On Sunday, September 13, 2026, at 7:32 AM, Linas Vepstas wrote: > 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.
Linas, I’ve done some work on this consciousness thing. I think consciousness is simply communication protocol automata. Conscious experience then would involve data transmission. This might razor most or all consciousness theories, basically the shortest description length? It would mean everything possesses some consciousness even an atom. It allows measurability/estimability, panpsychism and a conscious universe. If you take that position it seems to make it easier to answer questions about it… for example, why does one person feel the color blue differently than another? Ans: Protocol automata differences in their visual neuro-chemoelectrical qualia stack. Humans are semi-heterogeneous multi-agent systems communally arriving at objective facts communicated from diverse subjective experiences. Using this def would mean that an LLM’s consciousness might be computable whereas a human's estimable. An “Aha moment” would be a change in protocol (consciousness) resulting in an increase in intelligence with a reduction in computational complexity. Psychedelic experiences similar, molecular tweaks in neurotransmission protocol. Membrane computing, organ linings are electrets, mind-body consciousness. Enhancing consciousness enhances intelligence when mathematically constructing consciousness as protocol, then panpsychism and pancomputationalism would go together. There may be a universal consciousness which I assume is a shortest description length base communication protocol automata on an informational fabric/substrate. A fabric might be Planck scale automata, fields, or other substrates like quantum hole topologies… the Universe as a unit may have the thickest consciousness, structures like galaxy filaments make this interesting where we are the universe experiencing itself. Could all this be wrong and it not be protocol? Certainly. And you could say that all I'm doing is describing protocol. Maybe that’s all it is. Following this, individual free choice is going to be about human diversity in their multi-agent system collective, its learning and survival. Agents make bad choices, causes injury, good choices the system learns, into complexity. Some agents have less of the free choice capability than others for various reasons. Also, from what I gather from ample research, and people shy away from this, some humans are able to access the past, and partially access the future. Naturally this typically has some socially protected status but in some cultures, particularly one I have relations to, it’s considered a normal part of the culture and I can personally vouch that this is routinely possible FWIW. How it works scientifically I’m not sure but also from what I gather is that time itself is multidimensional but I don’t understand the physics enough to voice speculations there. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T9e51fc70bbc4e9fc-Mb2dbf9091b8894579308331e Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
