Conscious of Consciousness - An essay

The Reductively Irreducible

Consciousness is merely an ‘effect’ to which the cause is the state of us being or existing. When measured against time or duration and computed accordingly, it presents itself to us as an extended, all consuming, incalculable state of ‘non matter’; but still limited to and within our subjective experience.

The primary instinct of our species before even we will in ourselves that we need power is a will to understand what we experience. To observe, reduce and ascertain patterns. Apply that drill to our own consciousness and paradoxically we attempt to reduce what is an effect caused by biochemical, electrical and mechanical interactions between constantly interacting systems within us and its concomitant effect - the mind and its continued conscious state. The functions that make a being human are these same systems that perpetually remains interacting.

Consciousness, even if we choose to consider as another reducible entity in our reality and ignore that it is well within and exclusive to the experience of a living being’s being - it still remains as the pinnacle of randomness. That which is almost the sole result and consequence of observation and has no existence in itself will be prone to exhibit randomness. Therefore our methods of reduction as an approach to study consciousness results in an error or a paradox and we refuse to take note of it. Consciousness and the awareness of it is understandable although quizzing if you step outside and think of it. But the study of it with almost no awakening realization of how carried away we are in how much we believe the human experience is superior, that is incredibly erratic, for the lack of better words.

When I use the words ‘for the lack of better words’, it is not just a literary device. We reduce everything that affects us into fragments with patterns that we then accumulate and arrange as a way to refer and direct a comfortable existence, to create and sustain habitats. Maybe it is our fragility. But at one point, we became aware of how our own consciousness can affect us and we commenced the process of wanting to reduce, fragment, pattern match and gather information about it while being incapable of addressing that it just exists because we do. Add to it that, there is no way to understand and expound consciousness accurately with the language and the linguistic methods that we developed for the sole purpose of sustaining our conscious state and thus improve our chances of survival.

To further delve into this hypotheses please first test a reductive thinking where consciousness is a clearly overwritten ‘cache’ of gathered information, of which some are partial or partly lost information, historical information and attached sensory information. To make logical sense I had to use the word ‘overwritten’ because otherwise the ‘error’ or ‘erraticism’ is not as predictable. Now this consciousness is not memory because memory is storage and storage does not do anything by itself other than store. The incessant interactions between the memory and the external stimulus causes the effect that is consciousness.

The cause that is our existence has consciousness as its effect. The being has to exist and begin its being by developing its consciousness. The collective or individual consciousness is therefore well within our experience of existence. If there is no human existence there is no consciousness that we are talking about. Calling what else remains as consciousness is a choice not an answer. Now consider language as an instrument that can offer you a way to identify and compute along with the fact that accuracy and definitiveness is not its primary objective but instead identification and understanding. Accuracy and definitiveness calls for non subjective experience which we are incapable of.

Consciousness is not information like memory maybe and it does not have any separate existence outside of our human experience. Memory can have such an existence but consciousness cannot. The usage of the word information is already too reductive but for the purpose of this thought process, let us think of information as a collection of records from experiences we had, that inform, assist or resist our actions. Consciousness as a system uses pattern matching to detect similar patterns between the stimuli and the information in our memory to help direct us. Although I used words like information and computing please do not yet consider computers or computing mechanism without sentient expression or sensory information.

An essential openness to language with skepticism and beyond triggers is necessary to ascertain the essential scope or bounds of my work.

Let’s start reducing the reductive studies done and see what is different. Firstly, trying to understand consciousness with what made it expansive - language and the existing faculties for communication - those are never going to give us what we are looking for. Our need for an explanation that comes as an unquestionable, scientifically resolved, mathematically provable evidence based answer to what consciousness is, seems like a fool’s errand.

The need to use faculties we set up within our conscious state of being to enhance that state (predominantly using communication) to evaluate what ‘conscious being’ is, with a language/languages, is the most appalling oversight of it all.

Here is a reductive modus operandi to existing,

There is a stimuli. We are stimulated.

The recording of all the sensory and sentient experience it created is recorded with as much detail as we perceived and that includes sensory stimulation. So we have stimuli, stimulation and observation.

A pattern is therefore derived to locate a potentially similar encounter next time and we believe we are in more control therefore. The sensory information that assists adds an urgency and persistence to this recorded pattern.

Over time, close resembling patterns are detected and recorded into previous recordings based on continued collection and matching of information.

These combined continuing recordings, re-recordings and pattern matching and all the experiences it entailed form a ‘cache’ for us to look back at to perform or operate in all circumstances that presents as stimulus.

Time as a concept does not apply to this ‘cache’. But as beings that finds convenience in the concept of time, we assign consciousness to be subject to duration. But very often we incorrectly look at it as perpetual, as if it is us who is within consciousness or absorbent of it or like a receptacle of it as opposed to the reality which is the other way around. This assumption makes us never look at it as an error we make. The conscious state or consciousness does not have properties that splits it or makes it reducible the way we want. Even time is a construct within it. Time and observation and self does not exist outside of it and so it cannot be used to compute consciousness.

So using those to compute it in turn causes us to glitch every time we become aware of this consciousness, which seems stretched out at least for the duration of our own existence. We think self exists before consciousness. We ‘are’ only because we think. But we operate with a hierarchy where ‘we think because we are’ supersedes the other. We have taken “We are” for granted and have assigned so much value to it that we cannot unlearn it. It does offer solace though. Otherwise to many it becomes ‘oh well i am born, so now let’s die'. So if there is no thought, no self and therefore no language therefore, if we still manage to exist in that conditions, then there is no ‘we’. There is no ‘I’. It is just ‘one whole’ that does not have an end or beginning and we are just parts of it.

Add to it the fact that we almost never fail to assign this superlative essence to our being and living as a human, to the self - which is the primary hedonistic need in all of us. The word hedonistic may seem like a stretch but a pleasureful state of survival is what we all willingly, naturally seek. The answer is already there - the concept of ‘we’ or ‘I’ - its understanding, its representation, its meaning, its existence are all within our conscious state of being.

If at this point someone understands or finds themselves where I am at, I want you to pursue the idea that language is the most flawed, unreliable instrument to study consciousness. Language is for approximations, it is an approximation by itself because we cannot be accurate with or without it.

I chose to write and use the phrase ‘conscious of consciousness’ as opposed to awareness of consciousness or awareness of self because the latter two collection of words is an attempt at trying to make my whole description reduced into a vocabulary that can be better understood by more people. But that is not the goal.. Attempts to understand always need further reduction but such reductions always moves away from the actuality. It takes away from the meaning that is. So let’s give different words a chance to open our thinking, especially about consciousness.

Now, we have learnt over the history of learning that a thing that is definitively random and dissimilar no matter how many samples we evaluate, a thing that cannot be measured, much less exposit itself for precise comparative, quantifiable and calculable study - such a thing should not be subject to our default form of analysis and study which is reduction, dissection and the exploration that follows those. It only results in drawing circles inside of a sphere not knowing there is an outside to that sphere.

When ‘circle’, ‘sphere’, ‘deconstruct’, ‘understand’, and every word we write, say, draw and feel are merely acceptable ways of trying to approximately elicit our experiences (never accurately; we do not even know what accurate is), consciousness suddenly becomes even lesser, is that word even necessary. Language is to learn and understand, not of any use to the ultimate truths.

But one ‘can’ imagine Sisyphus happy. Getting the rock up the mountain suddenly seem most similar to the esoteric venture we take to understand consciousness, so yeah maybe that happiness, from the act we undertake and the pleasure from it is the true purpose. Not the necessity to formulate and know what consciousness actually is. The promising illusory enchantment of Sisyphus being able to stop and look at himself and his rock from a third super observer point of view to reach an ‘oh so enlightening eureka’ moment’ - I am in vehement denial of that being any more capable of finding the truth. This is because every super observer is still observing from within their consciousness and has patterns they understand. So I would not even know the closest approximation I must aim for in a land that is all but approximations, if I as the observer is the key. I must deem myself and my human experience diminutive but not absent or pointless to journey towards the truth. I say that last part specifically because the alternate option is to be limited to a hyperbole and an adjective assisted label of a nihilist which is insultingly rudimentary. So yes I am Sisyphus too and so is everyone, but let me get the rock all the way up one more time and see.

Origin of consciousness is by far the simplest part. Consciousness cannot exist without subjective experience. For starters, I am defeated by the knowledge that what we call objective truths is also undeniably within the subjective experience of a human or any being for that matter. There is neither objective nor subjective without human experience. If you like to deconstruct the word experience, then the word you are looking for is observation. But careful not to pet Schrodinger’s cat or stroke quantum physics yet. However we define objectivity, how absent of sensory human experience and subjective understanding we describe our version of objective realities to be - it is still observed, measured, experienced, logged, computed, compiled, consumed and spread out, all by humans if not systems or machines created by humans. So what is this objective reality other than a linguistically empowered creation of ours that we conveniently deem independent of subjective experience. Whether consciousness is labelled an objective truth or reality, whether the evidence to the objectivity of that consciousness is mathematically declarable, it still does not cease to be contained within the receptacle of human experience which contains the process of study, observation, computing, processing, sharing and advocating. Even math exists as a human experience. There is no way to know if there is an objective reality or non human experience that exists outside of sensory experiences and subjective study. That reality is humanly incomprehensible with language or math or any human scale, equation or lens. Granted, math is making an effort to do that but it’s impossible, it is still required to be understandable by humans and that negates the attempt as a whole. That is why the reality of non human experience, if it is to exist without our observation, it always will without our observation. But we define and constrain objectivity and subjectivity instead to both oppose each other by having opposing definitions within one singular conscious human experience and yet computed differently by different people who has subjective conscious experiences.

Reduction and the follow up study, as I established, is not helping us get to the bottom of this. Needing a bottom or center or a nuclei is a pattern we want but consciousness does not necessitate that or an understanding of it. However mere acceptance and marvel of it would make humans want to create a gods as answers to questions and we have done that already and that did not seem like the answer. So I am trying something akin to an infinite loop of negation to prevent myself from a need to be convinced of any single answer. In other words, I find that we need to negate the value of self and the pleasure that knowledge offers the self - in this context - to be able to understand consciousness outside of the subjective experience. As much as the history and the evolution of intellect like to suggest that we have stopped putting ourselves in the center of everything as we know it, we never did. We never stopped. Mostly because we just cannot do that. We cannot separate the idea of a separate self from the true and real human experience.

We are so pressed in this day and age more than any to figure out once and for all about ourselves and it is more a self serving journey now. Consciousness puts ourselves in the center of our being. Therefore we assume everything is outside of that ‘us’. Every single thing according to us is ‘according to us’. See the limitation. If we must negate metaphysics and just look at physics, we are still the center. Science is within the human subjective experience. If a collection of humans share the same experience and has material, factual and measured evidence, it is still within the conscious human experience and there is subjectivity to it. There is never no reality or fiction or science where human being is not an observer. For that to happen it has to be a non living being experience. I do not think that is the word for it or there is any. Knowing what I know and writing this, I cannot assign enough importance to myself to coin a word either. Our consciousness and our awareness of it is all but a part of this whole human experience and it becomes more than that only if we assume that the state of being human and commenting our thoughts, whether calibrated or chaotic is above everything else and that it is the sole truth. Attempts at understanding consciousness is made not in the pursuit of something beyond. We are stuck inside of only what we can know and it is so primitive.

Observe ourselves and the consciousness phenomenon as absolutely diminutive. This is not the same as reduction or dissection for learning. Instead this is the ability to diminish and negate what drives us in the journey of knowledge. Acknowledge that everything we do is to supplement being comfortably alive and surviving, even on the cellular level. In this context, which is not at all new, we are no different from any organism or being with life, whether that is a single cell organism or apes or whales. Each has a consciousness that originates as a result of its own bodily functions along with the interaction to its surroundings and the patterns collected out of it. In fact the difference between any other species and us is merely in the functions and operations which somehow has enabled in us an overcoming power or the sensory experience of being in control. A sense of superior-being. No other animal is known to exhibit this experience the way we do especially with elaborate communication. Our capability to identify more patterns than others distinguish ourselves and our ways from our primal tendencies which then somehow elevates us to believe we are doing something different. Getting naked and mating in a satisfyingly safe place makes it ‘sex’ and ‘acts of intimacy’. But it is still mating and a need to keep on living and existing. That’s every living being.

We as beings go against what we are originally. Not in the same context I see people understand Albert Camus saying something akin. But we have this elaborate and unbelievably immersive fiction we have weaved together with sensory experiences, feedback, feedback loops, computation and deduction. Our species has always been one of the most vulnerable and fragile, we had to develop communication to this extent to make ourselves at least believe that we are invincible. Not super sight, not infinite regeneration, not mutation, not spitting venom, but deduction, computation, pattern recognition, processing and any other word we want to call it to feel like we are superior; like for example - intelligence. Note that many species have some of the attributes that we have in terms of ‘existing’ and the moment we learn or observe it in them, we are quick to exclaim and be in awe. We are much more in awe of the humane tendencies in other beings and alarmed at a marginal expression of animal tendency in human. But it is all the same. Our awakenings and highs are when we are one with the whole, our orgasms are when we are that closely linked to another being.

What language is not, is means to understand itself, because it was never the intent, and therefore our inquiry of consciousness with it is seriously flawed. We are unaware that we are confined by the human experience and language supplements our oblivion of that fact. Separation from singularity is available to humans also because we experience in patterns and for patterns we need time - another pattern that aids us in our survival.

Here is another way to ponder about it and this does help cater to a beyond human scope we yearn for but remains within our experience.

Consciousness is outside of time. Not because it is a cosmic reality or divine proof that needs to be defined in that context or because we are devices to a universal consciousness. The very idea of the parallels that can be drawn between the existence of quantum entanglement or superposition and the study of the randomness that is attributed to consciousness is - these are all patterns that our faculties condition us to notice. It is the available matching pattern. ‘We find what we can understand because that is what we are trying to find’. But what we find is not always humanly understandable unless we accept the computation to serve our intents and purposes.

On one side advancement in quantum physics is possible but once again, the subjective human experience contains and influences that and any study no matter how reductive or singular. Therefore, there is no universal truth to consciousness, much less a universal truth that exists even if humanity does not. Existence of a universal truth is imagined only because of consciousness. But as we progress in our studies of it we can give it more names and further reduce it. Or we can call it a god and still continue.

We know what consciousness is. It does not need to be known in ways we know other things. We ‘are’ its fleeting existence. The material form of consciousness is us and only us.

The contradictions or the polarity that we are somehow incredibly dependent on consciously and subconsciously to separate the idea of self from the other or even us collectively from animals, or life from non-life is where we began the journey to differentiate and assimilate information. This need to differentiate is more reflective of our refusal to look once again at the singularity that never begged human conception, much less reduction. Within our wiring (not implying that it was done) we had to understand our prey and its pattern better just as we had to understand predators and patterns where predator can be nature and its ways too or essentially anything that can impact us.

Differentiating ourselves from animals is often a discourse that runs verbose on the concept of awareness of self and consciousness. But this awareness and ‘the state of or the being that is conscious’ is only on a pedestal because we put it there with instruments and faculties available for communication. Strictly within the simple joy and glory of the human experience, we have figured out what consciousness is already but we are unable to reduce it, to split it into atoms, to formulate equations and to accept that determinism and indeterminism exists because the limited human capability needs it like that - it cannot understand any form of singularity. It cannot understand it is irrelevant. Humans may figure out what to do after the sun collapses, to sustain life. But that does not mean we are in control or supreme to anything because human life cannot continue on its own. If it found a way to survive, if it finds habitable planets to go be in, all it still does is what a cell does and keeps doing in the scale of its reality. It survives, it sustains. Survival and sustenance is a narrative important solely to what we identify as life form. We remark about it like that is universal but we are just projecting and pattern matching.

The only reason a program needs to be conscious of itself is to improve itself or keep functioning. That is just the same as human - the motivation for the human to be more conscious is to sustain its chances of survival which means a state of being that is satisfactory to continue existing.

I will now resort to the pattern I promised. Let me negate myself and assume that consciousness does have a material nature to it. Figuratively or otherwise, we need multiple lenses of meaning to evaluate this materiality of consciousness. Only if I don’t negate human experience as I know it so far, can I use terms such as ‘the answer’, ‘the truth’ or ‘the question’ etc. So I must be indifferent to and park my learning that the only material nature of consciousness is us. Maybe there is something else. Think with me.

Up until recently I loved romanticizing the fear of death and harbored it in me. I validated it as opposed to denying or reasoning that fear away with arguments like it is a certainty, so why fear? But certainty is not supposed to be feared? That sounds like certainty is the primary need to keep on. The romanticism of the fear of death is not to refute the chaotic exquisiteness of human experience. The end of consciousness as it is subjective to me is what I feared. Once again in the essence that all is just one, which I keep calling singularity, death of my consciousness is death of all consciousness “as I know it”. I know your consciousness because I am conscious. So collectively if humanity ceases to exist there is absolutely nothing. If we could use our sensory faculties the same way we use computational faculties, as in if we can touch and feel air and micro organisms and anything and everything that exists, all the time, we would not even have had the capacity for spatial awareness. The illusion of us being separate or different will cease to exist. Our inabilities to detect and feel and be sensitive to most material existence is what gives us the spatial sense of separation. Similarly our need to detect patterns combined with our incapability, call for the concept of time. When there is no concept of time we do not remain in the world as we know now. If there was no illusion of space we would probably be another type of being altogether with a consciousness that supports survival like that.

So what we know with computation is a close approximation, backed by sensorily experience that is deemed inefficient in comparison to pure computation, so it is an approximation too. Then to elicit this combination we use language which is yet another loose approximation. The result is always something we can understand and not what actually ‘is’.

I also artistically flirted with the idea of saving my consciousness post death into either a mechanical/electronic device or to a tree. The latter is heavily an artistic philosophical and sensory assisted romanticism. I used the very words - “As a young man, I wanted to be many things. As an older man I want to be a tree.” But a tree as conscious as it may be, it is not humanly conscious. It cannot be. It need not be. Human consciousness is a human necessity. It is the most primitive and primal nature in us - the construction of our conscious being. To respond to stimuli.

It is foreseeable that some translated/recorded or incomplete form of consciousness will soon be founded with a materiality to it. Calling that system or state in whichever physical form it is, ‘a conscious being’ will only show how carried away we are. But where and how we are as humans, we will surely celebrate it as the heights of intelligence or intelligent creation. People will once again sing praises and make textbooks and there will even be a ‘father of consciousness’. In that space and time we will blatantly ignore the overflowing self ridicule that actually entailed.

My approach to the study of consciousness and its findings is predominantly philosophical and thought based. As much as I compel the eradication of reductive methodologies, for the sake of argument you can easily point out the devouring reductionist approach I still take. I will admit that my approach is more based on negation and yes it is a penultimate form of reduction. Each time I read what I have written I wanted to find ways to negate my theories or to find errors. Maybe I cannot find that error that makes the whole of my findings incorrect. But since I am elaborating these thoughts and findings with language and expression, I did verify if I am bigoted by a specific paradigm of research that entertained, favored and validated me or my theory most. Hence I stringently take an effort to negate each time I sit down to continue this work.

First let me negate my need to inconsequentially look beyond the human and accept the human experience alone to be all. So therefore I accept that the human experience is the epicenter. Nothing exists without our need to understand. I will negate that there is no way for us to know what is beyond human experience and accept that it is imperative we have to know all that we cannot know.

It’s time to approach a little more scientifically. Literature often has a tendency to flex itself.

I first learnt Godel theorem as I watched Sir Roger Penrose explain it. For me in the subject matter we are exploring (and I am open to being wrong), it translates to the incapacity of a conscious system using its constituent mechanisms to prove and understand itself; but to be beyond something it knows. Is there even a need for consciousness to exist outside of human experience?

Our skills, let me list once more, reduction, pattern matching deduction, computing and adapting. Even if this was a computer program (not that I mind calling it AI but I question the “I” in AI), it would result in a visual output at minimum. Or audio output. But no consciousness. Simply because there is no sensory receptors to decipher that output in its own way like we do.

Let me attempt to calibrate the idea. Our awareness of consciousness is a result of us pattern matching our patterns. But then our need automatically becomes reducing it to understand. But being conscious of consciousness is only just us being a conscious being with consciousness. There is no journey to take except a need to reduce it in hopes it all turns out to be some marvel. As if it isn’t already in its true being.

We as beings are populating for strength which helps in our survival. This populating primarily needs food and shelter. The skills adapted over time ease the work of attaining those primordial necessities. When life became easier we applied those skills everywhere but not with a need to improve ourselves this time but instead to create a sensory contentment that makes us feel validated - which again ideally promotes populating and survival. Our predators are now each other, so these skills have to be further refined. However none of those skills were to understand consciousness. This is because the collective ‘will to understand’ or the attempt to do it every second in a being’s life is what generated that consciousness. If understanding is the combined process of reduction, pattern matching, deduction and adapting then the complied output of it is consciousness. The combined sensory deciphering of it is awareness. See how much it misfires. The most mentally manic, paranoic, schizoaffective man has a version of reality and consciousness that is just as real as ours. As humans we did the four functions to determine what version of consciousness is ideal to outlive or replicate and found ways to keep at it.

Our skills are now so refined that we are trying to understand the sensory experience of our understanding by reducing it, however looking a lot less ‘self aware’ in the process. ‘Self aware’ must mandatorily be distinct from ‘awareness of self’ because within my study, self coming first dictates what is observed to create what the ‘self’ needs.

We mix some honey, milk and tea leaves to make a nice tea. Then we drink that tea and ask “What is even tea? What a marvel it is? Why is drinking tea such an experience?”. We reduce, scrutinize and interrogate the tea leaves to its absolute last electron until it loses it and it is all over the place and nowhere and at the same time. Then we get to deciphering what superposition could imply. But it was a tea we made to create that sensory pattern which pleased us prior or we see in others to be offering them pleasure. Pleasure as an ideal enjoyable non threatened state of survival.

It is tea. We made it. It was needed.

Consciousness is the effect of being. Let’s take reduction to an abysmal scale and include time to minimize it and call it an ‘algorithm’ with receptors and transmitters - as in running a perpetual program that receives, matches, computes, transmits and receives again and continues. What happens when it is asked to compute its continued state of being and to find out the why and what to it’s doing it. Well it might say - “but that’s what you asked me to do/that’s what I am meant to do”.

No that is not proof of a god but of the nature that is innate to us.

Awareness of this consciousness and its reduction is truthfully the least necessary scientific pursuit. The only reason we want to pursue it is our sheer need for pleasure and gratification the endeavor promises I suppose. However that’s not the sentiment of the world. After all if human experience is all there is and we are incapable of an experience beyond, why would I be so critical of it? I am not blaspheming religion nor science. I am saying we are more of a self serving creature than we ever were. We cannot recognise that we are the aliens we look for or the craziest animals there ever was or every answer we ever need.

Being aware of consciousness or the wanting to deuce it is amusingly similar to what chimpanzees would do the first time it sees itself in a mirror without knowing what it is. But their first instinct is to fight it or sexually select it but our species even if we see a clone the self and the idea of self engulfs everything else.

Are you happy with what you see in the mirror, or are you unhappy, or do you not care or do you ask the mirror, who is the most intelligent person in the world and does it answer?

Language was an instrument to aid the four survival functions that were unique to us. It was a way to record our consciousness with emotions that are a result of sensory experiences. Language with its hyper-individualistic interpretation became as chaotic and erratic in its approximation of what consciousness is so much so that now we have to spent time understanding where consciousness came from. Come on.

The singularity (that everything and nothing is) is not conscious; because even ‘conscious’ is a linguistic apparatus to explain a state that was simply essential for survival of a being. Consciousness did not emerge on it own. It had no reason to be. A planet or a galaxy is never running away saying “oh no” when an asteroid or another galactic system is about to hit it.

Clearly if we understand and are capable of compartmentalizing time as a concept subjective to us then we can begin to understand consciousness and formulate new ways to learn it.

A key idea to that learning therefore becomes not using familiar reductive mechanisms. I am not well versed to know the implications of this on how this can be mathematically approached and if it already is. Structures outside of space time continuum does not cut it at all. Those are just two of the patterns rooted to everything as we learned to understand but it is hardly what started it. The eradication of observer will be the study to undertake but the paradox of it is then it is not a study. Or maybe that is the true answer to the study. To be one with the whole.

What piques me is knowing that we do not know any other way of thriving and surviving other than the reductive approach. It is so hard coded inside of us that I doubt if we are even capable of anything else. Any tease of us as human beings coming close to encountering the interconnectedness and singularity is restricted to the exquisitely insane, the spiritually enlightened or on potent psychedelics. If not those, we have to look at art and although the world is super busy reducing art to understand or replicate it or enable super computing systems to mimic it poorly, art and very often its abstraction demands a whole experience than merely trying to find out its constituents.

I do not intent to suddenly take a spiritual turn here to better delineate consciousness by saying that we must step away from our faculties and simply marvel. No once again this is not the part where I plan to introduce God. This is not me advocating use of substances to make life or living better either. But not being able to be in a state of rest and unison with our habitat because of a constant need to complete the process of figuring things out in the name of conservation of the species or the self - that is a marker of an error especially if we consider the extraordinarily engrossing paradox of using all the faculties that create consciousness - to reduce consciousness into form or matter or energy that we can measure and control.

My own inquiry led me to areas that were intriguing, like I was thrilled to learn what little I learned about microtubules and then questionably my pattern matching it to specifics of string theory. In spite of ideas arising out of possible similarities between them (or is it my personal illusion/delusion) I don’t imagine it allowing me to postulate anything solid. It just offers more questions.. In fact I feel like that search for a discovery where I choose to perceive microtubules and the string nature of particles in string theory in the same plane - I feel like it is yet another clear implication that the more we look for what we can find, we just keep finding it. We are so unsuspecting of the fact that -

Everything is only what we CAN understand, not what IS.

The speed of light - if we do find a way to travel faster than light, then what remains to be perceived/observed/computed or understood? Every pattern we are familiar with collapses and our constitution seems incapable of grasping what remains. If life or living (for the lack of better words again) is possible outside in that realm we have to remind ourselves that there are no words to explain it, much less a need for words and there is no semblance we can think of whatsoever to that state of being. Understanding and all the preceding process or the succeeding ones which involves the formation of a consciousness and operating with it to survive as long as we can is a process we developed for this world. We chalk up this world as much as we can for sustaining our lives. As if it is separate thing. That is not a criticism. The realities we create and navigate is hard for a living being that lacks consciousness. Such a being however never exists. If it does, it ceases to exist because how can it ‘be’ if it is not conscious?

But again, if consciousness is just a part of being a living being trying to stay that way, what is life then? What is living? Why is living a thing and why are there non living things? There are clear answers to all that which might seem unsatisfactory until we try and separate or negate the need to consider the nature of our knowledge universal.

The answer is - living and life is not separate. We are a part of the whole. It does not matter how integral we are. What we do to exist is our requirement. Our requirements are all we know and will know in human experience. The word experience has to be stripped of a motivational, time constrained definitions and thought of as a whole. We experience life against time. In the scale of universe, I am doubtful if we are even the size of quantum particles. In that scale we never lived or died, we exhibit superposition or if we are smaller than any humanly studied particle, we do not exist for now. But this is strange because I am applying human methodology again to understand what cannot (yet?) be understood in human methodology.

The theory is not that there is actually no consciousness at all. In very basic language the idea that we need questions and answers is consciousness needing more information for sustenance of the life it came out of to be. There may be no way for us to not be reductive because the basic experience of the smallest cell is separated into living and dying. The split happens even there. Maybe the first reduction a living thing does of its experience is living and dying or in other words experiencing and not experiencing. The only way to go from there is to reduce that in order to better sustain.

Right here is me realizing that in the course of this recording of my thinking and observation,

1. I mentioned that consciousness is an effect and the awareness of it as a stimuli, is paradoxical. This however mostly sounds aesthetic in its claim. As if I am trying to visualize it and against possibly the lack of a concept of time.

2. I have suggested its nature to be primarily sustenance. I called it analogous to a living ‘cache’ of all the interactable information between memory and external stimuli we collected and arranged in such vivid randomness and disorder that by itself it is incomputable or incomprehensive, that it has to be in a living body to exist. Considering the weight we give to our idea of self and what we create or collect to preserve it, when consciousness by itself becomes completely chaotic, disorganized, incomplete and yet remains whole and still advises us on surviving, we are intrigued about its existence. It becomes a stimuli. We consider the possibility that the erroneous nature of consciousness is powerful if not dangerous. So we do what we always do with things that come at us as powerful or dangerous. Reduce it, deduce it.

3. I then also used vocabulary that ridiculed our need to ironically reduce consciousness into some kind of marvel as opposed to allowing it to be the resultant state of sensory experiences processing the earlier mentioned vividly arranged collection of pattern based information. The actual marvel is how small we become in our need to assign marvel into something that may not need it.

One could then entertain the question - Are the religious and the god fearing - are they then right with their chosen way of life. The acceptance of something beyond human and beyond science? Not really, no. They are as oblivious as any other human. The best of the them are still maintaining belief in a god that is susceptible to human understanding. Much like science need reducible patterns, the believers of god unapologetically assign patterns akin to everything they can understand to God. God is created out of a human necessity especially when the act of being conscious is not cutting it in their survival mechanisms. If god is a word and I use it to contemplate on the singularity of it all or everything outside of possible human experience that I can never know, I am not any more wrong or right than any other human. If I want to label the singularity and the totally restricted abilities of human experience as an absence of god, I am still no more right or wrong than any other human.

It is in this light that I try to loosely explore the concept of metaman. It is bizarre thinking about how all the reduction and computing finally has pushed humans into a need to create a singular being and have such vested interest in developing it as an achievement of humankind. Yes there is fear involved and warnings out of that fear, but that is again hilarious if you are willing to humor what this particular concept entails.

Let us start from AI. Artificial Intelligence. That’s right we who choose intelligence as the word to define our process of forming consciousness and deploying faculties in accordance with it to supplement it, creating electrical systems that do some of the computing and compiling functions faster. What does these systems use? Information that are collected, recorded, stored and shared. So essentially in terms of the functions it just does the collect-compute-compile process faster with an electrical system and mechanical aids at best. In its advancement we are hoping it can do more of what humans can. The absolutely oblivious inflated hedonistic selves in some humans cannot wait to race towards those advancements and chasing the credits of it being something they are part of or something they get to experience first. The purpose of these systems according to them is to assist human living and life in ways that was never before seen. Conservation of the species or even of all the species. Imagine the infantile excitement of the world we are asked to subscribe to, a world that feels AI is a crowning moment for humanity. Maybe they can claim that Noah does not have to build an ark or spaceship anymore. ‘Noah’ just have to sit back. Whoa! It is epic isn’t it?

No. It is not at all epic. How carried away must a human being be to think that it is anything at all but a monkey with a fancy rock? Human experience is beautiful, there is no question about it. But it does not in anyway become a rationale to create systems such as this and never realize the paradoxically funny and silly beings we are. What would we do if we were in some human zoo. We will never be aware of it. Oh no, I am not into the whole, we are in a simulation bit. The utility of AI in washing my dishes when I write this is not entirely a strong argument when there is research and experiments done to identify how conscious or sentient AI can be and what its most evolved and advanced state is. Let’s assume though, isn’t that what we do anyway. I will try to be simplistic and subtract fantasy so I do not sound emotionally charged, which I do not mean to be.

How conscious can AI be?

Firstly, why should AI be conscious?

If I break too many rules by answering a how question with a why question, call it an absurdity but let’s keep going.

Case 1 - So we manufacture such an AI system. It is both enhanced to collect, compute, compile and this means it replicates records of what the human experience was like for instances and datasets of these collected three C functions (if I may call it that, because a person can call anything any name actually) collect, compute and control. So this combine within it is then able to let the AI being project and mimic what it has observed and that resembles at least a horrifyingly limited existence.

But the result - Human beings celebrate it and we go further in its enhancement. Then we notice an unlimited physical form for systems with unlimited capacity often proposes human extinction as a solution for the quintessential human suffering. So we limit it into physical forms that basically withers away no matter how much of a super computing system it could potentially become, therefore eliminating the threat of it taking over humanity.

Which basically is at its peak is a human. I mean we could have just copulated to create it and that would be far more of a wonderfully flawed creature that can learn to belong and enjoy the human experience.

So no AI or human made computing systems without an organic, decaying body cannot be conscious. It can mimic it in case the goal is to tell the world it is conscious and for the validation starved self or selves behind it to become the father of Super AI or Metaman even.

Case 2 - Well maybe the objective is not to create a creature similar to human but instead one without sensory experiences and excels incredibly well in the human scales of efficiency in the 3Cs. Like something capable of infinitely doing the 3Cs. Something that can maybe build or simulate the type of particle accelerator that can seek answers to the penultimate scientific inquiry. What does it do though? It presents questions beyond that which will need systems that can supersede it and is capable of more power. If the 3Cs can be measured in a scale then, we or the systems themselves enhance powers in orders of magnitude so that - the 3Cs are done better. I have to stop here, not just because the pressing question here is ‘why’ but because this chase is endless only for us to never understand that the idea of a question and an answer is merely a result of the need to survive. Supplanting human life with supremely enhanced computing systems or let’s even say being able to make immortality possible is not any evolution of the human race, it is still a monkey with fancy rock. An immortal human will seek mortality simply because he is human and the human experience does not compel the necessity of immortality unless the being is self serving beyond human understanding. But this venture can definitely serve the human need to be validated, the feeling of being a ‘being with self’ of being celebrated (although only among humans) or the sheer pleasure that we enjoy when there is a new marvel that we like to reduce. Along the way the numerous errors we are naturally inclined to make but refuse to embrace will give us reasons to keep at this for eternity as each of us competes to define it.

Case 3 - People think this supremo AI or Metaman existence is God and since that existence is often made by one or many that always wanted to see themselves as superior or with a self that is powerful in the same ways gods are, it basks in the power and strives for control over humanity. Rest is science fiction but in the way that this god in its mightiest might has no answer and no question and no epiphanies outside of what can be humanly experienced and in fact, it is incapable of understanding an existence without the need for self. The only thing therefore that it does is please the self within it that it manufactured.

This is not an attempt to create another awareness message of the danger of AI becoming conscious. This is to remind how laughably animalistic and basic humans are, to indicate with human linguistic device, how absolutely carried away with self each of us are in our efforts to make the idea/concept/feeling of the self last.

Survival is easier today but does that call for a need to use the human functions for ‘being’ purely for the need of pleasure and gratification? Pleasure as a result of acquisition of all consuming self validation. If I must consider the wellbeing and good for humans, then that seeking of pleasure is the naivest answer. Whether it is driven by science or gods, at a certain point our search for truths purely spawns on a need for the validation of ‘self’ or the collective self through discovery and understanding.

So again, consciousness is not universally fundamental. It is just an effect to the cause that is our being. We do not and possibly cannot know or understand what is universally fundamental because all the reduction and the best approximate calculations that was done - it is fundamental to only humans. Our methods, our way of being, our understandings, we and I are all fundamental to just us. We have not been able to negate our self from any equation or theory put forth. That includes mine, this essay, every word in it, every phrase and meaning it can clarify. We are beings that use mirrors and then we came up with selfie as a concept. A being that is so fragile, so easily diseased and so exquisitely unaffected or blind towards formulating the idea that death or the end is all that is significant after our birth, and if that is not accepted then a being is prone to fundamentally approach everything as a threat to its existence. A being looking for that threat, when it suddenly becomes aware of the self and all the functions this self partakes in to exist, starts seeing this self and the resulting consciousness also as something to be computed.

The first of our species was by itself vastly enhanced in its innate functions for survival. Trace back further to the very origins to imagine the first lone organism where everything started. It cloned or divided or reproduced itself to form two of it. These two definitely did become aware of each other. The two then had to find ways to ensure each other is not a threat much like its surroundings aren’t. This never stops. This will never stop. We will reduce more and we will learn more. We will always learn more. But it will remain that if we do not step away and find a way to negate this self or mathematically if we do not remove the observer, we just play with the toys we can get and we name them. This is alright though, We just have to stop pretending to give it a universal nature. We are just entertaining ourselves as we go further. We are not a universal being and we have no universal knowledge. We know what we can and only that.

The information collected and stored in us biologically, to be a biological being is the only way we can retrieve it. It can be simulated in mechanical-electrical systems yes, but consider this purely science fiction thought train. In terms of information storage or memory, it is proven that it is better stored when there is a sensory reaction whilst observing the phenomenon that we memorize. Take for instance, favorite food, trauma, pain, orgasm, driving, writing, reading, this essay. Every sensory experience as data is part of every data we computed for patterns. These stay together and are stored together. We store information in a format that is not yet named and defined properly. We attach it to specific sensory experiences. So we feel, We sense. We are familiar with what we perceive. We are curious about what is new. So consciousness is an advanced form of data storage then? It still is a weak plot that will need action and five act structure and renowned director to make it digestible.

Every living thing has a consciousness of its own and every non living thing is measured and understood by this consciousness and its capacity. Supercomputers, Artificial Hyper Intelligence, Metaman, all of them in their own timelines are systems we are creating under the assumption that computing, pattern matching and compiling without sensory, sentient information attached is the penultimate answer.

The best supercomputer we can make that is accurate and takes into account all variables associated with human experience and sensory data is a human baby. But that’s not enough, is it? On the other hand, the best answer we can create out of human experience without a need to compute, pattern match and compile is a God. But that has not worked either, has it?

The answer is obvious. We are not satisfied with it. We refuse to be in a reality with anything that we have not marked and labelled to know if it is safe. I like the monkey with fancy rock metaphor not just in the straightforward sense where everything humans play with is just a rock to please the self. The rock in the hands of the monkeys to us, if we must visualise, is our functions. The rock is our ability to compute, collect, match and record before making a decision. We apply it to everything. Now we apply it to ourselves, our minds, our thoughts and therefore the effect that is consciousness. Since we are far from reductively understanding how we biomechanically do this, consciousness remains larger than us.

Consciousness is not memory. It is not senses, it is not awareness, it may or may not one day be reducible to mathematical equation. But it never will be anything without the human experience of it. Every inquiry has to start with the self and as much as that is okay for anything we want to study and understand, looking into consciousness that way will not give us an answer other than what we already know. Within the human experience, consciousness exists. It will adapt to be the best fit for the experience of being a human but that is all it will do. Negate the whole self and there is no awareness of consciousness.

So let’s call it a day, let’s collect ourselves for a marginal moment without the need for self and know that we are ‘just’ a being using the conscious state to ‘be’. If that answer does not suffice, continue. If it does, let’s still continue. If like me, you have now learnt, there is only just human experience then let’s just continue in the search for the most satisfactory human experiences.

Maybe the only way we can navigate our being is by allowing ourselves be carried away.