Ivan Bogachev

Consciousness and self-awareness. They affect our behavior. But how do you technically recognize yourself in data?

I see a system as conscious if it saves and extracts data in real time. If you stop all data flows, the consciousness goes away. Complex systems may have many data channels connected to their memory. We can see different levels of consciousness, depending on which set of channels is active at the moment.

If you have a memory, a bunch of sensors, and data channels to connect everything, you may start to react to things in a structured manner. On the lower levels of evolution, where random mutations affect everything, we would expect to see all sorts of odd reactions. They don't have to make any logical sense to us. Natural selection will take care of them.

If your system is functionally independent from other things, it would be very convenient to mark sensors or channels as internal or external. You get that mutation, sooner or later.

These are simple binary flags. It definitely works on the level of bacteria. They don't necessarily have enough brains to understand what they're doing in detail, but they collect data and use it to guide their behavior in the environment.

At this moment your system is aware of the fact that there is you and there is an environment. And it's not the same. This is the most primal version of self-awareness that you can get.

You would probably say that this is far from our human self-awareness. Yes. But we add more internal sensors and connect data channels in loops. This is where the real magic begins.

You may observe data extraction from your memory. Now you're aware that you're aware. You can clearly see your selfies being used. Some people would probably argue that this is where you get the "real" consciousness and self-awareness.

If you have intelligence and work with rules, you may observe their creation. You make your own decisions! This data comes from your internal channels. It's yours! It's your will! Philosophers may call this an illusion, in the sense that this will is not free from prior causes, but it's a functional part of the system anyway. You won't be a human without it.

New sensors. More loops. More data. More rules. More bizarre effects. Eventually you pass the mirror test. But. It's not a functional self-awareness test. It's an IQ test. It's not enough to distinguish yourself from the environment. That's easy. You need to work with Euclidean relations in your data to pass the mirror test. We have to be aware of that.

We suffer from a 99 languages problem. Let's take free will for instance. One word. But. Psychologists may say that you use it to change your life. Physicists say it's impossible. Politics say it exists, but we don't want you to have it. Priests argue about freedom from god and mortal sins. Philosophers... you know, philosophers. It's a kindergarten. Every boy says that he is the real man and knows the truth.

In every field people look at the same universe. They just have different coordinate systems. We should be able to use geometric transformations to move all data into one system.

It's not just a simple linguistic translation word to word, but a projection, system to system. We can keep most of the relationships between data points and make a coherent picture using data from several fields simultaneously.

All coordinate systems should be interchangeable in our context. We can make a choice using our aesthetic preferences alone, but some options will be more convenient in practice.

For example, in physics, we have an axis from determinism towards randomness. It's hard to work with it. Data tends to be stretched between two extremes. It's either "pretty sure it's determined" or "pretty sure it's not". Our computers don't have enough precision to work with things in between.

It looks like you need free will to get away from determinism, but then you are immediately thrown into randomness. We can't work efficiently with complex models of reality in the middle.

If we get some inspiration from pagans, we may choose another axis, from order to chaos. It's similar, but it's not the same one. Data appears on our screens in a different shape.

You need the same free will to get away from order, but instead of two extremes we clearly see a spectrum. Some things can be more structured or more chaotic. We can work with that.

Wills look like proper forces now. They push you along the axis, free will in one direction and will to live in the opposite one. We see how they affect our society, how do you use them to make choices, how do you actually build them, why people may see them differently, etc. Everything suddenly works. We can compare our notes and make new theories.

Of course, every boy in the kindergarten will say that this is not the real free will and chaos is not true randomness. Exactly! That's the whole point. This approach is a cosmic compromise. It moves everything in one place and helps to see the big picture. We need it to build new things. Then you can project data back to your home field and use it in the "right" way.

The tree of evolution is gigantic. How do we work with it? We choose a place to start, and travel along the edges from there.

There are two distinct ways of traveling that may show us the process of evolution of matter from different perspectives.

We can choose some place and just walk around. This is what biologists do. They choose some organism and follow it. Mutation happened? We go that way. New environment? Turn over there! Predators ate your test subject? Ouch. Next one!

We may see increasing complexity or decreasing one. We can walk in circles. We observe minor mutations, gradual changes, and collect data with great precision.

We can study non-living systems in the same way. And produce never-ending debates about the borders between life and not life. Technically, the biological evolution, as we know it, is a special case. There are identical processes in different fields. We just may have a personal interest in this one.

Alternatively, we can travel from the center in a straight line. We'll have a constantly increasing complexity, evolution in a general sense, but no good subjects to follow. It's more like a theoretical travel across our data.

Subatomic particles. Self-replication. Single-celled organisms. Don't forget the big things. Stars. Planets. Ocean here. Volcano there. We get ecosystems. Predators eat prey. Machines collect data. And, eventually, we meet an alien civilization with nuclear reactors, space rockets, holy wars, and toilet humor.

This process is the same travel across the same tree, as with biological evolution. We fly at the speed of light in one direction, instead of passively orbiting around some particular subject, but we look at the same universe.

Since we have to travel fast to cover everything, we lose precision. We don't see species-specific details, but get the opportunity to study the universal patterns instead.

Major physical limitations. Logic. Energy conversion cycles. Inevitable structural parts in various systems. Invariants in behavior. Predefined sets of diseases. The longer you look, the weirder it gets. Patterns are literally everywhere.

There is no right or wrong here. Both ways of traveling have their roles in the development of the theory of everything. We need both the big picture and the fine details. Our knowledge is an organism in the same tree at the end. Combine it. Mutate it. Just don't lead it to extinction.

I'm more interested in answering the question "how the machine works?" first, rather than speculating on "how it sees itself?" with no blueprints on hand. But there are some limitations to the process that we can predict for any system. Let's dive into that.

In order to save any picture of anything, we need a memory mechanism. Then we add sensors to collect data and channels to transfer it into that memory. Once an image is created, we can use it.

Sometimes we have degenerate cases, like where the sensor and memory are located in the same place and we could say that the channel has zero length. Think about a film camera.

But, technically, that's it. We don't need much to save data. Later, we'll need a processor to process everything, but not right now.

If a system has sensors to scan itself, it'll be able to make a selfie. And yes, if we have enough energy, we can make this work for every part of it.

Series of snapshots of sensors and data channels allow us to monitor things. Ideally, it's a more or less real-time log of everything that happens with data in the system.

Logs constantly accumulate. In the real world we may have recent copies, but we don't save all logs from the beginning of time. We'll need to constantly add more storage for that.

Snapshots of data in memory can be done as well. But again, we can't create a full copy of a storing device and save it in itself. It'll not fit. We can make a partial image. By saving these images, we create a history of some part of the system.

Most likely we don't have sensors for everything. This means that our logs and snapshots include just some part of the story. There are things that we don't see. It's expected.

On average, people associate data in recent logs with consciousness and qualia, data in history with self-identity, and data in unmonitored channels with unconscious.

Some would say that our hardware is a material body and data is an immaterial soul. We definitely have some functional differences here. However, data is the same matter or energy as everything else, so this is just poetry, not physics.

Logs and snapshots show us events in the past. Looking at them, the system sees itself not only partially, but always has outdated information as well. And it doesn't depend on how the observer module actually works.

How do you see yourself in this situation?

Are you the selfie, or the system that looks at its selfie?

Emotions are a signaling part of the self-diagnosing system. Normally, you connect it to the decision-making unit and pass data to it. If that unit doesn't use this data, some will call it an intellectualization. It's like a defense, but the symptoms aren't specific. The causes can be different.

First situation. Your system works fine, but your resources are limited. You need to be efficient. In this case, you may play with priorities and mark some data as not important.

This is what they teach you to do in traditional martial arts. You're aware of your status, but you don't use that data to make decisions at the moment. Good news or bad ones. It doesn't matter. Keep the balance. You need intelligence here.

Second situation. You got an overamplified signal in the system. It can easily fry your decision-making unit. Your fuses stop it automatically. No intelligence. Just a fuse.

You lose all data from some part of your system. It's not because you created a logical rule to ignore it, but because your safety system got triggered. Your data can still be there, but you can't get to it until your fuses reset. You may measure tension in the system and feel isolated in some sense.

Third situation. Your system lost energy. This is what we expect to see in schizophrenia, when the completely opposite processes annihilate each other and constantly waste energy.

You have to cut power in some places. Self-monitoring system is optional, so you can safely shut it down and keep the main system running. Your fuses are intact. You don't have any rules to ignore data. You just don't have any data for now.

Interestingly enough, sick people, who understand that some system doesn't work and adapt their rules in advance, can be suspiciously stable in catastrophic environments. Everybody around is getting overloaded and confused and they don't.

Also, there is a fourth scenario, where the physical damage to data channels prevents you from using information. It's a whole new level of problems, but it gives us similar results.

These situations look almost identical from the outside. You use your upper brain and you don't get unbalanced by data of the specific type. It's easy to accidentally see them as one.

Next time you blame somebody for being not emotional enough, pay attention to details. Not every person is identical, and the most popular second scenario for intellectualization doesn't require intelligence at all. Keep that in mind.