[part one]
More random thoughts on the mystery of awareness

Computer hard drives inhabit platonic realms of pure order.
Given enough time and power, any computer can solve any finite problem. The Cray 1 supercomputer of the mid-1970s, less powerful than a Nintendo Wii, would need a thousand years to finish a calculation a 2010 supercluster could perform in less than a day.
In another thirty years, some computers may become powerful enough to understand the previous sentence. Society will change in ways no one can predict when awareness can be directly created and controlled.
According to the best current theories, the human mind is the sum of many simple, repeating processes. Quantity is quality.
Freud divided the mind into the id, ego, and superego: the Klingon, Vulcan and Jewish parts of the mind. The reality is much stranger.
When it finally comes, the explanation of the great mystery won't feel like a sudden, great insight. It will probably be a confusing amalgamation.

The most important piece of the puzzle is the mystery of complexity.
Someone is sitting down, not thinking about anything in particular: that is what the number quadrillion feels like.
The neuronal state of the human brain at any moment is incredibly complex. About one kilogram of cells have to constantly rearrange their connections to create even the most casual thoughts. The most casual thought of an ant is more complex than the detailed cellular anatomy of an ant itself. An ant has only a few milligrams of cells.
Even the simplest sensation requires a collection of facts too long to recite in a lifetime.

Despite all this, humans can appear incredibly dumb.
Ultimately, awareness may turn out to be relatively simple, like the humming of an immense machine.
The great mystery is how so little remains of so much. Only a few pertinent facts fill the subject's consciousness at any time. Millions of possible thoughts almost happened, leaving no trace.
It's a matter of incomplete analogies. Minds can't really understand anything, therefore they can understand everything.

Somehow, minds can directly sense their own full complexity. Every element improves the whole. Awareness appears to encompass the known universe, including itself.
It could just be a memory illusion. Humans may only be fully aware when they're thinking about awareness.

A human-level AI would have to be able to answer, or at least process, any question.
For example: if the universe suddenly turned into its own mirror image, would anyone notice the change?
Compare the following two names:
Horner
Homer
A visual gap of less than half a millimeter seen from half a meter away can be instantly processed, in the same way that the words 'version' and 'virgin' are recognized as homonyms.

A mind is the index of its environment.
It doesn't really store data but connections in time and space, real and imaginary.
The connections don't formally describe reality but only its outline, using as many shortcuts as possible, relying on the unchanging environment to store most of the data. That's why you can't accurately draw the cast of Family Guy from memory.
Every memory is a competing network of links.
In the future, the neural nets for different languages in a human brain may be separately colorized and made visible.

The bigger the brain, the larger the fraction of resources devoted to internal communications. Almost half the human cortex is white matter, representing long-range connections. There is a clear combinatorial limit to how much information can be processed at once.
Awareness may be extremely wasteful, an evolutionary shortcut that has neared its biological limit. Raw complexity is easier to generate than deep insight.
Animal awareness may be almost as intense as human perception, but vastly more focused. Squids are surprisingly clever but they have little long-term memory.
The human brain has reached a natural size limit, at least in its current configuration.
It already contains many protective features to prevent runaway thought processes. One of the most effective defenses is laziness. Another important evolutionary tool is depression, which has evolved to confine the sufferer to a stable location. Depression tends to lock people in place. It's the inevitable result of tens of thousands of generations of war and famine, a way to suppress all unproductive activities. Sometimes, the brains of long-term sufferers shrink in size, literally vanishing into thin air. The very notion of change is blocked.

Inside the brain are many 'mini-brains'.
Traits are organized hierarchically by such structures as the hippocampus, ruled by pain and pleasure. Obsolete priorities are erased by the tendrils of new thoughts.
Awareness is constantly sorting the mind's priorities. A flowchart would represent different brain sections: the top layer (the cortex), many secondary layers in the mid-brain (only a few of which are active at once), and countless autonomous responses.
The latest research has identified hundreds of separate structures, and many connections between them.

Awareness is context, the boundary of all permissible thoughts. Situation X may be impossible or vital.
Imagine a breaking news bulletin that the world will be destroyed by a passing black hole eleven years from now. The reaction would be different from watching a movie with this plot. A dimly seen lion at the end of the street causes a different impression than a high-definition IMAX lion.

This brings us to the videogame rendering metaphor of awareness. The way games represent virtual worlds could tell us something about how the brain experiences them.
Only the videogame metaphor can explain why the moon looks bigger when it's low on the horizon, even though it really isn't. The visual cortex uses differently sized 'windows' to scan the horizon and the sky.
In a lucid dream or a hallucination, the 'mental screen' keeps adding new layers on top of the others, overwriting earlier elements.
Images far more vivid than reality itself can be built up. To some individuals this happens three or four times a night.
Most people have experienced tens of thousands of strange trips that were extremely significant at the time, with impossibly complex plotlines and evolving social settings.
Dreams can also simulate dangerous situations, with forgotten flashes of terror leaving permanent changes.

The philosophical significance of drugs has also been underestimated. Drugs like Mescaline variants and certain leaf and toad extracts allow many complex insights and facts to be represented at once, a virtual cosmos of distant and subtle connections. Most of them are of course nonsense, but not necessarily all.
Seen through a brain scan, the most complex possible insight a human could ever have about reality might be indistinguishable from an extreme LSD trip.




The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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