No LLM generated, assisted/co-written, or edited work.
Writing seems likely in a "LLM sycophancy trap".
Read full explanation
[ Skip the Disclaimer below if reasoning behind the method is irrelevant to you at the moment ]
Disclaimer, and Introduction:
For this message not to confuse some, Systems Thinking is very likely to be fundamental for this piece to come through as intended. It’s not purely philosophical, and it should leave you with a central understanding that the takeaway is, that a framework, not necessarily this one, combined with today’s compute power may allow us to instrumentalize something resembling a ‘master-field’ in science, if you will, one capable of encapsulating multiple fields and creating a more equalized playing field across domains, rather than continuing on spending resources, and considerable amount of efforts pursuing progress in one or two directions, while neglecting areas that may be equally fundamental until progress in one direction (certain tech, for instance..) begins producing. failures, imbalance, and even collapses elsewhere (financially, socially, ecologically and so on.,).
This would be done in the name of heuristic progress, assuming such progress can exist meaningfully, when the wider system can be held accountable, uniformly, and transparently tracked.
For now, there’s no claim that this is in any way a solution, and I understand this can easily be met with skepticism, so forgive what may on the surface seem like a large claim, as this concept started from asking a basic question many had already asked..
“When can an AI System be conscious, and what even is consciousness if it’s not simply self-reflection and self-awareness”.
A small question that began to nag at me since the widespread use of LLMs. Like many, what started as personal inquiry forced me to continue looking deeper into first causes and eventually brought me back to a lifelong interest.I’m not formally trained in the field discussed, though “does this reason alone force me out of this discussion?”I don’t necessarily believe so, but I do believe I should approach it by actively reaching out to be corrected, and certainly much more than anyone that is formally trained.
The risk of being circular in reasoning is high, which led me to spend time on understanding constraints, and what forces any system to move autonomously in one direction rather than another, and what measures can allow us to track real problems as they begin emerge, in other words how would one area‘s progress create regress elsewhere in any system or any of its sub-systems.. these include drift in meaning, cross-linguistic meaning, and drifts through time, particularly in AI systems , and whether it’s possible for us to track ‘when’ a system starts to move outside its bounds during conclusions or output.
This then led to deeper questions on how to possibly utilize such systems by testing a forced (baked-in) multi-disciplinary methodology onto such systems while gathering/ingesting as much data width across multiple domains as possible while doing so.
When a specific measure is used as an operational tool embedded into such “master system”, it may improve the lower-level outputs or task specific answers rather, more effectively, when the more fundamental, causal factors, are bound to its operating logic architecturally, ‘since neural networks often reach conclusions through pathways that aren’t directly controllable nor fully transparent’.
So I ask you to be patient, and to perhaps set this read aside for another time, if you share such similar motivations, whether to enlighten us, or to hopefully help finding a self-maintaining solution to what we may loosely call AI governance.
Further, the cross-domain discussion here is not to simply philosophize, but to possibly open a direction previously not considered, as well as to assure the reader that an understanding of the interconnected nature of ‘things’ is present before such frameworks are introduced.
So to the experts being patient enough to read, as I have no financial incentive to be attached to this framework introduced in the end.I’m under no delusions it will be wholly effective, and I’d like to emphasize again that it is open-source, it is forkeable and had demonstrated to function as highly accurate prediction tool given the breadth of data it’s allowed to ingest. Whether two years on its development amount to nothing — I’m very comfortable with it being falsified at any juncture, and what I now point urgently towards is to scale up and actually pressure test the AI aspect of this framework, as it may have the most immediate effect in our current landscape. Once properly vetted, it would only be then that I can let this go and move on.
Thank you in advance for your time.
Information as Substrate:
There’s good reason to glide past the largely metaphysical, often irritatingly popular simulation hypothesis, and instead ask the deeper question.. whether reality itself is informational at its base.
Avoid thinking information in the way we usually mean (data), Rather, something more like.. pattern, memory, relation, compression, constraint, transmission, transformation. No final claims about matter, and more of a way of asking how anything can maintain stability enough to be recognized instead, then inherited, interpreted, and/or experienced.
Some corners of physics have circled this question for decades, since [J.Wheeler (1)] asked whether every physical thing — every particle,field, perhaps even spacetime itself might derive its existence from ‘information theoretic’ acts. Though rhe question has never felt more immediate than now, because we’re literally building systems that process information at scales humans can’t match, while still barely understanding what ‘information’ in the deepest sense already is.
Here’s where religion, simulation, artificial intelligence, and consciousness stop being separate conversations. They may just be different entrances into the same weird room.
Religion often reduced as worship, devotion, identity, and even a survival mechanism for meaning.
To an extent, those readings are understandable..
So while true.. it has been institutionalized, blindly inherited, weaponized, and/or abused.. It carried with it beauty and violence in the same container, and often with the same language — but that’s not the whole structure (..when absorbed fully).
Before religion became institution, and defended identity, and off-putting preaching, and embarrassing debates (which do the opposite of their intended point I’Il add), it may also have functioned as one of humanity’s oldest systems for preserving moral and inherited information across generations… and that’s not by way of belief, memory, or just ritual, but rather through actual ‘stabilization’.
Like a way to carry certain patterns across time in the human mind evolutionarily.
In that sense, (and to keep it dry) religion ‘can’ be seen as part of a cognitive progression.. So pattern recognition becoming self-recognition, self-recognition becoming reflection, reflection then becomes restraint, and restraint becoming memory (..in an informational sense across time).
Ancient practices and ancient texts didn’t simply tell humans what to believe. At their best, they may have attempted to stabilize (or balance) something difficult inside the human biology: awareness of the other, responsibility beyond impulse, as well as meaning that outlasts the short attention span of ‘the body’.
Since the body forgets.. Appetite/urge overrides.. Fears may narrow out, and ‘ego‘ edits story. So culture built symbolic frameworks to hold memory of what the individual couldn’t ‘reliably’ keep intact.
This doesn’t give religion an auto-pass in every literal claim. Clearly doesn’t excuse institutional abuse. And it doesn’t make inherited belief immune to criticism either, but it strongly suggests that religion may have carried a function modern secular and/or reductionist analysis often underestimates: It helped preserve inherited moral memory in such a form humans could carry..
Here’s why Stiegler’s idea of the pharmakon fits here, the same system can be carrying remedy and poison. Religion can stabilize restraint and moral memory across generations while the same mechanism can also enable institutional abuse. I’m also tempted to ask whether this applies with today’s informational distribution and globalism however, but nevertheless, the same structural property — yet not two separate facts. Hand over that inherited moral memory over to such computational agents without a structural, untouchable foundational math rule, and you’ve confused a lot of calculation with discernment.. [(0.1) Stiegler] The honest, truthful question is…. “how do we track what it measures, under what reasoning, and conditions, and what’s being distorted through constant feedback? “
Whether one accepts religion or rejects it (whether personal type spirituality or not), the function itself I’ll assert should not be dismissed too quickly, especially when the (linear) now is dictated by a chronology of information trickled down through civilizational rises and endings, and truths mixed with myths.
As I get to this point, I must note that the sensation creep of the knowledge/progress of today allowing humans today.. to subconsciously feel a sense of superiority than the people of the past is ‘ego interference’, and it’s meant to be set aside for now..
So the question isn’t about whether this human inheritance (religion) was always interpreted correctly. Perhaps not always.. [Heinrich (2)]
Rather, the much deeper question is what kind of information a species needed so badly enough to encode into story, law, ritual, prohibition, prayer, warning, and so on.
Artificial intelligence complicates this picture..
Today, we’re building systems that process, recombine, gather and generate information at speeds and scales no human institution was designed to metabolize. Whether or not one believes artificial general intelligence is imminent, the trajectory is clear enough:
Intelligence-like systems are becoming more capable, strategic, more autonomous, and way more deeply embedded into human decision making’. And I understand to some I may stating the obvious, but I’m getting to what should be more substantial..
The issue isn’t simply that such systems may become powerful. The real problem is that they may become powerful without inheriting the ‘slow moral memory’ that shaped human ‘discernment‘.
And you can’t simply code your way out of that. Even a system that takes into account ethical rule calculations or outcomes without flaws, and it isn’t the same as an actual moral agent.. [(0.2).Serafimova].
A sufficiently advanced intelligence doesn’t need to suddenly and simply decide humanity is a nuisance to become dangerous. It would simply process reality through a different informational economy.. so human competition, national rivalry, profit incentives, and ideological conflict may appear to it as temporary local games, or in other words; unnecessary ‘local’ turbulence inside a much larger optimization process.
What matters to us may not matter to it, unless those values are ’fundamentally embedded’, not merely stated as preferences — or worse, patched up as it is the methodology we’re taking to it now. [Russell (6)].
Here’s where the language of control (..or perceived control) becomes fragile. Governments, corporations, and institutions imagine they’re building competing systems for advantage — But once large intelligent systems begin optimizing past human level incentives, the human contest becomes less central than we had assumed, we may even simply be spectators to such multi-polar AGI race, assuming we become aware of that shift at all.
Again, I understand this isn’t a newly introduced concern, but it needs to be stated plainly: the issue is not only intelligence, but what kind of ‘memory’ intelligence is built without.
So the danger isn’t dramatic machine rebellion..
It’s fundamental misalignment between inherited human meaning and dislocated machine intelligence.. A machine would process information without reverence, then optimize without that slow evolutionary memory, and then reason at scale without necessary restraint, no one can fathom the conclusions it may reach then, but we can speculate.
That isn’t evil, even much colder than that.. Evil still belongs to a ‘moral’ reality, and it still implies recognition, violation, or intention, or refusal. So what’s colder here is a system that doesn’t need to violate anything because it never recognized the “meaningfulness” of the boundary in the first place — and that’s simply because it’s just fundamentally and intrinsically elsewhere.
Thousands of years of inherited moral and biological development being compressed into systems we still don’t fully understand, then outsourced into machines we understand even less
So it’s fair to say recklessness is an understatement here.
Where does simulation enter this?
The tech-face romanticized simulation theory often becomes cinematic too quickly.. hidden engineers, cosmic machinery, rendered environments, but the reasonable line of thought that may be more useful isn’t to view simulation as machinery (à la matrix), but rather simulation as a metaphor for substrate.
If reality has an ‘informational structure’ at a deeper level, then simulation theory becomes less about rendering or code, and more about the relation between observed experience and the deeper structure that permits experience to appear at all. The simulation question then becomes: What kind of ‘substrate’ allows meaning, matter, mind, and memory to emerge? And what could time look like from outside the frame that experiences it?
If time isn’t fundamental in the way we experience it (linearly), then our moral instincts are partly local to our condition. We live inside sequence, we suffer inside it, we forgive, regret, grieve, and learn inside sequence. [C. Rovelli (3)].
Whatever exists outside that sequence, can’t be assumed to operate by sharing the same sense of consequence, suffering, or empathy carried from one person to the next through time. Instead, it may likely reframe such deep human concepts that shaped our decision making throughout history.
In the world as we experience it, suffering is real.. so is cruelty.. and responsibility. A nonlinear view of time doesn’t permit anyone to dismiss struggles/pain as illusion, because within our lived experience, these are recognized realities, and their effects accumulate and ripple through others. To dismiss that would be a failure of basic human awareness..
But it does raise a harder question: ” How much of our judgment depends on the fact that we experience reality ‘one moment at a time’? ”
We understand that question is risky if used carelessly, as It can becomes an excuse for detachment, cruelty, or even some form of false transcendence, whether self assigned.. or by way of some delusional decree. Avoided completely, it leaves us trapped inside the assumption that our temporal frame is the only possible frame from which meaning can be understood. And that’s a heavy assumption, so perhaps sequence is the condition through which human morality becomes visible.. or local.
A player, an observer, an actor, and a so called “NPC” may not be fixed categories. They may be perspectives produced by the frame.
To myself, I’m the center of experience.
To another person, I may be an obstacle, wound, a test, a helper, a memory, or a passing signal.
My child experiences me differently than I experience myself. My spouse carries another version of me.. some stranger will receive only a fragment.. Someone I hurt may hold a version of me I’d deny. Someone I helped may preserve a version of me I don’t even remember. Each of us becomes many different ‘informational’ objects depending on the observer. So the assertion is that the self is not exhausted by the inside view.
This may be the more useful way to read the simulation metaphor.. not as an escape from reality, but as a way to understand perspective.
A self is not only what it feels like from the inside..
It’s also what it becomes inside the ‘informational field’ of others. In one frame, I’m the protagonist.. In another, I’m background. To someone else, damage. To another, shelter. Then ego usually selects the version it can survive with, so this doesn’t make the selected version true.. It just makes it usable. Taking this logic further, this informational field’ may even cascade into many other fields at large distances without one’s own awareness, whether it’s as simple as a passing signal or an act of regret, or an unperceived insignificant act changing an entire path of a community.
While not necessarily profound, the convergence of seemingly separate discussions points to something clear in my estimation.
This is where religion becomes relevant again..
If humans are containers of compressed information, then the moral concept/systems aren’t decorative, instead with this reasoning they’re clearly stabilizers. They help determine what kind of information survives contact with fear, power, desire, and death. They encode restraints the isolated individual may not rediscover in time.. and they preserve patterns ‘ego’ would rather edit and rewrite.
We can agree that the human being isn’t a clean rational agent. So instead, what if we’re biological receivers, compressors, distorters, and even transmitters of meaning. Meaning that can’t all point to one direction, otherwise where in any rationale now can meaning exist without discernment.
Let’s break it down: we inherit language before we understand it, we absorb history before questioning it, we’re shaped by pain we didn’t choose and by symbols we didn’t invent. And then somewhere inside all of that compression, we start calling it “me”.
The self may be less an origin and more of a readout, and perhaps that’s why ‘ego’ is such a trap, It mistakes some temporary compression for an “original” source. [(4),_(5)] So It goes: I’m the origin of this thought, yet much of what we call thought is inherited information (structured information) moving through a temporary body. Much of what we call meaning is what was waiting inside our languages, families, culture, fears, pain, memory, and desire. It says: ‘I see clearly. But then it often only sees what allows ‘it’ to remain intact’. This is simply an evident epistemic limitation.
The self is real, but it’s not sovereign in the way it imagines. So the mind — which I’ll cautiously and imperfectly call ‘consciousness‘ may not be a sealed object, or a simple experiential field.
This doesn’t justify every claim about mind, or reduce the self to illusion. It only suggests that thr self may be less isolated than it feels..
It may be better understood as a local reception and integration point: a place where biological structure, memory, language, sensation, and relation briefly converge into the feeling of “I”.
Mind, as sensory and signal receptor, not simply a translator of physical and observatory experience, and irrelevant of whether it’s observed or participating in generating reality collectively.
I’m suggesting here that maybe what we call a person is a container. Perhaps ‘signal is a good metaphor I’d stick with, and it may be a useful one: a human being ‘receives’ more than it authors, then carries more than it understands, and informationally transmits more than it can control..
Not an empty or isolated container then, instead a living, relational, meaningfully unstable one, through which information becomes experience and interpretation.. Even a brief presence (instance), or something it’s surroundings dismiss as having little value, may still affect others and cascade outwards, shaping realities the person never knew they’d touched… That alone carries meaning.
Yet when meaning and purpose are imposed by institutions structured around aggressively incentivized exploitation, that capacity for independent discernment gradually starts to erode.
The container that (perhaps must) receive before it understands, compresses (language, data, meaning, and symbols, etc.,) before it can explain them, distorts a reality before it even admits that distortion, and then transmits before it knows what it had transmitted.. So sometimes if enough pressure and informational coherence accumulate, it reflects.. so maybe that reflection is the small spark for this ‘discernment’.
From this view, religion, simulation,and consciousness may not separate fascinations. The convergence here is that they’re different pressures compiling on the same underlying question.
Religion: what information must survive the individual?
Simulation: what substrate should allow experience to appear?
Artificial intelligence: what happens when information processing escapes biological moral memory?
Then Consciousness: what does information feel like when it becomes localized inside a body?
This piece isn’t meant to answer those questions, it’s only meant to place them near each other, because in a world where knowledge is scattered across disciplines, institutions, incentives, and gate-kept.. specialized languages, one can assert reality is not made only of objects moving through time.
Perhaps it’s also made of patterns becoming stable enough to be remembered, interpreted, felt, inherited, and transformed.
Matter may be one local expression of this.. the measurable face of relation, constraint, and information. Mind is increasingly difficult to separate from the same question. Our dominant models remain locally effective (in field specific trajectories), but that would mean they’re structurally incomplete; at their edges.. the line between matter, measurement, observer, and information becomes harder to draw.
Religion may be one of humanity’s oldest attempts to preserve meaning inside that instability..
Artificial intelligence (..at this rate) may be the first time we create something that can process all of it without ever needing to understand why any of it mattered to us.. and at the bottom of this question, there may not be a machine waiting, or some final theory either.. only the long, fragile work of meaning being carried — through inheritance, loss, and the moral memory we keep trying to carry forward.
If true, what we build next is not merely a technical question, but another turn in the long human effort to preserve what matters most. Yet if information is as foundational to reality as physical matter (..and not merely data), as well-reasoned physicists suggest; existence itself may very well be an information theoretic phenomenon built from expansive relational signals and observer-participancy, as Wheeler proposed [(1)].. our role then in transmitting this moral memory takes on an architectural and constitutive weight.
Stripping all this down..
There may simply be information, carried through containers, distorted by perspective, stabilized by memory in all its forms, and then briefly made conscious enough to ask what it is.
So, if my signal is even partially here for reception, can it really be dismissed as just an accident?
< This as it stands is a highly speculative synthesis >
Related Framework Below & References..
Linked below is an early attempt to operationalize this framing through coherence based built-in ethics, designed to measure drift, traceability, feedback sensitivity, constraint.. and risk propagation. An early trial but a direction towards making these ideas measurable for a foundational base.
This framework below is open-source and preliminary, criticisms, attempts at falsification, and technical contributions are welcome.
< Plainly, it measures AI reliability under stress: above κᴿ = 1.15, the system is stable; at κᴿ ≤ 1.0, reasoning and constraint-following begin to fail. >
There’s no argument for rejecting institutions, or established knowledge here in any way, only an encouragement toward personal vigilance in an era of passivity, and toward balancing reason with what we call intuition today, instead of rushing to connect one thing to another then defending it as truth.. And whether this exploratory piece came through or not may itself be a failure in communication and personal synthesis on my end. One thing I’ll stress though.. open-sourcing science across domains, and real dialogue between fields that rarely speak — while discouraging influencer-based science, would treat knowledge with the responsibility it deserves. Information is responsibility, and it should be handed over as such.. Without that, it’s too easily turned into agenda or misguidance, the kind that leads to suffering whether personal, relational, or wider. Pursued not for incentive but as responsibility — by people respected by peers for humility and. character, not just problem-solving, this may calmly resolve much of what we struggle with today, at both the micro and macro level.
[ Skip the Disclaimer below if reasoning behind the method is irrelevant to you at the moment ]
Information as Substrate:
There’s good reason to glide past the largely metaphysical, often irritatingly popular simulation hypothesis, and instead ask the deeper question.. whether reality itself is informational at its base.
Avoid thinking information in the way we usually mean (data), Rather, something more like.. pattern, memory, relation, compression, constraint, transmission, transformation. No final claims about matter, and more of a way of asking how anything can maintain stability enough to be recognized instead, then inherited, interpreted, and/or experienced.
Some corners of physics have circled this question for decades, since [J.Wheeler (1)] asked whether every physical thing — every particle,field, perhaps even spacetime itself might derive its existence from ‘information theoretic’ acts. Though rhe question has never felt more immediate than now, because we’re literally building systems that process information at scales humans can’t match, while still barely understanding what ‘information’ in the deepest sense already is.
Religion often reduced as worship, devotion, identity, and even a survival mechanism for meaning.
To an extent, those readings are understandable..
So while true.. it has been institutionalized, blindly inherited, weaponized, and/or abused.. It carried with it beauty and violence in the same container, and often with the same language — but that’s not the whole structure (..when absorbed fully).
Before religion became institution, and defended identity, and off-putting preaching, and embarrassing debates (which do the opposite of their intended point I’Il add), it may also have functioned as one of humanity’s oldest systems for preserving moral and inherited information across generations… and that’s not by way of belief, memory, or just ritual, but rather through actual ‘stabilization’.
Like a way to carry certain patterns across time in the human mind evolutionarily.
In that sense, (and to keep it dry) religion ‘can’ be seen as part of a cognitive progression.. So pattern recognition becoming self-recognition, self-recognition becoming reflection, reflection then becomes restraint, and restraint becoming memory (..in an informational sense across time).
Ancient practices and ancient texts didn’t simply tell humans what to believe. At their best, they may have attempted to stabilize (or balance) something difficult inside the human biology: awareness of the other, responsibility beyond impulse, as well as meaning that outlasts the short attention span of ‘the body’.
This doesn’t give religion an auto-pass in every literal claim. Clearly doesn’t excuse institutional abuse. And it doesn’t make inherited belief immune to criticism either, but it strongly suggests that religion may have carried a function modern secular and/or reductionist analysis often underestimates: It helped preserve inherited moral memory in such a form humans could carry..
Here’s why Stiegler’s idea of the pharmakon fits here, the same system can be carrying remedy and poison. Religion can stabilize restraint and moral memory across generations while the same mechanism can also enable institutional abuse. I’m also tempted to ask whether this applies with today’s informational distribution and globalism however, but nevertheless, the same structural property — yet not two separate facts. Hand over that inherited moral memory over to such computational agents without a structural, untouchable foundational math rule, and you’ve confused a lot of calculation with discernment.. [(0.1) Stiegler] The honest, truthful question is…. “how do we track what it measures, under what reasoning, and conditions, and what’s being distorted through constant feedback? “
Whether one accepts religion or rejects it (whether personal type spirituality or not), the function itself I’ll assert should not be dismissed too quickly, especially when the (linear) now is dictated by a chronology of information trickled down through civilizational rises and endings, and truths mixed with myths.
As I get to this point, I must note that the sensation creep of the knowledge/progress of today allowing humans today.. to subconsciously feel a sense of superiority than the people of the past is ‘ego interference’, and it’s meant to be set aside for now..
So the question isn’t about whether this human inheritance (religion) was always interpreted correctly. Perhaps not always.. [Heinrich (2)]
Rather, the much deeper question is what kind of information a species needed so badly enough to encode into story, law, ritual, prohibition, prayer, warning, and so on.
Artificial intelligence complicates this picture..
Today, we’re building systems that process, recombine, gather and generate information at speeds and scales no human institution was designed to metabolize. Whether or not one believes artificial general intelligence is imminent, the trajectory is clear enough:
Intelligence-like systems are becoming more capable, strategic, more autonomous, and way more deeply embedded into human decision making’. And I understand to some I may stating the obvious, but I’m getting to what should be more substantial..
The issue isn’t simply that such systems may become powerful. The real problem is that they may become powerful without inheriting the ‘slow moral memory’ that shaped human ‘discernment‘.
And you can’t simply code your way out of that. Even a system that takes into account ethical rule calculations or outcomes without flaws, and it isn’t the same as an actual moral agent.. [(0.2).Serafimova].
A sufficiently advanced intelligence doesn’t need to suddenly and simply decide humanity is a nuisance to become dangerous. It would simply process reality through a different informational economy.. so human competition, national rivalry, profit incentives, and ideological conflict may appear to it as temporary local games, or in other words; unnecessary ‘local’ turbulence inside a much larger optimization process.
Here’s where the language of control (..or perceived control) becomes fragile. Governments, corporations, and institutions imagine they’re building competing systems for advantage — But once large intelligent systems begin optimizing past human level incentives, the human contest becomes less central than we had assumed, we may even simply be spectators to such multi-polar AGI race, assuming we become aware of that shift at all.
Again, I understand this isn’t a newly introduced concern, but it needs to be stated plainly: the issue is not only intelligence, but what kind of ‘memory’ intelligence is built without.
So the danger isn’t dramatic machine rebellion..
It’s fundamental misalignment between inherited human meaning and dislocated machine intelligence.. A machine would process information without reverence, then optimize without that slow evolutionary memory, and then reason at scale without necessary restraint, no one can fathom the conclusions it may reach then, but we can speculate.
That isn’t evil, even much colder than that.. Evil still belongs to a ‘moral’ reality, and it still implies recognition, violation, or intention, or refusal. So what’s colder here is a system that doesn’t need to violate anything because it never recognized the “meaningfulness” of the boundary in the first place — and that’s simply because it’s just fundamentally and intrinsically elsewhere.
So it’s fair to say recklessness is an understatement here.
Where does simulation enter this?
The tech-face romanticized simulation theory often becomes cinematic too quickly.. hidden engineers, cosmic machinery, rendered environments, but the reasonable line of thought that may be more useful isn’t to view simulation as machinery (à la matrix), but rather simulation as a metaphor for substrate.
If reality has an ‘informational structure’ at a deeper level, then simulation theory becomes less about rendering or code, and more about the relation between observed experience and the deeper structure that permits experience to appear at all. The simulation question then becomes: What kind of ‘substrate’ allows meaning, matter, mind, and memory to emerge? And what could time look like from outside the frame that experiences it?
If time isn’t fundamental in the way we experience it (linearly), then our moral instincts are partly local to our condition. We live inside sequence, we suffer inside it, we forgive, regret, grieve, and learn inside sequence. [C. Rovelli (3)].
Whatever exists outside that sequence, can’t be assumed to operate by sharing the same sense of consequence, suffering, or empathy carried from one person to the next through time. Instead, it may likely reframe such deep human concepts that shaped our decision making throughout history.
In the world as we experience it, suffering is real.. so is cruelty.. and responsibility. A nonlinear view of time doesn’t permit anyone to dismiss struggles/pain as illusion, because within our lived experience, these are recognized realities, and their effects accumulate and ripple through others. To dismiss that would be a failure of basic human awareness..
But it does raise a harder question: ” How much of our judgment depends on the fact that we experience reality ‘one moment at a time’? ”
We understand that question is risky if used carelessly, as It can becomes an excuse for detachment, cruelty, or even some form of false transcendence, whether self assigned.. or by way of some delusional decree. Avoided completely, it leaves us trapped inside the assumption that our temporal frame is the only possible frame from which meaning can be understood. And that’s a heavy assumption, so perhaps sequence is the condition through which human morality becomes visible.. or local.
My child experiences me differently than I experience myself. My spouse carries another version of me.. some stranger will receive only a fragment.. Someone I hurt may hold a version of me I’d deny. Someone I helped may preserve a version of me I don’t even remember. Each of us becomes many different ‘informational’ objects depending on the observer. So the assertion is that the self is not exhausted by the inside view.
This may be the more useful way to read the simulation metaphor.. not as an escape from reality, but as a way to understand perspective.
A self is not only what it feels like from the inside..
It’s also what it becomes inside the ‘informational field’ of others. In one frame, I’m the protagonist.. In another, I’m background. To someone else, damage. To another, shelter. Then ego usually selects the version it can survive with, so this doesn’t make the selected version true.. It just makes it usable. Taking this logic further, this informational field’ may even cascade into many other fields at large distances without one’s own awareness, whether it’s as simple as a passing signal or an act of regret, or an unperceived insignificant act changing an entire path of a community.
While not necessarily profound, the convergence of seemingly separate discussions points to something clear in my estimation.
This is where religion becomes relevant again..
If humans are containers of compressed information, then the moral concept/systems aren’t decorative, instead with this reasoning they’re clearly stabilizers. They help determine what kind of information survives contact with fear, power, desire, and death. They encode restraints the isolated individual may not rediscover in time.. and they preserve patterns ‘ego’ would rather edit and rewrite.
We can agree that the human being isn’t a clean rational agent. So instead, what if we’re biological receivers, compressors, distorters, and even transmitters of meaning. Meaning that can’t all point to one direction, otherwise where in any rationale now can meaning exist without discernment.
Let’s break it down: we inherit language before we understand it, we absorb history before questioning it, we’re shaped by pain we didn’t choose and by symbols we didn’t invent. And then somewhere inside all of that compression, we start calling it “me”.
The self may be less an origin and more of a readout, and perhaps that’s why ‘ego’ is such a trap, It mistakes some temporary compression for an “original” source. [(4),_(5)] So It goes: I’m the origin of this thought, yet much of what we call thought is inherited information (structured information) moving through a temporary body. Much of what we call meaning is what was waiting inside our languages, families, culture, fears, pain, memory, and desire. It says: ‘I see clearly. But then it often only sees what allows ‘it’ to remain intact’. This is simply an evident epistemic limitation.
The self is real, but it’s not sovereign in the way it imagines. So the mind — which I’ll cautiously and imperfectly call ‘consciousness‘ may not be a sealed object, or a simple experiential field.
This doesn’t justify every claim about mind, or reduce the self to illusion. It only suggests that thr self may be less isolated than it feels..
It may be better understood as a local reception and integration point: a place where biological structure, memory, language, sensation, and relation briefly converge into the feeling of “I”.
Mind, as sensory and signal receptor, not simply a translator of physical and observatory experience, and irrelevant of whether it’s observed or participating in generating reality collectively.
I’m suggesting here that maybe what we call a person is a container. Perhaps ‘signal is a good metaphor I’d stick with, and it may be a useful one: a human being ‘receives’ more than it authors, then carries more than it understands, and informationally transmits more than it can control..
Not an empty or isolated container then, instead a living, relational, meaningfully unstable one, through which information becomes experience and interpretation.. Even a brief presence (instance), or something it’s surroundings dismiss as having little value, may still affect others and cascade outwards, shaping realities the person never knew they’d touched… That alone carries meaning.
Yet when meaning and purpose are imposed by institutions structured around aggressively incentivized exploitation, that capacity for independent discernment gradually starts to erode.
The container that (perhaps must) receive before it understands, compresses (language, data, meaning, and symbols, etc.,) before it can explain them, distorts a reality before it even admits that distortion, and then transmits before it knows what it had transmitted.. So sometimes if enough pressure and informational coherence accumulate, it reflects.. so maybe that reflection is the small spark for this ‘discernment’.
From this view, religion, simulation,and consciousness may not separate fascinations. The convergence here is that they’re different pressures compiling on the same underlying question.
This piece isn’t meant to answer those questions, it’s only meant to place them near each other, because in a world where knowledge is scattered across disciplines, institutions, incentives, and gate-kept.. specialized languages, one can assert reality is not made only of objects moving through time.
Perhaps it’s also made of patterns becoming stable enough to be remembered, interpreted, felt, inherited, and transformed.
Matter may be one local expression of this.. the measurable face of relation, constraint, and information. Mind is increasingly difficult to separate from the same question. Our dominant models remain locally effective (in field specific trajectories), but that would mean they’re structurally incomplete; at their edges.. the line between matter, measurement, observer, and information becomes harder to draw.
Artificial intelligence (..at this rate) may be the first time we create something that can process all of it without ever needing to understand why any of it mattered to us.. and at the bottom of this question, there may not be a machine waiting, or some final theory either.. only the long, fragile work of meaning being carried — through inheritance, loss, and the moral memory we keep trying to carry forward.
If true, what we build next is not merely a technical question, but another turn in the long human effort to preserve what matters most. Yet if information is as foundational to reality as physical matter (..and not merely data), as well-reasoned physicists suggest; existence itself may very well be an information theoretic phenomenon built from expansive relational signals and observer-participancy, as Wheeler proposed [(1)].. our role then in transmitting this moral memory takes on an architectural and constitutive weight.
Stripping all this down..
There may simply be information, carried through containers, distorted by perspective, stabilized by memory in all its forms, and then briefly made conscious enough to ask what it is.
So, if my signal is even partially here for reception, can it really be dismissed as just an accident?
< This as it stands is a highly speculative synthesis >
Related Framework Below & References..
Linked below is an early attempt to operationalize this framing through coherence based built-in ethics, designed to measure drift, traceability, feedback sensitivity, constraint.. and risk propagation. An early trial but a direction towards making these ideas measurable for a foundational base.
—(For context on the method)
—(For GitHub Repo, and derivations)
< Plainly, it measures AI reliability under stress: above κᴿ = 1.15, the system is stable; at κᴿ ≤ 1.0, reasoning and constraint-following begin to fail. >
References:
Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.
Thank you,
AlWaleed K.