, death is caused by material processes such as decay or accidents. If that happens in one branch, then it couldn’t affect consciousness because consciousness wouldn’t be causally impaired by material events.

It’s interesting that the predominant interpretation of quantum mechanics is the Copenhagen interpretation, that says that the act of observation is ultimately what converts the wave function into a particle. In other words, it posits a separate “observer” that is outside the wave function, and thus not causally affected by it. Such an observer, being outside of material causation, would be immortal anyway.

So really, you have the possibility of immortality through multiple ways. The only way you would be mortal is if there is just one universe, and consciousness is emergent from matter. And given we’ve seen a ton of evidence that there isn’t just one universe, that there is no such thing as local reality, and still many unanswered questions about the emergence of consciousness, the odds are certainly in our favor that immortality is real.

Ethical Questions

If immortality were possible, would it be desirable? Would people want to live forever, or would the idea of eternal life be unappealing?

This is a serious question. Some people, like myself, stand in awe of the thought of living forever. The world literally becomes your oyster. But what if you didn’t share the same enthusiasm? What if you wanted to escape?

The perhaps sad thing is, if QI were true, escape just wouldn’t be an option. You wouldn’t be able to even if you wanted to. Even if you pleaded, commit suicide, tried a million ways to leave this life - they would all fail, like the movie Groundhog Day.

As a Christian, I can’t help but see how this could easily become a kind of hell. It’s been described as a fire pit with “screaming and gnashing of teeth” - kind of how you react when you’re put into an undesirable place and want to escape but cannot. An existence that you detest, where you want to escape but cannot, wouldn’t that match this description? Wouldn’t it be hell?

The only solution would be to teach people to embrace life, and try to make the most of it. It would be the only humane approach. If people reject that, then I guess they can “go to hell”!

Now we must ask: How would society adapt to the possibility of immortality? Could there be overpopulation, economic and resource challenges?

If it were as simple as everyone living forever, then our world would look very different. The population of the earth would be something like 120 billion. But that isn’t the case. We see people die all the time.

And this is because quantum immortality is subjective immortality. It would only seem to be immortal from a first-person perspective. We see other people die, but from their perspective they continue living, just in a different branch where they overcame that disease or somehow avoided that accident.

The age we see people die today could just be a factor related to how our consciousness works. There are several speculative ideas of why this is the case which I’ll describe in another post. But the challenges of resource availability clearly won’t be any more of a problem than they are today. Ultimately many of these concerns stem from the risk of oneself “starving to death”, yet in a world where first-person death isn’t a possibility, the concern is greatly reduced.

Another question: How would the idea of death and the finitude of life change? Would death still have the same significance and meaning if people knew they could potentially continue living in another branch of reality?

Now perhaps people would take more risks. But should they? After all, if you almost die in one branch, you can leave behind a whole lot of mess for everyone else. And likewise, you will have to handle the recklessness of everyone else who believes this.

So perhaps it won’t or shouldn’t really change how much risk we take. And maybe it will force us to be more engaged with the world, seeing that we’ll be forced to live here regardless of what we do.

And lastly: What would be the implications of immortality on our understanding of the self and identity? Would people be the same person if they were to continue living in a different reality?

This is a big question. You have the likes of Sean Carroll - a big proponent of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, but who does not believe that the other Seans in other branches are him. And you have Max Tegmark who think of the other branches as being like “brothers”.

But this misses a really important point. And that is: We are already constantly branching, trillions of times a second. If those branches aren’t me, then I am not me at all! Are they trying to sneak in some kind of Buddhist doctrine of anatta?! Given that we generally have an experience of being a persistent identity, then it’s fair to say that each of those branches are equally me. Pragmatically and experientially, how could that not be the case?

And there’s a second dimension to this: do we even experience death, and just continue on as another “copy”, like having a backup? Or do we not even experience death, and subjectively just continue on?

Let’s delve into this a little, because it’s quite important.

Continuity of Consciousness

You see all these books talking about “the power of now” and “only now exists” - but what does that really mean? Consciousness isn’t simply an instantaneous thing. Firstly, if it emerges from processes, then there has to be a process over time - things moving from one place to another. And that takes time, and means that consciousness itself must be something that starts at one time and ends at another time.

If it doesn’t emerge, then it must exist outside of time, not causally affected by it, so why would it have anything to do with “now” which exists within time?

The idea of an extended “now” that takes more than an instant is called the “specious present”. The philosopher William James wrote a lot on this topic. In his book "Principles of Psychology," William James stated that the specious present, which is the duration of the immediate experience of time, can last from a fraction of a second to around three seconds. He suggests that this duration can vary depending on the individual and the task at hand. He states that some people might be able to experience a longer specious present, while others might experience a shorter one. He also says that the specious present can be longer for certain tasks that require a high degree of attention, such as playing a musical instrument, where the specious present can be extended to a few minutes. James also notes that the specious present can be shorter for tasks that require less attention, such as walking. Overall, James suggests that the duration of the specious present is not fixed, but rather can be expanded or contracted depending on the individual's attention and the task at hand.

What constitutes this specious moment is that it must have a certain structure and integrity. It’s a block of information, and it’s a block that fits into a series of blocks - because that’s what gives it significance in the first place.

In other words, consciousness depends on continuity. There has to be a continuum, and that specious present has to bridge two other specious presents: one before and the one after.

Now if that’s true, which it appears to be, then how could we ever experience death? Surely that bridge will only ever bridge to a branch where you continue, not a branch where you discontinue? The path of consciousness, then, can never end so long as there’s a way for it to continue - a way that the multiverse most certainly provides. And thus, from your perspective, that final demise simply never comes. Maybe you fall asleep but you always wake up.

Degree of Consciousness

Ok, but there’s a problem, and it’s a problem that Max Tegmark pointed out: aren’t there states of consciousness where you simply “fade away”, in a long drawn out eon of silent suffering? Your neurons slowly decay over a vast amount of time, while you are paralyzed and unable to do anything. It sounds horrific. He thinks there are an infinite ways that your brain could decay over an extremely long time. Wouldn’t that bridge always take us to the vast number of suffering branches, because there’s so many of them?

But, thankfully, this defies what we understand about emergent consciousness. It defies what we’ve seen empirically about what is required for consciousness. You see, consciousness simply isn’t that cheap: it emerges only when a certain degree of integral complexity is reached. A simple knock to the head is enough to disrupt it, so why do we think that it would be capable of being active for years of decay?

The requirements for consciousness are significant. We fall unconscious quite easily - especially when we’re on death’s door-bed. As such, I can’t see how there are any of these states where we’d be conscious and suffering for any reasonable amount of time. We’d be far more conscious in branches where that doesn’t happen, where we’re able to think creatively.

In other words, even the suffering aspect will necessarily be limited because of the very constraints that the nature of consciousness imposes on us, and we’ll soon find ourselves recovering, and living on, forever.

The Age Question

Some people ask: if we’re immortal, why do people die of old age? Why am I this age and not 1,000 years old already?

These are two separate questions. Firstly, as we discussed above, we already know that we’ll see people die, but subjectively they won’t die. From our perspective we see them die. From their perspective, they will continue living. This is simply how it works: the immortality is subjective, it’s first person only.

So yes, that may include dying of old age or other reasons. In actual fact we die all the time in some branch, as horrifying as that seems. We don’t remember it because we simply cannot be conscious of it: it’s impossible. That’s simply the way consciousness works.

The second question is a bit more interesting: why am I, say, 40 and not 4,000? Surely if I were immortal I would be more likely to find myself being a really really old age and not under 100?

If you look at your self, you’ll soon realize that you’re not really the age you think you are. The fact is that my age is actually very old: my DNA has been around for perhaps 4 billion years. If I counted my actual memory it would necessarily include my DNA which remembered everything that my ancestors went through in terms of challenges overcome. We just now conveniently count age only in terms of our individual person and conscious memory. Give another 5 billion years and perhaps we'd count it in an entirely different way, from not just our memory but a collective store (like the Internet). If parts of our bodies are made from replaced parts, maybe we would start measuring age entirely differently.

Keeping in mind that when we talk about QI it’s subjective immortality - that our current conscious experience continues. But really what we're talking about is our memory of our life, which actually started more like 4 or 5. Prior to that we presume that consciousness worked the same way, but we are not sure by any means. It could be, though, that there will simply always be a memory window going back a set number of years, and we call that consciousness. Prior to that are biological continuations of some kind, that construct the memory.

So in 1000 years, we may have a conscious moment that again spans back, say, 50 years, and not prior to that because consciousness itself is the integration of information into a store that is the size of our current brain. And when that happens we may still say that we are 50 years old? That suggests we would stop counting and start again at some point, meaning that our body itself wouldn't be immortal, it'll just be the subjective experience alone.

It's definitely a valid point that there is much about our age that is arbitrary. We count the time that we collect memories, but our DNA is a memory. We count the time that we are an independent body, but we're hardly independent at all.
 
At some point in our future there'll be another explanation for how we are saved but it'll involve a different history that'll explain how the same memories and conscious state came about, with sufficiently minor modification for it to be continuous. And perhaps this is the point: from moment to moment our conscious experience is just a minor change in memory, sometimes based on events in time as they are experienced, but sometimes based on whatever is required to survive.

More to the point, for survival we only actually need up to, say, 50-100 years of memory. This may be a factor of how fast change occurs in this environment, or how much first-hand knowledge we actually need to survive. That could decrease as we have access to more information through the Internet, or it may decrease if we find an alternative explanation for us surviving - for example if we can simply fully trust someone to save us. But either way, we would always be likely to find ourselves in that timeframe of memory, just that we may have a different bodily age depending on how we measure it (eg. date of "birth", maybe in the future it might be date of mind transference or something!).

The age number we assign may always be a relatively small number, but our actual age is much, much larger.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the concept of quantum immortality presents an entirely new perspective on the age-old question of whether we live forever, which has been central to most religions since the dawn of humanity.

It suggests that through the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, our consciousness can continue to exist in parallel universes, leading to the likelihood of subjective immortality.

However, this concept makes a couple of assumptions, such as the idea that the quantum wave function is real, and that consciousness emerges from processes in the brain. While these assumptions are still open to question, the evidence is quite supportive.

The possibility of quantum immortality brings a new level of rationality to the idea of immortality and raises important questions about the nature of consciousness and our place in reality.

And it provides quite a cogent and positive answer to our opening question, “Is there such a thing as eternal life?”

GPT-3 is what’s called a “large language model”. Under the hood, it’s a specialized neural network - a computer program. A neural network is a software system that contains a virtual network of blocks of information called “neurons”, because they analogically (loosely) mimic the way the brain’s neurons work.

These neurons encode concepts of different levels, and contain something called “parameters” which just record how a specific level of “weighting” on that neuron will activate weighting on a list of other neurons, and vice versa. The weighting is like an electrical impulse shooting through the brain. This structure allows it to record how concepts relate to one another, both at low level concepts such as words, and very high level concepts such as “explains how bridges are built”.

This language model specialization differs because it has something called “multi-head attention”, that allows it to understand the changing of context, at different levels, as it reads information. This is kind of what gives it a “big picture” view of the content.

It’s then fed a huge corpus of information - as much as possible, and in the case of OpenAI’s system it was literally fed the entire contents of the Internet, in text form.

So, what’s interesting about this is that in a neural network the learning process is actually a form of lossy compression. It can read text, understand what concepts it relates to, and then just encode it in terms of those concepts rather than the original text.

You can see this when it’s trying to quote from specific books - it will reconstruct the quote based on the concepts it learned, and it will do this loosely so that it’s not using the original words, just the general gist of what was communicated.

Given that this is a highly efficient form of data compression - and many studies have shown that the process of consciousness is itself this kind of data compression - does this mean that GPT-3 is conscious?

Consciousness from Data Compression

Behaviorally, it can give the impression that it is. It can talk like a human. It would certainly fool someone into believing they are communicating with a human. But behavior isn’t necessarily an indication of consciousness - as we’ve seen in the case of the Blindsight experiments, or even people sleepwalking.

In those cases we may be able to say that they’re not conscious because there’s no active data compression going on - no confrontation with novelty that would be required for that.

And, arguably, when you are interacting with GPT-3, it isn’t learning - it’s using your input to predict what would come next. But you could say that it’s still compressing your query, because when it analyzes it, it maps your query onto the concepts it is using, reducing it to those concepts in a form of compression. But it’s a temporary compression, because once it provides the answer that data is then discarded. It doesn’t change the model. And really, in these papers that discuss consciousness as data compression, they’re talking about the process of changing a compressed model being consciousness, not temporary lookups.

Why is that such an important difference to whether something is conscious or not? This is difficult to know for sure. But it could be related to the continuity from one moment to the next. When we are conscious, there is always a bridge from one state of the model to the next, and these discrete steps creating a line of continuity that we seem to require to be conscious. It’s been called the “specious present”. If this state resets at the end of the query, then it breaks that continuity. Much like when we’re dreaming and then awake and lose that continuity. It’s that loss of continuity that makes us forget what’s in the dream, and then consider the whole episode of being one where we’re not conscious.

Now, while it was training you may have a better case of saying it was conscious. It was finding new information, learning, compressing and expanding its model as it did so. Yet it was during the training that we saw no behavioral activity that would have appeared to be human.

And that tells us something that may be significant: is it thinking that produces consciousness, and not behavior? And not even thinking, but learning. Long-term learning: memorizing.

But surely it can’t be that simple, because otherwise just recording data onto an SD card or a hard drive would be enough to be considered conscious. But that seems too simplistic. And if it only happens with large, complex models: then how complex?

Irreducible?

Such questions make me wonder whether such a reductionist approach to consciousness is even tenable. Does consciousness really emerge from processes? Is there really a point of complexity where it reaches a threshold and consciousness just “switches on” ? Even if that is the case, it must surely be a gradient, where consciousness gradually comes on - but even then, what is qualitatively different from less complex to more complex? Because surely the actual experience of consciousness is an entirely different phenomenon than just electricity moving around neurons.

Is it possible something entirely different is going on, and that the driving force for consciousness is something else, that what we see as a cause is merely an explanation for what is perceived through this consciousness once we probe its mechanisms? Is a neural network just an explanation for the observed mechanisms of conscious behavior, but not the actual cause?

This is something that needs some serious consideration, and it’s something I delve into in my article on the metaphysics of Idealism.

It seems that now we have demonstrated that these observed mechanisms can be replicated, as we see in GPT-3, to make it create a kind of human-seeming being, without there being any kind of actual consciousness there. A literal p-zombie, or at least behavioral zombie?

Yet if this is true, then it raises many questions: is it possible there are other humans that are also acting like they’re conscious but aren’t? And what is it that even creates these conscious experiences then? If there isn’t even evidence of other people having the same conscious experience, is it all just me? Is everything else just behavior that reflects my own conscious experience, but doesn’t have any inherent consciousness?

And wouldn’t that be idealist, if not solipsist?

I somehow feel that ChatGPT wouldn’t agree with this assessment.

Abstract

In this paper I put forward a theoretical mechanism for apparent causation sourced at the level of the mind, or more specifically the observer. I will discuss theoretical physicist Michael Lockwood's "Many Minds Interpretation" of quantum physics, and elaborate upon it in light of recent advances in our understanding of the nature of consciousness, in particular empirically-testable theories of consciousness based on algorithmic information theory and data compression. I will first explain how recent experimental discoveries in quantum physics have made Lockwood's Many Minds Interpretation more plausible. Critically, I will then show how combining these theories can allow for downward-causation at a subjective level, whereby events appear to be caused not simply by conventional efficient causes (what we also call universal or micro-causes), but primarily by a particular state of mind, or informational state of the observer. 

I will then discuss the consequences of the theory: how it predicts the likelihood of unconscious automaton in the form of "probabilistic zombies", subjective immortality, and how such a theory may provide an explanation of certain synchronicities or coincidences that we experience in everyday life, elaborating on the work by Carl Jung, and in general discussing how it provides a more straightforward and more plausible explanation for the immense complexity of the world around us. Lastly I will discuss what would be entailed in creating an experiment to test this theory.

The State of Quantum Physics

Quantum physics, the science of understanding the nature of the most fundamental elements of the world around us, has been in a state of flux ever since the shock of its discovery. Experiments that show interference patterns from an individual particle repeatedly appear to show the existence of a vast number of "shadows" of each and every individual particle - what has been called a particle's wave function. It describes that what we considered to be a single particle actually exists in a vast number of positions and states simultaneously, in what is called a superposition.

How many states? From a mathematical perspective, the wave function - meaning the size of the particle's possible positions - is infinite - meaning that there is an infinitesimally small probability that an electron could be found infinitely far away from its previous position. This, even theoretically, would mean that the particle can move faster than the speed of light, which would mean that Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is only true typically, and not an absolute rule.

This discovery of Quantum Physics has fundamentally changed our view of reality. Testament to this is the fact that the pioneering physicists who discovered quantum mechanics, such as Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr, Wigner and Pauli, all became spiritual "converts" and went on to show significant interest in mysticism.

So what are we to make of this? According to David Deutsch (Deutsch 1997), the very existence of interference patterns in quantum experiments is proof that there must exist superposed particles, otherwise what exactly would be interfering? If they don't actually exist then they surely would not be able to interfere with themselves. Many leading theoretical physicists attribute the superiority of quantum computing to the fact that the interference of these vast superposed particles can be utilized to perform massive computations in parallel. The reality, as Quantum Computing pioneer (and D-Wave CEO) Geordie Rose has pointed out, is that what we are seeing is not simply a vast number of virtual clones of a single particle, but rather we are confronted with real parallel universes. The multiverse. And quantum computers utilize the parallel processing throughout these universes to gain massive superiority in computing power.

Yet that isn't the whole story because it appears that all-but-one of these superposed particles disappear as soon as they are in any way measured, or, rather, as soon as they come in contact with a different particle. What exactly is happening at this point has been a bone of contention for over a century.

For many years the theory that superposed particles must "collapse" (reduce) into a single particle upon measurement was taught as the standard interpretation of quantum physics, known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. The first problem, however, is that it explained very little. While we do measure only one particle, all that appears to happen is that the alternative, superposed particles stop interfering as soon as one of the particles becomes entangled (involved) with another - so long as that entangled particle becomes entangled with yet another, and so on, all the way to the photon hitting the retina in our eye, or maybe hitting the brain process that formed the conscious moment of observing it. They stop interfering, but we do not know that they disappear. They simply become undetectable to all the particles entangled with it.

And while the Copenhagen Interpretation tells us that the alternative particles disappear from existence at the moment of entanglement, it provides no reason why they disappear, or why one particular value gets chosen over another - seemingly at random. In fact it was this very appearance of randomness that caused Einstein to famously declare in frustration with quantum physics: "God does not play dice!". It appeared to contradict the very casual determinism that he trusted to explain reality.

The second problem is that the hope that these superpositions "collapse" into a single particle under various conditions has faded as experiment after experiment has shown that the superpositions persist at larger and larger scales - perhaps even to the scale of an individual creature. 

So if we know these superposed "shadow" particles exist and there is no collapse, where does that leave us? A far more reasonable explanation was put forth in 1957 by physicist Hugh Everett, which he named the Relative State theory, but which was later coined the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, by Bryce Dewitt in the 1970s. And it wasn't so much a new theory - it was actually just a simplification of what was already known. He asked: what if there is no collapse at all, and if each possible interaction of every possible superposition of every particle actually goes on existing? What if all that happens is that interaction (or, really, entanglement) between one possible particle value and another particle just excludes further interference? (A process that is known as decoherence).

This simple statement had massive ramifications. If that happened then it would mean these lines of possible interactions would each effectively become an entire, separate timeline of a universe. A whole world, in a vast (maybe infinite) number of possible worlds - all of which exist in parallel, totally hidden from one another.

In other words, when we see these "shadow" particles, what we're actually peeking into are "parallel universes", identical to our own except for a slight variation in the position (or other characteristic) of a single particle. As soon as that particle interacts with another particle, it creates yet another parallel universe entirely hidden and protected from the others. Effectively, this is the leading interpretation of quantum theory today.

Acceptance of the idea of parallel universes has certainly entered mainstream physics, if not mainstream culture. It appears not only in explanation of quantum phenomenon, but also when we peer far out into the universe: cosmologists believe that inflation theory, from which many predictions have been proven true, to also require these parallel universes (Siegel 2019). To quote Stephen Hawking (Hawking 2001):

There must be a history of the universe in which Belize won every gold medal at the Olympic games, though maybe the probability is low. This idea that the universe has multiple histories may sound like science fiction, but it is now accepted as science fact (by cosmologists, at least). 

An informal poll of 72 of the world's leading cosmologists and quantum theories showed that the vast majority of them were firm believers in the Many Worlds theory, including Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman. Today that support is even greater.

Competing theories were largely depending upon the existence of what was dubbed "hidden variables" - states within particles that we simply hadn't detected yet but that would tell us how it is likely to "collapse". Yet these have now been disproven in many ways, most recently in the proof of the violation of Bell's inequality theorem - the experiment by Alain Aspect et al in 2022 that won them the Nobel prize for physics. The Many Worlds Interpretation seems more and more likely.

The State of Mind

But a true understanding of the Many Worlds Interpretation shouldn't lead us to think that superposition is limited only to individual particles. Everything around us consists of particles moving about. The vast array of possibilities that can occur through the minute variations in the universal wave function, and the process of entanglement that isolates them, allow for entirely disparate and wildly different timelines to occur in parallel, each with large scale differences.

So it must be recognized, then, that you and I are also made of particles. And that means that we must, also, exist in this state of superposition and that there are therefore many of "me" at any one time. This is an unavoidable conclusion if the Many Worlds Interpretation is true, yet it is immensely profound.
 
And these copies of me are "branching out", forking into different timelines, each independently, and each experiencing potentially different turns of events. Quantum physics, in fact, allows for quite "magical" events to occur. The size of this wave function, the "cloud" we call a particle, is immense, perhaps even infinite, and this means that a particle has a probability (even though it's small) of seemingly bizarre behavior, for example suddenly appearing 2 foot to the left. An even smaller probability exists that your entire arm would appear 2 feet to the left. Yet being so improbable we do not typically witness these - even though they all occur. How is this so? David Deutsch, the theoretical physicist who invented the quantum computer, believes it is because there are many more of these branches where we necessarily experience only that which makes rational sense. To quote (Deutsch 2019):

If I boil some water in a kettle and make tea, I am in a history in which I switched on the kettle and the water became gradually hotter because of the energy being poured into it by the kettle, causing bubbles to form and so on, and eventually hot tea forms. That is a history because one can give explanations and make predictions about... In some tiny sliver of it, the kettle transforms itself into a top hat, and the water into a rabbit which then hops away, and I get neither tea nor coffee but am very surprised. That is a history too, after that transformation. But there is no [classical] way of correctly explaining what was happening during it, or predicting the probabilities

Our classical way of viewing just one timeline or history at once in some way dictates which of those timelines we experience. But how does this really work?

We know, empirically, that consciousness - our experience of existing - emerges from specific configurations of neuronal activity in the brain. Various forms of brain damage have affected consciousness in ways that make the correlation indisputable, albeit not fully understood. Damage to the thalamus, for example, always causes unconsciousness. So if there is indeed a hard link between neural configurations and consciousness then this means, in  particular, that the processes within our brain that give rise to a conscious experience of "me" must also exist in different variations at any one time, in superposition. Thus we must be having different and independent conscious experiences in parallel all the time.

In fact, recent research has showed that our brain is always teetering on the brink of chaos (Science Daily 2009). So what is it that maintains that fragile and temporary order? Consistent with such quantum variations, it appears to suggest that there may be many timelines where the brain does exist in a state of chaos, a chaos that would not allow for consciousness to exist. Yet within that chaos there occasionally emerges connections that are fruitful, that form a conscious moment, and those are the ones that we experience. A kind of neural "fine tuning".

What defines a conscious moment phenomenologically? This is a vast question, and one that we have yet to fully grasp. At its base it is awareness, but not awareness of sense data (eg. smell, sight or sound) because there are many instances of sense data that we ignore and are clearly not conscious of. Rather, it is something higher-level that constitutes consciousness: more akin to the process of learning from sense data: when specifically filtered sense data is applied to update existing neural structures in order to learn something important to our own survival. That is the extent, and thus the limit, of what constitutes a conscious moment, as we shall discuss in some detail.

I emphasize the word "limit" because this is how we can delineate the boundaries of a conscious experience from a neural perspective: only those neural networks within our brain that cause that limited conscious moment constitute the unique and isolated experience of "me" at any moment. And from what we now know about the Many Worlds Interpretation, there must be many of those such isolated moments that are exactly the same, in parallel, at any one time. And, according to the Law of Identity, those exactly the same conscious moment configurations must be the same person.

But, of course, there must not only be multiple such conscious moments in parallel - but each moment of consciousness must be connecting with multiple entire, distinct parallel timelines, timelines of entire worlds where entirely disparate events may have unfolded. Events that we simply do not know about and thus are not part of the neural configuration that constitutes our conscious moment.

Let's look at an example. Imagine a timeline where the same conscious processing of a person sitting in a chair decides to call a friend they haven't spoken to for many years. In one timeline they find out they have won the lottery, and in another timeline is the same person calling the same friend only to find out they are having a new child. Those are examples of two entirely disparate events.

Both timelines of these events have been entirely hidden from the person and unfold in parallel, on the other side of the world. Both events constitute possible quantum-level divergence: six lottery numbers picked randomly from chaotic neural "noise", a chaos that certainly consists of variations at a quantum level, then applied to fill out a lottery ticket; or the chance happening of the fertilization of an egg - something so utterly complex it must require the perfect alignment of many processes that also vary considerably at a quantum level, meaning there will be timelines in which the fertilization happens with one particular sperm, another sperm or does not happen at all.

So there exists at least two timelines where this person has exactly the same prior state of mind (sitting quietly on a chair) with these two disparate, concurrent events occurring, entirely information-hidden from the person. And we must assume that these parallel persons with exactly the same state of mind must actually all be the same person. But that state of sameness then bifurcates from that point onwards: one moment of consciousness experiencing the lottery phone call, and another experiencing the news of the new child.

Prior to that phone call, we have to assume that there is (effectively) one of this person, experiencing one conscious moment because they do not yet know about the events on the other side of the world.

But the critical question then becomes: during the bifurcation that occurs in the phone call, would there then be two of this person, simply experiencing both events in two different timelines equally, totally unaware of the other's existence? Or do some branches, some possible outcomes, involve "more consciousness" than others? And if so, could it mean that I am more likely to find myself experiencing certain timelines than others based on how conscious I am in them?

Let's take a step back to understand this. This concept of being "more conscious" (or "more present") in certain eventualities (branches) than others is referred to as certain branches having a "greater measure" than others. It simply means that if you mapped out all of the possible timelines from the current moment, of which there could even be an infinite number, there would be a certain percentage where there is the "same you" being conscious (to varying degrees), and a certain percentage where it is either a different person (so different that it wouldn't be considered the same person), or you are not conscious at all. As theoretical physicist Michael Lockwood explains (LOT 2005):

According to the Everett interpretation, when an observable is measured, all possible outcomes occur in parallel. So, as we conventionally apply the concept of probability, the probability of any measurement outcome, regardless of the value of the coefficient associated with the corresponding eigenstate, can surely only be one! [Certain] How, then, are we to reconcile this implication of the Everett interpretation with the appearance, in quantum measurement, of probabilities? 

In other words, the "greater measure" idea is a necessary requirement of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics, simply in order to explain why we have such a thing as probabilities (that statistically certain events are more likely to occur, historically, than others). This is because, if every quantum-level possibility occurs, what does it mean to have certain outcomes be more probable than others? They should all occur with equal probability: 100%. However, statistically this is not what happens, and there does seem to be a probability of certain results occurring over others.

This is the point of departure for Michael Lockwood's theory of Many Minds. 

His thesis is that it is indeed likely that we are more conscious in certain of these many-worlds timelines than others, by virtue of how the brain works. He explains in detail how the brain contains within it encapsulated components of "co-consciousness", each of which are like mind modules (MoM 2009) processing one particular aspect of sense data or concept that it creates. When these converge in a certain sense, we experience a unified consciousness: a moment of consciousness.

Certain brain configurations create more consciousness, and others less consciousness. We know this, for example, when we subjectively "skip over" periods of being unconscious - for example when we are in a deep sleep or under anesthesia. We also ignore certain phenomena that are less relevant to us, something that has been proven empirically.

He posited that out of all the possible parallel configurations of these components in our brain, we would be more likely to find ourselves in those superposed brain configurations where there is a greater "maximal phenomenal experience" - a term he uses that is broadly synonymous with actual consciousness. In other words, that those parallel neural configurations that entangle with certain, more relevant disparate (external) events could cause a greater experience of consciousness than others.

He goes on to say that there is a kind of "fifth dimension" - parallel to space and time - that measures the actuality of our consciousness of events passing, a corollary of the necessity to perceive space and time. To quote (LOT 2005):

It seems to me that the twosome of time and space should now be extended to a threesome of space, time, and what I shall call actuality. I here have in mind a formal parallel between the way we use the term ‘now’ and the way in which, in the context of the Everett [Many Worlds] interpretation, it seems natural to use the words ‘actual’ or ‘actually’. There is time, in the sense that there is such a phenomenon. But there is also the time— for example, 7.00 GMT. One is a dimension; the other is a point on this dimension that is subjectively salient— namely, the time that it is now. The actuality that I wish to add to space and time conforms to the same logic. In the context of the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, there is actuality in general, which encompasses all terms of a superposition. But once again, there is also what is subjectively salient. By that I mean what we ordinarily think of as actually happening— happening, that is to say, in this term of the superposition as opposed to the others.

In summary, he says that our brain must undergo a superposition of different configurations (which he refers to as combinations of neural components), simultaneously, to reflect its confrontation (quantum entanglement) with different events in each of the parallel timelines. These incur different levels of consciousness in perceiving those events (some we are more conscious of than others), and the measure of this consciousness is what he calls the actuality, which becomes a kind of dimension running directly alongside space and time. 

I have illustrated this in figure 3. In this figure we show that, because some of these componentized brain states have stronger relationships, they create greater consciousness, quantified by the degree of that relationship. As Lockwood explains on p291:

..Think instead in terms of a relation of co-consciousness defined upon brain states and events, and allow this relation to be a matter of degree. Two brain states or events are co-conscious, we shall say, if and only if they figure constitutively within the same phenomenal perspective [moment of consciousness].

Returning, then, to the problem of probability, he explains how we only see those results that are ultimately compatible with greater conscious awareness: 

According to this version of the Everett interpretation, the subjective probability of an outcome is directly proportional to the size of the region of actuality in which this outcome occurs.

He continues this discussion in MBQ on page 236:

In short, I see the preference of a particular basis [certain probabilities being observed] as being rooted in the nature of consciousness, rather than in the nature of the physical world in general. I do not pretend to know, in general, how and why the eigenstates of a particular set of compatible brain observables correspond to or figure  within phenomenal perspectives, while others don't. Yet that does not seem to me to be any more of a mystery than... why only certain aspects of what goes on in the brain registers as consciousness anyway. 

Since these ideas were proposed, much has changed in the study of consciousness. The aforementioned mystery of why certain brain configurations cause more consciousness and others cause less consciousness is the very thing we hope to illuminate in this paper when we come to discuss current theories and research into the nature of consciousness.

Lockwood expresses just how fundamental this proposal is to our understanding of reality. He continues (MBQ, p232):

I hardly need say that this is an exceedingly radical proposal. For my own part I would say only that this conception seems to be to be vastly superior to any other proposed interpretation of quantum mechanics, where interpretation is to be contrasted with modification. Consequently, it should, I content, be regarded as the preferred view, unless and until some evidence emerges that quantum mechanics itself breaks down at the macroscopic level, in such a way as to block the creation of macroscopic superpositions.

By "macroscopic" he means whether these strange quantum effects such as superposition still happen at scales larger than individual particles. It is a pressing question, yet it should be noted that we are now at a point where we have indeed demonstrated the existence of superpositions at a macroscopic scale. In the 1990s we succeeded in seeing interference patterns for molecules that contained 430 atoms. Later they did the same with molecules with 2,000 atoms (Fein 2019), then whole proteins were shown to be capable of being in superposition (Shayeghi 2020). More recently we've seen experiments trying to push this even further, maybe even to the size of creatures (Lee 2021). At some point we will likely prove that Schrodinger's cat was indeed dead and alive, in parallel universes.

So it seems that the idea of quantum collapse being related to the size of a system is a proverbial red herring. The more proof of macroscopic superpositions we find, the harder it will be to deny the Many Worlds and Many Minds interpretations of quantum physics.

And, as we said, if it is true then we must analyze this apparent mystery of what constitutes a degree of consciousness in the first place. This would indeed hold the key to how this dimension of "actuality", of our reality, unfolds, at least in terms of probabilities. And to understand this, we have to delve into the current theories of consciousness, many of which have made significant progress in this area in recent years in ways that are directly relevant to Lockwood's thesis.

Theories of Consciousness

The question of what consciousness actually consists of is called the "hard problem" for a reason. This explanatory gap between our scientific knowledge of how the brain functions and the phenomenal, subjective aspects of its function have become an impassable gulf. The phenomenal aspect of experience is something we live with and barely notice because it is so intrinsic to and entangled with existence itself, so under our noses that we simply don't notice it. So far many would say it isn't simply hard, it's down-right elusive.

However, that has not stopped us from analyzing what we can know of this consciousness phenomenon and its neural correlation. It must, after all, have a nature that can be studied. Several theories have arisen based on analyzing how the brain processes information, and how states we know to be unconscious change this processing. Yet what is common among these theories is that they are all based upon information theory.

In particular we will briefly look at Integrated Information Theory (Tononi 2014), a theory called Consciousness as Data Compression (Maguire 2005), and another theory that seeks to prove that consciousness is memory integration. All of these are related, and demonstrate the importance of information theory to understanding consciousness. But recent empirical studies that demonstrate human memory to work using a specific form of compression would lend considerable credibility to the latter two theories.

Integrated Information Theory

Over the past decade or so, the study of consciousness has become far more serious as a scientific discipline. This was led by Giulio Tononi who spearheaded the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, also known as IIT (Tononi 2014).

IIT basically says that consciousness is fundamentally linked to integrated information processing in the brain. It formalizes a technique to actually measure the amount of consciousness by measuring the integrated information, referred to as Phi (Φ). The human brain, which we know to exhibit consciousness, has a very high degree of integrated information, so it has a high value for Phi. Other complex systems may have smaller, varying degrees of integration that would suggest they may also be conscious, just to a lesser degree.

The ramifications of IIT are quite radical. If it is true, then in theory we could build a "consciousness meter" that would tell us the degree that a system is conscious. This could be quite useful to determine whether patients in a vegetative state were conscious for example.

There are three characteristics that must be exhibited by a system that would have measurable Phi:

1. Information
   What is information? Basically any data that has meaning is considered information. Books contain information, the Internet contains a lot of information. However, as information is in the eye of the beholder, it may sometimes be difficult to discern objectively if a system contains information.

2. Integration
   An integrated system means that the value of the information depends upon all of the parts present. If you can remove a part and it has no impact on the value of the information, then it would not be that integrated. On the other hand, if changing any small part reduces the information value drastically, then it would suggest that the parts are deeply integrated with one another. Measuring integration accurately is hard and time consuming, so IIT makes do with rough estimates based on a primitive part-removal technique.

3. Maximality
   Lastly, IIT says that a system is conscious if it is not actively part of a greater integration. If it is, then the greatest integrated system with the same characteristics would be considered the conscious entity, and not the parts themselves. It is conjectured that during sleep or anesthesia our brain gets fundamentally "split" to cut off the level of integration it usually has when it is awake. This may produce smaller units that themselves have a degree of consciousness (Phi > 0), but they are not conscious to the degree that a typical human brain would be - and thus would not feel conscious.

IIT is not without critics. Some say it is overly simplistic (yet measured in an overly-complicated way). Others point out that it's fundamentally flawed because it suggests that a large array of XOR gates would be conscious by its definition - yet intuitively we would say that is not the case. 

Tononi addressed some of these concerns in later iterations of the theory. But in many ways these issues are resolved by another theory, which also deals with information integration but in a more specific way. What IIT succeeded in doing is drawing in the scientific community into the study of consciousness, and in particular viewing consciousness as a sub-discipline of information theory, which in itself has been a very fruitful endeavor. 

Consciousness as Data Compression

A number of discussions have arisen over the past decade about whether the brain utilizes a form of data compression in order to store memories. We have learned a lot about data compression in information theory, because of its practical applications in communicating large amounts of information efficiently. Basically, data compression is the process of making data shorter without losing critical content. It often involves finding redundancy - parts of the source material that are deemed unnecessary and thus can be removed without affecting the overall meaning. It also involves finding patterns, which can then be referenced rather than repeated, to save space.

Something called "algorithmic data compression" goes even further than this. It is the creation of a list of commands (a program) that, when executed, would regenerate the original source material using techniques similar to this. For example, a command that says "repeat pattern P 1000 times", with a preceding command that defines pattern P. Such a program would be significantly shorter than the original source material (in this case the pattern P appearing 1,000 times). The analysis of the relationship between algorithms and information is called Algorithmic Information Theory, and this discipline has been surprisingly fruitful in understanding how the brain works.

In computer science, there are two forms of compression: lossy and lossless compression. Lossless compression seeks to store a high fidelity replica of the original source material in the most efficient way possible. It allows for no loss of data, which obviously makes it hard to reduce in size. Lossy compression, on the other hand, allows for only the critical aspects of the data to be retained. The remaining, redundant data is discarded. This is how the brain works: it picks out the bits of the sensory data that are important to remember, and replaces those with "pointers" to existing patterns stored in memory, along with anything novel about the experience that may be important in the future.

In the competitive environment of natural selection, it would make sense for the brain to use an optimal form of compression when creating memories, as the efficiency this would create would provide a survival advantage over those creatures without this capability. This alone is a good reason to believe that compression could be a central feature of how the brain works, and in particular how it stores memories. Recalling memories would then be a process of decompression.

But perhaps it goes deeper than that. Perhaps it touches on the most fundamental functioning of the brain: consciousness itself. The relationship between data compression and consciousness within a brain has been analyzed in depth in a paper by Phil Maguire called "Consciousness is Data Compression"  (CIDC) (Maguire 2005). To quote, 

"In this article we advance the conjecture that conscious awareness is equivalent to data compression. Algorithmic information theory supports the assertion that all forms of understanding are contingent on compression (Chaitin 2007). Here, we argue that the experience people refer to as consciousness is the particular form of understanding that the brain provides. We therefore propose that the degree of consciousness of a system can be measured in terms of the amount of data compression it carries out. " 

The phenomenon of understanding, which the paper holds to be synonymous with conscious experience, then, is directly correlated to the process of data compression.

Many recent theories of consciousness appear to come to the same conclusion. For example, this technique of compressing source material into the shortest possible form is also a means that is used for measuring the complexity of data, a measure known as Kolmogorov complexity. The idea is that the longer the compressed representation that can recreate the source material, the more complex that source material is considered to be. It's rather interesting that another theory of consciousness has been proposed that quite literally equates consciousness with an increase in the Kolmogorov complexity of information within the brain (Ruffini 2017). But this really just reiterates precisely the same premise behind "Consciousness is Data Compression", as an increase in Kolmogorov complexity necessarily means that compression is occurring, memories are being generated, understanding is occurring, and this has been equated with conscious experience.

To quote Maguire from CIDC:

If an organism perceives a stimulus, yet can discern no pattern in the sensory data, then that stimulus will appear completely random and meaningless to the organism: the stimulus will not be experienced at all. On the other hand, if some redundancy can be identified, then the stimulus can be ‘understood’ (i.e. experienced) by relating it to previously gathered sensory information. For example, when people look at an apple, they perceive a round shape by identifying redundancy between the appearance of the apple and previously encountered round objects; they perceive a green color by identifying redundancy between the appearance of the apple and previously encountered green objects. When we ‘see’ an apple we are not just processing an instantaneous visual stimulus but, rather, compressing a set of data which has been gathered over a wide cross section of space and time. The structure of the brain allows a sensory stimulus to be translated into the subjective experience of understanding through the process of compression.  

Such a mechanism is echoed in Ruffini 2021:

Conscious experience has a richer structure in agents that are better at identifying regularities in their I/Os streams, i.e. discovering and using more compressive models. In particular, a “more” conscious brain is one using and refining succinct models of coherent I/Os (e.g. auditory and visual streams originating from a common, coherent source, or data accounting for the combination of sensorimotor streams). We may refer to this compressive performance level as “conscious level.”  

In other words, we can measure consciousness based on a system's ability to compress input data from its environment, from which it can make a determination about necessary attention - a process critical to its survival.

More recently there have been empirical studies done that confirm that the brain uses data compression as its mechanism to store data in memory (Planton 2021). Those experiments go into significant depth to uncover a kind of language the brain uses, where words represent concepts - much like the patterns that are recognized when compressing data. To quote the conclusion of that study:

Our study provides a first demonstration that, even after accounting for statistical transition probability learning, responses to sequence violations can be used to uncover the properties of the abstract mental language used by individuals to encode sequential patterns. The present proposal, which takes the form of a psychologically plausible formal language composed of a restricted set of simple rules (conforming to a simplicity principle and especially relying on the human ability to detect repetitions), proved to be more effective than alternative approaches in modeling the human memory for simple sequences. The observed relationship between sequence complexity and performance in the detection of violations is consistent with the idea that the brain acts as a compressor of incoming information that captures regularities and uses them to predict the remainder of the sequence.  

There are several aspects to the process of finding patterns that correspond to certain aspects of conscious activity. Firstly, there is the first indication that a pattern might exist. This will take the form of noticing repeating phenomena, such as noticing a red hat. But this is measured against the association with the phenomenon against potential survival or reproductive benefit. In particular if the pattern is likely to be reused in the future. So if you just witnessed someone being hurt by a man in a red hat, and you see another person with a red hat, that becomes the beginning of a pattern.

And then there is detecting the limits of the pattern. For a pattern to have identity it must be delineated from other patterns. So, getting back to my example: you will naturally start to look for other phenomena that distinguish that characteristic from others. You look for other indications: angry looking men. Then you notice that the angry looking men are wearing red caps, and one other lady who looks scared is wearing a wooly red hat. This further refines the pattern you are forming.

This process of forming the pattern, broadly synonymous with the act of learning or memory-formation, is the critical aspect of compression that causes the experience of consciousness, and it therefore means these processes would be more likely to shape our experience. So in amendment to the theories of compression as consciousness, I would add that it is the construction of novel patterns specifically that constitute a conscious moment (learning), and not simply finding matches to existing patterns (understanding).

The previously mentioned theory, Integrated Information Theory, is also highly related to data compression. The process of compression involves a high degree of Phi, as per IIT's calculations. That's because it involves information, integration (as the patterns stored as critical to be able to decompress memories) and maximality (the entire system is required for maximum compressibility). This is likely why a common means of estimating IIT's Phi efficiently actually measures the Lempel-Zif compression of neural processes (Vermani 2019).

From these various studies and empirical data, it should be quite clear that data compression - information compression - is indeed closely related to conscious experience, and the degree of consciousness seems directly proportional to the amount of active data compression, and specifically pattern forming, that is occurring. The components of the brain, that Lockwood referred to as co-consciousness, are effectively the patterns that ultimately feed the compression. The successful orchestration of these in the act of data compression is what results in a conscious experience.

Consciousness Cut-Off

If we were simply to say that the act of information compression is a conscious event, then that would mean when I zip-up files on my computer, I am creating a conscious being, and then destroying it once it's complete. In fact compression is happening all the time in many ways - a single word is the compression of information, the concept it describes. Even a single strand of RNA is compressed information. For those ethicists who believe in absolute right of conscious beings, this may cause a serious moral dilemma. It would also give credence to beliefs such as panpsychism, the idea that everything in the universe is conscious to some level.

But there is good reason to believe that is not the case. We know what it is like to be conscious. You are likely (hopefully) conscious as you are reading this. But we also know what it's like to not be conscious. And we also know what it's like to be less conscious, perhaps when we wake in the middle of the night to use the toilet for instance. I have noticed, personally, that during the night when I wake into those states of semi-consciousness, my body reacts with a kind of aversion to any attempt to think of higher level, or more complex concepts. I imagine those higher level parts of my brain are getting their much-needed rest and don't particularly want to be disturbed. Yet somehow I can still function at a lower level without it.

The state of unconsciousness, when we are in a deep, dreamless sleep, is obviously not the same as being dead. Our body continues working, the heart beating, the kidneys filtering, the liver producing enzymes, the immune system fighting off pathogens and our body repairing itself. The brain is also still active at a lower level, entering into a certain pulsating rhythm of electrical activity. We do not know what actual processing the brain is capable of while we are unconscious, but there certainly is some form of processing occurring.

More to the point, the body is still acutely aware of its surroundings. The parts of the brain that can process sensory data are still very much active. For example, events we have tuned out, like a humming fan, are safely ignored by those modules in our brain. But others, for example the cry of a baby or an alarm, will wake us instantly.

This would mean, then, that awareness is not the same as consciousness. This was proven empirically in the Blindsight (Collins 2010) experiments. In these, a man with part of his brain removed discovered that it made him blind. However, he was strangely still able to maneuver around a room even though he could not see: He would move and unconsciously avoid obstacles, but have no awareness of that processing.

There are many other accounts of such unconscious processing. Another would be sleepwalking (technically called somnambulism) which can involve quite elaborate activity while still apparently unconscious, from walking around the house, practicing karate, preparing food, or even driving a car. Even when under general anesthesia (e.g. during surgery), patients with anesthesia-isolated forearms will respond to questions and move their arm, yet have no recollection of the event after the surgery (Panditt 2015) - or even of any time passing at all. As with sleepwalkers, communication from them is nonsensical. What is common among all these episodes is that, apparently, both memory and rationality are switched off - and that seems to be a signature of unconsciousness.

This appears to be a very similar phenomenon to what we call "zoning out" or "working on auto-pilot". One part of the brain that has been identified as being inactive during this unconscious behavior has been called the Default Mode Network (DMN), and has been the subject of several recent studies (Hamzelou 2017). These studies have shown that when the brain is learning, different areas including the DMN are activated. However, when the brain is merely applying that learned behavior, and working autonomously, then the Default Mode Network is barely activate - and this state is what we consider working autonomously, without higher-level conscious awareness.

All of this can inform us about what, subjectively, it means to be conscious compared to being unconscious. We are conscious when learning, creating new patterns, and thus building information. Yet absent this process, our brain can still function just at a different level. It can even appear to an observer to be acting perfectly normally. It can drive, perform functions that it has previously learned. Yet for it to process new information, to learn, then it switches into a conscious state.

So while we can say that the process of compression is directly related to consciousness, it must necessarily include the creation of new patterns, useful patterns, not simply of finding patterns it has previously met. It is not pattern matching, or even just pattern construction, but specifically novelty that becomes a conscious event.

Although this may not be the entire picture either. Hypnosis, for example, can involve learning new techniques while unconscious, yet they are still able to be recalled later - just without explanation, or even with a fabricated explanation. Arguably during hypnosis the patient is not taught novel information, just commands by association. But it certainly justifies further study. As do instances of apparent unconscious problem solving, something famously attributed to mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss who claimed to have been working on a proof for two years when suddenly the solution popped into his head. He wrote "Finally, two days ago, I succeeded not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the concluding thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible." In other words, Gauss was not conscious of his having solved the problem, it happened unconsciously. There are many other similar anecdotal stories: For example, Paul McCartney claims to have written Yesterday, one of the most popular songs in history, during his sleep - waking up humming the melody with  no recollection of where, or how, it arose.

But perhaps this kind of creativity, even problem solving, is qualitatively different than the type of novel information integration that necessitates consciousness. Linking together pre-existing patterns in a creative manner is not necessarily the same as receiving new patterns extrinsically, and perhaps this holds the key to understanding what differentiates a conscious moment from an unconscious one: Being shut-off from external stimuli, or being unable to process and integrate that external stimuli.

It is worth pointing out that when we discuss these unconscious modes, we are talking about the behavior as occurring in a third party, not ourselves. This is because to ourselves we simply do not experience this unconscious behavior. It can occur in parallel with conscious attention such as mind wandering, or may not occur at all if we are sleeping or under anesthesia.

No doubt, studies will continue even though we seem to have made significant progress in our understanding. 

Subjective Downward Causation

So now we have an idea of what might be meant by saying that some brain processes and external events may involve "more consciousness" than others, or even what it means for a process to be conscious or not conscious. Indeed we may even have a way to quantify this consciousness, to come up with a value - even though the precise inputs to that calculation are likely beyond reach. Nonetheless we can estimate whether one event may constitute greater conscious experience than another based upon certain broad characteristics that can tell us about the relative novelty and compressibility of the input data, for survival purposes.

Now we must consider the fact, as we have seen, that mental states (such as specific memories) can influence the degree of consciousness of future experiences. If existing mental states impact the way we might understand or learn from future events, then that means mental states must also impact how conscious of that event we would be. As we have learned from the discussion on Many Minds above, whether a brain would be more conscious of one event over another is critical to determining what we are more likely to experience, out of all the possibilities available (which may be infinite in number). This would mean that future events that we experience, out of all the possible events allowable by the universal wave function, may be determined (to some degree) by prior thoughts and experiences. In other words that our memory and thoughts may be the greatest influence on how reality unfolds for us. It is this phenomenon that is the basis for what could be considered mental causation, also known as downward causation because of its top-down nature.

While our selves, across the many worlds predicted by quantum physics, may be confronted with a vast number of possible circumstances, each of which have an entire bottom-up history, only certain of those will likely be experienced depending on which of those events involve the construction of more novel observations useful for our survival. This determination would certainly depend on the current contents of our memory, and thus on the state of our mind. In fact what predicates those experiences from a causal perspective would be determined by how the mind is primed, and not simply the efficient causes based on the state of the particles in the universe at that time. In other words, what we are describing could be considered a form of "Mind over matter".

Before we get too carried away with the idea of "mind over matter", I must point out that this phenomenon is significantly constrained. It's not simply that we can "think" anything we like into existence, as if we were in a Harry Potter movie, waving a magic wand and uttering some Latin phrase. The brain is finely tuned to tend to what is critical to its own survival, a set of constraints that are highly complex having developed over millions of years. But it may well mean that what we choose to learn that is relevant to survival could impact what it is we are likely to ultimately experience in the future.

This is clearly a radical conclusion to draw, and one perhaps quite inconsistent with how we have been taught to understand the world around us. Yet the mounting evidence both in terms of how consciousness functions and the nature of reality at a quantum level makes the possibility of this conclusion tantalizingly plausible.

Such a radical conclusion would naturally bring radical consequences, and we will discuss some of those at the end of this paper. One consequence is that, so it would follow, the more we are able to understand, the more we constrain the future according to the reasoning we hold. Memory formation is dependent, after all, on the flowing narrative that it constructs. Future memories, then, must be consistent with those of the past. And this means future events we experience will be shaped by what we do (or don't) recall.

It's worth noting that while we have been looking at this from the perspective of quantum physics, there have been other, entirely independent projects based upon algorithmic information theory and Kolmogorov complexity that have arrived at the same or similar conclusion from mathematics alone. One such theory, dubbed "Zero Worlds" or "Law without Law" (Mueller 2017), has looked at how mathematical models can be created from an observer's perspective based purely upon the highest likelihood of what would be observed next, using Solomonoff induction, which uses Kolmogorov complexity (and thus compressibility) to predict subsequent events. What is surprising is that from this simple top-down approach emerges many of the laws of physics that we assume arose bottom-up. This underscores the fact that ultimately what may be most fundamental in the universe is not some quantum particle field, but rather information itself, being driven by the process of survival and compressibility.

Causal Constraints

As we discussed in the previous section, it is important to stress that by no means does this phenomenon suggest that the human mind can simply think anything it desires into existence. Not only is the specific process of compression the brain utilizes complex and not fully understood, the mechanism is likely closely tied to the requirements the brain has to survive, and that involves some highly complex negotiations with the laws of physics and the entire history of the world around it, and filtering that determines what is and what isn't interesting to its survival. The core concepts or patterns related to our survival are likely imprinted from genetics that date millions of years, and experienced through instinct. And then as we explore the world around us, we compress input by referencing these firmly-ingrained core survival concepts, only creating additional concepts extending these patterns as absolutely needed.

And this is a good thing: the rigidity of the world around us, with all its laws and constraints, is - in fact - what allows this rich consciousness to exist in the first place. They are inseparably linked to one another, as a beautiful flower is to its roots hidden deep in the dirt. The entire history that led up to the creation of the human mind, governed by what may be called "natural law", is the richest source of information available to us.

So, unavoidably, the world still operates and evolves according to the laws of nature. Unsuspended bricks still fall down, it seems they cannot be made to suddenly float by thinking as such. Yet when we look closely at quantum physics, and the variations of particle positions that are possible in the wave function, it does suggest that it would be possible, just improbable, that some very surprising and unanticipated behavior could actually occur. (Indeed, when we speak of the probability of something occurring, what we are actually talking about is how conscious we would be of such an event occurring. In other words, how compressible it is. Ultimately, this is all that probability is (see Solomonoff's theory of inductive inference for more information)).

Take for example the phenomenon of quantum tunneling. A particle has a set number of positions we may think it could be in at any one time. In this superposition, as we have discussed, it actually exists in all of them at the same time. But what is interesting here is that some of them may be on the other side of a barrier. It's possible, just improbable. As such, this phenomenon allows particles to cross barriers they wouldn't ordinarily be thought capable of crossing. Fluids can leak from or enter into containers. Molecules and processes can be randomly disrupted. Nuclear fusion that fuels the Sun requires quantum tunneling. In fact, it has been hypothesized that the genetic mutations that cause cancer likely originate from a quantum tunneling event. involving protein disruption during meiosis. Maybe life itself arose through this same process (Jefferson 2022).

It seems that quantum tunneling, the ability for us to be conscious of particles in seemingly impossible (but actually just improbable) locations, could be at the root of many unexpected events in history. And it could allow for them in the future.

Theoretically it is possible for my entire body to suddenly move a foot to the left, because of the variation possible in every particle in my body. It is possible, just incredibly, maybe infinitesimally improbable. Yet in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics, there is indeed a universe, a parallel timeline, where this must occur. So why don't we experience it? The answer, as we have discussed, is that as a seemingly unexplainable anomaly, it would be less useful as a pattern, so therefore less compressible, less understandable, thus we are less likely to be conscious of it occurring. And so, in general, we don't experience it.

Could we easily change our state of mind to be able to be conscious of such things? It would be unlikely because our brain has been intrinsically programmed to expect the world to work a certain way, for a certain stability and necessary predictability. This is essential for our survival, and any attempt to reprogram such a fundamental thing would surely jeopardize its very existence. And this effectively is what Markus Mueller (Mueller 2017) posited: do the laws of nature create us, or do we create the laws of nature because our nature is to observe predictability? Predictability may be "boring", but it is essential to the very stability we call survival that allows us to exist in the first place.

Ramifications and Further Discussion

Emergent Complexity

The most complex form we know to exist in the entire universe is the human brain. Life itself is extraordinarily complex, even though to us it often appears facile. How could it have arisen from such simple processes? This pressing question of abiogenesis has yet to be answered satisfactorily. But, as we have seen, there are mechanisms, such as quantum tunneling, that could allow for the possibility of complex life to arise (Jefferson 2022), given sufficient opportunity. Such occurrences would be unlikely, incredibly rare in fact, but still possible. But this is the key. In fact, if you consider that every possible particle interaction, as dictated by what may be an infinite wave function, actually takes place in its own parallel timeline, it would allow for an unfathomable number of developments to occur - and with it, timelines with unfathomable complexity. Including life.

Such complexity is necessarily "always there", and the only barrier to experiencing those would be the compatibility of the event with current conscious experience. Yet conventionally when we see complexity we look for micro or foundational causes, arising from the bottom upwards. This universal causation is naturally how we think about any event, because reason allows us to easily probe such causes through empirical methods and apply this for practical gain, in particular for survival. Indeed it is the cornerstone of the scientific method and reductionism in general. When those causes seem possible but highly unlikely, where does that leave us? Shrugging our shoulders and saying "it was just a fluke" ? When we look at the unfathomable complexity of various biological processes, things that seem far beyond our own intelligence to create, is "random fluke" really the best explanation we have? It could actually be that the vast improbability of such events is telling us something important about cause and effect, something that we have been missing all this time.

Some scientists have recently started to question whether we have cause-effect upside down (Ball 2022). To quote Philip Ball, in an article in New Scientist about this very turn of events in our understanding of causality:

The problem with the reductionist approach is apparent in many fields of science, but let’s take applied genetics. Time and again, gene variants associated with a particular disease or trait are hunted down, only to find that knocking that gene out of action makes no apparent difference. The common explanation is that the causal pathway from gene to trait is tangled, meandering among a whole web of many gene interactions.

The alternative explanation is that the real cause of the disease emerges only at a higher level. This idea is called causal emergence [or downward causation]. It defies the intuition behind reductionism, and the assumption that a cause can’t simply appear at one scale unless it is inherent in microcauses at finer scales.

The same, it should be noted, could also be said of cancer. For many years we have attempted to treat cancer by knocking out certain low-level mechanisms of how cancer cells function, by blocking specific cellular pathways, only to find a short while later that they have found an alternative route - often in ways that make you seriously ponder on whether the cancer is exhibiting intelligence. It appears that cancer gets its footing not necessarily in these low level processes, but rather at a higher level, which it maintains through a form of downward causation.

He goes on,

Causal emergence seems to also feature in the molecular workings of cells and whole organisms, and Hoel and Comolatti have an idea why. Think about a pair of heart muscle cells. They may differ in some details of which genes are active and which proteins they are producing more of at any instant, yet both remain secure in their identity as heart muscle cells – and it would be a problem if they didn’t. This insensitivity to the fine details makes large-scale outcomes less fragile, says Hoel. They aren’t contingent on the random “noise” that is ubiquitous in these complex systems, where, for example, protein concentrations may fluctuate wildly.

As organisms got more complex, Darwinian natural selection would therefore have favored more causal emergence – and this is exactly what Hoel and his Tufts colleague Michael Levin have found by analysing the protein interaction networks across the tree of life. Hoel and Comolatti think that by exploiting causal emergence, biological systems gain resilience not only against noise, but also against attacks. “If a biologist could figure out what to do with a [genetic or protein] wiring diagram, so could a virus,” says Hoel. Causal emergence makes the causes of behavior cryptic, hiding it from pathogens that can only latch onto molecules.

Could, then, downward causation help explain the vast (yet seemingly fragile) complexity of life and the universe around us? Could we say that in some sense the mind causes the brain, rather than the other way around? If the micro-causes seem possible but highly improbable, it would certainly seem plausible not only as an explanation, but maybe even a better explanation for how such complexity arose. The very existence of such improbable complexity could itself be supporting evidence that downward causation is at work. And perhaps looking at things from this perspective may in itself help pave new approaches to problems that have all but reached a dead end in biology.

On The Possibility of Unconscious Automata

We spoke earlier how some processes within our brain are less conscious than others. As we also discussed, there are likely many actions we could make that we wouldn't be conscious of at all. I think this is familiar to most of us as it is demonstrated by the phenomenon of sleep walking, of acting on "auto pilot", and unconscious actions while a patient is under anesthesia. We discussed this in detail in the previous section.

As we have seen, in the multiverse there are a vast number of behaviors that you perform that you will not be phenomenally conscious of. Yet the question remains: will anyone consciously see you make those actions? Could there be a conscious person in that same parallel timeline that observes your unconscious behavior? The answer appears to be that quite possibly they will. When observing another person, you will be conscious of the behavior you expect to see, or that is most understandable or conscious to you. However, when that doesn't match with what they themselves can be conscious of, because of their mental state, then you will be observing someone who is behaving as if they are conscious, but who actually are not necessarily conscious. 

A person who is behaving as if they are conscious but who actually are not conscious is known in philosophy circles as a probabilistic zombie, or a behavioral zombie (They are similar in some ways to the p-zombies or philosophical zombies of David Chalmers, except they are predicated upon their behavior alone, not their particle-for-particle consistency as Chalmers would have it.). They are unconscious automaton, moving according to your subjective expectations without having the kind of conscious experience that comes with their own deeper thinking.

This phenomenon is also predicted by Markus Mueller's theory of Law without Law (Mueller 2017). In his example he looks at two observers - one called Alice and the other Bob. Both only experience what is probable for them, based on the compressibility of possible experiences. He then talks about the possibility of there arising a conflict between the observed behavior and probability of experience of each individual:

A priori, both probabilities can take different values. However, if they are in fact different, then we have a quite strange situation, reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s philosophical concept of a “zombie”: Bob would in fact not observe what Alice sees Bob observe, but would divert into his own “parallel world” with high probability. [This would] mean that Alice is confronted with some sort of “very unlikely instance” of Bob, and that the Bob that she knew earlier has somehow subjectively “fallen out of [her] universe”.

What would it feel like to be such a "zombie"? It would be impossible to know for sure, but we could hypothesize that it would be similar to how one feels when one acts on "auto pilot". For example, performing actions when not thinking (for instance, driving or riding a bicycle through habit, or playing the piano). Typically exhibiting a primitive awareness, but lacking higher-level processing and memory formation, what we have come to see as processing that results in information compression. Acting with a kind of confusion or lack of understanding.

Empirical studies have been done that demonstrate our ability to act seemingly intentionally, but entirely unconsciously, known as the "Blindsight" experiments (Collins 2021). Such experiments prove there is such a phenomenon as acting unconsciously. The precise degree to which this happens, and whether it is the "default" mode of existence for non-human, more primitive animals, is an area that remains to be studied. Yet it is encouraging that there could be some empirical evidence for these unconscious-but-behaviorally-indistinct probabilistic zombies that our theory predicts. And if not beings, at the very least moments of such unconscious autonomy.

Subjective Immortality

Within the constant branching of the universe, with every possibility playing out, there is likely a timeline that occurs with certain frequency where your life ends. In fact, according to the Schrodinger equation, our body must deteriorate constantly in multiple branches. Do we experience that, in that particular timeline, say every few seconds?

This raises an important question: is it even possible to experience your existence stopping? Certainly, if (as we have theorized) you are more likely to find yourself (be fully conscious) in timelines where there is greater conscious experience, it would seem unlikely (if not impossible) to experience a timeline where there is no conscious experience at all. It is even unlikely you would find yourself in a timeline where there is less conscious experience. That would mean that, subjectively, you will probably always find yourself in a timeline where you have averted a situation that involves you ceasing to be conscious. 

How this averting death scenarios occurs will depend on what is actually physically possible. It may be that you are in a bad car accident, you fall unconscious but then wake up to recovering from surgery that saved your life. In some timelines the surgery was not possible, and you died, but you would not experience those. Depending on the circumstances and what is possible, you may find yourself in extremely improbable scenarios - "miracle cures", and events so outlandish that you may even find yourself putting them down to divine intervention.

This phenomenon has been discussed at length by theoretical physicists and philosophers who have dubbed it "Quantum Immortality". However, in light of the understanding of consciousness described in this paper, it would seem to have been given a new life.

It gained significant traction with Max Tegmark, who in his book "Our Mathematical Universe" (Tegmark 2014) posed a thought experiment related to this effect of consciousness subjectively continuing through multiple available timelines where it is able to continue, even though in one of them you may die. He addresses the topic in Chapter 8, proposing an experiment where you toss a coin and if it comes out heads then something kills you:

"What if the... multiverse is real? Then there would be infinitely many parallel universes to start with that contained you in subjectively indistinguishable mental states, but with imperceptibly slight differences in the initial position and velocity of the coin. After one second, you'd be dead in half of those universes, but no matter how many times the experiment is repeated, there would always be a universe where you never get shot. In other words, this sort of macabre randomized-suicide experiment can reveal the existence of...parallel universes more generally."

If immortality is guaranteed, what, then, about old age? Surely at some point you will die of old age? Could there be possibilities where you evade even eventual degradation of your cells, and your brain? Such conjecture is far too academic to provide any serious response, but nonetheless we can speculate. Firstly, one would presume that actual consciousness ceases before your body actually dies. As we have discussed, consciousness is a complex function that requires a high degree of functioning, and even minute disruptions in that information integration can cause consciousness to cease (even though the person may appear to be conscious). Secondly, the aging of cells is likely related to a process called quantum tunneling, which is a phenomenon that occurs only with a certain probability - meaning there would be timelines where it would not occur.

So, the moment before your brain finally goes into an unconscious state from old age - would it not be possible that you find yourself in a timeline where this aging stops, or even reverses? Or perhaps you receive a just-invented medicine that reverses aging, extending telomeres and repairing broken cells? At the moment it seems impossible, but it is not ruled out. Again, if there was a timeline where this is possible - and surely it would be possible if aging itself is a quantum effect - then naturally the likely scenario would be for that timeline to be experienced, and not death by old age where we fall unconscious, or at least less conscious.

So, you may ask, why don't you see people who are 1,000 years old around you now?

Firstly, we must keep in mind that our bodies are actually billions of years old already - our DNA stretches back very far, and maybe even much further than we realize. Yet consciousness only requires a memory that goes back, say, 15 years with clarity - and the further back, the vaguer it gets and thus the more easily those memories can be replaced with explanations that allow you to live longer and longer.

Secondly, it may simply be that at our age it is unnecessary to have people in our lives that live much further than our own age, it would be superfluous to current survival needs. The "most compressible" rule would dictate that we don't experience phenomena that are beyond what is necessary for survival. In fact, the existence of extremely old people may make you feel more resilient than you actually are, and thus cause you to take higher risks that threaten your survival. But as time goes on, you'll likely find more outlandish circumstances arise that allow you to live longer, and then you may well start to see others live a similar amount of time. Over a lengthy amount of time, the requirement for the continuation of consciousness could result in the selection of truly miraculous-seeming solutions for longevity. 

Coincidences and Carl Jung's Synchronicities

The theory promoted in this paper is not purely academic, it also makes certain predictions. The predictions may explain not only why there exists such a degree of unexpected  [*] complexity around us, but also why there arise certain coincidences (also called synchronicities) in everyday life.

I'm sure, like everyone, the reader has experienced such coincidences. Even though we quickly forget their significance, simply because as we learn about their bottom-up causation it just becomes another every-day event and explainable.  And perhaps this is a good reason to actually keep a record of such events, so they can be analyzed more objectively after the fact. Just to add some anecdotes to this section, I will recall a few of my own.

Some of the examples of coincidences may seem frivolous: a friend in school once told me that the number 147 shows up everywhere. Since that day it truly has just shown up everywhere. I frequently look at the clock and it would say 1:47pm. I look at the stock ticker and it will show that it's up 1.47. I look at text messages and see the last one I sent was at 1:47. I go to the store and everything is on sale at x1.47. Is it just an unexplainable coincidence, or am I just remembering the incidents where I see the number 147?

Others are more difficult to explain: I was reading about a physicist working at Los Alamos one evening before I slept (a lab I barely knew about), then the next morning I literally get a call from Los Alamos National Laboratory asking about a product we sell, the first time I have ever heard from them (or any laboratory).

Other times I may just be thinking of something, or reading something, and then hear of something related, even though it's an entirely different medium.  For instance, just last week I read the words "late stage capitalism" in an article, a term I hadn't really heard before, and then seconds later I got an email from twitter where one of the tweets (at the top of the list) read "This isn't late stage capitalism.". Another time I got home from the shops with a new lamp, and the TV was on in the background. My wife asked: what kind of bulb does it take? And the person on TV, on cue, said "That would be a 40 watt bulb", just making an analogy and talking about something entirely different. Even right now, I take a 30 second break from writing and switch to read a (political) news article that, right in the middle, starts talking about the phenomenon of strange coincidences and Carl Jung! (completely unrelated to the topic of the article, which was far more pedestrian).

Carl Jung, a Swiss analytical psychologist born in 1875, took coincidences very seriously, and spent much of his life trying to find an explanation for this ubiquitous phenomenon. He coined the term "synchronicity" to describe it, and wrote at length on the topic. He pitted synchronicity against the more conventional universal causation, the bottom-up micro-causes we're familiar with. Other than being good friends with Albert Einstein, he also worked at length with quantum theory pioneer Wolfgang Pauli, and they collaborated on several papers trying to understand synchronicity from a quantum theory perspective. Together they proposed what was called the Pauli–Jung conjecture.

While this conjecture mused that certain characteristics of quantum theory such as its non-locality and entanglement may provide a sound basis for synchronicity, it never went far beyond such speculation. I would propose that the theory explicated by Lockwood and expanded upon in this paper would significantly expand upon and cement those intuitions held by both Jung and Pauli. The link between coincidences and conscious experience is indeed quantum entanglement. These "synchronicities" are subtle echoes of the downward causation that is literally how the mind, and the universe with it, functions. It is the perpetual construction and compression of relevant information, out of infinite noise - even if that information is sometimes mundane topics like light bulbs, or the number 147.

The process of compression must necessarily reuse concepts in order to store new data in the most efficient way. When you have a particular concept instilled in your mind, because (as I have explained) the act of compression carries with it more consciousness, and we are more likely to find ourselves in timelines where there is more consciousness, the re-using of these concepts in novel ways is thus more likely to be experienced. It is this re-using or development of concepts that we call coincidences or Jung calls synchronicities, and that many of us can testify to experiencing frequently.

The concepts are not always as simple as objects or themes. They may also be other patterns of experience or associations that exist in our neural configurations that we can discern less readily. For example not something as specific as a kettle, but rather the broader concept of cooking, eating, or even satisfaction in general. One can imagine that a more in depth analysis of metaphor in general may provide more insight into the nature of these patterns.

It has been reported by psychologists that people are more likely to report coincidences during times of emotional stress. During such tumult our brains are perhaps tasked with finding changes in circumstances, an "escape hatch" so to speak. During this time we perhaps rely less on those deeply ingrained patterns and instead seek to form new memories using patterns it has learned more recently. As a consequence, the emphasis on current mind states rather than longer-term memories could increase the likelihood of experiencing coincidences, and also affect our ability to test the phenomenon empirically - which we'll get to next.

This phenomenon, juxtaposed against our understanding of how consciousness functions, could also be closely related to the general feeling that things typically don't seem to work out as they would be expected, especially when an expected outcome is boasted - expressed in the idiom of tempting fate or tempting providence. Quite simply we would be less likely to experience things to go exactly as we expect, because there would be more conscious experience in those timelines where new patterns are created, not old patterns continued. The bias towards novelty then necessarily increases the likelihood of surprise, but only in ways that are repeatable and useful in the future. 

The Possibility of Future Experiments

It is quite possible that the effect described in this theory could be tested empirically, beyond anecdotal evidence of experienced coincidences. If it is true that our subjective experience will always be biased towards the taxonomy of our past experiences and novel new experiences, then surely this could be tested in a way that is consistent with the scientific method?

The primary obstacle to testing this empirically is that it necessarily predicts the phenomena only at a first-person level. The only feasible way to convey the phenomena would be through documenting experiments that an individual can perform themselves, and then convey the resultant experience to others only as a personal testament. It would simply not be possible for me to perform these in a convincing way, document them and share them with others because they would not necessarily see the same results that I am conscious of - based upon what we discussed above in the Probabilistic Unconscious Automata section.

While this may sound rather solipsistic, it's unfortunately the nature of how this phenomenon is predicted to work and an intrinsic limitation of its verifiability. And for that reason it may be impossible to offer convincing evidence beyond personally-reproducible experiments. Even if you were to successfully reproduce such an experiment, when you convey this to others they would likely dismiss it as confirmation bias, or even a "fluke" that is otherwise explainable naturally. All unexpected results will still predictably be explainable through bottom-up causation, as we discussed earlier, which makes it even more difficult to convince people.

These are not insurmountable challenges. If it were indeed possible to construct an experiment, such experiment must be straightforward enough to reproduce easily, and there are several other requirements we can enumerate. For instance, it must:

1. Necessarily be performed first-person.

2. Involve the presentation of quantum-randomly selected data. This means that the data presented must be randomly selected at a quantum-level such that entanglement with the seemingly random data would result in a bifurcation of the timeline for each possible outcome. Quantum random number generators may be suitable candidates. [*]

3. Measure the correlation between your own cognitively compressible perception and the possible values that can be presented. This will vary from person to person so may require explanation and justification.

4. Be repeated sufficient times to allow the bias in probabilities to emerge.

The last point is important, as the theory does not predict that those timelines with less consciousness are not experienced. They are experienced, but with less "measure", meaning they are less likely to occur.

The ability to quantify what would be more cognitively compressible is also going to be extremely hard without a more thorough understanding of precisely how compression in the brain functions, and also how exactly that relates to the experience of consciousness. For example, from the little that we know we can at least say that it would not be enough to simply think of a number and then expect that to appear from the random number generator. Without any perceived rationale behind the digit appearing, there would be no process of understanding and thus no novel integration of information that would constitute a greater degree of consciousness. The processes are extremely constrained, as we discussed earlier.

Saying that, it is quite possible that have already seen evidence of the phenomenon in the case of unexplainable coincidences, and further analysis of these coincidences may help us understand this correlation. 

There is also the compelling yet controversial experiments by Radin et all, on the “Psychophysical effects in double-slit interference patterns” (Radin 2020). This large study, replicated multiple times, empirically proved a connection between mind and the outcome of quantum experiments. There has been some skepticism, as would be expected for such a radical conclusion. But the evidence is strong nonetheless.

Keeping all this in mind, the author does hold out hope that our understanding of the information integration processes in the brain will expand as time goes on, and at some point we may have a sufficiently deep understanding of the mechanism to be able to more easily construct a meaningful and easily replicable experiment to prove this phenomenon beyond all doubt.

Conclusion

In this paper I have sought to answer the age-old question of whether it is at all plausible that there are other factors at work than simple efficient causes, as the scientific method would tell us. Is it at all possible that the nature of mind itself may play a role in how reality unfolds?

To answer these questions I have put forth a theory that expands upon the work of Michael Lockwood, synthesizing cutting edge quantum physics experiments, an explication of the leading theory of quantum physics, combined with current theories of consciousness. In doing so I hope to have put forward the natural and rational conclusion of how, when these are combined, it raises the possibility of downward, or mental, causation.

Now, in conclusion, it must be asked: If this phenomenon of downward-causation is true, should we expect to have seen evidence of it through the ages?

We have already discussed the vastly improbable complexities that surround us today, and also the occurrence of coincidences or, as Jung coined them, "synchronicities" - both of which would be predicted by this theory.

But what is also evident is that when we start talking about downward causation, seemingly miraculous happenings, strange coincidences and immortality, one may start to wonder about religious or spiritual overtones. While the theory explored in this paper is of course scientific in nature, it is undeniable firstly that those pioneering physicists who discovered quantum theory uncharacteristically went on to develop great interest in spiritual and mystical matters. But it is also undeniable that the cultural history of mankind in general is awash with beliefs in such things. Even more recently we've seen emerge a strong belief in phenomena such as "manifesting", "affirmations" and the "Law of Attraction" - the idea that thoughts can in some way influence or determine the future. Consider, also, anecdotal reports of miracles from petitionary prayer, faith healing and also of telepathy or precognition: the experience of our thoughts manifesting in others, or in future events.

Is it possible that this isn't simply the myths and folklore of "primitive culture", but reflective of an actual phenomenon that scientists have disregarded? Because, certainly, this theory would predict such occurrences and provide a rational basis for them.

The problem with any scientific analysis of these downwardly-caused miraculous or seemingly supernatural event is that, even if it did have an origin in downward causation, it would also have an upward causation emerge to explain it. This is how the mechanism works: Every timeline that we become conscious in has an entire history of micro-causes that mirror the reality that is experienced. It is human nature, and entirely rational, to see those causes and be satisfied, stopping further enquiry and dismissing the event as purely natural, mundanely so, even if it were a fluke for it to occur.

What this theory explains isn't the occurrence of the event itself, but the correlation between its improbability and the observer's state of mind. And in that area it truly could tell us something novel: about existence itself, but also about the significance of many phenomena throughout history where subjective, personal experience is treated in a manner that would seem, from an objective, scientific perspective, to be altogether misplaced.

In that vein, in addition to developing a deeper understanding of consciousness with a view to constructing experiments that would lend evidence to this phenomena, it would also be reasonable to propose that this theory might be quite fruitful as a foundation for a new metaphysic and also pave the way for further theological analysis, correlation and dialog in the future. The consequences could be radical indeed.

Citations

Deutsch 1997, Fabric of Reality, ISBN 9780713990614

Deutsch 2011, Beginning of Infinity, ISBN 978-0-7139-9274-8 
Le Doux 2020, "Consciousness through the lens of memory" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32961150/

MBQ, Lockwood 1993: Mind, Brain and the Quantum. ISBN 9780631161837.

LOT, Lockwood 2005, Labyrinth of Time. ISBN 978-0199249954.

Tononi 2014, "Integrated Information Theory" - http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_theory

Maguire 2005, Consciousness as Data Compression,  https://escholarship.org/content/qt0bc3p5sv/qt0bc3p5sv_noSplash_abd1cd1336f13cd97fbcb08adc074522.pdf?t=op2iuz

Planton 2021, "A theory of memory for binary sequences: Evidence for a mental compression algorithm in humans"  https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008598

Ruffini 2017, "An algorithmic information theory of consciousness" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30042851/

Vermani 2019, "A novel perturbation based compression complexity measure for networks" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6383034/

Chaitin 2007. "The halting probability Ω: irreducible complexity in pure mathematics." Milan Journal of Mathematics, 75, 291-304

Mueller 2017, "Law without law: from observer states to physics via algorithmic information theory" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01826

Jefferson 2022, "Quantum Mechanical Tunneling May Explain How Life Appeared on Earth" - https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/36102/20220214/quantum-mechanical-tunneling-explain-life-appeared-earth.htm

Collins 2010, "Blindsight: Seeing without knowing it" - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/blindsight-seeing-without-knowing-it/

Ball 2022, "A rethink of cause and effect could help when things get complicated" - https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433880-300-a-rethink-of-cause-and-effect-could-help-when-things-get-complicated/

Fein 2019, "Quantum superposition of molecules beyond 25 kDa " - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0663-9.epdf

Shayeghi 2020, "Matter-wave interference of a native polypeptide" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15280-2

Lee 2021, "Entanglement between superconducting qubits and a tardigrade" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07978

MoM 2009, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Modularity of Mind" - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modularity-mind/

Tegmark 2014, Max Tegmark, "Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality"

Science Daily, 2009, "The Human Brain Is On The Edge Of Chaos" - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090319224532.htm

Panditt, 2015, "Interpretations of responses using the isolated forearm technique in general anaesthesia: a debate" - https://academic.oup.com/bja/article/115/suppl_1/i32/233838

Hamzelou 2017, "Your autopilot mode is real - now we know how the brain does it" - https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151137-your-autopilot-mode-is-real-now-we-know-how-the-brain-does-it/

Seigel 2019, "Why the multiverse must exist" - https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/this-is-why-the-multiverse-must-exist/

Radin 2020, “Psychophysical effects in double-slit interference patterns” - https://osf.io/9csgu/download