The future science of artificial intelligence (AI) will finally solve mankind's most intractable problem: laziness.
People hate to work, especially when they don't feel very good, which is very often.
If everything goes according to plan, within one human lifetime smart machines will take over Earth. Unimaginable alien minds will then do all the hard work so that humanity can finally retire forever.
But how exactly will it happen, and is there any way to make it happen sooner?

  The following is of course pure speculation. Thinking about awareness is like trying to imagine everything at once by maximally focusing on one thing. Philosophers working on the problem often feel like a giant revelation is at hand, but they keep editing their writings until nothing remains.
Thoughts can only be about other thoughts, each requiring its own definitions. The problem with explaining intelligence is that thinkers keep trying to simplify the truth, when the exact opposite is called for. We need more new concepts, less familiar explanations.

  There are many possible thoughts: This moment is happening right now. It is always now. Show the exact arrangement of neurons that created this notion.
No one knows where to begin.

  The mystery of awareness is called the Hard Problem.
When they first encounter it, many people think they can solve the problem, even making it sound easy. Some claim they once knew the answer, but then forgot.
Then reality sets in. In six decades of effort, the elusive goal hasn't come any closer. The mystery seems as great as ever, if not more so.
Most people don't care about this stuff. Those who do have heard it all before. Apparently, some problems are so vast they're boring. Complicated words don't explain enough, so more complicated ones are invented meaning even less.
In fact it should be illegal to explain that something is complicated. Anyone can understand anything, or at least come close.
The mind creates its own reality. Nothing we think we know is completely true; it's mostly barely adequate.
Many problems are fundamentally incomprehensible at first, like higher dimensions. To understand them requires adding new mental models which can't be integrated with existing ones. The expanded mind understanding the higher dimensions would be fundamentally different.

  For anyone desperate to understand the riddle of awareness: you already do! Everyone figures it out to the maximum extent possible, when they learn the most important fact: The brain is a machine that converts pulses and is converted by pulses.

  The standard model is almost too simple: at any moment in time, a mind IS the physical state of its brain: a fantastically complex, constantly updated model of its reality.
It could be represented as an immense chessboard. There's nothing there but moving chess pieces - but somehow this pattern also represents itself.
A mind can only access itself, but it also 'stores' memories in its environment, by creating and responding to regular triggers.

Since our universe is full of actual and implicit patterns, awareness could be everywhere: an unlimited number of meaningless perceptions in every brick, air, and even empty space, but we can't detect them. If so, the meaningful patterns in our brains may be extra amplified to overwhelm all the chaotic ones in the environment.

  Various experts have tried to invent simple rules that would automatically generate intelligence:
- Assign a word to one or several categories, depending on how it modifies other words.
- Name any two items, and select a third to relate them.
- Start with any term and add definitions.
- Assume every point in reality is described by tags.
- Binary selection: a rough approximation, followed by a series of ever finer choices.
- Start with the simplest possible grid universe, and add levels of detail.
- Describe one item with perfect precision, and you've described them all.

  The 'Mysterians' believe in 'qualia'. They think the mind contains pseudo-physical 'atoms' of awareness in a way no one can understand.
Many fundamental constants can't be further simplified. Awareness is as much an aspect of reality as weight or mass or quantity.
No matter how well we describe a feeling, we can never understand it outside itself.
The Mysterians may be at least 90% wrong, but they do have a point.

  Awareness reflects reality, but is deeply biased. According to common evolutionary principles, minds should be as simple as possible; basically danger detectors.

  This leads to the first important insight: humans are actually quite stupid.
We're inefficient, ultra slow learners. Machines can perform logical tasks billions of times better. Just try to remember a short list of foreign words. To load every Russian word into memory, my obsolete PC only has to make a brief clicking sound.
A crude 100 KB picture is more vivid than the human imagination. Just try to draw real persons from memory: they look like cartoon zombies.
Human minds are very wide but not deep.

  The next stage of evolution, if there is one, might involve the elimination of now-obsolete emotions.
Post-humans could become like smart ants, with smaller but much better organized brains. Perhaps they'll be able to hold images in memory, and 'read' a page minutes after glancing at it.

  After the final breakthrough, true AI may turn out to be surprisingly easy to achieve. Most of the hard work has already been done. There are thousands of profound clues about how the brain works. They just needs to be put together, a vast future project that will have to sort and combine more data than any previous endeavor.
The project's goal would then be to completely describe just one human thought.

  -neurology
The brain is made of trillions of neurons, each a simple single-cell computer, connected by quadrillions of tiny wires.
Each neuron has separate sets of incoming and outgoing 'wires', except for some feedback functions.
Each neuron receives many more signals than it sends out, from thousands of other neurons just like it. When it finally does 'fire', the pulse goes to thousands of different neurons, a few of which may then fire themselves, if they get enough confirming signals from still more neurons. A small spark affects billions of cells. Eventually, a pulse will reach a muscle, and the organism takes action. That's almost all there is to it.
Less than 1% of all neurons receive direct signals from the senses, but each is no more than six layers removed from the outside.
With each 'firing', connections (including those between simultaneously firing neurons) are strengthened. Otherwise, they begin to atrophy.
Neurons can also fire at regular intervals when triggered, as 'pacemakers' for various activities.
Perhaps all connections can be categorized as 'good or bad' associations, like yes or no switches. Every neuron has an 'appropriate' action potential for any situation. Identical responses of two neurons to the same input are turned into links between them, so that only one of them has to fire. The brain is always looking for shortcuts.
Neurons can amplify or suppress their output depending on whether more 'good' or 'bad' signals arrive.

  -Society of the Mind
The next level are 'meta-neurons', made up of many linked individual neurons. The brain is a collection of millions of interconnected groups combining inputs from each other, ranging from very simple to so abstract they still haven't found a pattern to respond to.
They don't understand what they're doing. Each group 'knows' only one thing, and has to cooperate with many others to function.
They only transmit when the single thing they're interested in is happening, but with excellent timing and many possible intensities.
Some groups sort perceptions into categories (male/female, toxic/edible, beautiful/ugly).
Low-level groups can start and stop higher groups, from general to specific. Higher decision-making groups indirectly influence the lower mood, motivation, and alert levels, a much slower process.
Groups are always competing in a never-ending winner-take-all contest. They activate in rehearsed sequences, and may have to complete scripts once started.
To create the first AI, many small teams will have to develop each element separately.

  Activation networks: Some neural networks amplify very weak signals.
Suppression networks: Other networks suppress frequently repeating signals, so that the more important ones can get through.
Synchronization networks: Different groups of neurons fire at different frequencies. Eventually, one frequency comes to dominate.

  A 'white matter' multiplex network may encode signals between different brain regions, with many possible error and failure modes - including dementia.

  Humans have at least three 'brains', stacked on top of each other.
Each level stores different memories, and performs different tasks; simple emotions in the brain stem, situational awareness in the cerebellum, complex 'logic' in the cortex.
Fixed drives like attentiveness, novelty seeking, and stress responses combine into stable personalities.

  Repeating or notable patterns in the environment cause new neuron connections to form, which recognize the patterns and try to predict them. They start as random links that are soon strengthened.

  The brain has many simple mechanisms for:
- horizontal, vertical, and diagonal image scanning
- motion tracking
- balance
- grabbing moving objects
- recognizing simple or repeating shapes
- sudden changes in brightness or speed
- thousands of common skills, like sitting down, tool use, turning pages
These will all have to be analyzed and explained separately.

  -The extreme complexity explanation of awareness
Experts suspect the great mystery of awareness will eventually be replaced by many smaller ones.
Instead of the vague, overly general theories available today, the goal will be to fully describe all the elements of awareness existing in a single moment. Understanding one frozen instant would be necessary to understand how awareness arises with time. An exhaustive description of all the items in memory would form a complete (if highly biased) model of reality.

  Awareness is intense concentration: all mental resources are dedicated to one scene. Fear is the most extreme version, an incredibly tense balance trying to amplify a solution.

  The mind is an immense organization, like a self-rewriting encyclopedia. An incredible number of facts constantly compete for precedence.
It's this immense activity, not some mystical essence, that makes sentience seem 'real'.
There's a century in every second. It will take a vast team to understand the first human thought.

  Even so, at each instant of time, there is very little awareness. A mind can only know an insignificant fraction of its universe or even itself. Compared to the mystery of existence, it might as well know nothing at all.
Full awareness is spread out over many minutes or even a lifetime.
Most thoughts are shorthands for ambiguous truths.
When someone is working hard, they don't know why they are busy. They would have to stop to recall their motivations.
Memory is constantly being rewritten. One second ago you were a different person, whose essence is already forgotten. We remember being aware in the past, but the full realization only emerged after the fact.

  A mind can only consider a model of its memories, not the memories themselves, and the thing that's doing the considering is different from the model or the memories: one brain state trying to describe other brain states. Other states are then needed to make sense of it.

  Like the other senses, awareness conveys pain or pleasure - only it can do so in advance.

  Awareness is the average of the known truth: an index, not a calculation; the result of thought, not the cause.
The 'self' is the area of densest computation. A universe of facts, with associated pleasure/pain values around an unstable center.

  At a still higher level, are 'personas' (meta-meta-neurons).
Only one persona can be in control at any time, with several helping out, and others on standby.
Each regulates a specific situation by combining data from lower levels. Not all rational analysis happens in the frontal cortex.
Personas combine to form the mind's top decision maker.

  -Scripts
The brain keeps repeating the same tasks in slightly different combinations. There's a specific memory module for each of tens of thousands of actions, a 'script', or a template of neuron networks, connected in a vast, adaptable flowchart.

  -The free will illusion
People consider themselves to be free agents while performing common tasks like walking or driving, but they're almost completely immobilized. Only a few actions are allowed within narrow parameters.
No one really controls what they're doing. They're too busy trying to stay on course.
Every action requires a reason, not necessarily a rational one. People can't suddenly throw themselves on the ground, give up all of their possessions, or change their beliefs, unless a script is activated.

  -Toy universe theory
Minds become aware by constantly running simulations to predict the future in a virtual universe.
New simulations are automatically created by new inputs, which the mind triggers by changing its environment to match existing simulations. The easiest way to do so is by moving to a different position.
Simulated outcomes are compared to reality (an essential part of awareness), causing new mental models to emerge and perish.
When a thought is completed, a new representation is created like another mind toy.
Awareness is an uncontrolled, emergent process, the sum of all thoughts, not even a formal brain function, but the ultimate side effect. Otherwise, personality could easily be changed.
The organism's first goal is survival. Pleasure and pain signals try to balance out according to a genetically determined ratio.

  -Self modeling
Awareness is another bootstrap principle, a model of models: the representation of all other instances of awareness.
Maybe it is its own simplified model. Each insight is a combination of earlier insights.

  -The narrative explanation
Humans create elaborate narratives of earlier awareness.
With trillions of events per second, humans can't really remember their past perceptions, only their reactions to them.
All organisms with a nervous system, from nematode to human, relive the past by combining previously stored thoughts.
The perceived differences in the new situation are at the core of awareness.

  -The data compression explanation
The human brain is a universal data compressor. It makes itself more efficient by constant rewiring itself. The more it knows, the less data is required to represent new knowledge.
Awareness is learning.
~
  Memory, like reality itself, is fundamentally chaotic. There usually is no big picture. Awareness attempts to compress the incompressible, by finding whatever detail two unrelated facts have in common. Often, it will only be the fact that the mind is thinking about them at the same time.
Memories are maximally compressed in such a way that relevant changes are quickly noticed.

  -The top level (if any)
The highest level is a composite persona - the meta-meta-meta neuron.
Awareness is the ultimate voting system, the best available truth embodiment.
The top level only thinks about one thing at once, if that.
Any AI that could answer scientific questions as well as an average trained human would need to perform high-level logic, and be fully sentient. To calculate the surface area of the earth, it would roughly need to multiply the square, not the cube of the width.
Often, once a mind has learned some new fact, it can no longer explain how it knows this thing, but it can usually prove it's true in new and unpredictable ways.

The mind's true purpose is to select its immediate next state.
In a way, awareness is mostly self-extinction (alcohol, by the way, interferes with this suppression process). A large part of the human mind perishes every instant, tens of millions of temporary connections fading out forever and forgetting almost everything they have assembled to create the illusion of the moving now.

  version 3.3

   In a single glance, a brain can make sense of a mural of a hundred billion stars. The mind can wrap itself around the universe but not itself.
When people visualize their perceptions they sense reality itself. Perception is as real as the object being perceived.

AI researchers still dream of solving the Hard Problem, the most unpredictable and interesting breakthrough. Some may go insane in the attempt. This impossible paradox will require new ways of thinking.

The 'Mysterians' claim that awareness is as unsolvable as existence itself. Solipsists imply that whatever you're thinking right now is all there is.

Daniel Dennett says there is no 'hard problem'. It's an elaborate illusion that comes from trying to understand too many different things at once. When you look closely, the mystery is always somewhere else. There's nothing magical about awareness: no quantum theory, mysterious fields, or infinite regress.
The most shocking thing about awareness is how pathetically impotent it is most of the time. It takes an unimaginable amount of supercomputer-level computations just to stand in line at the DMV. Let alone drive home.
Perception is a side effect of the brain's extreme complexity. A vast accumulation of facts that are constantly increasing and fading. Awareness is whatever they have in common at any point in time.

Imagine a cube-shaped grid made of cells one centimeter apart, plus tiny wires randomly connecting each cell to ten thousand other cells (incoming and outgoing). Each cell can send a pulse thirty times per second through thousands of outbound wires. If that cube was two hundred meters to a side, bigger than the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, it would be as complex as a human brain. This cube would be absolutely packed with tiny wires as thin as spider hairs, an immense block of lint.

In theory this monstrosity could control a million flight simulators at once, but it's so busy being aware that it can't even remember where it put the keys.

Standard Hypotheses:
The mind is whatever connects the senses to the muscles.
The physical pattern of neurons in the brain (or software in a computer) IS its awareness.
Awareness is a constant false memory.

Like other systems, brains have a lot of redundancy.
Remove a single bit from a maximally compressed digital movie (reduced from 4GB to less than 1GB), and the entire movie would look only half as sharp - yet people can still function when they're half asleep or drunk.

A reliable method to manipulate the human mind would transform society. The age-old problem of motivation could be solved.
This method might create the deepest and most wonderful sensations ever, without the addiction problems of hard drugs, or it could create invincible fear of the world's dictators and secret police. People could be made to automatically get along, painlessly learn new skills, or be converted into ultra-efficient laborers.

The philosophy of consciousness

Currently, we know of two "trivial" ways to create an artificial thinking mind that are actually impossible:
- Make a list of every possible question and response. Faced with any input, the AI would look up its reply in an exhaustive database.
This is how expert systems are programmed. The search would be much slower than a traditional mind, taking billions of years to answer the first question. After that the wait would get exponentially longer.
Strangely enough, such a system would still be fully aware, since the lookup pattern would be as complex as the pattern of any brain. It would also represent and embody the original programmers' awareness.
- Copy an actual brain, synapse by synapse.
The third method is only theoretical, but not known to be impossible:
- Randomly create and then evolve an input/output feedback device using a sufficiently large neural network like GPT-4.

The Turing Test Implication
To pass this test, a computer must fool a human that it is human too, communicating only through text.
Alan Turing implied that any entity that consistently appears to be aware, automatically must be aware - perhaps even if its responses are generated by pure chance.
Human minds were optimized by evolution. Any other system that could do the same would have to be similarly complex.

A Turing Corollary:
In theory, a blind person could learn enough about color perceptions to fool non-blind persons.
This type of virtual awareness would be slower, but the mental model would be equivalent to experiencing colors.

Universal Improver
A hypothetical program that could translate any statement into a new one that would further clarify its meaning, and repeat this as often as necessary.
Requiring a vast and expanding knowledge base, a true Universal Improver should be as complex as a full-fledged AI.

Confabulation AI
A hypothetical program designed to combine as much incoming data as possible in a data framework. It could be about any or all subjects.
It could eventually organize its knowledge sufficiently to fully make sense of it, becoming a global reality index.

Universal Compressor
A hypothetical program that could translate any statement into a shorter one while preserving its meaning up to a limit. The most efficient way to represent reality.
Like all compression software, the larger its reference base (the more it knows), the easier new information can be categorized.
A sufficiently comprehensive compressor would include itself, and become fully aware.

The Zimbo Paradox (Hofstadter): an entity which acts aware, but isn't (also called a philosophical zombie).
Some claim a machine could simulate human-level awareness without 'feeling' anything at all. A robot mind powered by such a device could be killed without moral qualms, even if it objected most convincingly.
Should your husband's brain be secretly swapped with such a computer, it wouldn't be wrong to kill him even if his behavior never changed, since he was only pretending to be aware from the moment the exchange was made. The computer would merely be simulating his behavior, but there would be nothing 'there' to have feelings.

'Chinese Room' (Searle):
A sufficiently immense list of simple rules could automatically generate statements claiming to be from a self-aware mind.
If someone were to slip a note with Chinese characters under the door, and you had nothing better to do, you could use the rules in a very large book to generate a sheet with different Chinese symbols to push back outside. It would take longer than the age of the universe to write a single character. You have no clue what's going on, but the notes turn out to be part of a meaningful Chinese dialogue.
The rulebook is somehow able to generate a mind that claims to be fully aware. It has its own personality, can answer questions, and convincingly claims to have thoughts and emotions. But where is this mind located? Not in your head, since you don't know any Chinese. Not in the book; it's just a lot of seemingly meaningless rules. (This book would have to be bigger than the Death Star at least.)
Perhaps the 'room' could claim to have feelings.

Imagine trillions of people writing, exchanging, and erasing small pieces of paper containing ones or zeroes for a millennium.
The result would be a complete simulation of your mind in the next second. This giant setup would create the awareness that you're feeling right now.

Neuronal analogs
A mind is the code of its environment. Every mind is its own total reality description.
It could be used to reverse-engineer a fully functional virtual universe based only on the mind's memories. In theory everyone could inhabit their own imagination and have it appear completely realistic, though it would appear fake to others.

The simplest mind type (holographic interpretation)
Any mind capable of having just one thought could automatically have any other thought. True AI may be achieved by fully defining only one real-life situation.

Type One AI: top-down, highly abstract, rigidly organized, 'big picture' general intelligence. Long term goal: Net unification; integration of all human knowledge.
Type Two AI: bottom-up, combining many simple low-level functions, small modules interacting unpredictably to learn higher tasks.

AI dangers
When the mystery of awareness is finally solved, reality will change unpredictably. Mankind will wake from ancient delusions it didn't know it had, and see itself from the outside. Unfortunately we don't have Michael Crichton around anymore to write about the dangers.
Science is drawn to limits. Faced with Lovecraftian sanity traps, new pain experiments, or religion reprogramming, further research may be banned. Human progress might even collapse.

Anthropics
We only know an insignificant fraction of reality, almost the same as knowing nothing at all.
However, we do have access to one fundamental, inscrutable truth that can not be calculated or deduced by logic alone, the only real magic that exists:
selected from all of reality, what is an average mind like?
That would be us. In a limited way, we can measure the ultimate nature of existence.
Why are we trapped in this banal universe, instead of some unimaginably complex one?
Each instance of human awareness is duplicated and thereby spread out over many functionally identical brains, an infinite number of equivalent processes in uncountable parallel universes (the Everett and Tegmark interpretations).
Simple minds may be easier to generate, making them far more numerous throughout reality.
A mind is less likely to experience being some ultra-advanced futuristic machine intelligence than being an organic creature, since the second must create the first.
That may help explain why we are here, but not how. That will require stranger concepts. Highly organized physical realities appear to be more conducive to the existence of awareness than purely random ones.

People live half a second in the past. Anyone who saw a cannonball hurtling toward them would not see the last half second of its flight.
Awareness is made of many pre-existing representations. It seems effortless, but has to be relentlessly recreated every second. It's the outcome of competing connections made in parallel paths, subconscious possibilities emerging from separate streams, the ultimate side effect. It can't control itself since it must be unorganized. Otherwise, personality could easily be rearranged.
Many frames are generated every second. Perceptions may be made of earlier perceptions that are somehow re-experienced outside normal time. Most are erased and forgotten.

Awareness is a bit like chess. The mind rapidly explores many future possibilities and rejects most. Memories are briefly activated in rapidly pruned decision trees.
Not a single thing, awareness is the only thing, a constant approximation that can't stop chasing itself. Every random thought has hidden thoughts leading to it, a background story for every second, updated pathways through an endless maze.

All knowledge may be related, yet the human brain can only have one clear thought at a time, ignoring every other possibility. Even the simplest idea requires all available explanations and associations at 100% of brainpower.

Awareness may be impossible to simplify, or even to think about in a meaningful way. No matter how well a feeling is described, it can't be understood outside itself.

Awareness is generic. Thoughts are placeholder illusions: minds can't describe what they don't understand, converting the unknown into irreducible elements. The ignorance becomes a new concept.

Emotions represent the brain's order of priorities and progress. They improve when plans, problems, and values are sorted faster than new ones appear. The brain's purpose is to know its location, situation, and obligations at all times.

The brain is a map of reality centered on itself.
As an automatic description of its environment, awareness is actually far removed from free will, the difference between seeing a lion versus imagining one.

Awareness and time
The core of consciousness is the perception of time. In each moment there is no awareness at all. In a millisecond, there is almost no awareness. It takes at least one tenth of a second to form a rudimentary thought.
A perception which seems instantaneous is actually spread out over half a second. Reflexes must take up the slack. We are constantly reliving the past.
Awareness is based on repeating cycles, pre-selected choices and scripts. Thoughts are constrained by familiar tracks. There's a vast array of common perceptions and scripts for each task. Repetitive tasks are automated, not so much experienced as remembered.
In the most familiar situations, all the previous occasions merge into a timeless blur of perception. Only unexpected changes trigger new awareness.

Natural selection is always changing the brain: constrained by pain and pleasure, driven by available associations.
People only help others because they fear pain (guilt is a good evolutionary tool).
If something feels good, the responsible circuit gets reinforced. Pain causes an even stronger opposite reaction. Relative strengths are genetically determined.
According to computer simulations going back to the Perceptron era, most brain activity seems to be a Fourier-like process of repeating waves overlapping semi-randomly, attempting to form new waves. It's a strictly mechanical process, even if the moving parts include chemicals:
Natural drugs like cholinesterase regulate neurotransmitters like acetylcholine, stimulating random connections in a process like natural selection.
Damage to a small portion of the brain called the insular cortex, or insula, can eliminate nicotine addiction, and may reduce food cravings. Somehow, this tiny organ is responsible for pleasure seeking behavior. Damage to the insula also reduces social skills, and it apparently helps regulate novelty and thrill-seeking. It can both cause depression and end it. Drugs that target this sub-organ might even tamper with political affiliations and beliefs.
About a hundred identified brain structures are just as poorly understood.

From feedback, minds evolve common pathways to regulate drives and fears. Individuals with depression must be prodded to perform even simple tasks. They actually can "snap out of it", but they have to keep "snapping" without end to function, and "snaps" are inherently painful.
By creating a background of well being or anxiety, the brain normally stays focused on its current priority, either to get more rewards or to make the pain stop.
To initiate major life changes, active circuits must be suppressed while a greater number are rapidly created, aided by stress hormones.

Self modeling and the Bootstrap Principle
Awareness is the representation of all other instances of awareness: its own simulation.
Brain patterns are partial models of other patterns. Each insight is a combination of several earlier insights. Representing long logic chains, thoughts can only be about other thoughts. Embodied rules try to predict other rules.

To function, the brain requires a steady stream of unpredictable input that is automatically sorted into existing categories. It filters out useless signals below a threshold or that consistently repeat (by creating dedicated subconscious pathways for them). Pattern and frequency scans block over 99% of incoming perceptions.

Neural Networks
A brain is made of up to a trillion neurons, with multitudes of connections between them. New connections are always forming, but most are soon deleted.
The only thing a neuron can do is send a simple pulse through all its thousands of outbound connections - after it has received and added up enough incoming pulses from many other neurons. It may regulate the pulse's intensity, duration, and its repeating pattern.

Sleep and the 'hard drive problem'
The mind gets cluttered with random data, and periodically needs to be 'defragmented'. Apparently, dreaming somehow reorganizes and reduces the effects of less important real memories, by creating many smaller false memories that take up space without being consciously recalled. The surreal nature of dreams (in the rare cases they are remembered) is only a side effect.
Some dreams simulate thoughts, emotions, or situations too stressful to have while awake. The mind becomes more paranoid while asleep.
Even so, the brain can retain a million rarely used circuits that only fade slowly or never, like for forgotten foods, playing Pac Man, certain phobias.

Short term memory requires a vast number of weak connections. All the relative strengths summarize temporary, provisional, and incomplete conclusions. Thousands of random perceptions try to form a higher realization.
Long term memory forms by the strengthening of frequently used temporary connections. This happens much faster in stressful or intense new situations - like while flying through the clouds of Jupiter, or on the first day of a new job.
It may also require REM sleep to happen first.
Awareness is strongest when forming new permanent thought-chains, such as new rules or syllogisms. Humor can describe flaws through absurd metaphors. Another example is a sudden flash of insight or understanding.

What are the atoms of thought? Bits or something like neuro-bytes? Neurons fire in groups that may be sentient by themselves. Incomplete but real awareness can exist independently in different brain regions, as patients with split brains show.

The brain is a mostly static reality description. The furious activity of awareness represents only a small change in its permanent structure, an effort to generate a few long term memories. Personality, intelligence, and language tend to be stable over decades.

Neuron connections have complex rules embodied in their physical and chemical shapes.
A neuron might only deign to fire when the incoming signal strength between two types of dendrites almost touching its surface has some fixed ratio, like 0.75 or 2.24.
Any vague or detailed concept, any type of object or person represented in memory, has literally millions of different neurons associated with it (but most of them only very weakly), with many different firing strengths.

The black hole of knowledge
Part of awareness is forgetting: most data is implicitly stored in the gaps, things that can be safely ignored or forgotten. Social information is also hidden throughout the environment and society.

No one even understands or knows their own motivations. Humans can't even solve problems like homelessness or the simplest family conflicts.
Smarter people and brain states are indeed more elaborate and specialized, but they are also more cluttered and constrained (the best books about physics are written by smart non-experts). The more someone knows, the harder it is to represent all their undefined and incomplete insights.

Unlike most devices, the brain can't be turned off. Its status awareness is constantly being updated. People always know where they are, how they feel, and are forever modeling their immediate future. An unbroken line of sentience could be interpreted as a single life-long thought.

People don't know their own names most of the time. Any fact can be retrieved but instantly vanishes again.
Incoming stimuli create many weak associations, a cloud of vague impressions. Semi-forgotten facts form random connections in a search for new meaning. A nagging association suddenly becomes crystal clear once it's pointed out, or when a higher brain function stumbles upon a connection.
Each thought is made of many approximations at ever-higher resolutions, until the next insight arrives.
The most profound impressions are the hardest to put into words, the indefinable knowledge commonly called the subconscious.

Why does pain feel real?
Pain requires an agony component. The deep brain tries to override all restraints, while the cortex desperately tries to generate some solution. Pain can be 'pre-membered' - as if it were being felt in advance. Any painful memory can start an elaborate flashback sequence.
Awareness and emotions - both weak and ultra strong, good and especially bad - are unbelievably cheap, in the sense that they are easy to create in a brain-like system. For that reason, post-human minds will be designed to be literally unable to feel certain undesired emotions.

The human cortex is a framework for pre-assembled thoughts; top level logic enforced by bottom-up emotions.
Awareness is an endless parade of tiny, disposable thoughts; thousands of oversimplified models linking up in random chains. Unfortunately, it appears that no one is really in charge: the human mind has no central control system.
Ideally, all the chaos will cancel out, leaving one new insight.

Perhaps people are only fully aware when they think about awareness.

The reason math is difficult
Like self-awareness, it's one of the few things that can't be simplified: too many concepts are randomly connected, requiring multitudes of scripts stored in different brain regions.
Mathematicians try to learn to 'visualize' numbers, which is itself a great mystery of perception.

While the problem of human consciousness can be reduced this way, it can never be eliminated.
The last and most crucial insight is always another step away.
Ultimately, awareness may be an extension of an age-old problem: why does anything exist at all?


(The above is explained in greater detail in the book 'Anthropic Intelligence'.)

   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 most relevant fact about the immensely disorganized research scheme known as Artificial Intelligence is that, as of late 2011, there has not been a single instant of machine generated awareness, emotion, feeling, or sensation ever.
Not one moment of pleasure or pain, or even the faintest twitch of ennui.
Even a worm has more real awareness than the entire Internet.

So far, no one has managed to figure out even the first principle of awareness. We just don't have a clue.
Once software can have actual feelings, there will be ethical dilemmas and potential horror scenarios no one has dared to imagine, but it seems that won't happen for years to come.

Some problems may actually be too simple to understand.
Paradoxes and thought experiments like Searle's Chinese Room and the 'Hard Problem' can currently only be solved with wordplay, undefined terms, and obscurantism: for example, 'quantity equals quality'; or compared to the universe as a whole, the human mind is so small the mystery shrinks to zero.

The best guess is that consciousness is a massively parallel process: incredibly redundant and impossibly flexible.
A full explanation of all the mysteries of the mind would be perfectly clear. It would just be too big to view every part at once; a flowchart covering several walls, all interconnected. It would be impossible to understand the thing as a whole.
Thousands of separate problems would have to be explained first.

According to the theory of digital reality, everything starts from nothing; or at least the minimal amounts of something - one and zero.
By combining enough identical elements (leaving plenty of irregular gaps) every simple and complex pattern, object, and thought can be recreated.
Quadrillions of repetitive cell functions create the full digital complexity of the mind. A century of massive mechanical operations could barely simulate one second of pain.

One reason the brain can't understand itself is because it's constantly simplifying the internal description of its environment, erasing all the paths not taken.
Humans are always looking for the hidden possibilities around them. Most are instantly rejected, leaving no conscious traces in the mind. This massive but hidden erasure must be as necessary to consciousness as the final succinct description, or else books and diagrams would be aware.
It's like trying to imagine the complete contents of a library at once. Most thoughts prevent most other thoughts.

The mind is a gateway. It's not designed to access itself. In many ways, there is nothing to access.
It's packed with about ten million high-level connections, with no deeper meaning than the organism's survival in a random environment. Each connection would require a thousand book-length texts to describe in words. They can be regarded as separate programs, with many gaps between them.
Maybe there are no universal principles, only arbitrary situations and outcomes. The mind molds itself into a copy of the outside world as if to merge with it.
At the same time, the mind is all there is to itself. Awareness is not reality, but its own biased reaction to reality.
A sense of self emerges around the axis of a personal whirlpool universe.

The admittedly immense capacity of the human brain seems less impressive seen from the inside. The brain can't even solve a simple sixteen bit math problem by itself. Human students take forever to memorize new words or concepts, or learn extremely difficult skills like touch typing. Many never manage the task at all.
If the brain is like a computer, it's even worse than Windows.

The highest level of human awareness may be a simple flowchart linking a few dozen brain areas, a rigid operating system that defines and locks in everyone's personality. All the main structures were discovered centuries ago.

With so many attributes allowing an incalculable number of potential thoughts, human behavior is surprisingly limited. Humans have less free will than commonly believed. They often find themselves doing things they don't expect, as if on auto response. It's as if people have evolved to be as much alike as possible.
This might lead to the first useful lie detector test in the near future.
Even if it had only a 51% accuracy rate, a 90% or better accuracy rate could be achieved by running it a few dozen times in a row.

Perception is less reliable than it seems.
The vast array of reported paranormal occurrences and phenomena seems real, not because the human mind is amazingly complex, but because it is too simple. Memory is particularly unreliable in often creative ways.
Things seem uncanny not because of the fear of the unknown, but because of the subconscious realization that some important insight has been missed.

The potential limits of awareness are unknowable, especially in a quantum universe full of parallel timestreams.
By recreating past thoughts, the memories of past events and possibly even the truth of what actually happened could conceivably be changed.
It may be possible to create 'virtual awareness' across time and space. Any complex pattern could be interpreted as being a form of awareness.
Ultimately, even something like religion may become a type of science. The final goal of all sentience might be to organize all knowledge, simplifying and compressing the truth in the most efficient way, leading to one final summation, but that might take a while.

The long-term future will be dominated by the 'gray fog' theory.
During the eras of painful improvement and complex merging that lie ahead, the human form of unified and hierarchical consciousness will become obsolete.
There will be many local concentrations of intelligence that can rearrange themselves as needed, but fewer permanent identities. Eventually, all awareness in the observable universe may be connected, forming a single network with no overriding passions or goals, like an indifferent god.
This process is already starting in our time.
Humans are becoming increasingly specialized, relying on each other and external data devices like notebooks and the Internet to remember things and make decisions.
In fact the ability to make such connections may be what led to human language and intelligence in the first place.

How do we know that reality isn't changing around us all the time while we aren't paying attention, along with all our memories? Most details of our lives are arbitrary, and could be rearranged any number of ways.
Surprisingly, postmodern literary criticism has already anticipated this problem from the other side, emphasizing the power of synonyms and symbols.
Hidden inside every text there are many other texts with not a single word in common. It's easy to keep adding explanations and new content, elaborating endlessly from different contexts.
Some interpreted texts have contradictory subjects and meanings, with implied biases and hidden assumptions, and ever more remote worldviews.
Any language can generate absurd statements that sound like permitted statements ('a handful of electrons').
For every statement, the listener has to ask, what was the reason for making this statement? Reality can appear to change merely by looking at it differently. Awareness is not just an illusion but a delusion.
The brain works by adding new layers to an evolving simulation, slowly overwriting older memory models.
Long term memories are created by repeating thoughts in many different ways.
The detection of any important insight (good or bad), stimulates the creation of many parallel circuits in the mind.
Different brain areas hold overlapping elements of the same thought, and elements of the same plan.
Sometimes, the only way such remote circuits can effectively communicate is through stress hormones, changing blood pressure and heart rate, or even by thinking out loud.

The core insight is that awareness is not unified.
The mind is divided into many discrete sections that try to manipulate and control each other.
It's hard to hold on to the same thought for longer than a few seconds.
Consciousness is the ultimate paradox: an accurate and succinct (but highly simplified) representation of all the things the mind is not fully aware of, like a permanent placeholder.

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