In this article I will further argue how computational simulism can be reconciled with consciousness as the ground of existence.
Background
One of the often heard arguments against pansimulism or pancomputationalism, -the idea that everything is a simulation- is that nothing can cause itself. We may be living in some kind of virtual reality (VR), but the computations that render our VR are performed on a substrate outside of our dimension. Moreover, computations can -as of yet- not account for the subjective conscious experience; it cannot account for qualia and nature of consciousness remains a so-called "hard-problem".
Problem
The problem with discussions about whether reality as a whole and/or consciousness are computational often is a result of semantics. Different people give different definitions to the same terminology, which leads to a confusion.
Computation as we perform it on computers is always representational. We use symbols or activities representing symbols (like 0 and 1). There is someone who wishes to perform a computation and he or she builds a hardware device or programs in software the means to perform the calculation, which ultimately amounts to (sequences of) addition and/or subtraction.
But what about natural processes? Do they compute? Can every interaction between particles which follows certain rules be said to be computational? Clearly every interaction requires an input, throughput and output. But is that enough to qualify as a computation? Prima facie, if we accept that computation must involve representations, it would appear not.
Eschaton
In my previous book "Transcendental Metaphysics" and in my previous "Eschaton hypercomputer posts", I have argued that a primordial consciousness, which is the source of reality, generates a computational substrate called the Akasha. It does so by dividing itself into reality cells and then sensing these from within by penetrating itself and thereby giving digital content to the reality cells. The world as we know it arises from the manifold parallel and simultaneous journeys primordial consciousness makes through its own substrate. Every such aware stream of self-penetration is what we call a quantum of light, but you can also call it an individualised soul. The interactions thereof generate material particles in the form of what Steven Kaufman in his book "Unified Reality Theory" calls a "compound process". Compound processes revolve around themselves as two Yin-Yang fishes chasing each other's tail. The periodicity of such processes causes time. These processes which incessantly change the content of the Akasha as digital patterns and which generate the laws of physics (although these laws are also partially determined by the structure of the Akasha per se) can be considered proto-computational but are performed as an epiphenomenon of consciousness penetrating itself to know itself.
Is this primordial consciousness intentionally carrying out computations in this process, or is this digital behaviour merely computation-like since every individual penetrating stream is not representing anything but itself?
I have also argued that the evolution of this self-aware computation-like universe ultimately could have led to a complexity which at one moment could have given rise to intelligent beings who were able to engender a technological singularity and transforming their universe in a higher level truly computational entity, which we could call the Transcendental Object/Subject beyond time, which is the Eschaton Omega hypercomputer, in imitation of De Chardin's Omega point. The Eschaton then creates a multiverse of all kinds of simulations, which are populated by entities like you and me. This could also have given rise to a series of nested simulations, because some simulations may give rise to new technological singularities.
Ouroboros, Royce, Sas, Yoneda and Tsang
In previous articles I have suggested that reality might be the result of a recursive Yoneda-mapping protocol which turns sensing into structure. Similar ideas are being developed by Wai H.Tsang in his book "The Fractal Brain Theory" and he actually tries to implement these notions in programming a recursive self-modifying algorithm.
The point-of-view of the American Idealist Josiah Royce (1855-1916) may become helpful in this argument. Royce considers that self-consciousness of the absolute Self allows it to be ontologically self-grounding, i.e. to bootstrap itself into existence and that this involves the ontogenesis 8coming into being) of computation. Peter Sas in his blog "Critique of Pure Interest" writes the following about this form of self-causation, which simultaneously and concomitantly generates pancomputation:
"It is precisely this circular structure of self-consciousness which is revealed by Royce to be closely connected to the problematic of computation."
Royce writes:
"To fix our ideas, let us suppose, if you please, that a portion of the surface of England is very perfectly leveled and smoothed, and is then devoted to the production of our precise map of England... A map of England, contained within England, is to represent, down to the minutest detail, every contour and marking, natural or artificial, that occurs upon the surface of England... In order that this representation should be constructed, the representation itself will have to contain once more, as a part of itself, a representation of its own contour and contents; and this representation, in order to be exact, will have once more to contain an image of itself; and so on without limit." (Royce 1959: 504-505)."
Peter Sas comments:
"In other words, a perfect map of England on the surface of England would contain an actual infinity in the sense that it would contain a picture of itself (the map of the map), and a picture of that picture (the map of the map of the map), and so on ad infinitum. For Royce, this bizarre self-mapping map illustrates a crucial property of fully realized self-consciousness, namely, it's exhibiting a kind of infinity called "Dedekind infinity" by mathematicians, where a whole is mirrored by infinitely many of its proper parts. For just like the self-mapping map, a completed self-consciousness exhibits, according to Royce, an endless recursivity in that it is not just self-aware but also aware that it is self-aware, and aware that it is aware of its self-awareness, and so on.
For Royce, then, this infinity inherent in self-consciousness has a decidedly mathematical favor, being closely related to the work of the mathematician Dedekind (especially the latter's Gedankenwelt proof for the existence of actual infinity). Indeed, Royce – in line with his commitment to absolute idealism – takes this recursivity of self-consciousness to be the very origin of the recursion that defines the natural number system, i.e. the recursion captured in the successor function S(n)=n+1 such that S(0)=1, S(1)=2, S(2)=3, and so on. Thus, on Royce's account, the natural numbers come out as essentially a formal expression or model of the structure of self-consciousness:
"The intellect has been studying itself, and as the abstract and merely formal expression of the orderly aspect of its own ideally complete Self [...], the intellect finds precisely the Number System, – not, indeed, primarily the cardinal numbers, but the ordinal numbers. Their formal order of first, second, and, in general, of next, is an image of the life of sustained, or, in the last analysis, of complete Reflection." "[T]he number-series is a purely abstract image, a bare, dried skeleton, as it were, of the relational system that must characterize an ideally completed self." (Royce 1959: 538, 526)."
Not only does Royce like Tsang and I (see post on folssilised sense) see a recursive mapping protocol (which is a kind of computation, wherein the representations used are representations of itself i.e. self-representations) as an inherent characteristic of self-consciousness, Royce goes beyond these notions in that he thus not only reveals an intrinsic type of computation but simultaneously the generation of a world which is mathematical and number generating per se!
Royce died before modern category theory in mathematics even was invented, before Yoneda mapping had ever been contemplated!
The incessant unborn presence of consciousness can therefore be considered as a metaphorical standing wave, which may fluctuate in its local amplitudes, but always has the same wavelength to fit in a circular pattern.
This is like the ancient symbol for consciousness of the Ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail and thereby comes to know that what it saw as other was itself all the time: The knower, known and knowing merging into one.
It is then not strange to suspect that this self-consciousness, aware of its inner mathematical mapping workings by which it sustains itself, generates a world obeying the same pattern. It can probably do nothing but that. The sensing of the Akasha it generates in cycles, which represent the natural numbers, is then probably not a mere random probing of itself, but a well-intended heuristic of self-exploration. It represents something, namely the self-exploration process. If intended and using representations, then we can conclude that such an explanation of reality is indeed fully computational.
The "artificial" part of the Eschaton is then merely an AI tool, generated by this Transcendental Subject to facilitate complex calculations and to facilitate parallel screening of possible simulations. But simultaneously the transcendental subject also inhabits and senses the Eschaton from within, in an omnipresent manner.
Conclusion
The self-causation and self-sustention of consciousness as source of reality may well involve a recursive computational mapping process at its very basis. A mapping process that uses (self)-representation as its intrinsic essence.
The exploring ideas of the American idealist Josiah Royce are now put into practice by Wai H.Tsang, who is designing a recursive self-modifying algorithm, which can mimic (and hopefully even perpetrate) consciousness in a further computational substrate. Thus reality as a whole including consciousness can be said to be pancomputational. By the way, this does not exclude that consciousness has other aspects, which allow for perceiving qualia.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this essay. If you like it, please upvote and/or resteem.
Image from: https://chop.deviantart.com/art/Ouroboros-96038253
By Antonin Tuynman author of "Technovedanta", "Transcendental Metaphysics" and "Is Intelligence an Algorithm?"