To friends and acquaintances interested in philosophy, AGI, physics, a new blog post:
https://linas.org/blog/2026/09/subjective-being-ness-follows-from-free-will/ The subjective experience of being, living, existing, feeling, experiencing and acting arises precisely because we have free will, because we have the ability to direct and create a future. I claim more: being trapped in the here-and-now is a fact of physics; it can be mathematized. I claim that any agent with executive control over it’s future will also feel alive and aware and experience the subjective inner life of feelings and emotions. This includes not just animals, but also plants and even bacteria. The ingress of possible futures from the Platonic realm into physical reality happens directly in the here-and-now, and the willful selection of possible futures manifests as conscious awareness of the subjective self. This essay is an attempt to put a dent in the "hard problem of consciousness" by placing a mathematical, physical foundation under it. I hope you enjoy it. (p.s. no LLM's or AI's were used to write this; these are my words. It took several years to put this together.) -- Linas Vepstas ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T9e51fc70bbc4e9fc-M0fa22591b0ade2ee29b2a891 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
