Hi John, Thank you!
>From what I can tell, communications is vital for organizing suborganisms into superorganisms. Organizing people into corporations, organizing individual cells into organs, organizing the innards of a bacterium, organizing atoms into molecules; these are all communicative acts. But I'm a mathematician, so I'm trying to write down rules and axioms -- formulas -- that generically describe the communicative act. And theorems, lemmas about how/why the communicative act creates superorganisms. I dislike limiting myself to just automata and turing machines. These are deterministic, and fail to capture the full variety of dynamical systems. This is where almost all mistakes get made in these kinds of arguments, when conducted at the casual level. If you want to understand "what is reality?", you have to be a physicist. My attempts to do so have resulted in this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Linas/Articles -- those are the foundation stones that I use to attack the problem of consciousness and being-ness and willful action. -- Linas On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 3:01 AM John Rose via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T9e51fc70bbc4e9fc-Mb2dbf9091b8894579308331e> > -- Patrick: Are they laughing at us? Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T9e51fc70bbc4e9fc-M57f9a9c6edea46401c1c9000 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
